How the Pope Might Renew the Church
Francis A. Quinn – The New York Times
I am a Catholic, born in 1921 of Italian and Irish families and raised in California seminaries….
American Catholics are divided, primarily, by three internal church conflicts.
The first is over priestly celibacy…. The church should start relieving the desperate shortage of clergy members by also accepting for ordination men of mature age, of proven character and in stable marriages. Optional celibacy allows a choice between an abstinent life, totally free for ministry, or a married life that enables better understanding of the lives of parishioners….
American Catholics are also divided over the ordination of women as priests. Recent popes have said publicly that priesthood for women cannot be considered because the gospel and other documents state that Christ ordained men only.
Yet women have shown great qualities of leadership: strength, intelligence, prayerfulness, wisdom, practicality, sensitivity and knowledge of theology and sacred Scripture….
Finally, why is a divorced Catholic who has remarried denied the Eucharist? Such people are considered living in an irregular union.
Nuns with the Hospitaler Sisters of Mercy in New Jersey pose for a selfie with a cutout of Pope Francis, at the World Meeting of Families conference on Sept. 22, 2015 in Philadelphia.
The Man Pope Francis Should Meet in Washington
Matt Bai – Yahoo News
One day in 1997, Wojnowski read an item in the newspaper about a sexual abuse scandal roiling a Catholic diocese in Texas, where the victim had killed himself….
Something about this story jolted him. It unearthed, he says, the shards of an adolescent memory he had blocked from his mind for 40 years.
When he was 15, Wojnowski will tell you, he was tutored by a middle-aged priest in Milan, where his father was a university librarian. The priest touched him and asked him to masturbate. Wojnowski, embarrassed and confused, asked if the priest was going to show his genitalia, too. The rest he has never remembered, or can’t….
Watch: John Wojnowski’s protest against pedophilia in the Catholic Church
So he entered a confessional and told a priest, and the priest sent him to a church therapist, and the therapist told him to write a letter to the Vatican’s embassy in Washington….
For more than 17 years now — more than 6,000 days, even allowing for a handful of absences — John Wojnowski has shown up on this sidewalk, weekdays and weekends, from late afternoon until darkness obscures him. Through three presidents and three popes, through swampy summers and polar fronts, through downpours and blizzards and cyclical storms of cicadas.
Cuban Dissidents Long to Hear Pope Francis Preach Religious Liberty
Kristina Arriaga – USA Today
Artists and journalists such as Cuban exiled novelist Orlando Luis Pardo Lazo, and Time magazine-lauded blogger, Yoani Sanchez, who still dares to live in Havana, have consistently tried to appeal to the world and to our government for freedom of speech as the virtues of openness between the U.S. and Cuba continue to be universally extolled. But to no avail….
- Pope Francis meets Fidel Castro in Havana, Cuba, Sunday, Sept. 20, 2015. (AP)
This month these dissidents hope, as do I, that while Pope Francis remains in Cuba, he will call for freedom of speech and of worship, and for the kind of openness that his Polish predecessor, Pope John Paul II spoke about frequently when, in 1998, he was the first Pontiff to visit the island….
A young Catholic holds a sign that reads ‘Welcome Pope Francis’ during a vigil to pray in front of Havana’s Cathedral in Cuba on Sept. 18, 2015. (Reuters)
They hope, against all hope, that the Pope will disavow the strange and inaccurate words of Cuban Cardinal and Havana Archbishop, Jaime Ortega, who recently stated that there were no political prisoners in Cuba while 60 dissidents languished in prison….
They hope to hear the Pope say: “Yo, yo tambien soy cubano.” “I, too am Cuban.” And invite the rest of the world to do the same with El Sexto, with Berta and the Ladies in White, with Dr. Biscet, with Yoani and with so many others who have earned and richly deserve the world’s solidarity.