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The Peace Pulpit by Bishop Gumbleton	Monday, November 17, 2008
Homily Archives

[Bishop Gumbleton delivered this homily to the Confirmation class at St. Mel Parish, Dearborn Heights, Mich., Nov. 17]

Your teachers and pastor have given me very powerful testimony that you have prepared for Confirmation and they're confident that you're ready to be confirmed, so I have no doubt that you are well prepared and ready for this sacrament tonight. However, because it is such an important moment in your life (and I want you to be thinking about this), it's a moment when Jesus, through his spirit, enters into your spirit, deep in your heart and touches you in a very deep way, something that can change your whole life, so it's a very important moment for you.

By JOHN L. ALLEN JR.

A high-profile Italian nun has run afoul of church authorities for expressing her desire not to be kept alive in a vegetative state, at a moment in which the ultra-Catholic nation is gripped by bitter debate over its equivalent of the Terry Schiavo “right-to-die” case in the United States.

On the Road to Peace by John Dear S.J.	Tuesday, November 18, 2008
	Vol. 3, No. 11

Last Tuesday, the U.S. bishops' conference gathered at the Marriott in Baltimore. There they were invited to a dinner hosted by U.S. military chaplains. This piqued my curiosity, so I called the U.S. bishops' conference in D.C. "Yes," I was told, "that was the annual dinner for the bishops; the military puts it on. If you want more information, call the Pentagon."

By JOHN L. ALLEN JR.

On the heels of the U.S. bishops’ recent declaration that abortion remains their top political priority, Pope Benedict XVI this morning issued a reminder that children already born, especially those who suffer from poverty, disease and war, must also have a place within the church’s ambit of concern.

El Rio Debajo El Rio: The river beneath the river, by Dr. Clarissa Pinkola Estés
Vol. 1, No. 29 - November 14, 2008

"Water can wear through stone,"
good advice my grandmother said ...
but not if that prayer puts us to sleep
causing "sinful patience" or an aeternal "put-up-with,"
rather than rousing us to new ideas and actions.
Consider then, an additional path of heart ...
When the wound to a people or the soul is ancient
or ongoing, and hierarchies chronically
disturb the healings,
then, what say you my sister subversive soul,
what say you my brother co-conspirator,
let us rise up to heal the wounds,
bypassing the hierarchy completely ...

More ripping sutures off wounds between Jews and Christians? More enmity fanned between Jews and Catholics?

Again?

This week, The London Times online (www.timesonline.co.uk) reports that Riccardo Di Segni, Chief Rabbi of Rome, has accused Pope Benedict XVI and Benedict’s close-in major-domos -- who also vociferously support beatification of Pope Pius XII -- of having "turned a blind eye" to the Nazi Holocaust ... this has aroused "indignation." Rabbi accuses Benedict of reversing Pope John Paul’s apologies to the Jews.

All Things Catholic by John L. Allen, Jr.
	Friday, November 14, 2008 - Vol. 8, No. 8

From the outside, it's tempting to conclude that a hard-line position on abortion prevailed among the U.S. bishops during their Nov. 10-13 fall meeting in Baltimore. That seems to be the impression people got from news reports; one prominent American Jewish leader called me on Wednesday, for example, to ask why the bishops were the first major group in the country to fire a "shot across the bow" of the incoming Obama administration.

To be sure, that reaction has a basis in reality. The bishops were remarkably compact in their determination that there will be no "truce," as Bishop Daniel Conlon of Steubenville, Ohio, put it, in their defense of unborn life. The bishops seem especially galvanized in opposition to the Freedom of Choice Act, or FOCA, which would bar restrictions on abortion at state and federal levels such as parental notification laws or limits on partial birth abortion, and which, according to worst-case readings, could eventually put Catholic hospitals in the position of either providing abortions or closing their doors.

The Peace Pulpit by Bishop Gumbleton	Sunday, November 9, 2008
Homily Archives

I don't know if this ever happens on any other Sunday or feast day, but there's something very strange about the scriptures today because they seem to indicate that we really ought not to be celebrating the feast of the dedication of a church building, which is what we're doing in this liturgy commemorating the dedication of a huge building located in Rome that has now been designated as the pope's official cathedral church, built in about the fourth century, after Constantine had converted and Christians were free to celebrate in churches.

But the early Christians didn't have any churches. They never dedicated church buildings. They celebrated the breaking of the bread in their homes. Small communities of disciples of Jesus gathered together in homes throughout the Roman Empire, and that's how it was for over 300 years. No churches, no buildings to celebrate and to dedicate, to use almost as a place where we feel that somehow, because it's sacred and we're not, that when we go there, God will not punish us.

Today, Cardinal Francis George of Chicago, President of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, issued a statement in the name of the bishops regarding relations with the incoming administration of President-elect Barak Obama, focusing in particular on the bishops' concern with abortion. The following is the full text of that statement, which is the result of three days of d