The British author, Ernest Benn once remarked: “Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it whether it exists or not, diagnosing it incorrectly, and applying the wrong remedy.”

He could have been writing of course

about some outspoken members of today’s

American Catholic hierarchy.

New York’s Cardinal Timothy Dolan has released his pre-election letter, since he will be in Rome on November 6^th. He wants American Catholics to understand the real issues in the upcoming presidential election. Some of his salient observations: “…as I leave for Rome, I want to share with you some of the concerns that I will bring with me to the tombs of the apostles, SS. Peter and Paul, and to Assisi, the town of St. Francis. I am concerned about a culture that has become increasingly callous about the radical abortion license, and a legal system that affords more protection to endangered species of plants and animals than to unborn babies; that considers pregnancy a disease; that interprets ‘comprehensive health care’ in such a way that it may be used to threaten the life of the baby in the womb (and, it should be noted, to exclude the undocumented immigrant as well). I am concerned as well for the infirm and elderly who are nearing the end of life, that they will not be treated with the respect, dignity and compassion that is their due, but instead be encouraged to seek a hasty death before they can become, according to some, ‘a burden to society.’”

Over in Illinois, Bishop Daniel Jenky has now completely morphed into a not-so-kind political propagandist. Jenky, remember, made headlines in April when he said that President Obama was today’s Hitler. “Hitler and Stalin, at their better moments,” Jenky said during a  Sunday homily in his St. Mary’s Cathedral, “would just barely tolerate some churches remaining open, but would not tolerate any competition with the state in education, social services and health care.” Then the Peoria bishop continued, “In clear violation of our First Amendment rights, Barack Obama – with his radical, pro-abortion and extreme secularist agenda – now seems intent on following a similar path.”

Now, Bishop Jenky is warning American Catholics that a vote for Obama is gravely sinful. A friend has forwarded excerpts from a pastoral letter to be read aloud at EVERY weekend liturgy on November 3^rd and 4^th.  It’s extreme, to say the least. Bishop Jenky’s letter begins stating there has never “been at time more threatening to our religious liberty than the present.” It states that the Affordable Healthcare Act will “require all Catholic institutions, exempting only our church buildings, to fund abortion, sterilization, and artificial contraception.” It overtly implies that any Democrat politician supporting the Affordable Healthcare Act and anyone voting for a Democrat “rejects Jesus as their Lord” and are “objectively guilty of grave sin” and show no “hope for salvation.”

How misleading. How strange. How disconcerting.

An American religious leader is now instructing Catholic American voters how they should vote, directly or indirectly, and with menacing threats of damnation if the voter does not vote as instructed by her or his bishop.

Today’s American-Catholic-bishop politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it whether it exists or not, diagnosing it incorrectly, and applying the wrong remedy.

I think our first American Catholic Bishop

Archbishop John Carroll

must be spinning in his grave in Baltimore!

HAPPY BIRTHDAY VATICAN II

May you live long in our theology and church life!

Pope John XXIII gave notice of his intention to convene the Second Vatican Council on 25 January 1959, less than three months after his election in October 1958. Members of the Curia Romana began to fear that John was up to no good! In discussions before the Council, Pope John often said that it was time to open the windows of the Church to let in some fresh air. He said the old church needed updating. Aggiornamento was the word he used. And John invited Christians outside of the Catholic Church to send observers to the Council.

Pope John XXIII opened the Second Vatican Council on 11 October 1962 in a public session and read the declaration Gaudet Mater Ecclesia before the Council Fathers. In this opening address, he rejected the thoughts of “prophets of doom who are always forecasting disaster” in the world and in the future of the Church.

The Pope stressed a pastoral, not a doctrinal, focus for the Council: The Church did not need to repeat or reformulate existing doctrines and dogmas; but rather it had to teach Christ’s message in the light of the modern world’s ever-changing trends. In other words, Pope John said the church need not fear the secular world, because it is in the secular world that we encounter the living God.

John exhorted the Council Fathers “to use the medicine of mercy rather than the weapons of severity” in the documents they would produce.

And today………..Fifty years after the Second Vatican Council revolutionized life inside our Roman Catholic Church, nearly three hundred bishops from around the world are gathered in Rome to remember the Council and to confront what they see as an external threat to the church and Christian Faith: secularization.

The Synod of Bishops on the “New Evangelization” brings together 262 church leaders for a three-week summit at the Vatican, joined by lay experts and representatives of other Christian groups.

Setting the tone for the bishops’ discussion, Washington DC’s Cardinal Donald Wuerl called on Christians to “overcome the syndrome of embarrassment” about their faith with a more assertive offense against the “tsunami of secular influence” that is sweeping away “marriage, family, the concept of the common good and objective right and wrong.”

Donald Wuerl has been appointed by Pope Benedict XVI to be the “Relator General” of the Synod, with the key task of summing up the main points of the bishops’ discussions. What I find so remarkable about Wuerl is his nearly total distortion of the message and impact of Vatican II. While Vatican II marked a moment of renewal and enthusiasm for the church, Wuerl said, it was followed by decades of poor teaching and substandard worship — “aberrational liturgical practice,” he called it — that made “entire generations” of Catholics incapable of transmitting the faith to their children and to society at large, ushering in today’s secularized society.

So now we know what happened. All contemporary church and societal problems are the fault of the Second Council! ……

Wuerl of course is wrong. He can speak of a “tsunami of secular influence;” but he is blind and deaf to the sounds and sights of the credibility earthquake that he and other contemporary church leaders have inflicted on the church.

So, as we celebrate this special Vatican II anniversary year, let’s look at a few basic facts (not the whirlwind of Wuerl’s rhetoric)…….facts that enable us to evaluate the various interpretations, reinterpretations, misinterpretations, and misrepresentations that will be promulgated by regressive church authorities in the coming year.

(1) Vatican II was an ecumenical council, the latest of only twenty-one in the two-millennia history of the Church. It was not a sinister group of subversives out to destroy the church. As such, it was and is to be respected as a specially authoritative voice of the church.

(2) There are those of course, like Don Wuerl and sadly a number of other U.S. bishops, who try to make Vatican II something it wasn’t and who claim today that it has been grossly misinterpreted. Strangely, many of today’s negative “interpreters” are bishops who were there and voted on the documents that came out of the council. They oversaw the implementation of  the council.

(3) When the bishops arrived for the Council, they found that members of the Curia (the Vatican bureaucrats who had rattled crosiers when Pope John announced the Council) had already tried to take control of the conciliar process. Note well: the majority of the Council fathers took control. They strongly defeated attempts by conservative Roman cardinals to steer Council deliberations and decisions in a conservative direction.

Pope Benedict has proclaimed a “Year of Faith” to remember Vatican II. So my friends, during this holy year, if you hear complaints about Vatican II and its stress on the church as the People of God, complaints about collegiality, warnings about a confident encounter with the “joys and hopes, the griefs and the anxieties” of people today, about respectful encounters with other religions, about public prayer marked by “full, conscious and active participation in liturgical celebrations,” about reminders that “the revision of liturgical books should allow for legitimate variations and adaptations to different groups, regions and peoples”……. Yes, if you hear such complaints or grumbling about these things, remember that you know the facts; and since you know the facts, give the complainers the attention they deserve. None whatsoever.

Beware of Hierarchical Attempts at Rewriting Catholic History

The lights are going out in Vienna.

The Tablet reports (27 September) that The Archbishop of Vienna, Cardinal Christoph Schönborn has announced that the 660 parishes in the Archdiocese of Vienna are to be drastically reduced over the next 10 years to just 150.

The Archbishop made the announcement to a startled audience of journalists at the annual media reception at the archbishops’ palace on 20 September. The main factors behind the restructuring are the declining number of churchgoing Catholics and the shortage of priests. Parishes in the archdiocese will in future be much larger, with three to five priests in charge, one of whom will be responsible to the archbishop. Each of these large parishes will be run jointly by priests and lay Catholics. Cardinal Schönborn described the move as “probably the greatest structural reorganization of the Vienna archdiocese for 200 years.”

The Roman Catholic decline around the globe is accelerating and the old gentlemen in Rome seem to be taking it all in stride. Maybe they feel a smaller church is more easily controlled. Or maybe our church leaders are simply unable to acknowledge their own shortcomings. In any event, Catholics are jumping ship and Peter’s Bark is taking on water.

As theologian, Charles Curran told a Detroit, church reform group recently: “One would expect in any other organization – if your organization, your business, your group, whatever – it was lost one-third of its members, wouldn’t you try to do something about it? The American Catholic Church has barely mentioned the problem, let alone done anything about it. Amazing! Simply amazing! If a business lost a third of its members, they’d be doing everything possible. They’d be going out of business, or saying, ‘We gotta do something about this.’ We have done nothing about it in the American scene specifically….”

In any event. I haven’t grabbed my lifejacket yet.

Next week : a birthday party for Vatican II!

Freedom…

I’ve been on the road for a couple weeks with family and friends, visiting Normandy, France and various D-Day sites. I have been there before; but this time was particularly special for me.

At the Normandy American Cemetery and Memorial in Colleville-sur-Mer (above Omaha Beach) I visited the grave of my grandmother’s nephew. I am the first person in my family to ever be here and stand at his grave. He was a farm boy from the Midwest, with a grade school education. He was drafted, three days before Christmas, in 1942.

Marion, my distant cousin, was one of the first American soldiers to wade ashore at daybreak on Tuesday, June 6th 1944. Omaha Beach. He was one of the first to die there, as well: Private First Class, U.S. Army. Twenty-two years old. Now, almost seventy years later, we gathered around the white cross at his grave. “He must have been a brave young man,” our cemetery guide told us as he conducted a brief memorial service, “because he had been given a Silver Star as well as a Purple Heart.” No dry eyes that day, as we stood there at cousin Marion’s grave, with nine thousand other graves around us. “They gave us our freedom,” our young guide said. I kept thinking, as we walked back to our car: fearful and brave soldiers…. and so very, very young.

Freedom…..

The evening after my visit to Colleville, I got an email from a friend in Michigan, giving me the latest Catholic news from the Archdiocese of Newark, New Jersey.

Archbishop John J. Myers, the spiritual leader of 1.3 million Catholics in the Archdiocese of Newark, has issued a pastoral letter saying that the legalization of gay marriage threatens religious freedom and that Catholics, who don’t accept the hierarchy’s teachings on the subject should refrain from receiving Communion.

More thoughts about freedom. Whose freedom? And who’s being threatened here? What is freedom. John Myers sees gay marriage as a threat to freedom….. Or does gay freedom threaten him? Thoughts….

With a bit of a chuckle I remempbered a comment from my old fellow-professor friend (and a rather conservative Catholic) a couple years ago. We were talking about people being gay and about gay unions. He was a sexologist and I the theologian; and I had asked him what he thought about “gayness.” Our local archbishop had just issued a statement that gay people are innately disordered and all gay sexual activity was a grave sin. “Well,” he said, “some people are very other-sex oriented. Some people are very same-sex oriented; and most of us are somewhere in the middle.” “So?” I asked. “Well,” he said, “if that’s the way God made people I guess God won’t mind at all if people are true to themselves….”

I re-read Archbishop Myer’s statement and I thought about the twenty-two years old fellow in my introduction to theology class last summer. In his university parish he is Eucharistic minister, a member of the parish council; and he is helping with the organization of shelter for battered women. And he is gay. And he would like to “marry” his companion. Does he have freedom? Should he have freedom? Can one be free to be oneself and is that a sin? And I thought about his parents, whom I met at a reception. They asked me about church teaching and their son’s lifestyle….they couldn’t believe their son was living in mortal sin, as their local parish priest had said.

Another email from my Michigan friend, with Seton Hall University student reactions to Archbishop Myers’ letter. (Seton Hall is New Jersey’s largest Catholic College.) One student captured the sentiments of many of her classmates, when learning about the Archbishop’s statement: “I think it’s outrageous….Our generation is more accepting. I think it’s going to make people quit….They might not want to go back to church, because they won’t feel accepted.”

Being an old researcher, I turned to the Pew Research Center to examine the most recent data about American Catholic views on same sex-marriage. Archbishop Myers would not be happy with what I found. A majority of lay Catholics — 53 percent — now support gay marriage; and the number of gay-marriage supporters rises to 72 percent among Catholics between the ages of 18 and 34.

Yes…..what is freedom? Whose freedom should we enable? What does it mean to be free? How do we as church promote and honor freedom?

———————

But now I close……and my meandering thoughts return to my young cousin and the 425,000 other Allied and German soldiers who were killed, wounded or went missing during the Battle of Normandy.

As I load photos into my computer, I look at one of my friends standing on the spot where President Reagan stood in 1984, on the fortieth anniversary of D-Day, and I recall his words then: “We stand today at a place of battle, one that 40 years ago saw and felt the worst of war. Men bled and died here for a few feet of – or inches of – sand, as bullets and shellfire cut through their ranks. About them, General Omar Bradley later said, ‘Every man who set foot on Omaha Beach that day was a hero.’”

Comedian Stephen Colbert and Comedian Timothy Dolan interacted onstage Friday night, September 14^th, before 3,000 cheering students at New York’s Fordham University.

As Laurie Goodstein reports, the evening was publicized as an opportunity for two Catholic celebrities to discuss how joy and humor permeate their spiritual lives. “They both delivered, with surprises and zingers that began the moment the two walked onstage,” Goodstein reports. “Mr. Colbert went to shake Cardinal Dolan’s hand, but the Cardinal took Mr. Colbert’s hand and kissed it — a disarming role reversal for a big prelate with a big job and a big ring.” Apparently it was all great fun.

I like comedy but recall the line from Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream: “Lord, what fools these mortals be!”

Comedy, of course, can be a temporary or a long-term distraction. Comedy Catholics, with all due respect to comedians Colbert & Dolan, would love to distract us, hoping we will not think too long or too much about the leadership problem in today’s church…..

When the laughing stops, here are some no-joke contemporary American Catholic realities:

• Cardinal Dolan, of course, creatively navigated his way through the Republican and Democratic national conventions. Let us not forget that, when commenting on President Obama’s health care mandate, the Comedy Cardinal suggested that if contraception is available, perhaps prostitution services should be made available for men with erectile dysfunction. The Big Apple Big Archbishop compared homosexuality to incest. Perhaps that is better than Cardinal Francis George of Chicago who compared gay and lesbian advocates to the Klu Klux Klan. Dolan reminded American Catholics that “we bishops are pastors, not politicians.” What great pastoral leadership. Dolan of course still proclaims his friendship and admiration for Republican vice presidential candidate Paul Ryan, saying he “wants to see him in action.”
•  Over in Denver, Archbishop Samuel Aquila says he admires Paul Ryan’s fiscal prudence and suggests thinking people should not ignore Ryan’s message just “because the consequences seem compassionless.” In Ryan’s home state, Bishop Robert Morlino of Madison continues to praise the vice-presidential candidate’s “accomplishments as a native son and brother in the faith;” and Morlino reassuringly asserts that native son’s budget proposals involve “choices where intrinsic evil is not involved.” Morlino forgets to mention that the Ryan budget would do great harm to the poorest and most vulnerable in our society. But I guess one can denigrate and oppress the poor without slipping into intrinsic evil.
•  We should remember Baltimore, as well.  There, Archbishop William Lori, the top USCCB man for their religious liberty campaign, issued a bitter and sarcastic response to America magazine’s editorial highlighting the flaws of the US bishops’ position. Lori refused, as well, (more intrinsic evil or just incest???)  to participate in a Catholic University of America discussion about homosexuality and Catholicism. He was afraid such a discussion “might weaken Church teaching.”

 A few more comic anecdotes from my contemporary Catholic humor file…..

• Philadelphia’s Cardinal Justin Rigali, responded last year to a grand jury report that documented 37 priests still in active ministry despite serious allegations of sex abuse against them. Rigali reassuringly asserted there were no such priests in active ministry. One month later, of course, the archdiocese suspended 21 priests. And at the end of July, Rigali’s clergy helper, Msgr William J. Lynn, was sent to jail. For failing to protect children from a known predator priest, Lynn will spend three to six years in prison. Philadelphia Judge M. Teresa Sarmina, addressing the former secretary of clergy for the Philadelphia Archdiocese on July 24: “You knew full well what was right, Msgr. Lynn, but you chose wrong.” The judge also told Lynn, he had “enabled monsters in clerical garb … to destroy the souls of children.”
•  And then of course we have some great episcopal one-liners: Bishop Daniel Jenky of Peoria, Ill., compared Obama to Adolph Hitler and Joseph Stalin…..Bishop David Zubik of Pittsburgh told his people that the Obama administration is saying “to hell with you.” …..Current Philadelphia Archbishop Charles Chaput said “contempt for religious faith has been growing.”

The issue is pastoral leadership,

not contempt for our Catholic Faith!

So what do we do?

My friends at ARCC, Association for the Rights of Catholics, have re-focused their October program, in response to participant needs. I like what they say: IN ALL THINGS HOPE.

 In All Things – Hope

This workshop will empower you to identify issues of injustice, then determine in community with others how to respond in a way that is both non-violent and effective.

Together we will follow the example of Jesus of Nazareth, who eschewed violence while insisting on living faithfully his relationship with the Father.

As the workshop progresses, we will become aware of the following:

 • All hierarchical systems of government are dependent on the obedience and cooperation of the governed and their social institutions.

• The governed have the ability to limit or retain their contributions and obedience to the system.

• If the governed retain their contributions and obedience to the system in large enough numbers and for a long enough time, the system will have to negotiate or collapse.

By the end of the workshop, you will be equipped, with tools and a community, to take action against injustice in a way that is non-violent while fully consistent with who you are before God.

ARCC website has complete info:

http://arcc-catholic-rights.net

R. Daniel Conlon is the Roman Catholic Bishop of Joliet, Illinois. He is also chairperson of the USCCB’s Committee for the Protection of Children and Young People.

In an August 13, 2012 address to the National Safe Environment and Victim Assistance Coordinators Leadership Conference in Omaha, Nebraska, Bishop Conlon acknowledged that the US hierarchy’s credibility on fixing the sexual abuse problem is “shredded” and that the situation is comparable to the Reformation, when “the episcopacy, the regular clergy, even the papacy were discredited.” Bishop Conlon’s Omaha address was published in the 30 August edition of Origins.

The Bishop of Joliet said he had always assumed that consistently implementing the bishops’ policies on child protection, “coupled with some decent publicity, would turn public opinion around.” With genuine frankness, he added: “I now know this was an illusion,” and acknowledged there is a widespread impression that the bishops “have failed to keep their commitments.”

Yes. Bishop Conlon is correct. Our bishops do have shredded credibility, but their lost credibility stretches far beyond sexual abuse issues. Our bishops dress like Renaissance princes and think and speak like nineteenth century ecclesiastical bureaucrats. Their’s is a scrambled theology….

The times have changed, but our contemporary Catholic bishops, starting with the Bishop of Rome, are feverishly tying to reverse all the church’s clocks.

Nineteenth century Catholicism — which lasted well into the 1950s when many of our bishops were pubescent little boys — was anchored in a static, unchanging, view of reality and a Catholic ethos that stressed: blind obedience to authority — sins as primarily of a sexual nature — the superiority of the ordained — the inferiority of women — and an absolute disdain for anyone who dared to think, ask a question, or challenge Church leadership.  

As Cardinal Martini said, the Church is 200 years behind the times. But most Catholics are not!

Our credibility is rooted in authentic and contemporary Christian witness. Our challenge is to challenge EVERYONE in the Church to make it happen.

Carlo Maria Martini, former Cardinal Archbishop of Milan, recently described the Roman Catholic Church as being “200 years behind the times.” At age 85, he died Friday, 31 August, in Milan, after serving there as Archbishop for twenty years. (He had retired in 2002, suffering from Parkinson’s Disease.)

Martini, a brilliant biblical scholar, was once seen as a future Pope. Many had hoped he would succeed John Paul II. He was also an outspoken critic of contemporary Catholic leadership and urged his fellow bishops to recognize the institutional church’s errors and launch a program of thoroughgoing structural reform and theological updating, starting with the papal office.

He was a courageous and wonderfully outspoken man. A contemporary Roman Catholic prophet. I met him once, briefly; but he was my hero for many years, especially when, accused of heresy, I tangled with church authorities. He reminded me and encouraged me with the conviction that a Catholic theologian can, and must be, a contemporary thinking believer.

Cardinal Martini gave his last interview to a fellow Jesuit, Fr. Georg Sporschill, at the beginning of August when he knew his death was near.

Martini criticized the way the church far too often addresses contemporary believers with negatives and prohibitions rather than words of encouragement.

Contemporary Catholics lack confidence in the church, he said in the recent interview, because: “Our culture has grown old. Our churches are big and empty. The church bureaucracy rises up, and our religious rites, and the vestments we wear, are pompous.”

Speaking about divorced Catholics, Martini stressed that the church must adopt “a more generous attitude towards divorced persons.” The question, he said, was not whether divorced couples can receive communion, but how the church can help complex family situations.

“The child sex scandals oblige us to undertake a journey of transformation,” Cardinal Martini said. And he stressed “a radical transformation, beginning with the Pope and his bishops.”

A courageous and pastoral bishop indeed. Cardinal Martini was not afraid to speak his mind on issues considered taboo at the Vatican, like priestly celibacy, expanding the role of women in the church, homosexuality, or advocating the use of condoms to combat Aids. In 2008 he criticized the official church’s prohibition of birth control.

Cardinal Martini was well-known and well-liked by Italians. Many got to know him by his frequent contributions to the leading daily newspaper Corriere della Sera, in which for three years he wrote a popular column ‘‘Letters to Cardinal Martini,’’ in which he responded to questions submitted by readers.

His funeral will be on Monday in Milan’s cathedral.

+++

“Where is the Life we have lost in living? Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?”

― T.S. Eliot

Thinking about all the Americans without jobs this Labor Day week end, it seems to me that neither major political party is really tuned in to what is happening in our American society. (The same can be said about our US Catholic bishops, but I will not comment much about them this week end…)

We are living in a time of deep and rapid socioeconomic change.  It seems to me that our politicians on both sides are still offering solutions to last century’s economic challenges. (Somewhat like our bishops still fighting yesterday’s issues and regressing to an overly-idealized 1950-styled church.) 

Indeed, our economy today is less predictable and less secure. Many factors contribute to this situation: the technology revolution, globalization, the nature of work, the distribution of the rewards from working. Thanks to rapidly expanding and ever smarter machines and global trade, the well-paying, middle-class jobs that were once the backbone of our American society (not just America of course!) are vanishing quickly. Driving around and through Detroit recently these realities really hit home for me…

I am a theologian not an economist; but there is something seriously wrong, when our economy’s growth engines are enriching the few and squeezing out the many. Glenn Hubbard, economic advisor to presidential candidate Mitt Romney, said recently that we simply need to allow the economic system to heal itself: “If an economist is honest with you, the best he or she say is what we need to do is allow those opportunities to happen, and they will.”

Hubbard uses the example of the successes of the Industrial Revolution, which indeed ended up greatly improving the economic welfare of millions of Americans, creating a more comfortable and stable middle class. I guess that’s why people since WWII have said on the first Monday of September:  “Happy Labor Day!”

What Hubbard and his followers forget of course is that industrialization worked  thanks to an elaborate system of new social, economic, and political institutions, along with trade unions, universal public education, and a social welfare safety net.

Today’s society and today’s people-needs are different. We can’t rely on steam-engines  (or analogically Latin liturgies in the church) to put people back to work, families back into their mortgaged homes, and to give young people a future worthy of their dreams. 

My favorite poet, T.S. Eliot, said it very well: “For last year’s words belong to last year’s language and next year’s words await another voice.”

We need new political and social institutions to conduct us safely through today’s and tomorrow’s global and virtual communities. Inventing those new institutions will be hard work and thinking and talking about them can be frightening. 

Frankly we have no alternative. Regressing to yesterday’s program will not work, because we no longer live in yesterday’s world. I wish the makers of contemporary political rhetoric in both parties could understand this…….

In any event, friends, HAPPY LABOR DAY! I hope you can spend good time this week end with family and friends.

In All Things – Hope!

You’re aware of injustices in the Church.

You know action must be taken to stand against it until it is brought into the light.

You’re not alone!

The Association for the Rights of Catholics in the Church (ARCC) invites you to a time of reflection and empowerment – moving from identifying issues, to taking effective action in response.

These workshops will empower you to identify issues of injustice, then determine in community with others how to respond in a way that is both non-violent and effective. Together we will follow the example of Jesus of Nazareth, who eschewed violence while insisting on living faithfully his relationship with the Father.

As the workshop progresses, we will become aware of the following:

• All hierarchical systems of government are dependent on the obedience and cooperation of the governed and their social institutions.
• The governed have the ability to limit or retain their contributions and obedience to the system.
• If the governed retain their contributions and obedience to the system in large enough numbers and for a long enough time, the system will have to negotiate or collapse.

By the end of the workshop, you will be equipped, with tools and a community, to take action against injustice in a way that is non-violent while fully consistent with who you are before God.

 THE NEXT WORKSHOP

 Philadelphia   AREA    IN  OCTOBER

October 26 & 27, 2012 (Friday 6-9 p.m, Saturday 9-5 p.m.)

Collenbrook United Church, 5290 Township Line Rd.,

Drexel Hill PA 1902

You can also promote the workshops, either by sharing information with your friends, or working with ARCC to organize a workshop in your area.

To REGISTER for the October workshop and for more information:  ARCCWorkshops@gmail.com          or call 1-877-700-2722.

The Associated Press reports that the Roman Catholic Cardinal Archbishop of New York and President of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, Timothy Dolan, will give the benediction at the Republican National Convention on the night Mitt Romney accepts the presidential nomination.

Joseph Zwilling, spokesperson for the Archdiocese of New York, said Cardinal Dolan’s agreement to participate in the Republican National Convention should not be seen as partisan nor an endorsement of Mr. Romney.