1. Ex-member corrects, challenges Vatican over sex abuse board.
By Associated Press, March 15, 2017, 8:01 AM
The clash between a former member of Pope Francis’ sex abuse advisory commission and the Vatican heated up Tuesday, as prominent Irish abuse survivor Marie Collins challenged a top Vatican cardinal over his claims that his office had cooperated with the commission.
In an open letter, Collins pressed her case that the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith had ignored or scuttled commission proposals to protect children and care for abuse victims that had been approved by the pope.
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Francis has pledged “zero tolerance” for abusive priests, and he won praise for creating the commission to provide the church with expert advice on protecting children and keeping pedophiles out of the priesthood. But questions have dogged him from the start about whether he really “gets it” about abuse, given he never dealt with the issue as archbishop and has surrounded himself with cardinal advisers who themselves have botched handling cases.
2. Christians in the Hands of Donald Trump.
By Ross Douthat, The New York Times, March 15, 2017, Opinion
Having spent the late Obama years trying to reconcile themselves [conservative Christians] to growing marginalization, to sudden secularization and increasing liberal pressure on their institutions, they suddenly find themselves with a real share of power — with allies all over the Trump cabinet, whatever the president himself may believe — in a political alignment that almost nobody saw coming.
This reversal of fortune provides the unexpected backdrop for several new books from conservative Christian writers, all written back when liberalism’s cultural-political progress seemed more inevitable (that is, last year). They include Philadelphia Archbishop Charles Chaput’s “Strangers in a Strange Land: Living the Catholic Faith in a Post-Christian World” and the Providence College English professor Anthony Esolen’s “Out of the Ashes: Rebuilding American Culture.” The most talked-about title is Rod Dreher’s “The Benedict Option” (blurbed, the alert reader will note, by Russell Moore), whose arresting title references the founder of Western monasticism, St. Benedict of Nursia, and whose countercultural themes have been percolating for some time in Dreher’s prolific blogging.
Each book has its own tone. Chaput’s is ruminative and strains for optimism; Esolen waxes poetic in the service of a cultural jeremiad. Dreher’s is an interesting mixture. It begins in sweeping pessimism, describing a Western Christianity foredestined to all but disappear, collapsing from within even as its institutions are regulated and taxed to death by secular inquisitors. Then it pivots to a more practical how-to guide for believers trying to build religious communities — churches, schools, families, social networks — that are more resilient, more rigorous and more capable of passing on the faith than much of Christianity today.
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But one might also think of the Benedict Option not as an absolute demand — to the monastery, go! — but as an invitation to sort of religious ratchet, in which people start from wherever they are and then take one step toward a greater rigor and coherence in the way they marry faith and life.
If every Catholic high school or college were one degree less secularized and worldly; if every Protestant megachurch were one degree more liturgical and theological; if not every Catholic but more Catholics became priests and nuns; if not every Christian family but more Christian families decided to have a third child or a fourth or fifth; if not every young Christians but more young Christians looked at working-class neighborhoods as an important mission field; if Catholics and Protestants alike could imitate even part of Mormonism’s dense networking … all this would be a form of the Benedict Option in action, and both the churches and the common culture would be better for it.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/
3. Pope warns of ‘very grave sin’ when jobs are cut unjustly.
By Nicole Winfield, Associated Press, March 14, 2017, 9:23 AM
Pope Francis said Wednesday that employers who fire workers for unclear economic reasons are committing a “very grave sin” and should ensure dignified work for all their employees.
Francis made the comments at his Wednesday general audience after appealing for a resolution to a labor dispute at Sky Italia, where employees are facing job cuts and relocation as the satellite channel moves offices from Rome to Milan. Francis called for a solution that respects the rights of all, “especially families.”
Speaking off-the-cuff, he added: “Those who for economic reasons or to conclude unclear negotiations, close factories and business ventures and take away jobs, this person is committing a very grave sin.”
4. Pope: Conversion – learning to do good with deeds, not words.
By Vatican Radio, March 14, 2017
Avoiding evil, learning to do good, and allowing yourself to be carried forward by the Lord: this is the path of Lenten conversion pointed out by Pope Francis in his homily at the morning Mass at the Casa Santa Marta. It is a conversion, the Pope said, that is manifested not with words, but with “concrete things.”
The Pope’s attempt to trace out the lines of Lenten conversion took its starting point from the words of the Prophet Isaiah from the day’s First Reading. Avoiding evil and learning to do good – the heart of Isaiah’s exhortation – are stages along this path. “Each one of us, every day, does something ugly.” The Bible, in fact, says that even “the most holy people sin seven times a day.”
