O God, fill us with the divine humility of Christ: that, having the same mind that was also in him, we may look not every one on his own things, but every one also on the things of others, emptying our wills of pride, and our hearts of complaining, and laying down our glories before the cross; through the same Jesus Christ our Lord.

Foreign policy is a deep study, unsuited to the short attention spans of democratic politics. It is unlikely to figure in the forthcoming election. Yet there is still enough time for long views before the campaigning starts, and two interesting contributions to foreign affairs have recently been published. One of them made headlines: the report of the House of Commons’ foreign affairs committee which advocated a more cautious approach to the US and proclaimed the death of the special relationship.

Scepticism is in order. The coroner has often been called on to deal with that supposed corpse, and a wise coroner would come to two conclusions: that it never existed, and that it will last for the indefinite future. As the Irishman said, “This pig doesn’t weigh as much as I thought it did, but then again, I never thought it would”.

Those who announce the relationship’s death usually start with a shocking discovery: that America always places its own interests first. This would not have come as news to Winston Churchill, who invented the phrase “special relationship” and who could have provided a score of examples of American unilateralism.

Read it all.

Add an entire school day to the chopping block. State lawmakers want tomove financially struggling schools to four day weeks. They say it willsave money, and it won’t affect classroom time.

Thesuperintendent of one local school district believes the plan couldwork. CBS 2’s Dorothy Tucker paid them a visit.

“I think it’ssomething we should take a look at,” said Dr. Kamala Buckner,Superintendent of Thornton Township High Schools District 205.

Read it all.

The folks at National Public Radio understand the power of words. Managing Editor David Sweeney announced yesterday that the station would no longer refer to people in the abortion debate as “pro-choice” and “pro-life.” Instead, the station will say “abortion rights advocates” and “abortion rights opponents,” according to a memo circulated to NPR staff.

In making this change, NPR is shifting the terms of the debate to make it more friendly to the pro-choice position.

Being pro-something sounds much nicer than being anti-the other thing. So while the pro-choice and pro-life labels may not be particularly profound — neither group is anti-choice or anti-life, after all — they do convey each side’s position on a level playing field. One believes women should be able to choose whether to keep a pregnancy, the other believes that even the unborn have an inviolable right to life.

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Pope Benedict, facing one of the gravest crises of his pontificate as a sexual abuse scandal sweeps the Church, indicated on Sunday that his faith would give him the courage not to be intimidated by critics.

The 82-year-old pontiff led tens of thousands of people in a sunny St. Peter’s Square in a Palm Sunday service at the start of Holy Week events commemorating the last days in the life of Jesus.

While he did not directly mention the scandal involving sexual abuse of children by priests, parts of his sermon could be applicable to the crisis.

The pontiff said faith in God helps lead one “towards the courage of not allowing oneself to be intimidated by the petty gossip of dominant opinion.”

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When Pope Benedict XVI was archbishop of Munich and Freising, he was broadly described as a theologian more concerned with doctrinal debates than personnel matters. That, say his defenders, helps explain why he did not keep close tabs on a pedophile priest sent to his archdiocese in 1980 and allowed to work in a parish.

Yet in 1979, the year before Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, the future pope, approved the Rev. Peter Hullermann’s move to Munich, the cardinal blocked the assignment to the local university of a prominent theology professor recommended by the university senate. And in 1981, he punished a priest for holding a Mass at a peace demonstration, leading the man to ultimately leave the priesthood.

Pope Benedict’s four-and-a-half-year tenure as archbishop is among the least-examined periods of his life, but his time presiding over 1,713 priests and 2.2 million Catholics was in many ways a dress rehearsal for his present job tending to the Roman Catholic Church’s more than one billion members worldwide.

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Shortly after the Civil War, Andrew Carney, an Irish-born tailor who had made a small fortune selling uniforms to the US Navy, bequeathed $56,000 to a fledgling hospital in South Boston. He wanted it to serve the working class, “without distinction of creed, color, or nation.’’

Even in those early days, Boston’s Catholic hospital had financial problems. The Daughters of Charity who ran it “begged daily in the streets of Boston for the money and food to keep the hospital open and the indigent patients fed,’’ historian Thomas H. O’Connor wrote in his book, “Boston Catholics.’’ When word got back to the archbishop of the hospital’s plight, he organized a grand bazaar to raise money. It took in $25,000 and put the hospital on firm financial ground.

Nearly 150 years later, a private equity firm has stepped in with needed cash for the Carney and the other five hospitals in the Caritas Christi Health Care network, which have struggled in recent years to meet their mission to provide care to the poor, while making the improvements necessary to survive in a cutthroat and increasingly complex industry.

The firm, Cerberus Capital Management, has promised the hospitals will continue to be run as Catholic institutions, in accordance with Catholic teachings that prohibit procedures the church considers to be immoral, such as abortion and sterilization. Hospital leaders have cast the deal as a way to preserve Catholic health care in Boston.

Read it all from the Boston Globe.

Here is the paradox. We are living in what is possibly the most secular age since Homo sapiens first set foot on Earth, and Europe is its most secular continent. Yet faith schools are the growth industry of our time. More and more people want them, and are prepared to go to great lengths to get their children admitted. This applies to parents who are not themselves religious. What is going on?

The simple answer is that faith schools tend to have academic success above the average: so, at any rate, the league tables suggest. But why should this be so, if faith inhibits critical thought and discourages independence of mind? This is a question worth serious reflection.

My tentative suggestion is that faith schools tend to have a strong ethos that emphasises respect for authority, the virtues of hard work, discipline and a sense of duty, a commitment to high ideals, a willingness to learn, a sense of social responsibility, a preference for earned self-respect rather than unearned self-esteem, and the idea of an objective moral order that transcends subjective personal preference.

Read it all.

By 1982, GM had had enough and put the Fremont factory out of its misery, Two years later, GM and Toyota reopened the factory with ”” incredibly ”” most of the same workforce.

But first, they sent some of them to Japan to learn the Toyota way.

The key to the Toyota Production System was a principle so basic, it sounds like an empty management slogan: Teamwork.

At Toyota, people were divided into teams of just four or five and they switched jobs every few hours to relieve the monotony. A team leader would step in to help when anything went wrong.

At the old GM plant in Fremont, Calif., the system had been totally different and there was one cardinal rule that everyone knew: the assembly line could never stop.

“You just didn’t see the line stop,” Madrid said. “I saw a guy fall in the pit and they didn’t stop the line.”

This is just a fabulous story. Don’t miss the image of a single bolt. read or listen to it all.

BRITAIN’S special relationship with the US ”” forged by Winston Churchill and Franklin Roosevelt in the second world war ”” no longer exists, says a committee of influential MPs.

Instead, America’s relationship with Britain is no more special than with its other main allies, according to a report by the Commons foreign affairs committee published today.

The report also warns that the perception of the UK after the Iraq war as America’s “subservient poodle” has been highly damaging to Britain’s reputation and interests around the world. The MPs conclude that British prime ministers have to learn to be less deferential to US presidents and be “willing to say no” to America.

Read it all.

Christians in Britain are being persecuted and “treated with disrespect”, senior bishops have said.

Six prominent bishops and Lord Carey, the former Archbishop of Canterbury, describe the “discrimination” against churchgoers as “unacceptable in a civilised society”.

In a thinly-veiled attack on Labour, they claim that traditional beliefs on issues such as marriage are no longer being upheld and call on the major parties to address the issue in the run-up to the general election.

In a letter to The Sunday Telegraph, the bishops express their deep disquiet at the double standards of public sector employers, claiming that Christians are punished while followers of other faiths are treated far more sensitively.

Read it all.

This is yet another case in which the religious rights of the Christian community are being treated with disrespect. We are deeply concerned at the apparent discrimination shown against Christians and we call on the Government to remedy this serious development.

In a number of cases, Christian beliefs on marriage, conscience and worship are simply not being upheld. There have been numerous dismissals of practising Christians from employment for reasons that are unacceptable in a civilised country. We believe that the major parties need to address this issue in the coming general election.

The cross is ubiquitous in Christian devotion from the earliest times and clearly the most easily recognisable Christian symbol. For many Christians, wearing a cross is an important expression of their Christian faith and they would feel bereft if, for some unjustifiable reason, they were not allowed to wear it. To be asked by an employer to remove or “hide” the cross, is asking the Christian to hide their faith.

Read it all and note the signatories.

From here:

This morning at 7.15 am the Vestry of St. Andrew’s Church ~ Mt. Pleasant met and unanimously passed the following resolution:

RESOLVED that the resolution unanimously adopted by the Vestry on March 28, 2010 for this church corporation, parish, and congregation to withdraw from and sever all ties with The Episcopal Church in the United States and to transfer its canonical residence to the Anglican Church in North America or another province of the worldwide Anglican Communion be ratified by the members of this church corporation.

The Parish then met in a Special Meeting at 12.15 pm for the purpose of ratifying and concurring with this decision of the Vestry to withdraw from The Episcopal Church.

Read the whole blog entry from rector Steve Wood.

Because of the new health care law, Arizona lawmakers must now find a way to maintain insurance coverage for 350,000 children and adults that they slashed just last week to help close a $2.6 billion budget deficit.

Louisiana officials say a reduction in federal money to hospitals that treat the uninsured under the bill could be a death knell for their state-run charity hospital system.

In California, policymakers estimate they will have to come up with an additional $500 million a year to make necessary increases in payments to Medicaid providers.

Across the country, state officials are wading through the minutiae of the health care overhaul to understand just how their governments will be affected. Even with much still to be digested, it is clear the law may be as much of a burden to some state budgets as it is a boon to uninsured consumers.

States with the largest uninsured populations, like Texas and California, might be considered by its backers the biggest winners to emerge from the law, because so many additional residents will have access to health insurance. But because those states are being required to significantly expand their Medicaid programs, they are precisely the ones that will face the biggest financial strains, in many cases magnified by existing budget shortfalls.

Read it all.

Though the Diocese of South Carolina remains affiliated with The Episcopal Church, the two are waging a battle over Scripture and polity.

South Carolina Bishop Mark Lawrence was not hesitant this week to express his continuing frustrations with the national church body’s “false gospel” and ongoing pursuit of litigations.

“The distractions that come from the decisions others have made within The Episcopal Church have created restlessness in my spirit,” he said at the diocese’s 219th annual convention which concluded Friday.

“Like those in the Church at Corinth with whom St. Paul was confronted, many within the leadership of The Episcopal Church have grown willful,” he lamented. “They will have their way though it is contrary to the received teaching of God’s Holy Word, the trustworthy traditions of the Christian Faith, and the expressed will of the Anglican Communion.”

Read it all.

Columbia, South Carolina–Tony Dungy stood before more than 1,700 prisoners Tuesday, sharing a smile and message of hope that has become his life’s work.

The former NFL championship coach said he recently visited an inmate in Florida that he had ministered to nearly 10 years ago. The prisoner thanked Dungy for changing his mental and spiritual outlook.

“That,” Dungy said, “was a bigger thrill for me than winning the Super Bowl.”

Somehow wonderfully appropriate on Holy Week. Read it all.

As on this day we keep the special memory of our Redeemer’s entry into the city, so grant, O Lord, that now and ever he may triumph in our hearts. Let the King of grace and glory enter in, and let us lay ourselves and all we are in full and joyful homage before him; through the same Jesus Christ our Lord.

Lift up your heads, O gates! and be lifted up, O ancient doors! that the King of glory may come in. Who is the King of glory? The LORD, strong and mighty, the LORD, mighty in battle! Lift up your heads, O gates! and be lifted up, O ancient doors! that the King of glory may come in. Who is this King of glory? The LORD of hosts, he is the King of glory!

–Psalm 24:7-10

This is the conclusion of an analysis by Riccardo Cascioli that appeared in today’s edition of Avvenire, the newspaper of the Italian episcopal conference.

According to The New York Times, “top Vatican officials — including the future Pope Benedict XVI — did not laicize a priest who had molested some 200 deaf boys, despite the fact that several American bishops repeatedly warned that the lack of decisive action in the matter could embarrass the Church.”

“In reality, in fact, the whole documentation published by The New York Times on its site, contradicts this tendentious reading of facts regarding Father Lawrence Murphy, between 1950 and 1974, chaplain in a school for the deaf of the Diocese of Milwaukee,” Cascioli clarified.

He added: “In fact, the documents state that the only ones to be concerned with the evil done by Father Murphy were top officials of the American diocese and of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, while the civil authorities filed the case.

“In particular the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, entrusted with the issue only between 1996 and 1997, gave procedural indications in dealing with Father Murphy despite the distance of time of events which constituted an impediment to the norm of Canon Law.”

Read it all.

The Rt Rev Stephen Cottrell, Bishop of Reading, will take up the post officially in the autumn.

But on Monday he came to the county town to introduce himself.

He said: “I knew about six or seven weeks ago, but it was surrounded by secrecy.

“I was born and brought up in Essex and although I have not lived here since I was 18, I think of it as home.”

“I am looking forward to returning to this large and richly diverse diocese and excited by the challenges that lie ahead.”

Read it all.

It’s been a banner week for Democrats: ObamaCare passed Congress in its final form on Thursday night, and the returns are already rolling in. Yesterday AT&T announced that it will be forced to make a $1 billion writedown due solely to the health bill, in what has become a wave of such corporate losses.

This wholesale destruction of wealth and capital came with more than ample warning. Turning over every couch cushion to make their new entitlement look affordable under Beltway accounting rules, Democrats decided to raise taxes on companies that do the public service of offering prescription drug benefits to their retirees instead of dumping them into Medicare. We and others warned this would lead to AT&T-like results, but like so many other ObamaCare objections Democrats waved them off as self-serving or “political.”

Perhaps that explains why the Administration is now so touchy. Commerce Secretary Gary Locke took to the White House blog to write that while ObamaCare is great for business, “In the last few days, though, we have seen a couple of companies imply that reform will raise costs for them.” In a Thursday interview on CNBC, Mr. Locke said “for them to come out, I think is premature and irresponsible….”

On top of AT&T’s $1 billion, the writedown wave so far includes Deere & Co., $150 million; Caterpillar, $100 million; AK Steel, $31 million; 3M, $90 million; and Valero Energy, up to $20 million. Verizon has also warned its employees about its new higher health-care costs, and there will be many more in the coming days and weeks….

Read it all.

Who is Brian McLaren, and what has he done to make these people so angry?

It turns out that McLaren is considered one of the country’s most influential evangelicals, and his new book, A New Kind of Christianity, takes aim at some core doctrinal beliefs. McLaren is rethinking Jesus’ mission on Earth, and even the purpose of the crucifixion.

“The view of the cross that I was given growing up, in a sense, has a God who needs blood in order to be appeased,” McLaren says. “If this God doesn’t see blood, God can’t forgive.”

McLaren believes that version of God is a misreading of the Bible.

“God revealed in Christ crucified shows us a vision of God that identifies with the victim rather than the perpetrator, identifies with the one suffering rather than the one inflicting suffering,” he says.

Read or listen to it all.

Read it carefully and read it all also.

Read it carefully and read it all.

Two years ago The Episcopal Church House of Bishops asked a panel of eight theologians, four “conservative” and four “liberal,” to produce a study document addressing the issue of same-sex marriage. The Rev. Dr. Grant LeMarquand, Trinity’s Academic Dean, was one of the theologians on that committee. Their work is now done.

Along with Dr. Willis Jenkins of Yale, Grant went to the Spring 2010 meeting of the House of Bishops to present the work of the panel. Both Willis and Grant gave ten minute presentations summarizing the two positions, for and against same-sex marriage. The bishops then discussed among themselves in table groups following which there was an hour for the bishops to ask questions. Perhaps the most interesting thing which happened during that question period was a short speech by Gene Robinson, Bishop of New Hampshire, who expressed dissatisfaction with both papers and stated that it was time to move beyond speaking simply of “GLBT” (Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgendered) orientations: “there are so many other letters in the alphabet,” he said; “there are so many other sexualities to be explored.” He did not elaborate as to what those other sexualities and other letters of the alphabet might be.

Read it all.

From here:

An article on Thursday about the fallout from the Roman Catholic sexual abuse scandal in Europe misstated the estimated number of children in Ireland who were victims, according to two government reports last year. The report said the children numbered in the tens of thousands, not the “hundreds of thousands.”

From here:

The editorial in the New York Times of March 25, 2010, regarding Edward Cardinal Egan needs to be corrected immediately. In his twenty-one years as Bishop of Bridgeport and Archbishop of New York, there was no known incident of the abuse of minors by priests in the Cardinal’s care. The case that is described in the report to which the Times editorial refers has to do with events before the Cardinal’s tenure and was correctly handled by the Cardinal and his collaborators. During the Cardinal’s tenure in Bridgeport, despite careful questioning by diocesan staff and counsel and by professionals in the most highly-esteemed psychiatric institution in the nation, it was never proved that the priest in question had abused minors. Nonetheless, the Cardinal withdrew the priest’s authorization to exercise his priesthood and directed him to reside in a former seminary. When after four years the former seminary residence was no longer available, the priest was re-directed to live in a convent of religious women while acting as assistant-chaplain in a nursing-home. It is reported that some years after the Cardinal left Bridgeport, new information about the priest’s conduct emerged, and he was dismissed from the priesthood. During Cardinal Egan’s tenure, however, the case was handled both carefully and appropriately.

In December 2009 the Cardinal’s proper handling of alleged incidents of the abuse of minors by priests was detailed in the two attached statements of the Diocese of Bridgeport and the Archdiocese of New York released to the media and published in the December 3, 2009 edition of Catholic New York.

The Holy Father needs to directly answer questions, in a credible forum, about his role — as archbishop of Munich (1977-82), as prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (1982-2005), and as pope (2005-present) — in the mismanagement of the clergy sex abuse crisis.

We urge this not primarily as journalists seeking a story, but as Catholics who appreciate that extraordinary circumstances require an extraordinary response. Nothing less than a full, personal and public accounting will begin to address the crisis that is engulfing the worldwide church. It is that serious.

To date, as revelations about administrative actions resulting in the shifting of clergy abusers from parish to parish emerge throughout Europe, Pope Benedict XVI’s personal response has been limited to a letter to the Irish church. Such epistles are customary and necessary, but insufficient.

Read it all.

Intense scrutiny is being devoted these days to Pope Benedict XVI’s history on the sex abuse crisis. Revelations from Germany have put his five years as a diocesan bishop under a spotlight, and a piece on Thursday in The New York Times, on the case of Fr. Lawrence Murphy of Milwaukee, also called into question his Vatican years as prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith.

Despite complaints in some quarters that all this is about wounding the pope and/or the church, raising these questions is entirely legitimate. Anyone involved in church leadership at the most senior levels for as long as Benedict XVI inevitably bears some responsibility for the present mess. My newspaper, the National Catholic Reporter, today called editorially for full disclosure [1] about the pope’s record, and it now seems abundantly clear that only such transparency can resolve the hard questions facing Benedict.

Yet as always, the first casualty of any crisis is perspective. There are at least three aspects of Benedict’s record on the sexual abuse crisis which are being misconstrued, or at least sloppily characterized, in today’s discussion. Bringing clarity to these points is not a matter of excusing the pope, but rather of trying to understand accurately how we got where we are.

The following, therefore, are three footnotes to understanding Benedict’s record on the sexual abuse crisis….

Read it all.

During her visit to Grand Island on Friday morning, Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori spoke to church leaders and parishioners about the Episcopal calling to serve a hurting world.

But before she spoke, she also got to witness an ideal example of that type of service in Grand Island’s own St. Stephen’s Community Center.

After her tour, Jefferts Schori said she was wowed by the partnerships she found among the numerous community groups that use the community center, which is connected to St. Stephen’s Episcopal Church.

Read it all.