And that has made all the difference

People often paint a bleak picture of Baltimore City. And, quite frankly, there are plenty of sad and disturbing stories to go around. Take my friend, who worked as a social worker for Baltimore City children in foster care. She would conduct home visits with parents interested in getting their children back. She spoke of apartments crawling with cockroaches, overflowing toilets not even hooked up, pet feces littering the floor and cases where parents admitted to not taking their medication. My friend would help these individuals outline the steps they would need to take to get their children back. In the midst of this, she had foster children tell her they had been abused or went without food.

But even in the bleakest of situations, light shines through. My friend treasures the hand-drawn cards from foster children she helped.

One such light in Baltimore City is Cristo Rey Jesuit High School on Chester Street in Fells Point. I have previously written about Cristo Rey student Arthur Williams.

In 2009, he was one of two sophomores chosen to meet personally with Bill Cosby.

When asked if this was one of the highlights of his life, the then 15-year-old responded, “No.”

Taken aback, I remember asking, “Well then what is?”

“Seeing my mother get clean,” he responded. “Meeting Bill Cosby was a great opportunity and affected my life, but seeing my mother stop using was much more crucial.”

Arthur, a resident of Boys Hope Girls Hope in Baltimore, is an example of what is possible with inner determination coupled with a quality education and a supportive home environment. According to the Boys Hope Girls Hope website (bhghbaltimore.org), Arthur is now a Cristo Rey senior who has a corporate internship with Under Armour and plans to apply to Loyola University, Gettysburg and Moravian College.

In a story which will run March 17 in The Catholic Review, writer Matt Palmer interviewed another Cristo Rey senior, Chris Ellis. Cornelia Ellis, Chris’ adoptive mother, spoke of how proud she is of her son, but fretted that she didn’t make enough money to give her son the education and things he deserves.

She said her son simply tells her, “I’m going to do the best I can with what I got.”

“I’ve grown as a person here, both mentally and physically,” Chris said of Cristo Rey. “I’m different now.”

These young men were on a path that led them to places like Cristo Rey and Boys Hope Girls Hope. It’s this difference that helps shine a light on Baltimore.

Chris Ellis, a senior at Cristo Rey Jesuit High School and his mother Cornelia, attend the school’s “100 days until graduation” meeting March 8.

Loyola Blakefield student loses battle with leukemia

Loyola Blakefield freshman Joseph T. Gorman died March 9 after two years of battling leukemia.

Gorman was a student at Loyola for four years and had just turned 15. He had recently been informed that he was going to receive the “Childrens’ Hope Medal of Honor” presented by Heroes of Hope, a program under the World Health Foundation. He inspired a bone marrow drive that resulted in the registration of nearly 900 new donors. Gorman himself was the recipient of a bone marrow transplant. Damage keeps Japanese church officials from assessing needs

TOKYO – Damage from a magnitude 8.9 earthquake and ensuing tsunamis were preventing church officials in Japan from assessing needs as tsunami warnings were issued for 50 other countries.

Yasufumi Matsukuma, a staffer at the Japanese bishops’ conference, told the Asian church news agency UCA News that most staffers would remain in the offices overnight because of suspended rail service and continuous aftershocks.

“In Tokyo, telephone lines are so busy that I cannot contact diocesan chancellor offices in Japan. Aftershocks have followed. The tsunamis are terrible and we cannot get any information concerning the church yet,” he said.

Disruption of telecommunications has made it impossible for the conference’s general secretariat to contact Sendai, near the quake’s epicenter, and neighboring dioceses, he added.

Television and web video showed cars, ships and even buildings being swept away by a wall of water hitting Sendai, and CNN reported police discovered at least 200-300 bodies in the city.

Daisuke Narui, executive director of Caritas Japan, said in a statement: “We are still collecting information at this point, but currently we are not able to communicate on the phone. Cell phones are also out of service.”

A spokeswoman for Catholic Relief Services said the agency was on high alert in many countries in Asia, including the Philippines and Caritas Oceania, which is active in many islands in the Pacific.

This earthquake is the strongest since a magnitude 9.1 quake struck off Indonesia in December 2004. The quake and the tsunamis that followed left about 220,000 people dead or missing in more than a dozen countries around the Indian Ocean.

“We know from 2004 the devastating impact that these tsunamis can have,” said Sean Callahan, CRS executive vice president for overseas operations. “As with all such disasters, CRS will help people recover from the emergency and stand with them as they recover.”

Pope accepts resignation of Bishop Ricard of Pensacola-Tallahassee

WASHINGTON – Pope Benedict XVI has accepted the resignation of Bishop John H. Ricard of Pensacola-Tallahassee, Fla., and appointed Miami Archbishop Thomas G. Wenski to be the diocese’s apostolic administrator until the installation of a new bishop.

The resignation and appointment were announced March 11 in Washington by Archbishop Pietro Sambi, apostolic nuncio to the United States.

Bishop Ricard, 71, retired for health reasons. In 2009, he suffered a stroke and was hospitalized. He has undergone subsequent surgeries. He is four years younger than the age at which bishops are required by canon law to turn in their resignations to the pope.

Bishop Ricard, a native of Baton Rouge, La., was named bishop of the Pensacola- Tallahassee Diocese in 1997 and previously served as an auxiliary bishop in the Archdiocese of Baltimore.

On the national level, he has been chairman of the U.S. bishops’ Subcommittee on the Church in Africa and has served on the bishops’ international justice and peace committee and the national collections committee. In retirement he will be in residence in Pensacola.

Curley names new principal

Conventual Franciscan Father Joseph Benicewicz, president of Baltimore’s Archbishop Curley High School, announced the appointment of Philip Piercy as principal, effective July 1.

Piercy has been Curley’s assistant principal of academics for five years. A parishioner of St. Francis de Sales in Abingdon, he previously was a social studies teacher and dean of students at The John Carroll School in Bel Air.

Piercy holds a bachelor’s degree in secondary education from Elizabethtown College and a master’s degree in administration and supervision from Loyola University Maryland. He is currently a doctoral candidate in educational leadership at the College of Notre Dame of Maryland.

“During the course of this year,” Father Benicewicz said, “I have been very impressed with Mr. Piercy’s intellectual capabilities, dedication to the mission of Curley and the value of Catholic education, and his desire to help Curley continue to meet the challenges we face as a school.”

Piercy succeeds Barry Brownlee, who is retiring after 10 years as principal and a total of 22 on the Curley faculty. Curley also announced that vice president for finance Joseph DellaMonica, who has been with the school for 43 of its 50 years, will retire this summer.

Father Beniciewicz noted that Brownlee and DellaMonica delayed their retirement plans in order to assist his transition to the presidency of the school. Slideshow of Deacon Tanghe’s ordination

Our readers at The Catholic Review are pretty amazing. They’re everywhere and use their cameras to capture some touching, incredible moments. Last week’s ordination of transitional Deacon Warren Tanghe is a perfect example. Kitt O’Brien and Carrie Joneckis, both of St. John the Evangelist in Severna Park, were snapping away and offered to share some of what they were able to get. Unfortunately, all the photos couldn’t get in the March 3 edition of the paper. But, they’re embedded below in a video. Please enjoy and feel free to share your photos with me at [email protected]

New Bible features C.S. Lewis

There’s a new Bible on the market from HarperOne that features annotations taken from the spiritual writings of C.S. Lewis, one of the greatest Christian writers of all time best known for his “Chronicles of Narnia.” The newly released “C.S. Lewis Bible” incorporates passages from some of Lewis’s greatest works, including “Mere Christianity,” “The Screwtape Letters,” “The Great Divorce,” “The Problem of Pain,” “Miracles” and “A Grief Observed.”

The New York Times has the story:

(Lewis’) most famous apologetic is “Mere Christianity,” based on radio talks given during World War II. That book has helped convert Christians as dissimilar as the Watergate felon Charles W. Colson and the National Institutes of Health director, Francis S. Collins.

In “Mere Christianity,” Lewis writes of Jesus: “I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him: ‘I’m ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don’t accept His claim to be God.’ That is the one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic — on a level with the man who says he is a poached egg — or else he would be the Devil of Hell.”

This famous passage does not, on a second read, make much sense. After all, could not a great moral teacher have messianic delusions? But on a first read, it is quite persuasive, and classic Lewis. It is clear, confident and a bit humorous, and it offers a stark choice as it firmly suggests the right answer.

According to (Michael) Maudlin, an executive editor at HarperOne, the “Narnia” books are still “huge backlist sellers that dominate everything else” his company publishes by Lewis. But “Mere Christianity” still sells about 150,000 copies a year, as does “The Screwtape Letters” (1942), a satirical correspondence from an uncle demon to his nephew demon about how to lead a human astray.

“I would say in the last 10 years, C. S. Lewis has sold more books than any other 10-year span since he started publishing,” Mr. Maudlin said. “He’s not only not declining, he is in his sweet spot.”

No wonder HarperOne, owned by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation, repackages Lewis so. The Lewis Bible, available in cloth (18,000 copies sold since its November debut) or leather (6,000), shares a recycling genre with “A Year with C. S. Lewis,” a collection of 365 Lewis readings, which since 2003 has sold 200,000 copies.

The new Bible splices in quotations from Lewis’s books and unpublished papers. For example, in Genesis, next to the story of Noah’s drunkenness, appears an excerpt from a 1955 letter to one Mrs. Johnson. “One can understand,” it reads in part, “the bitterness of some ‘temperance’ fanatics if one has ever lived with a drunkard.” But, Lewis suggests, teetotalers are wrong if they write alcohol out of the Bible.

More here.

Anglican priest studies spirituality of snowboarding

Photo/Shanty Creek Resort

An Anglican priest in British Columbia has just earned a doctorate, looking at the spirituality of snowboarding. Rev. Neil Elliot of St. Andrew’s Anglican Church in Trail investigated “soulriding” – examining whether there was a spiritual dimension to snowboarding down a mountain. The priest’s findings don’t bode particularly well for organized religion.

What he learned from his research is that context and location largely determine whether an experience is spiritual. For example, he said, many people describe their experiences with nature as spiritual, but few would use the same term in reference to a night of fun at a club downtown. “It may be the same kind of experience, but they don’t frame it as spiritual because of the context.”

His research contains bad news and good news for organized religion. “One thing that was very clear in the research that I did is that people didn’t see any necessity to include God or any kind of structure in their understanding of spirituality. In fact, a number of people said it’s about spirituality; it’s not about God.

“That’s quite challenging, coming from an institutional church which very much sees God as key in spirituality.”

His work also brought him to the conclusion that people want community but they don’t want institutions, rules and regulations. Although he insists churches are communities, they are often viewed as inflexible institutions and that’s what drives people away.

“We need to help people see that we’re a community and not an institution,” Elliot said. “Ironically, the challenges that we’re facing in terms of finances and congregations are actually helping us to do that, because we haven’t got the money to prop up the institutional stuff [any more].”

The Vancouver Sun ?has more here.

French president appeals to Christian past

His popularity waning with a year to go before an election, French President Nicolas Sarkozy is reminding the French of their Christian heritage. The Syndey Morning Herald has the story.

Reuters photo

Nicolas Sarkozy, the leader of a secular republic, has been photographed with Catholic nuns before praising Christianity, stoking nationalist sentiment and questioning the role of Islam in French society.

Two weeks before regional elections and a month before France implements its ban on the wearing of the full face veil in public, the French President has created a rift in his centre-right party, exploiting anti-Muslim feeling in an attempt to stop voter defections to the far right.

During a visit to the pilgrimage town Puy-en-Velay in southern France on Thursday, he said the French must not forget the religion on which the country was founded, the ”magnificent Christian heritage” that shaped its culture.

”As a secular President I can say that,” he said, speaking in the village known best as a traditional stop on the ninth-century pilgrimage the Way of Saint James, which leads to Santiago de Compostela in Spain.

”This heritage comes with obligations, this heritage is a privilege, but it presents us above all with a duty: it obliges us to pass it on to future generations, and we should embrace it without doubt or shame,” he said. ”This is the France that we love, the France that we’re proud of, the France that has roots.”

More here.

Pakistani Christians bid farewell to slain government minister

BANGALORE, India – More than 20,000 Christians from all over flocked to the remote village of Kushpur in the Faisalabad Diocese for the funeral of Shahbaz Bhatti, Pakistan’s assassinated minister for minorities.

“It was a very emotional funeral with the people wailing and weeping all through,” Peter Jacob, executive secretary of the Pakistani bishops’ justice and peace commission, told Catholic News Service in a telephone interview from Kushpur March 4.

Bhatti, 42, a Catholic, was assassinated by unidentified gunmen who pumped bullets into his car from automatic weapons as he was being driven to his office in Islamabad March 2.

The final leg of the funeral was led by Bishop Joseph Coutts of Faisalabad, joined by two Protestant bishops and dozens of Catholic priests.

Bhatti’s body was flown to Kushpur in the afternoon from Islamabad, about 300 miles away, after a memorial Mass at Our Lady of Fatima Church in Islamabad. Bishop Rufin Anthony of Islamabad-Rawalpindi was principal celebrant.

Thousands of Christians, religious leaders, foreign diplomats and government officials led by Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gilani attended the Islamabad service, which included a state salute.

“Today is a very sad day,” said Gilani, describing Bhatti as a “very rare leader.”

“All the minorities (in Pakistan) have lost a great leader,” he added.

Bhatti founded the Christian Liberation Front in his student days and launched the All Pakistan Minority Alliance in 2001. He joined the Pakistan Peoples Party in 2002. When the party, under President Asif Ali Zardari, assumed power in early 2008, Bhatti was named to the National Assembly under the quota reserved for Christians and was soon the federal minister for minority affairs.

An outspoken critic of Pakistan’s blasphemy law, Bhatti became a target of Islamic extremists in November after he initiated a clemency petition for Asia Bibi, a Christian mother of five sentenced to death for blasphemy.

Catholic leaders implore parishioners to contact Maryland delegates on same-sex marriage bill

As the full House of Delegates prepares to begin what is expected to be an intense debate on legalizing same-sex marriage in Maryland, Mary Ellen Russell is imploring Catholics to contact their delegates and make their voices heard on the issue.

The House Judiciary Committee voted 12-10 to approve the bill March 4, following a narrow Feb. 24 vote in the State Senate to do the same.

If the bill gets 71 votes in the House, it will pass and Gov. Martin J. O’Malley has promised to sign it into law.

“It’s imperative that our lawmakers hear from us,” said Russell, executive director of the Maryland Catholic Conference, legislative lobbying arm of the state’s Catholic bishops.

Archbishop Edwin F. O’Brien joined Washington Cardinal and Wilmington Bishop W. Francis Malooly in issuing an urgent appeal Feb. 28, strongly encouraging Catholics to contact their lawmakers (see story).

“The debate is not yet over,” they said. “A solid number of the members of Maryland’s House of Delegates remain opposed to redefining marriage. They need to be assured by you immediately that they have the support of the majority of their constituents in rejecting this legislation.”

The bishops said the haste with which the measure is moving through the legislative process is “unprecedented.”

The Maryland Catholic Conference has prepared a question-and-answer page on marriage to help Catholics speak to their lawmakers and others on the issue.

The statement notes that “drastically altering” the legal definition of marriage in Maryland by recognizing same-sex marriage is not necessary to achieve benefits because they already exist in law. “Instead,” the statement concludes, “approving a same-sex marriage bill would significantly undermine the legal, social, and cultural status of marriage that is appropriately assigned only to the union of one man and one woman.”

Because the legislation could face a vote next week, Catholic leaders emphasized the importance of contacting lawmakers as soon as possible.

Visit www.mdcathcon.org for information on contacting your lawmakers and accessing the Q&A page on marriage.

Supreme Court upholds First Amendment rights in funeral protest case

WASHINGTON –The First Amendment right to free speech trumps the rights of a deceased Marine’s family to be protected from emotional distress intentionally inflicted by extreme and outrageous protests outside his funeral, the Supreme Court ruled March 2.

In a narrowly applicable 8-1 decision, the court upheld a 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruling that the members of the Westboro Baptist Church of Topeka, Kan., were within their First Amendment rights when they staged a protest outside the 2006 funeral of Matthew Snyder at St. John Parish in Westminster.

His father, Albert Snyder of York, Pa., sought financial compensation for emotional distress, defamation and other injuries after he learned about the Westboro group’s protest.

The members of the small church, which consists of the Rev. Fred W. Phelps and his family, have made a practice of staging protests at the funerals of soldiers and at other public places with signs such as “God Hates the USA,” “God Hates Fags” and “Thank God for Dead Soldiers.”

Rev. Phelps teaches that the deaths of soldiers are God’s vengeance on the United States for society’s tolerance of homosexuality. The is a frequent target as well, with protesters’ signs about pedophiles.

But in writing for the court, Chief Justice John Roberts said the Westboro members had a constitutional right to be where they were and to say what they did, despite the objectionable nature of what they were doing.

“Westboro believes that America is morally flawed; many Americans might feel the same about Westboro,” Roberts wrote.

Westboro’s funeral picketing is certainly hurtful and its contribution to public discourse may be negligible,” he continued. “But Westboro addressed matters of public import on public property, in a peaceful manner, in full compliance with the guidance of local officials. The speech was indeed planned to coincide with Matthew Snyder’s funeral, but did not itself disrupt that funeral, and Westboro’s choice to conduct its picketing at that time and place did not alter the nature of its speech.”

Making clear that the ruling was intended to apply narrowly, to the particular facts before the court, Roberts concluded that “speech is powerful. It can stir people to action, move them to tears of both joy and sorrow, and – as it did here – inflict great pain. On the facts before us, we cannot react to that pain by punishing the speaker.

“As a nation we have chosen a different course – to protect even hurtful speech on public issues to ensure that we do not stifle public debate. That choice requires that we shield Westboro from tort liability for its picketing in this case.”

Justice Samuel Alito, the lone dissenter on the court wrote a strong rebuttal, arguing that the breadth of rights under the First Amendment does not include intentionally inflicting severe emotional injury “by launching vicious verbal attacks that make no contribution to public debate.”

“In order to have a society in which public issues can be openly and vigorously debated, it is not necessary to allow the brutalization of innocent victims like the petitioner,” Alito wrote.

Roberts and Alito noted that the Westboro members target their protests less at individuals than at events where they are likely to garner the maximum public attention for their views.

As Alito noted, they threatened to protest at the Catholic funerals in January of Christina Taylor Green and Judge John Roll, two of the six victims of the shopping center shooter in Tucson, Ariz. They backed down when radio stations offered to give them free airtime to explain their beliefs.