archives

By Chaz Muth, Catholic News Service

WASHINGTON -- Retired Bishop Charles A. Buswell of Pueblo, Colo., who had been one of four remaining U.S. bishops to have attended all four sessions of the Second Vatican Council, died June 14 at the age of 94.

A funeral Mass was to be celebrated for Buswell June 19 at the Cathedral of the Sacred Heart in Pueblo, followed by interment in the bishops mausoleum in Pueblo’s Roselawn Cemetery.

An anti-war protester into his 90s, the Oklahoma native, who had been in poor health for the past couple of years, died peacefully in his Pueblo retirement home, said Deacon Jake Arellano, assistant to Bishop Arthur N. Tafoya, the current head of the Pueblo Diocese.

During his 1959-79 tenure as bishop of Pueblo, Buswell was outspoken on civil rights causes and backed the rights of conscientious objectors.

Buswell started a program known as the Ministry of Christian Service that allowed lay people to study theology and then assist in pastoral programs. He also encouraged diocesan and parish officials to seek out and invite women and minorities to participate in church life.

There are forces afoot that would justify sexual sins. This is so obvious in our secular culture today, that one would have to be unconscious to not see it. Casual sex, open living-together arrangements, homosexual sex - anything goes. If it isn't "going" openly now, just wait a bit; it is coming. After all, are we not "free"?

Even some priests are asserting that sexual sins are not the most serious, so we should not be so concerned about them. More serious is our obligation to the poor, whether we are kind to one another, and to other social justice issues. As a result, there is growing moral confusion in the Church. Some couples are openly living together unmarried, some are in active homosexual relations, some are divorced and remarried outside of the Church, others are in other situations that are objectively sinful - and yet they feel free to bypass repentance, remorse and conversion, and instead receive Holy Eucharist without compunction. No wonder the Church is so weak, and is weakening.

By GREG GARRISON, Religion News Service

JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why It Matters by James W. Douglass Orbis Books, 544 pages, $30

Catholic peace activist Jim Douglass of Birmingham, Ala., believes in conspiracy theories, including the Big Daddy of them all -- the conspiracy to kill President John F. Kennedy.

"There is no mystery as to how and why and by whom he was assassinated," Douglass said. And he's not referring to Lee Harvey Oswald, who he believes was framed as the assassin by the Central Intelligence Agency.

Kennedy's enemies were covert operatives in his own government, Douglass alleges.

"He was killed by a high-level national security state organized by the CIA," he said. "He was not carrying out what his national security state wanted."

That's not a groundbreaking theory; filmmaker Oliver Stone and others have covered that territory before. "Oliver Stone does not take a spiritual position," Douglass said.