On the Home Page --
September, 2017 I
* Fifth Anniversary Reflection
* Why is Canadian Catholicism So Muted?
* Mary Magdalene and the Women Disciples in the Gospel of Luke
* Mandatory celibacy at the heart of what's wrong
* Pope invokes ‘magisterial authority’ to declare liturgy changes
‘irreversible’
* Does Christianity have a Wonder Woman
* Catholics need to give women priests a chance
* Michael Crosby, reformer in boardrooms and basilicas, dies at 77
* New way to donate to RCWP
Canada -- via PayPal
* 195 Reasons why women should be ordained
* Continuing Features
* Francis, the comic strip
*Top and bottom of the page menu
Installation
as Pastor
Installation of Pastor Roberta Fuller will be celebrated
at St. Mary Magdalene, The First Apostle, Catholic Faith Community,
1066 Dunbarton Road, Pickering, ON, at 4:00 p.m. Saturday, September
16, 2017. Bishop Marie Bouclin will preside. All are
welcome!
Contact: therealrobertaf@gmail.com
Why
is Canadian Catholicism So Muted?
Michael W. Higgins, Commonweal | August 16, 2017
. . . For
Catholicism, however, the last fifty years have mostly been ones of
severe institutional decline. In 1967, for instance, the highly regarded cardinal archbishop of
Montreal, Paul-Émile Léger, head of the pre-eminent archdiocese in the
country, resigned to assume
a new ministry as a missionary to the lepers of Cameroon. In 2017, the
cardinal archbishop of Toronto, Thomas Christopher Collins, head of the
today’s pre-eminent archdiocese in the country, is committed to the
restoration of the ancien regime
in Catholic ecclesial life. These fifty years have seen the
disappearance of Catholic institutions from hitherto deeply Catholic Quebec (New France has opted to follow
Old France in its slavish adherence to the 1905 doctrine of
laïcité—with its rigorous exclusion
of religion from the political world), the rise and fall of national
leadership in Catholic social teaching by the Canadian Conference of Catholic Bishops (CCCB),
the marginalization of the Catholic voice in the political arena, and
the collapse of interest in
Catholic affairs in the secular media. Further, there’s the precipitous
drop in religious practice among Catholics, the aging of religious personnel, the clustering of
parishes, the selling of churches, the enduring stain of clerical sex
abuse, and the aftershocks of
the Residential Schools crisis (a cultural genocide stemming from the
late nineteenth-century policy of “assimilating” indigenous children by removing them from their
homes and housing them in institutions run by the United, the
Presbyterian, the Anglican, and
the Roman Catholic churches).
Read
More
Michael
W. Higgins is Distinguished Professor of Catholic Thought, Sacred Heart
University in Fairfield, Connecticut, past president of two Canadian
Catholic universities, and co-author of the forthcoming Impressively
Free: Henri Nouwen as Model for a Renewed Priesthood.
Continuing Features:
With appologies to Martin Luther
Click here for book-length pdf
copy
of
195 Reasons
My Journey From Silence to Solidarity
This
book available for free as a pdf file downloaded here. |
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COMMISSION WATCH
On
May 12, 2016 Pope Francis announced that he
will create a commission to study the possibility of restoring the
tradition of ordaining women deacons in the Catholic Church.
Follow this special section to stay up to date and get insights and
commentary on developments from many news sources.
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Fifth Anniversary Reflection
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Rev. Dr. Victoria Marie, RCWP Canada West | August
28, 2017
They say a priest has a miraculous
power
to turn bread and wind into Jesus
But the miracle is to cultivate
the seed of Jesus within, that feeds us.
It's been five years
since my ordination.
Have I served well, progressed
or rested in stagnation?
Have I preached well,
broken open the Word
encouraged others,
listened, truly heard.
Provided space for others
to share their talents,
steered folks towards
inner/outer balance?
Do I hear their woes,
share in the lament,
as well as the joys
Divine Mystery has sent?
Have I shown by my own actions
that everything is sacred,
by loving Creator, my neighbour
and all God created.
Have I shown, like faith,
love is a verb?
Faith without love, love without action,
is empty, absurd.
Even if I've answered
these questions well
these are things at which
a priest can never excel.
Like everyone else, a priest
will never reach perfection.
Like everyone else, a priest
grows with self-examination, reflection.
Ministers must aim
for wholeness, ever reaching.
It in striving and living,
a pastor's true teaching.
Celebrations, lamentations,
all part of the story
as a community strives for wholeness,
seeks to behold God's glory.
In the end it's not perfection
in ministry, our test.
It's open hearts, open minds,
trying always to give our best.
Rev. Dr. Victoria Marie
was ordained a priest on July 29, 2012.
She serves Our
Lady of Guadalupe Tonantzin Community. Mass is celebrated every 1st
and 3rd Sunday of the month at 3 p.m.
Liturgies are
held at The Listening Post, 382 Main St., Vancouver, BC
Mary
Magdalene and the Women Disciples in the Gospel of Luke
Barbara
Reid, O.P., Boston College presentation | July 21, 2017
 |
.
. . What the Gospels actually say about Mary Magdalene is finally
starting to become better known. But if
you ask most Christians, “Who was Mary Magdalene,” what are they going
to tell you? Yeah, that she
was a repentant prostitute, or maybe they’ll tell you she was the one
who wept over Jesus’s feet and
dried them with her hair, or maybe they’ll tell you that she was the
woman who was caught in adultery
and was about to be stoned before Jesus intervened. But in the Gospels,
none of those
things
are said of Mary Magdalene. Nowhere is there even a reference to her
having been a sinner, much
less a prostitute. The confusion between these other women and Mary of
Magdala was reinforced
by Pope Gregory the Great, who conflated all of them in his Easter
homily in 591.
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Christian
artists have also confused the various stories, which has helped to
reinforce false images of Mary
Magdalene. Paintings such as that of Titian depict Mary as morosely
repentant, half-clothed. I’m
unclear about what the state of undress has to do with repentance.
[laughter] Or they even depict her
as naked, as in this painting by Quentin Metsys that juxtaposes
so-called penitent Mary Magdalene with
a different legionary, Mary of Egypt, who went to the desert to repent
and whose hair covered
her
after her clothes deteriorated. For some reason, there’s a greater
fascination with the story of a sinner
who repents dramatically than with the story of a woman who became
Apostle to the Apostles.
Read More (13 page transcript) or Watch
(video of the presentation)
Barbara
Reid, O.P. is general editor of The Wisdom Commentary, which features
authors from diverse religious, racial, and cultural
backgrounds. The first three of what will ultimately be a
58-volume series of feminist biblical commentary, delving into every
book of the Bible, were published by Liturgical Press.
Mandatory celibacy at the heart of
what's wrong
James Carroll, National Catholic Reporter | June 9, 2010
Like all Catholics, I gratefully depend on the faithful ministry of the
many good priests who serve the church. Yet I offer a broad critique of
something central to their lives and identities -- the rule of
celibacy. Many priests will recognize the truth of what I describe. I
write from inside the question, having lived as a celibate seminarian
and priest for more than a decade when I was young. In the Bing Crosby
glory days, celibacy was essential to the mystique that set priests
apart from other clergy, the Roman collar an “Open sesame!” to respect
and status. From a secular perspective, the celibate man or, in the
case of nuns, woman made an impression simply by sexual unavailability.
But from a religious perspective, the impact came from celibacy’s
character as an all-or-nothing bet on the existence of God. The
Catholic clergy lived in absolutism, which carried a magnetic pull.
The magnet is dead. Celibacy cuts to the heart of what is wrong in the
church today. Despite denials from Rome, there will be no halting, much
less recovering from, the mass destruction caused by the priest sex
abuse scandal without reforms centered on the abandonment of celibacy
as a near-universal prerequisite for ordination to the Latin-rite
priesthood.
Read More
Pope
invokes ‘magisterial authority’ to declare liturgy changes
‘irreversible’
Inés
San Martín, Crux | August 24, 2017
Addressing
a group of liturgical experts on Thursday, Pope Francis said that after
the teaching of the Second Vatican Council (1962-65) and a long path of
experience, “We can affirm with certainty and magisterial authority
that the liturgical reform is irreversible.”
The
declaration came in a speech on Thursday to Italy’s “Center of
Liturgical Action,” which sponsors an annual National Liturgical Week.
By
“liturgical reform,” Pope Francis meant the changes in Catholic rituals
and modes of worship which followed from Vatican II, the most
immediately visible elements of which included Mass facing the
congregation, the use of vernacular languages, and a stronger emphasis
on the “full, conscious and active” participation of the people.
Read
More
Does Christianity
have a Wonder Woman?
Jennifer Mertens, National Catholic Reporter | Aug 10, 2017
I've watched "Wonder Woman" three times now in theaters and still can't
get enough. Returning home, I eagerly research trailer clips, cast
interviews and box office statistics — totally fascinated by a movie
that reflects something I've never quite seen, and a message I can't
fully describe.
I'm not the person you would expect to write a column about this
character or movie, Wonder Woman. I can't pretend to be a comic book
fan or superhero guru. My husband spent weeks just trying to convince
me to see the movie for the first time. At that point, my knowledge of
Wonder Woman was limited to the Wonder Woman T-shirts that some
colleagues and I once wore for Halloween — and which I now regret
giving away!
Help fund independent Catholic journalism.
Donate now.
As one of millions who have been introduced (or reintroduced) to Wonder
Woman as a contemporary cultural icon, I have been surprised by my own
hunger for her story, and by the extent to which this hunger is
evidently shared around the world, by women and girls, and also men and
boys.
Read
More
Catholics
need to give women priests a chance
Jim
Ketchum, Times Herald | Aug. 11, 2017
Roman
Catholic clergy remains an all-male club. But if you need someone to
officiate at a wedding, apparently a nun will do just fine.
That
happened in July in Quebec, where Sister Pierette Thiffault officiated
at a wedding in Lorraineville after her local bishop obtained the
Vatican’s permission, according to a story in America magazine and
reported online by The Huffington Post.
Read
More
Michael
Crosby, reformer in boardrooms and basilicas, dies at 77
Brian
Roewe, National Catholic Reporter | Aug 9, 2017
Capuchin
Fr. Michael Crosby, author of 19 books and advocate for church reform
and corporate responsibility, died Aug. 5, at the age of 77.
In
his five-plus decades as a Capuchin friar, Fr. Michael Crosby talked
and walked the language of conversion wherever he went, whether within
the Catholic Church, the corridors of American industry or individuals'
spiritual lives.
Read
More
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