St Catherine of Siena

The Dominican Order ~ The Importance of Study

The Dominican Channel

FEEL THE CALL TO BECOME A PRIEST??

FR TIMOTHY RADCLIFFE WITH THE DOMINICAN DOGS

STAND UPRIGHT

Timothy Radcliffe O.P.

'There will be signs in the sun, the moon and the stars and on the earth distress among the nations confused by the roaring of the sea and the waves.' In the last few weeks many people's lives in England have been disturbed by floods, bringing chaos to their lives. In the time of Jesus 'the roaring of the sea and the waves' symbolized the collapse of our ordered world, the unleashing of destruction.

Our worlds may collapse for many reasons. Our marriage may breakdown; we may lose our jobs, discover that we have cancer, become estranged from our children. In all of these situations, we may feel overwhelmed by disaster, and that our lives have no meaning. Then, Jesus says, 'Stand up and raise your heads, because your redemption is drawing near.' When we feel bowed down, Jesus tells us to stand up erect, with our heads raised, because salvation is at hand.

So when our lives collapse and lose their meanings, when we feel flattened and bowed down, Jesus invites us to stand upright. And we can do this because, the Gospel says, we will see the Son of Man coming with power and glory. This refers to the end, God's final triumph over chaos and all that destroys human life. But it also refers to Jesus enthroned on the cross in glory. Everything was done to crush Jesus, to humiliate and bring him low, but it became a moment of glory. He was lifted up high on the cross, upright on the cross. The most ancient representations of the cross do not show a broken man, but Jesus as a king in glory.

We can stand upright too, because in his death Christ embraced all that could crush us. He was overwhelmed by chaos; the sun was darkened, the world collapsed. But he stood upright for all of us. He brought humanity to its feet. The Lord has suffered every humiliation that flattens us, and he stands erect, lifted up by his and our Father. Leo the Great said in his Christmas sermon: 'O Christian, be aware of your nobility. It is God's own nature that you share.' Nothing can ultimately bring us low, to the ground.

'Stand up and raise your heads' sounds very like 'Stand up on your own two feet'. But the English expression implies that being upright is an act of individual will-power, something we must do alone. But the Gospel invites to help each other to our feet. Peter heals the lame man outside the Temple: '"In the name of Jesus walk." And he took him by the right hand and raised him up. And immediately his feet and ankles were made strong.' Let us prepare for the coming of Christ this Advent by helping each other to our feet. The test of a true Christian love is that it makes those whom we love strong. Once in Rwanda during the massacres, soldiers burst into our priory and made all of the brethren lie flat on the ground, putting pistols against their heads. When the soldiers left, the brethren helped each other to their feet, and shared the joy of standing up together.

Thank You To American Airlines MILES FOR KIDS IN NEED and EARTH ANGEL AVIATORS

WOODMAY LOIZER

All of us at PATHWAYS TO HOPE.ORG is very thankful to American Airlines Milies for Kids in Need and Earth Angel Aviators for their kindness in helping Woodmay Lozier a badly burned young teenager from Haiti for tickets to travel to the Shriner's Children's Burn Hospital in Sacramento, California, helping also Claire Labatte a regestered nurse and who speaks Creole and Sr Pauline Quinn op to be able to fly with Woodmay from Haiti to Sacramento.

Both AA Miles for Kids in Need and Earth Angel Aviators are wonderful organizations and if you can help them by donating to their organizations it will help them help other children in need..

EARTH ANGEL AVIATORS

MILES FOR KIDS IN NEED

Gregorian - Veni Creator Spiritus

PRAISE THE LORD FOR ALL WE HAVE

One of the tents amoung 50,000 tents in Haiti after the earthquake

YAHWEH, YOU ARE NEAR

HERE I AM LORD ~

IRISH BLESSING ~ THE PRIESTS

AMAZING GRACE

IF YOU ARE SAD, HERE IS A MESSAGE FOR YOU...

~ If we don't help victims of abuse by our love and compassion then we ignore Christ~

A CATHOLIC BISHOP WHO CARES ABOUT THE POOR ~ BISHOP RAUL VERA LOPEZ OP

CLICK HERE TO SEE HIM

Sex Trafficking IS a World Wide Problem

The Elderly in Prison

PLEASE HELP ME TO HELP WOODMAY A 15 YEAR OLD BADLY BURNED BOY FROM HAITI

CLICK HERE TO SEE FULL STORY

OUR LADY OF PEACE

Always strive for peace and reconcilation. When we are hurt, it can be difficult but not impossible. Focus on Our Lady of Peace...

photo and art by Sr Pauline

ST ROSE OF LIMA ~ A DOMINICAN

READ THE STORY OF ST ROSE OF LIMA ~ CLICK HERE

WE ARE ON A JOURNEY OF HOPE ~ IF YOU MISSED THIS TRAIN, ANOTHER IS ON IT'S WAY... JUMP ON

Everyone has their own journey that they are on and perhaps you would like to share your journey, too.

We might be on the same train which is taking us through this life as unique souls that we are.

Sr Paulina Quinn op

THE JOURNEY OF HOPE ~ Sr Pauline Quinn op

Click here to view this photo book.

As a young girl I had a very difficult life. I was so dehumanized that I was not able to even speak. Through many different events in my life, I was able to pick myself up and slowly started to move forward. With the wind at my face, I never gave up and I went out and helped thousands. I am proud of myself because I trusted in God and He led me out of the storm and found ways to help others so they won't have to suffer as I did.

ABUSE OF POWER IN THE CHURCH ~ IF ABUSE IS IGNORED, MANY MORE PEOPLE ARE HURT

Fr. Marcial Maciel Degollado (March 10, 1920 – January 30, 2008) was a bisexual [1]Mexican-born Roman Catholic priest who founded the Legion of Christ and the Regnum Christi movement. He was found guilty of having forced homosexual relations with underaged boys. Reports confirmed that Maciel maintained relationships with at least two women and fathered up to six children, two of whom he allegedly abused as well.[4] From 1956 to the end of his life he was engulfed in scandals after accusations of a lifetime of financial and sexual misconduct and drug abuse. On May 1, 2010 the Vatican issued a statement condemning Maciel as "immoral" and acknowledging that Maciel had committed "true crimes" and that he had led a "life deprived of scruples and authentic religious feeling". Pope Benedict also said he would appoint a special commission to examine the Legionaries’ constitution and open an investigation into the its lay affiliate Regnum Christi.[8]

In an April article in The National Catholic Reporter, U.S. investigative reporter Jason Berry wrote that "the charismatic" founder of the Legion of Christ "sent streams of money to Roman curia officials with a calculated end…Maciel was buying support for his group and defence for himself, should his astounding secret life become known." Berry and his late colleague Gerald Renner wrote the 2004 book "Vows of Silence: The Abuse of Power in the Papacy of John Paul II", which gave rise to the award-winning documentary "Vows of Silence" on Father Maciel and the Legion of Christ. Maciel's key supporters, who provided him with a protective shield, included Cardinal Angelo Sodano, Vatican secretary of state from 1991 to 2006; Cardinal Eduardo Martínez, prefect of the Congregation for Institutes of Consecrated Life and Societies of Apostolic Life; and Cardinal Stanislaw Dziwisz, the Polish secretary of late Pope John Paul II (1978-2005).[19]
Cardinal Ratzinger, now the pope personally stalled investigations into Maciel though he may have been forced to do this by other high ranking people in the Roman Catholic Church.

Cardinal Ratzinger — the future Pope Benedict XVI — halted the inquiry. “It isn’t prudent,” he had told a Mexican bishop, according to two people who later talked to the bishop.

For years, Maciel had cultivated powerful allies among the cardinals, through gifts and cash donations. Chief among these allies was the former Vatican secretary of state and the most powerful man next to Pope John Paul II, Cardinal Angelo Sodano, now the dean of the College of Cardinals.

The Cost of Father Maciel
Joseph Bottum


Cardinal Sodano has to go. The dean of the College of Cardinals, he has been found too often on the edges of scandal. Never quite charged, never quite blamed, he has had his name in too long a series of depositions and court records and news accounts—an ongoing embarrassment to the Church he serves. The Vatican has been responding in a disorganized way to the frenzy of recent press stories about often thirty-year-old abuse cases. What it should do is put its own house in order, moving out the unhelpful remnants of the bureaucracy that allowed those scandals to fester for so long.

The latest revelations concern the financial benefits Cardinal Sodano received from Fr. Marcial Maciel Degollado, the corrupt conman who founded the Legion of Christ and its associated lay group, Regnum Christi. And those revelations follow hard on the 2008 convictions of Raffaello Follieri for wire fraud and money laundering. (Follieri’s company, you’ll remember, was trading in decommissioned church property, and it relied for its crimes on the prestige of having Cardinal Sodano’s nephew as its vice president.) That news, in turn, followed the cardinal’s reported role in thwarting a 1995 investigation into the subsequently proved accusations against the episcopal molester in Vienna, Hans Hermann Groër.

In one sense, of course, it’s very sad. A long career in the Church is not ending well, and it would be kinder to protect the man and let him slip away unnoticed. But Cardinal Sodano himself seems unwilling to let it be so. Speaking of the stories that were on the front page of nearly every newspaper in the world, he told the pope publicly at Easter this year, “The people of God are with you and do not allow themselves to be impressed by the petty gossip of the moment.”

Petty gossip? There’s room for complaint about the way the scandals have been used to advance every agenda under the sun, but when the subject is abused and sodomized children, petty is not the adjective of choice. Even in a season of mismanaged Vatican responses to the frenzy of the press, Sodano’s line was stunningly tone-deaf, and it served mostly to give the media yet another day of headlines. As things stand, if (God forbid) Pope Benedict were to die, the obsequies would be led by Cardinal Sodano—and the newscasts, hour after hour, would feature rehashes of all that is now associated with his name.

But that’s not the real problem. The deeper point is the lack of consequences— visible consequences—for failures and missteps and wrong associations in the Vatican. The real problem is that heads haven’t rolled, penalties haven’t been exacted, for Fr. Maciel’s deceptions.

For many years, Cardinal Sodano received money and benefits for his projects from the Legion of Christ, and in 1998 he halted investigations into sexual abuse by the Legion’s founder. That apparent quid pro quo ought to have a price.

It ought to have a price precisely because the scandal of Fr. Maciel is so deadly. The child-abuse cases were a corruption in the Church. What Fr. Maciel attempted is a corruption of the Church. He fooled many people, including this magazine’s creator, Richard John Neuhaus, who once defended Maciel in a 2002 column, before agreeing later that Cardinal Ratzinger (investigating Maciel at the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith) and John Paul “know more than I know with respect to evidence.”

The irony is that Fr. Neuhaus didn’t undertake that defense at the behest of Maciel, whom he never knew well. He did so because people he did know well, young American priests of the Legion, begged him to do so, telling him that their founder was suffering an attack they were certain was false and unfair. The first victims are the men, women, and children that Maciel, in his polymorphous perversity, used sexually, but the second set of victims are the good, strong, dynamic priests who had little direct contact with the man and are nonetheless tarred by his actions.

In the long history of the Church, enduring religious establishments have been built by the sinful, but usually the new order’s spirituality is a correction to the sinfulness: a way, a charism, that leads such sinners to Christ. Maciel, however, wrote his sins, and his power to cover up those sins, deep into the spirituality of the Legion of Christ—in how it handles confession, how it treats obedience, and how it understands authority.

The bishops who undertook the apostolic visitation of the Legion have finished their work, presenting their report to the Vatican on April 30. In anticipation, the directors of the Legion issued a statement on March 26, which read, “We ask all those who accused him in the past to forgive us, those whom we did not believe or were incapable of giving a hearing to, since at the time we could not imagine that such behavior took place.” On April 25, Fr. Owen Kearns, publisher of the Legion’s newspaper, the National Catholic Register, added, “To Father Maciel’s victims, I pray you can accept these words: I’m sorry for what our founder did to you. I’m sorry for adding to your burden with my own defense of him and my accusations against you. I’m sorry for being unable to believe you earlier. I’m sorry this apology has taken so long.”

All that is good, and yet, it isn’t enough. First Things has never received money from the Legion (and the closest I personally have been to their finances was a single review, of an Orhan Pamuk novel, I wrote for the National Catholic Register back in 1997). But then one thinks of the likes of Thomas Williams, Tom Hoopes, Thomas Berg, and all the other friends and acquaintances who had associations with the Legion of Christ and Regnum Christi. For that matter, many American Catholic commentators have lectured over the years at the movement’s events. The money they received was never significant, but it all helped contribute to an atmosphere in which the Legion could close ranks after the first public accusations against Maciel.

That atmosphere has to be eliminated, which will require the rewriting and reordering not just of the institutional structure but also of the spiritual design of the Legion of Christ and Regnum Christi.

In April, the National Catholic Reporter published a two-part article about Maciel’s financial dealings. Given the obsession with all things Catholic this spring, a time when the Long Lent of 2002 seemed to have come around again, the article received surprisingly little attention. Perhaps that’s because the author, Jason Berry, didn’t quite have the story he wanted. His account of cash in Rome was thinly sourced, and his reporting on Maciel’s actions in Mexico didn’t find the smoking gun we’ve all long expected to be found—the one that shows the Legion’s connections to the likes of Carlos Slim, whose telephone monopoly and political string-pulling made him the world’s richest man, and to the endemic corruption of Mexican politics.

As I wrote when the articles first appeared, although they were fumbling as journalism, they were fumbling toward what seems to be the truth. A larger part of the reason that the mainstream media didn’t latch on to the story may be that it does not fit the narrative of the moment—for Joseph Ratzinger, first as cardinal and now as pope, comes off in the Maciel scandal as something like the hero. Not until the end did John Paul II see more than a charismatic Latin American figure, raising money and training vibrant, active priests. Cardinal Ratzinger clearly saw deeper, despite the powerful protection Cardinal Sodano cast over Maciel.

The received journalistic narrative skewed a great deal of other reporting this spring. All through March and April, Der Spiegel, the New York Times, and the Irish Times—to name only a few—were working, quite accurately, within the media’s standard picture, which demands that the pope himself must have been involved in covering up crimes in the Church.

A more accurate understanding, as I wrote in a recent Weekly Standard article, would see that the first part of the scandals—the most evil, disgusting part—is basically over. For a variety of reasons, Catholics suffered through a corruption of their priests, centered around 1975, with the clergy’s percentage of sexual predators reaching new and vile levels. The Church now has in place stringent child-protection procedures, and the cases now being discussed, real and imagined, are more than a decade old.

The second part of the scandals, however, involves not the mostly dead criminals but the living institution. The bishops who ruled over those corrupt priests catastrophically failed to act. There were never a lot of these Catholic cases, but there were plenty enough—with every single one a horror, both in the act itself and in the failure of the bishops to react. The Catholic Church did not start the worldwide epidemic of child sexual abuse, and it did not materially advance it. But the bureaucracy of the Church did not do nearly enough to fight that epidemic when it broke out among its own clergy. And for these failures, every Catholic is paying—in nearly $3 billion of donations lost in court judgments, in suspicion of pastors, and in deep shame.

Insofar as anyone comes out well from all this, it is Pope Benedict. However much the narrative demands that he be pulled in, nothing yet published has held up to serious scrutiny. Which ought not, really, to be a surprise. This man was the one who actually saw there was a problem—the one who, in 2005, openly denounced the “filth in the Church and in the priesthood.” A Maltese abuse victim who met the pope this April told an interviewer, “I did not have any faith in priests. Now, after this moving experience, I have hope again. You people in Italy have a saint. Do you realize that? You have a saint!”

Not that the Vatican has managed to tell this story. The responses of the bureaucracy in Rome have swung between unhelpful silences and wrong-headed whines. There may be good reasons not to play the publicity games—driven by media cycles and celebrity culture and dramas of shame and fame—in which the world is caught up these days. The wheels of Catholicism have always ground slowly, operating with a deliberation that will not, and should not, match the world’s hectic pace. Then again, there may be good reasons for the Church to take the world as it finds it, trying to move people toward Christ from where those people actually are.

But, over these recent months of frenzy, the Vatican has unsuccessfully adopted both these modes. The bureaucracy has attempted public relations and done it badly. And the bureaucracy has attempted interior review, for the edification of its people and the good discipline of its priests, and that, too, has not been done particularly well. The faithful are saddened, responding to the news accounts with a sigh and mumble, and the clergy are disheartened and confused.

For either purpose, a figure such as Cardinal Sodano has to be removed from his current position and told to serve the Church in prayer. Everyone inside the Church needs to be taught that there are consequences for scandalous mistakes. And, for the outside world, Catholicism needs a story to tell, a narrative that can convey the simple truth: Despite the sins of its members, the Church remains what it has been—a light in dark places, a force of charity for the weak and the poor, and a hope for humankind on its way to the saving truth that is God.

New Dominican Sister at Catarina Benincasa Dominican Monestary

MY TRIP TO HAITI

Cool Slideshows

The earthquake ~ Haiti

Haiti Needs Help ~ Photos I took on Mission to Haiti

PRAY FOR MISSING BISHOPS AND PRIESTS IN CHINA

Press Release – January 4, 2010
The Cardinal Kung Foundation

Contact: Joseph Kung
PO Box 8086, Stamford, CT 06905, U.S.A.
Tel: 203-329-9712 Fax: 203-329-8415 E-Mail: jmkung@aol.com
Web Site: http://www.cardinalkungfoundation.org


Bishop Yao Liang of Xiwanzi, Hebei died
Three underground priest in Xuenhua disappeared

Underground Catholic Bishop Leon Yao Liang, the auxiliary bishop of Xiwanzi in Hebei, died on December 30, 2009. He was 87. We have not yet learned of any funeral arrangements for his burial because the news of his death appears to have been tightly controlled by the Chinese authority.

Bishop Yao was born in 1923 in Gonghui Village, Zhangbei county. He was ordained a priest in 1946. After ordination, he was assigned to various churches as assistant pastor. He was restricted in the region of Xiwanzi for his priestly duty by the Communst regime in the early 1950’s, earning his livelihood from vegetable farming and from selling fire wood. In 1956, he was forced to enter labor camp, and in 1958, was sentenced to life imprisonment. His “crime” was to be in communion with the Pope and with the universal Catholic Church. He was finally released from the prison in 1984 after 28 years in labor camps and prison. He was ordained a bishop on February 19, 2002 under a mandate from the Vatican.

In the meantime, we learned that three underground Catholic priests from Xuanhua, Hebei, Fathers Zhang Cunhui age 46, Zhang Zhanglin age 45, and Liu (??) age 32 disappeared in June 2009. They are believed by the local Catholic community to have been kidnapped by the Government’s agent and are now detained in an unknown location. Underground bishop of Xuanhua, Bishop Zhao Kexun, is now hiding under a government arrest warrant. Other priests are under intense pressure form the government to join the Catholic Patriotic Association, which is an independent government sponsored religious agent independent from the Vatican.

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