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.
The Dublin Report was published last November, just as the worst floods in recorded history submerged major Irish cities, followed by the coldest winter in years.
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.
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. I've signed up, you can too.
Prsident of the U.S. bishops' conference Cardinal Francis George expressed a desire to be moving away from the sex abuse crisis in his opening address to the bishops at their November meeting:
Get it? Like CLUE, only with the pope instead of Miss Scarlet. And no, I'm not accusing the pope of actually killing the Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, though I do think Benedict dealt a serious blow to the Anglican Communion, intentional or not, by creating a special process to admit large numbers of Anglicans to the Roman Catholic communion.
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. The latest: A Canadian "activist," John Pacheco, has spent the past few weeks calling into question the orthodoxy of Richard Gaillardetz, a lay professor of Catholic studies at the University of Toledo, a Catholic university, according to Catholic News Service.
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:
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