By guest blogger Rory Fitzgerald It has been a long, dark winter here in Ireland. The church has been a rock for the Irish people for sixteen centuries. Ireland's economy has spectacularly collapsed. Now, people say that the ancient Irish church is collapsing.

An excellent essay in the UK Guardian by Keith Chappell on next month's meeting between the Irish bishops and Pope Benedict XVI regarding the sex abuse crisis in that country points to a big difference between this pope and the last: a far more robust response to child sex abuse.Many faulted Pope John Paul II, rightly I think, for a slow and insufficiently direct response to the U.S.

A new blog and Facebook campaign is asking the bishops to slow down on implementing the new English translations of the Mass, planned for 2010. It's based on an America essay by the pastor of the Seattle cathedral.

Prsident of the U.S.

Most Catholics last Sunday had inserted into their bulletins an alert from the U.S. conference of bishops on pending health care legislation.

Get it?

"Sister X" has spoken out in the pages of Commonweal regarding the Vatican "visitation" of U.S. women religious. Bravo to Commonweal for giving her so much space.

Mudslinging has become so common in mainstream media nowadays that we barely notice it, but I'm always astonished at the willingness of some Catholics to stoop to scoop up slime.

Well, I didn't say it, but Nicholas Cafardi of Duquesne University did. In a column on the National Catholic Reporter's website, Cafardi has hard words for "a Midwestern bishop" who said that "the Catholic Church does not teach that ‘health care’ as such, without distinction, is a natural right" and argued that the role of the state was to regulate the private sector.

I had to pass along this post from Newsweek/Washington post. Don't know who Anthony Stevens-Arroyo is, but he's got a great take on how the U.S. bishops should be approaching their task of a changing church in a politically charged environment: What leadership style a bishop chooses is crucial for addressing the crisis and making the necessary radical policy shifts.