Read it carefully and read it all and there is much more material here if you have time.

Spouses are therefore the permanent reminder to the Church of what happened on the Cross; they are for one another and for the children witnesses to the salvation in which the sacrament makes them sharers. Of this salvation event marriage, like every sacrament, is a memorial, actuation and prophecy: “As a memorial, the sacrament gives them the grace and duty of commemorating the great works of God and of bearing witness to them before their children. As actuation, it gives them the grace and duty of putting into practice in the present, towards each other and their children, the demands of a love which forgives and redeems. As prophecy, it gives them the grace and duty of living and bearing witness to the hope of the future encounter with Christ.

–Pope John Paul II, The Role of the Christian Family in the Modern World (1981)

The Churches only have themselves to blame for young people not knowing what Easter is about, according to a cathedral dean.

The accusation comes from the Very Rev Adrian Newman, Dean of Rochester, who declares: “We must find new ways to bring them to know its meaning.”

Dean Newman makes the plea in the March issue of Rochester Link, the Rochester diocesan monthly, in comments on a new survey revealing that people aged 16 to 24 “no longer have much of a clue what Easter is about”.

He says: “As our culture has become distant from our Christian roots, the meaning of Easter has somehow got lost in translation. These days when people encounter the great Christian traditions, it’s like they are stepping into a foreign country where the language and the customs are unfamiliar and odd.”

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LOL.

Thomas Gober, a former Mississippi state insurance examiner who has tracked fraud in the industry for 23 years and served previously as a consultant to the FBI and the Department of Justice, says he believes AIG’s supposedly solvent insurance business may be at least as troubled as its reckless financial-products unit. Far from being “healthy,” as state insurance regulators, ratings agencies and other experts have repeatedly described the insurance side, Gober calls it “a house of cards.” Citing numerous documents he has obtained from state insurance regulators and obscure data buried in AIG’s own 300-page annual reports, Gober argues that AIG’s 71 interlocking domestic U.S. insurance subsidiaries are in hock to each other to an astonishing degree.

Most of this as-yet-undiscovered problem, Gober says, lies in the area of reinsurance, whereby one insurance company insures the liabilities of another so that the latter doesn’t have to carry all the risk on its books. Most major insurance companies use outside firms to reinsure, but the vast majority of AIG’s reinsurance contracts are negotiated internally among its affiliates, Gober says, and these internal balance sheets don’t add up. The annual report of one major AIG subsidiary, American Home Assurance, shows that it owes $25 billion to another AIG affiliate, National Union Fire, Gober maintains. But American has only $22 billion of total invested assets on its balance sheet, he says, and it has issued another $22 billion in guarantees to the other companies. “The American Home assets and liquidity raise serious questions about their ability to make good on their promise to National Union Fire,” says Gober, who has a consulting business devoted to protecting policyholders. Gober says there are numerous other examples of “cooked books” between AIG subsidiaries. Based on the state insurance regulators’ own reports detailing unanswered questions, the tally in losses could be hundreds of billions of dollars more than AIG is now acknowledging.

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Watch it all–you need to understand it because of its huge implications going forward.

Sagging endowments and other shrinking revenue streams are challenging the status quo at the nation’s seminaries, most of which aren’t cushioned by a link to an endowed university.

Among the 175 “free-standing” institutions in the Association of Theological Schools, 39% were “financially stressed,” with less than a year’s worth of spendable assets, a fall 2008 report says. That’s up from 26% a year earlier, and the data don’t reflect fallout from the stock market crash in the fall.

Making matters worse, enrollments at ATS schools have dropped 4% since 2006, marking the first consecutive-year decline in more than 20 years. The Association for Biblical Higher Education (ABHE) says enrollments are also down at 60% of Bible colleges, which train undergraduates for ministry.

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Day 3 of our trip began in Selma, at Brown Chapel, which was the staging area and, later, the hospital for the marchers 44 years ago on the day that came to be known as “Bloody Sunday.”

The two-hour service was astonishing: a vivid portrait of the social and legal revolution that transpired in the second half of the 20th century.

The official speaker for the occasion was Eric Holder, the nation’s first African-American attorney general, who had been in office for less than a month. And the person who introduced him was the daughter of former Gov. George Wallace, who died in 1998 ”” the man who famously told the citizens of Alabama: “Segregation today, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever” ”” the same George Wallace who in 1963 stood in the door at the University of Alabama seeking to block two black students from enrolling. One of those students was Vivian Malone, Holder’s late sister-in-law.

Now these many decades later, Wallace’s daughter Peggy Wallace Kennedy spoke of the civil rights marchers in Selma as a brave band of believers who carried the flag of freedom. In the darkest moments, she said, they never gave up on the inherent goodness of mankind.

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A chaplain at Hospice by the Sea in Boca Raton has resigned, she says, over a ban on use of the words “God” or “Lord” in public settings.

Chaplains still speak freely of the Almighty in private sessions with patients or families but, the Rev. Mirta Signorelli said: “I can’t do chaplain’s work if I can’t say ‘God’ ”” if I’m scripted.”

Hospice CEO Paula Alderson said the ban on religious references applies only to the inspirational messages that chaplains deliver in staff meetings. The hospice remains fully comfortable with ministers, priests and rabbis offering religious counsel to the dying and grieving.

“I was sensitive to the fact that we don’t impose religion on our staff, and that it is not appropriate in the context of a staff meeting to use certain phrases or ‘God’ or ‘Holy Father,’ because some of our staff don’t believe at all,” Alderson said.

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She is not, and would never claim to be, some saintly figure serenely contemplating the prospect of a holy death-bed. That is precisely why her story has moved ordinary people so deeply. We can’t see ourselves as Theresa of Lisieux, but we can see ourselves as Jade Goody, fallible, human, frightened, yet right to the last longing for love, looking for hope, wanting to feel that the faith we have grasped makes some kind of sense, and that the life we have lived has a proper conclusion to it. A lot of us will want to say thank you, Jade, for reminding us that it does, and it has.

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Growing world population will cause a “perfect storm” of food, energy and water shortages by 2030, the UK government chief scientist has warned.

By 2030 the demand for resources will create a crisis with dire consequences, Prof John Beddington said.

Demand for food and energy will jump 50% by 2030 and for fresh water by 30%, as the population tops 8.3 billion, he told a conference in London.

Climate change will exacerbate matters in unpredictable ways, he added.

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“Despite his formality [Jonathan] Edwards was a passionate and affectionate man”¦.Once he had experienced the beauty of God’s redemptive love in Christ at the very center of the universe, everything else became secondary.”

–George Marsden, A Short Life of Jonathan Edwards (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2008), page 142

Unparalleled corporate greed and irresponsibility, predatory lending practices, and rampant consumerism have amplified domestic and global economic injustice. The global impact is difficult to calculate, except that the poor will become poorer and our commitment to continue our work toward achieving the Millennium Development Goals by 2015 is at great risk. A specter of fear creeps not only across the United States, but also across the world, sometimes causing us as a people to ignore the Gospel imperative of self-sacrifice and generosity, as we scramble for self-preservation in a culture of scarcity.

The crisis is both economic and environmental. The drought that grips Texas, parts of the American South, California, Africa and Australia, the force of hurricanes that have wreaked so much havoc in the Caribbean, Central America and the Gulf Coast, the ice storm in Kentucky””these and other natural disasters related to climate change””result in massive joblessness, driving agricultural production costs up, and worsening global hunger. The wars nations wage over diminishing natural resources kill and debilitate not only those who fight in them, but also civilians, weakening families, and destroying the land. We as a people have failed to see this connection, compartmentalizing concerns so as to minimize them and continue to live without regard to the care of God’s creation and the stewardship of the earth’s resources that usher in a more just and peaceful world.

In this season of Lent, God calls us to repentance. We have too often been preoccupied as a Church with internal affairs and a narrow focus that has absorbed both our energy and interest and that of our Communion ”“ to the exclusion of concern for the crisis of suffering both at home and abroad. We have often failed to speak a compelling word of commitment to economic justice. We have often failed to speak truth to power, to name the greed and consumerism that has pervaded our culture, and we have too often allowed the culture to define us instead of being formed by Gospel values.

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In your dioceses, many young men are presenting themselves as candidates for the priesthood. We can only thank the Lord for this. It is essential that serious discernment should take place. With this in mind, I encourage you, despite the organizational difficulties that can sometimes occur at the pastoral level, to give priority to the choice and training of formators and spiritual directors. They must have a personal and profound knowledge of the candidates for the priesthood, and must be capable of offering them a solid human, spiritual and pastoral formation so as to make them mature and balanced men, well prepared for priestly life. Your constant fraternal support will help the formators to accomplish their task in the love of the Church and her mission.

From the earliest days of the Christian faith in Cameroon, men and women religious have made an essential contribution to the life of the Church. I join you in giving thanks to God for this, and I rejoice at the development of consecrated life among the sons and daughters of your country, giving rise also to the expression of distinctively African charisms in communities that originated in your country. In fact, the profession of the evangelical counsels acts as “a sign that can and should effectively inspire all the members of the Church to fulfil indefatigably the duties of their Christian vocation” (Lumen Gentium, 44).

In your ministry of proclaiming the Gospel, you are also assisted by other pastoral workers, particularly catechists. In the evangelization of your country, they have played and they continue to play a key role. I thank them for their generosity and their faithfulness in the service of the Church. Through their work, an authentic inculturation of the faith is taking place. Their human, spiritual and doctrinal formation is therefore indispensable. The material, moral and spiritual support that they receive from their pastors, so that they can accomplish their mission in good living and working conditions, also serves to express to them the Church’s recognition of the importance of their commitment to proclaim the faith and foster its growth.

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What has happened – not only in America but also in Britain – to this promise of a calm, pragmatic response to the world’s economic problems? This week Mr Obama expressed outrage at the $165 million bonuses paid by AIG, the stricken insurance group, to executives in its financial products division who are responsible for most of its tens of billions of dollars in losses.

In Britain the row over Sir Fred Goodwin’s pension continues to grow. And in both countries, hatred of bankers is making it difficult for governments to take further action to stabilise the banks and support economic growth.

The behaviour of the bankers who first blew up the world financial system and then proceeded to loot it, is genuinely outrageous and deserves political retribution. But that should take the form of recovering the booty by the normal processes of law.

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President Barack Obama’s approval rating has slipped, as a growing number of Americans see him listening more to his party’s liberals than to its moderates and many voice opposition to some of his key economic proposals. Obama’s job approval rating has slipped from 64% in February to 59% currently, while disapproval has jumped from 17% to 26% over this period.

Although most people think the new president is doing as much as he can to fix the economy and relatively few say Obama’s policies have made the economy worse, the public expresses mixed views of his many major proposals to fix the economy.

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Let’s just say in September, when Lehman failed, it took people two plus weeks to find out where all of the counterparties were. I am certain during that time, which is the same week that AIG came under significant duress, they thought the same thing. It would take a significant amount of time to name the counterparties.

Now, you know, several month later, they can know who the counterparties were, but at that time they didn’t know who the counterparties were, and that is what is so frightening about how perverted the system had gotten, in terms of people didn’t know where the bodies were. And so in a way, it was a Band-Aid approach to say, OK, here is money, get it where it needs to go, it buys them time.

And the government reaction in all of this seems to have been, OK, we need more time, we need more time.

The curious thing about Geithner rushing to get a plan was, they weren’t ready. You know, do your homework and then come to the table and have a real plan. But all of this, had all these unintended consequences, and so we are talking about a $165 million bonus pool when it is not the real issue.

—Banking analyst Meredith Whitney, who used to be with Oppenheimer but who has now gone out on her own, last night on the Charlie Rose Show

Let me be specific: If you didn’t like reading about A.I.G. brokers getting millions in bonuses after their company ”” 80 percent of which is owned by U.S. taxpayers ”” racked up the biggest quarterly loss in the history of the Milky Way Galaxy, you’re really not going to like the bank bailout plan to be rolled out soon by the Obama team. That plan will begin by using up the $250 billion or so left in TARP funds to start removing the toxic assets from the banks. But ultimately, to get the scale of bank repair we need, it will likely require some $750 billion more.

The plan makes sense, and, if done right, it might even make profits for U.S. taxpayers. But in this climate of anger, it will take every bit of political capital in Barack Obama’s piggy bank ”” as well as Michelle’s, Sasha’s and Malia’s ”” to sell it to Congress and the public.

The job can’t be his alone. Everyone who has a stake in stabilizing and reforming the system is going to have to suck it up. And that starts with the brokers at A.I.G. who got the $165 million in bonuses. They need to voluntarily return them. Everyone today is taking a haircut of some kind or another, and A.I.G. brokers surely can be no exception. We do not want the U.S. government abrogating contracts ”” the rule of law is why everyone around the world wants to invest in our economy. But taxpayers should not sit quietly as bonuses are paid to people who were running an insurance scheme that would have made Bernie Madoff smile. The best way out is for the A.I.G. bankers to take one for the country and give up their bonuses.

I live in Montgomery County, Md. The schoolteachers here, who make on average $67,000 a year, recently voted to voluntarily give up their 5 percent pay raise that was contractually agreed to for next year, saving our school system $89 million ”” so programs and teachers would not have to be terminated. If public schoolteachers can take one for schoolchildren and fellow teachers, A.I.G. brokers can take one for the country.

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Saying that the recession continues to deepen, the Federal Reserve announced Wednesday that it would pump an extra $1 trillion into the mortgage market and longer-term Treasury securities in order to revive the economy.

“Job losses, declining equity and housing wealth, and tight credit conditions have weighed on consumer sentiment and spending,” the Fed said, adding that it would “employ all available tools to promote economic recovery and to preserve price stability.”

As expected, the Fed kept its benchmark interest rate at virtually zero. But in a surprise, it dramatically increased the amount of money it will create out of thin air to thaw out the still-frozen credit markets that have cramped lending to consumers and businesses alike.

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As Pope Benedict XVI makes his first trip to Africa as the head of the Roman Catholic Church, he will confront a phenomenon that can only be called a mystery.

Why is it that Africa ”“ a continent of bloody conflicts, forced migration, rampant health problems, and profound poverty where as many as 800 million people suffer from chronic hunger ”“ contains some of the most exuberantly religious people on earth? How do Africans find so much hope amid the hopelessness?

Unlike Europe and much of the Western world, where church membership seems to be on a constant decline, Africa is a kind of religious Klondike, where mainstream Christian churches, evangelical churches, and Muslim faiths all appear to be growing with no end in sight. The Catholic Church alone has 185 million members in Africa ”“ 20 percent of the continent’s population. In countries, like Angola, with a Catholic colonial past, Catholics make up 60 percent of the population.

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At a state institution for people with mental retardation in Texas, six staff members have been charged with taking part in staging what have been called human cockfights, using residents with mental retardation. The accusations have raised questions about how workers trained and hired to care for some of the most vulnerable people in society could instead treat them with cruelty.

The fights became known only because one of the workers lost his cell phone. It was found and turned over to an off-duty police officer. The phone had videos of more than a year of staged late-night fights, some as recent as this past January.

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The region has been handed over to the Pakistani Taliban in a foolish bargain made on behalf of Mr. Zardari’s government. Like most violent revolutionary movements, the Taliban use social injustice and a half-understood philosophy as an excuse to grab land and power. Houses and property have been taken over, and the Taliban have announced that people should pay 40 percent of their rent to their landlords and 60 percent to “jihad.”

In the district capital, Mingora, decapitated corpses were dangled from lampposts with notices pinned to them stating the “un-Islamic” action that merited death. At least 185 schools, most for girls, have been closed. Government officials, journalists and security troops have had their throats slit. Little wonder that most of my brother-in-law’s family has fled, along with 400,000 others.

What many Westerners fail to understand is that the Swat Valley is not one of Pakistan’s wild border areas. It is only 100 miles from Islamabad. In the words of Shaheen Sardar Ali, a cousin of Sana’s who is a law professor at Warwick University in England and was the first female cabinet minister in the government of North-West Frontier Province, “Swat is not somewhere you could ever see as being a breeding ground for extremism.” She remembers going to school unveiled as a child in the 1960s and studying alongside boys. But today, any girl who goes to school is risking her life.

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The missionary dimension of the priest is born from his sacramental configuration to Christ the Head: this brings with it, as a consequence, a cordial and total adherence to that which the ecclesial tradition has recognized as the “apostolica vivendi” forma. The latter consists of participation in a “new life” understood spiritually, in that “new style of life” that was inaugurated by the Lord Jesus and which was made their own by the Apostles. By the imposition of the bishop’s hands and the consecrating prayer of the Church, the candidates become new men, they become “priests.” In light of this it seems clear how the “tria munera” are in the first place a gift, and only as a consequence an office, participation in a life and because of this “a potestas.” Certainly, the great ecclesial tradition has justly detached the sacramental efficacy of the concrete existential situation of the priest, and thus the legitimate expectations of the faithful are adequately safeguarded. However, this correct doctrinal precision does not take anything way from the necessary, more than that, the indispensable, tension to moral perfection, which should dwell in every genuinely priestly heart.

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An interesting video piece from USA Today–watch it all.

U.S. combat deaths in Iraq have flattened at the lowest level since the war began six years ago Thursday, and the Navy has not lost a member to combat in more than a year.

Three Marines have been killed in combat since August, and none since December, records show. The Air Force hasn’t had a combat death since April, and the Navy since February 2008.

In some weeks, casualty figures for Iraq show, the number of non-combat deaths for U.S. troops topped those killed in fighting.

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Washington is temporarily at the center of the nation’s economic gravity and a noncommercial administration holds sway. This is an administration that has many lawyers and academics but almost no businesspeople in it, let alone self-made entrepreneurs. The president speaks passionately about education and health care reform, but he is strangely aloof from the banking crisis and displays no passion when speaking about commercial drive and success.

But if there is one thing we can be sure of, this pause will not last. The cultural DNA of the past 400 years will not be erased. The pendulum will swing hard. The gospel of success will recapture the imagination….

Walt Whitman got America right in his essay, “Democratic Vistas.” He acknowledged the vulgarity of the American success drive. He toted up its moral failings. But in the end, he accepted his country’s “extreme business energy,” its “almost maniacal appetite for wealth.” He knew that the country’s dreams were all built upon that energy and drive, and eventually the spirit of commercial optimism would always prevail.

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Human Rights Focus Pakistan(HRFP) has welcomed the reinstatement of deposed Chief Justice Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhry and other judges and wrote a letter appealing him to take a sue motu notice on discriminatory laws and their misuse.

The Chief Justice was asked to give special attention the Blasphemy Laws in Pakistan, in particular the following sections of the Pakistan Penal Code 295B & 295C.

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I have already noted the threats, that are well-known to exist, to the future of the Anglican Communion. From a careful reading of the Communiqué following the recent meeting in Alexandria of the Primates of the Communion, and on the basis of what some of them have written and said since, it would be foolishly optimistic to imagine that the existing difficulties were on the point of being overcome. One commentator seems to me to have summed up the situation well when he wrote: “(the communiqué) seemed to mark the acceptance, finally, of the unbridgeability of the Communion’s divide over sexuality and biblical authority, while leaving the outworking of this conclusion still undetermined.”

It may well be the case that only a proportion even of ‘active’ members of the Church of England are much concerned about the Anglican Communion. But even those less concerned would, I think, be faced with questions both within their churches, and from their friends and in the Media, if the Communion were explicitly, by decisions of responsible bodies, to divide. This too would suggest that things were not as they had been ”“ and the more so, if there came (as I think that there would quickly come) pressures upon the General Synod, or upon individual Dioceses, to make choices between the (by then) divided parts of the Anglican Communion.

Many fewer people, I think, are aware of the growing head of steam, in the ‘Global South’ and more accurately among the ‘GAFCON’ elements of the Communion, for a early Review of the processes for the appointment, and of the role, of the Archbishop of Canterbury, on account of the post-holder’s responsibilities as the senior Primate of the Anglican Communion, and as one (arguably, and certainly at present, the most significant and effective) of its four ‘Instruments of Communion’. Specifically, should these roles and responsibilities in and for the contemporary Anglican Communion be located in the See of Canterbury, whose occupant is an appointee of the British Crown (and to date a Briton though today not an Englishman), rather than in an (Arch)bishop elected, like every other Primate, by his peers.

Here are complex questions (explored already in the Hurd Commission’s Review of the See of Canterbury published in 2001): of the relationships of the Provinces of the Communion, and so of Anglicanism itself, to the See, and to the Cathedral, of Canterbury; of the future of the appointment of the Archbishop of Canterbury (and so of other English Bishops) by the Crown; and of the possibility of an Archbishop of Canterbury who was not British ”“ but could such a person fulfil the roles of the Archbishop of Canterbury in the life of England and of the Church of England? (Could we imagine an English bishop today as Archbishop of Nigeria, or of Australia?) These questions have the potential to cause a good deal of unsettled-ness in the Church of England, and to divert a good deal of energy, if the Global South presses them as I believe that it will.

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The debate over Alberta’s oilsands is taking on religious overtones these days.

Two months after a Roman Catholic bishop wrote a scathing letter against the province’s vast and controversial energy development, an Anglican bishop has spoken out against “vilifying one of the most exciting and challenging projects in Canadian history.”

John Clarke, bishop of Athabasca ”” a diocese that covers all of northern Alberta ”” said in a pastoral letter that some politicians and news reports focus on negative images of the oilsands, such as the mining process, tailings ponds and dead waterfowl.

“It is time for all (of) us across the Diocese of Athabasca and the Canadian Church to support the good work of the people of Fort McMurray, and not allow the agenda to be driven by the sensationalism of the National Geographic approach,” Clarke wrote in a letter published last week.

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