The dedication ceremonies for Houston’s new cathedral began this evening with vespers; the mass of dedication will be at noon tomorrow, and will be carried by ABC 13 on TV and on the internet. Here’s the order of worship.
Rocco Palmo has some comments.
Categories: Catholicism · Houston
I’ve got two daughters. 9 years old and 6 years old. … I am going to teach them first of all about values and morals. But if they make a mistake, I don’t want them punished with a baby.”
You have to have a bachelor’s degree to enter the FBI. Harris County Sheriff’s Department and Houston PD require an associate’s degree.
But the Border Patrol?
You don’t even need a high school diploma.
And background investigations have been outsourced from the FBI to private contractors, and these aren’t as thorough.
Veteran Border Patrol officials expressed concern about the quality of today’s recruits.
”What they’re getting now is, frankly, pretty disappointing,” said Bill King, who directed the Border Patrol academy from 1977 to 1978 and is retired. ”They just seem to have lowered the standard where it would have been unacceptable to me. It’s a difficult thing for me to say because I love the Border Patrol.”
Categories: Uncategorized
Tagged: Our culture
Journalists don’t get religion, says Rod Dreher of his colleagues.
They don’t understand how the religious mind works, and try to impose a political understanding on it, particularly in terms of conflict (besides, American journalism thrives on exploring conflicts, often to the exclusion of ideas). Nor do they get how the Catholic mind works, and seem to believe that Catholicism is just a smellsy-bellsy version of Protestantism, which more or less makes the individual believer the locus of religious authority (to be fair, any observer of the cafeteria that is American Catholicism could be forgiven this conclusion). And they tend to interpret the Catholicism that is in terms of the Catholicism they would like to see. As I have observed in a different context, it strikes them as normative that religion would be liberalizing in this day and age, and when it fails to do so, they sense that something is wrong.
He’s riffing on a column by Peter Steinfels:
This will now be the eighth or ninth papal trip to the United States, depending on whether one counts John Paul II’s several hours of layover in Anchorage in 1981. What is surprising about every papal visit, at least after 1965, when Paul VI addressed the United Nations, is what so many people find surprising. Each time they are surprised, for example, that the pope hasn’t abandoned the notion that all human lives, even in their earliest, embryonic phases, deserve protection and that therefore abortion is wrong.
Categories: Journalism
Sr. Barbara Markey has pleaded guilty to siphoning off church funds. She has been ordered to pay $125,000 in restitution, and could be sentenced to as much as 20 years in prison.
Markey was the director of the Family Life Office for the Omaha Archdiocese, and associate director of the Center for Marriage and Family at Creighton University. She was a leading figure in Catholic marriage preparation, best known as author of the FOCCUS tool, used by half a million couples each year. The archdiocese sued her civilly, too, saying she stole $820,000. Some of the money reportedly went to her gambling habit, but a good chunk went to family members. They, too, are being sued.
In the recent action, she didn’t exactly make a full confession.
Asked by the judge what she did, Markey mentioned only the minimum threshold for the charge she faced — $1,500.
Reading from a short, hand-scrawled sentence on a legal pad, Markey said: “I used at least $1,500 in funds I was not authorized to use by the finance office of the archdiocese.”
She then told the judge: “I’m not talking about everything they (the archdiocese) have said I did. Is that fair? Am I allowed to say that?”
Categories: Catholicism
