Let dispensed priests play active parish role, Vatican urges bishops

By Madeleine Teahan of the Catholic Herald (UK)

September 29, 2011

http://www.catholicherald.co.uk/news/2011/09/29/let-dispensed-priests-play-active-parish-role-vatican-urges-bishops/

Cardinal Ivan Dias: says dispensed priests should be able to play a greater role in parish life.

The Vatican has appealed to diocesan bishops to encourage priests who have left ministry in order to get married to play a more active role in parish life.

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FutureChurch is encouraging people to sign on to the following petition.

An Open Letter from the People of God
to the Bishops of the United States

 Dear Bishops:

Over the past forty years, the Roman Catholic Church in the United States and worldwide has experienced a steadily worsening priest shortage. At first, the process was so gradual that it was hardly noticed. But now, the rapidity of the decline is having a devastating impact on parish and sacramental life.
According to a 2008 Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate study, half of the 19,302 active diocesan priests plan to retire by 2019. We are ordaining about 380 new diocesan priests each year. In just eight years, we will have only 13,500 active diocesan priests to serve our 18,000 parishes, presuming ordinations remain constant, as they have for over a decade.
Many dioceses engage in the morally questionable practice of importing priests from the developing world despite even more severe priest shortages in those countries. Still others are accepting married priests from other religious traditions, while simultaneously dismissing Catholic priests who marry and failing to recognize the vocations of Catholic married men. Some bishops are changing priests’ retirement age from 70 to 75. Many are embracing several of these strategies simultaneously yet none will arrest the steep declines looming ahead.
We, the people of God, are regularly asked to “Pray for vocations,” and we have been praying diligently. Since Church law tells us that we have the duty to express our views about the Church’s welfare, we share with you the outcome of our prayer. It is simply this:
The slow deliberate pace of the Catholic Church, once deemed a virtue, is a luxury we can no longer afford. Delay caused by inaction threatens our Catholic life and mission. Without a viable priesthood and strong healthy parish communities, the terrible decline in vitality that has devastated the Catholic faith in Europe may well occur in the US.
Silence, blind obedience, and unquestioning trust on the part of faithful Catholics can no longer be viable options if the Church with the Eucharist as the center of its life is to survive. Now is the time to act as well as to pray.
Therefore, we call on you, our bishops and brothers in Christ, to embrace your roles as shepherds, and nourish the people you were ordained to serve. We ask you to encourage discussion of the genuine reform so necessary to the future of the Church.
The people of God, including priests and bishops, have already begun a courageous dialogue about restoring our early traditions recognizing married and celibate priests and women deacons. We ask you, as leaders of US dioceses, to open such a dialogue as well, officially or unofficially within your dioceses, the US Bishops’ Conference, and the Vatican itself.
May God bless our Church with people of vision, wisdom and courage.
 

Sign on to the Open Letter:

• We invite signatures from individual Catholics, Catholic parishes, organizations, prayer groups and justice groups.
• If you wish to remain anonymous it's ok to sign the first and last name field with something like "concerned pastoral minister", "overworked priest" or the like.
• The open letter will be published in one or several national Catholic publications in 2011 and 2012.
• It will contain a link to an online version that contains the names of all organizations and individual signers who wish to be identified. (Only your name and diocese will be included in the online listing.)

Click this link

http://www.futurechurch.org/fpm/optcel/openletter/?utm_campaign=pentecost2011&utm_medium=email&utm_source=ARCC

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The one who gave himself freely to death, as an innocent, would expect nothing less of us.

Dead wrong: Catholics must no longer support capital punishment

By Carol Glatz Catholic News Service

 VATICAN CITY -- The Catholic Church's position on capital punishment has evolved considerably over the centuries.

And as a result, "it is not a message that is immediately understood -- that there is no room for supporting the death penalty in today's world," said a Vatican's expert on capital punishment and arms control.

Because the church has only in the past few decades begun closing the window -- if not shutting it completely -- on the permissibility of the death penalty, people who give just a partial reading of the church's teachings may still think the death penalty is acceptable today, said Tommaso Di Ruzza, desk officer at the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace.

St. Thomas Aquinas equated a dangerous criminal to an infected limb thereby making it "praiseworthy and healthful" to kill the criminal in order to spare the spread of infection and safeguard the common good.

However, over the centuries, justice has evolved from being the smiting arm of revenge toward a striving for reform and restoration, much like today's medical science, where amputation is no longer the only recourse for curing an infection.

Modern-day popes have reflected that change in attitude.

As far back as the 19th and early 20th centuries theologians pondered the seeming paradox between the Fifth Commandment, "You shall not kill," and the church's dark history of condoning state-held executions to deal with heresy and other threats and crimes.

Pope Paul VI took concrete action in distancing the church from this form of punishment, first by formally banning the use of the death penalty in Vatican City State, although no one had been executed under the authority of the Vatican's temporal governance since 1870.

Pope Paul also spoke publicly against planned executions and called for clemency for death-row inmates. Pope John Paul II also would punctuate his Angelus and general audience talks with impassioned appeals to spare the life of a prisoner on the verge of execution.

It was the Polish pope who "earnestly hoped and prayed" for a global moratorium on the use of capital punishment and the abolition of the death penalty worldwide.

Pope Benedict, too, continues to send appeals for clemency in high-profile cases via telegrams either through a country's bishops or nuncio, and he has praised a U.N. resolution calling upon states to institute a moratorium on the use of the death penalty.

The 1992 Catechism of the Catholic Church recognized "as well-founded the right and duty of legitimate public authority to punish malefactors by means of penalties commensurate with the gravity of the crime, not excluding, in cases of extreme gravity, the death penalty." At the same time, it said, "bloodless means" that could protect human life should be used when possible.

The "extreme gravity" loophole was tightened with changes made in 1997, which reflected the pope's 1995 encyclical, "Evangelium Vitae." It specifies that the use of the death penalty is allowed only when the identity and responsibility of the condemned is certain and if capital punishment "is the only possible way of effectively defending human lives against the unjust aggressor."

However, given the resources and possibilities available to governments today for restraining criminals, "cases of the absolute necessity of the suppression of the offender 'are very rare, if not practically nonexistent,'" it says.

Pope Benedict, then-Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, had a major role in drafting the 1992 Catechism and, especially, its 1997 revised passages. When he told journalists about the changes in 1997, he said while the principles do not absolutely exclude capital punishment, they do give "very severe or limited criteria for its moral use."

"It seems to me it would be very difficult to meet the conditions today," he had said.

When a journalist said the majority of Catholics in the United States favor use of the death penalty, Cardinal Ratzinger said, "While it is important to know the thoughts of the faithful, doctrine is not made according to statistics, but according to objective criteria taking into account progress made in the church's thought on the issue."

Di Ruzza said the divergence of many Catholics in the United States from the church's current position is a sign that "the universal church must also accompany the particular churches a little bit" and help guide them on this "journey of purification," which is more a process of "maturity rather than a revolution or change in tradition."

Without reading Popes John Paul and Benedict's clear condemnations of the death penalty, the catechism will "unfortunately have the risk of being ambiguous or taken out of context," he said.

The church upholds the inherent dignity of all human beings, even the most sin-filled, and believes in hope, conversion and mercy, he said.

There is always room for conversion, he said, and forgiveness does not mean being naive about the real evil the human being is capable of committing.

The death penalty does not solve much; a victim still feels loss and crime is not deterred, he said.

Communities must strive to promote the common good, and it's dubious "that you can kill someone for the good of all," he said.

"The beauty of forgiveness must also be truly discovered; it's this that saves us," said Di Ruzza.

Otherwise, "by killing the just or the unjust without understanding that they have dignity, we will find ourselves after 2,000 years in the same courtyard shouting, 'Kill him!,' like they did with Jesus."

"God forgave us. He did not call us to death. Jesus let us overcome death" so as to more fully embrace life, he said.

Copyright © The National Catholic Reporter Publishing Company

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Save the Altar Girls

http://www.americamagazine.org/content/article.cfm?article_id=13056

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More Than A Monologue: Sexual Diversity And The Catholic Church

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/john-falcone/more-than-a-monologue-sexual-diversity_b_983120.html

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And the prayer of St. Francis, on the last day I celebrated mass in a Catholic Church with a congregation in 2006.

 Most high, all powerful, all good God!
All praise is yours, all glory, all honor, and all blessing.

To you, alone, Most High, do they belong.
No mortal lips are worthy to pronounce your name.

Be praised, my God, through all your creatures,
especially through my God Brother Sun,
who brings the day; and you give light through him.
And he is beautiful and radiant in all his splendor!
Of you, Most High, he bears the likeness.

Be praised, my God, through Sister Moon and the stars;
in the heavens you have made them bright, precious and beautiful.

Be praised, my God, through Brothers Wind and Air,
and clouds and storms, and all the weather,
through which you give your creatures sustenance.

Be praised, My God, through Sister Water;
she is very useful, and humble, and precious, and pure.

Be praised, my God, through Brother Fire,
through whom you brighten the night.
He is beautiful and cheerful, and powerful and strong.

Be praised, my God, through our sister Mother Earth,
who feeds us and rules us,
and produces various fruits with colored flowers and herbs.

Be praised, my God, through those who forgive for love of you;
through those who endure sickness and trial.

Happy those who endure in peace,
for by you, Most High, they will be crowned.

Be praised, my God, through our Sister Bodily Death,
from whose embrace no living person can escape.
Woe to those who die in mortal sin!
Happy those she finds doing your most holy will.
The second death can do no harm to them.

Praise and bless my God, and give thanks,
and serve God with great humility.

St. Francis