Despite disappointment and discouragement voiced over the slower pace of ecumenical talks than in decades past, Atlanta Archbishop Wilton D. Gregory offered his view that it is “high season” for the ecumenical movement during an April 20 address in Tampa.

“Some have even spoken of a ”˜winter’ of ecumenism in the sense that the enthusiasm of the early days has given way to a more sober realism,” Archbishop Gregory told participants at the April 19-22 National Workshop on Christian Unity.

He referred to German Cardinal Walter Kasper, president of the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity, whose book assessing the past 40 years of ecumenical dialogue, “Harvesting the Fruits: Basic Aspects of Christian Faith in Ecumenical Dialogue,” was published last year.

The book was written in part, according to Archbishop Gregory, because “we now face a new situation, quite different from the one we faced at the end of the Second Vatican Council,” whose decree on ecumenism, “Unitatis Redintegratio,” helped pave the way for greater ecumenical dialogue in the Catholic Church.

“We now realize that there was a kind of naive enthusiasm in those days, which now contributes to a certain fatigue or even disappointment,” Archbishop Gregory said. “We know now that the ecumenical enterprise will be longer than it appeared to be after the council.”

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In December 1969, Don Finto went looking for the Holy Ghost.

Growing up in the Church of Christ, Finto believed in God the Father Almighty, and he learned to trust in Jesus. But for the most part, he felt the Holy Ghost was missing from his life ”” especially when it came to speaking in tongues, a practice of praying in unknown languages.

“I felt like I was stuck in a box,” he said.

Finto, then 39, decided to give the Holy Spirit a try. The former missionary-turned-David Lipscomb University-professor knelt and prayed, asking to be baptized in the Spirit, an experience relatively unknown outside of Pentecostal circles.

When he stood up, Finto says, his life had changed forever.

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On Sunday, members of St. Matthew’s Episcopal Parish were still reeling from their separation.

For the second week, two dozen people gathered in the wood and brick building on Northeast Prescott Street that has been their home for 55 years. An hour later, almost 100 of their former brothers and sisters in Christ, who recently declared themselves Anglicans, worshiped in rented space at Mt.Tabor Seventh-day Adventist Church. The storm that has battered the Episcopal Church in the United States has touched down in Portland.

Since the Episcopal Church in the United States decided in 2003 to accept the election of its first openly gay bishop, the denomination has been rocked with disagreements over biblical authority. With a reputation as a conservative congregation, St. Matthew’s had for 66 years included people who read the Bible almost literally and others who interpreted it from more liberal points of view. But over time, that range grew problematic. On March 21, a majority of St. Matthew’s members voted to leave the church.

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Senior Vatican spokesman Fr Federico Lombardi was yesterday unable to confirm UK media speculation that leading Church of England bishops held a series of secret “conversion” meetings with advisers to Pope Benedict XVI in the Vatican last week. Other senior Vatican officials claimed to have no knowledge of such meetings.

Reports in yesterday’s online editions of the Daily Telegraph and the Daily Mail claimed the Bishop of Fulham, the Rt Rev John Broadhurst; the Bishop of Richborough, the Rt Rev Keith Newton; and the Bishop of Ebbsfleet, the Rt Rev Andrew Burnham were involved in meetings with the Vatican’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith last week.

The scope of the meetings was to discuss future Anglican conversions “en masse” to Rome with the bishops reportedly informing the Vatican that many Church of England clergy are keen to defect to Rome.

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A conservative former Episcopal bishop of Albany who left the church in 2007 to become a Roman Catholic has now returned to his former faith.

Daniel W. Herzog became an outspoken national opponent of ordaining gay clergy after he retired from the ministry in 2007. He made news that year when he and two other diocesan bishops left the Episcopal Church to join the Roman Catholic Church.

The Episcopal Church, the American wing of the worldwide Anglican Communion, had been in turmoil following the consecration in 2003 of V. Gene Robinson as its first openly gay bishop.

Herzog’s return was announced this week by Albany Bishop William Love. Both Herzog and his wife, Carol, left the church. Herzog was one of only a handful of Episcopal bishops ever to join another church.

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Churchgoers in almost 300 parishes that disapprove of women priests may take advantage of Pope Benedict XVI’s offer to change denomination if their “flying bishops” lead the way.

However the Church of England is expected to make a last-ditch attempt to stop the disillusioned groups leaving, by offering them concessions over the introduction of female bishops.

As The Sunday Telegraph disclosed, the bishops of Fulham, Richborough and Ebbsfleet held a secret meeting with papal advisers last week to discuss plans for Anglicans to convert to the Roman Catholic Church en masse.

At least one key member of the English Catholic church’s commission on the Anglican Ordinariate ”“ the Pope’s move to allow Anglicans to enter into full communion with the Holy See while retaining some of their spiritual heritage ”“ was in Rome at the same time.

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When Mahmoud Ahmadinejad walks up to the podium today in New York to deliver another blast of venom, the only proper response is for the US to hit Iran’s economy with much tougher sanctions than anyone has yet tried. That means targeting its oil industry, not just its leaders and its banks.

Otherwise, Iran’s President will deliver real injury, not just insult, to this crucial conference on the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT). He has taken Iran to the brink of having nuclear weapons, and if it does soon get them (despite protestations that it only wants nuclear power), that will trigger a Middle East arms race.

The only country able to impose tough sanctions quickly is America. It should do so now. The brutal truth is that the time for dissuading Iran has probably passed. But if it hasn’t, the US needs to act now. It’s a tribute to the success of the NPT, in force since 1970 and signed by 189 countries, that these five-yearly reviews are usually dusty talks about the inspection of power stations. Meetings have tried to patch up ”” but not rewrite ”” the lopsided bargain built into the treaty. This says that the original five nuclear weapons states (the US, Russia, China, Britain and France) promise to help others to get nuclear power (but not weapons), while cutting their own stockpiles.

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Then on the way home we bought a Sunday Paper to find the Telegraph spinning nonsense about ”˜defections’ to the Catholic Church. Most of what they wrote was reprinted from a stolen email they had already published months ago. All that was new was an assertion that three of our Bishops had visited Rome. If they did, and no chapter and verse was given, then the Newspaper was unable to find anything about what was said, whom they had met, why they were there. Just daft speculation.

This is the sort of nonsense we must expect to see appearing in the media over the next few months, as preparations are made for the visit to England of the Holy Father. Meanwhile, I am getting ready to go on Pilgrimage to Fatima next week. And, guess what, the Pope will be there too! No doubt the pilgrimage of half a million Portuguese has been specially arranged in order to cloak the secret meetings between me and the Holy Father! I hope I might possibly get near enough to take a photo with my zoom lens, and you should with luck be able to pick out a small figure in white somewhere in the crowds ”“ look for my blog two weeks or so from now”¦ but don’t breathe a word to the Sunday Telegraph.

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BISHOP GERALD KICANAS (Roman Catholic Diocese of Tucson, Arizona): Even the Arizona legislators, Bob, are considering modifications to the bill, which suggests that they themselves are concerned about how it could be misinterpreted. So there will be legal action, certainly, and we’ll monitor that and participate where we feel it would be appropriate.

{BOB] ABERNETHY: Do you think the church might become a party to the lawsuits to try to stop the bill?

BISHOP KICANAS: I don’t know that we’ll be bringing the lawsuits forward. Those will be brought forward by, certainly, others, but we will review those, and perhaps being a friend of the court where it would be appropriate.

ABERNETHY: Do you think in the end that the bill can be stopped, that the law can be stopped?

BISHOP KICANAS: Well, there is great national concern, certainly concern within our state among religious leaders, among many portions of our community. It has to be addressed that this bill does not well represent the state of Arizona and is not going to resolve the issues that we are facing.

Read or watch it all.

Greece announced Sunday that it had reached an agreement on a long-delayed rescue package that will require years of painful fiscal belt-tightening, but the deal probably will not defuse the potential threats to other European countries also suffering from mounting debts and troubled economies.

“I have done and will do everything not to let the country go bankrupt,” Prime Minister George Papandreou said in a televised address that urged Greeks to accept “great sacrifices” to avoid “catastrophe.”

The bailout, which was worked out over weeks of negotiations with the International Monetary Fund and Greece’s European partners, calls for as much as €110 billion, or $145 billion, in loans intended to stave off an immediate debt default and stop the spread of economic contagion to other parts of the region.

But analysts warned that Greece itself has not yet solved its fundamental problems and that other sovereign debt crises could arise as lenders and market speculators turn their attention to a handful of similarly vulnerable nations.

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We are at a remarkable moment. We have an open, 2,000-mile border to our south, and the entity with the power to enforce the law and impose safety and order will not do it. Wall Street collapsed, taking Main Street’s money with it, and the government can’t really figure out what to do about it because the government itself was deeply implicated in the crash, and both political parties are full of people whose political careers have been made possible by Wall Street contributions. Meanwhile we pass huge laws, bills so comprehensive, omnibus and transformative that no one knows what’s in them and no one””literally, no one””knows how exactly they will be executed or interpreted. Citizens search for new laws online, pore over them at night, and come away knowing no more than they did before they typed “dot-gov.”

It is not that no one’s in control. Washington is full of people who insist they’re in control and who go to great lengths to display their power. It’s that no one takes responsibility and authority. Washington daily delivers to the people two stark and utterly conflicting messages: “We control everything” and “You’re on your own.”

All this contributes to a deep and growing alienation between the people of America and the government of America in Washington.

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From Harvard came the Marshall Plan, from the University of Michigan Lyndon B. Johnson’s Great Society. John F. Kennedy gave his space-race speech at Rice and his world-peace speech at American University. Winston Churchill delivered his “Iron Curtain” speech at Westminster College in Fulton, Mo. Years from now, if we are lucky, we may recall that the big idea of the early 21st century came from Allegheny College in Meadville, Pa.

Like the others — the ideas that social justice and peace are good and that the threat of Soviet expansion and war are bad — the Allegheny idea isn’t really new, just a plain-sense notion plainly expressed.

Allegheny is a tiny college, fiercely proud of its devotion to teaching and admirably willing to boast of students whose interests are “wonderfully weird” — you’ll find those exact words on its website. Wonderfully weird, perhaps, but the Allegheny alumni I know also are wonderfully intelligent and sensible, so it is no surprise that the Allegheny idea is simple: “Nastiness, Name-calling and Negativity” (the title of the college’s ground-breaking new report) are bad, and civility and compromise are good.

The report emerges from a Zogby International poll of the nation that shows the better angels of America’s nature at work among the public if not among its politicians. The poll shows that 95 percent of Americans want civility in politics; 87 percent want political disagreement to be respectful; 70 percent want compromise, even on the most divisive issues.

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The arrival of Continuing Indaba on the Internet as part of the Anglican Communion web site makes visible the preparatory work already in hand for the series of pilot conversations between dioceses from different parts of the Communion to take place during 2010 and 2011.

Visitors to the new site will find an outline of the project,, which explains its origins as located within an African conversational method for resolving real or potential conflict through mutual listening and debate. The process emerges from the Indaba-style format used at the 2008 Lambeth Conference which is now being expanded to enhance the world-wide Anglican Communion in its quest to intensify relationships in the cause of shared mission.

These pages carry news of the initial series of ”˜hub’ meetings around the world during late 2009 and early 2010 whose remit is to develop resources which can guide and inform the model conversations between participants from dioceses from across the world.

There is also a growing library of the resource papers generated from and through the ”˜hubs’ in order to make them as widely available as possible for those wishing to follow the development of the Continuing Indaba conversations planned for 2010 and 2011….

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A leading Anglo-Catholic source contacts me this morning naming several English Catholic bishops whom he thinks were in Rome for this summit. He confirms that “very few people on our side” (ie, the C of E) knew it was happening.]

A fascinating update on the Ordinariate story tonight from Jonathan Wynne-Jones: the Church of England bishops of Fulham, Richborough and Ebbsfleet have basically said yes to the Pope’s offer. They were at the Vatican last week to discuss the details, apparently. The RC Bishops of England and Wales are hopelessly divided on the Ordinariate scheme, so Bishops John Broadhurst, Keith Newton and Andrew Burnham have gone to the top. Very wise.

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In a move likely to raise tensions between the two Churches, a group of Church of England bishops met last week with advisers of Pope Benedict XVI to set in motion steps that would allow priests to convert to Catholicism en masse.

They are set to resign their orders in opposition to the introduction of women bishops and to lead an exodus of Anglican clerics to the Catholic Church despite Dr Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury, urging them not to leave.

It would be the first time for nearly 20 years that large numbers of priests have crossed from the Church of England to Rome, and comes only weeks ahead of a crucial General Synod debate on making women bishops.

The Sunday Telegraph has learnt that bishops travelled to the Holy See last week to hold face to face discussions with senior members of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, the most powerful of the Vatican’s departments.

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1. S.E., you make no bones about being an atheist. Why defend Christianity against the liberal media?

I think being an atheist or a nonbeliever makes me the perfect candidate to address this issue, because I approach it entirely objectively. My agenda here isn’t to prop up my own belief system, but to defend others’ rights to believe in something I don’t, and more importantly, to demand a more responsible, representative press.

2. You say Christians are the only acceptable people for the media to make fun of. Expound on that.

Hollywood started treating Christianity like it was some kind of social disease decades ago. These days, it’s practically company policy in Hollywood to mock Christianity as hopelessly uncool and unsophisticated. The liberal media has, in the past 10 years or so, joined in the action. I think they’ve both been so successful in promoting that message in the popular culture, because Christians represent a vast majority — and majorities get complacent. But, if Christian America doesn’t stand up to the liberal media and demand more respect, they might not be a majority in the future.

3. Why do you think the mainstream media feel the need to target Christian America?

Two reasons: One, it’s a way of getting at conservatism. If they can effectively paint Christians as dangerous fanatics, it’s just a skip away from painting conservatives as dangerous fanatics.

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Police combed through a charred SUV and a crude assortment of explosives Sunday for clues to a failed Times Square bombing as a monitoring group reported that the Pakistani Taliban had claimed responsibility for the terrorist threat.

An intelligence monitoring group released a one-minute video allegedly from the Pakistani Taliban, in which it claimed responsibility for the failed bombing in a smoking SUV left parked in the city on Saturday night, clearing thousands of tourists and theatergoers from the city’s busiest district.

The U.S.-based SITE intelligence group, which monitors militant websites, said the Pakistani Taliban claims the attack is revenge for the death of its leader Baitullah Mehsud and the recent killings of the top leaders of al-Qaida in Iraq. Images of the slain militants are shown as an unidentified voice recites the message. English subtitles are at the bottom of the screen.

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The Revd Richard Carew, currently curate at Beverley Minster, has been appointed Domestic Chaplain to the Archbishop of York.

He will begin his new ministry at Bishopthorpe at the end of June. The Domestic Chaplain supports the Archbishop in all aspects of his ministry within the Archdiocese of York.

Richard grew up in Zimbabwe with both parents active Christians. He went to York University to study history and has been in the Diocese ever since, with St Michael le Belfrey being his home church for 13 years. On leaving university he went into teaching, before following a call to ordination. He has served a curacy at Beverley Minster.

Read the rest there.

The Episcopal Diocese of South Carolina is seeking to establish a missional partnership with the Church of Ireland Diocese of Kilmore Elphin and Ardagh.

Who: Our team consists of 14 teens and 3 adults that represent 8 churches as well as Porter Gaud (Episcopal) School.

What: As ambassadors, we will seek to build relationships with and serve alongside local teens to reach out to others in their communities. Our team will begin by joining the youth of their diocese in attending a large youth event, then travel to two communities where we will engage with young people. Our aim will be to share our faith with others and encourage the youth of the Church of Ireland while getting to know one another’s cultures. Then in the summer of 2011, we will host a group from their diocese here in South Carolina to continue developing the partnership.

Check it out.

Greece outlined deep spending cuts and tax increases Sunday to free up a multi-billion-euro rescue by the International Monetary Fund and European Union, the first bailout for one of the 16 countries using the euro.

The measures, which include tax increases and salary and pension cuts for civil servants, aim to reduce the budget deficit to below 3 per cent of gross domestic product by 2014, from the current 13.6 per cent of GDP, Finance Minister George Papaconstantinou said.

“We are called on today to make a basic choice. The choice is between collapse or salvation,” he said.

The full amount of the three-year IMF/euro-zone package will be announced in Brussels after an emergency euro-zone finance ministers’ meeting, where Mr. Papaconstantinou was heading after his Athens news conference. He said the amount would be “close to” widely reported figures. French and other officials have said it would be 120 billion euros.

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A T-shirt vendor saw something suspicious in New York’s Times Square Saturday evening — smoke coming from an unoccupied SUV on 45th Street near 7th Avenue — so he alerted police.

The tip led to what New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg called an “amateurish”-looking car bomb and what Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano told ABC News’ “This Week” today might have been part of a “one-off” attack.

The 6:30 p.m. scare prompted police to evacuate thousands of people from the heart of the Big Apple during one of its busiest times — a warm Saturday night when it was packed with theatergoers and tourists.

“We are very lucky,” Bloomberg said. “Thanks to alert New Yorkers and professional police officers, we avoided what could [have been] a very deadly event.”

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Also, an AP video report which I appreciated may be found here.

A local Episcopal church announced Sunday that it has indefinitely suspended all worship services and day-to-day operations due to financial problems attributed in part to declining numbers.

St. Paul’s Church at 903 Main St. will no longer hold Sunday services or Sunday school. The church’s officials and congregation are currently in talks with the Episcopal Diocese of Massachusetts to determine what to do next.

“St. Paul’s is facing some financial challenges as well as congregational challenges,” said Tracey Sukraw, director of communication for the diocese. “So worship services as well as day-to-day operations have been suspended.”

Sukraw said one problem is that congregants are divided over how to solve the financial problems.

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With just a dozen regular Sunday worshippers, the people of Holy Apostles Episcopal Church in Perry were in no position to afford a full-time priest.

But they didn’t intend to shut down their 170-year-old rural parish, either.

So the congregation looked within its own pews and found a willing candidate for the priesthood.

And he comes cheap, too.

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Until this downturn, the number of people expecting things to get better for themselves had always exceeded the number expecting lower incomes. But at the low point in this cycle, in February and March of last year when the financial system seemed most vulnerable, fewer than 8 percent of respondents expected their income to get better, while almost a quarter thought their incomes were set to decline.

The chart shows the difference between those two groups, ignoring the percentage, always large, that expects things to stay about the same.

The pessimism shown by those responses has declined since then, but not gone away. In April, the Conference Board reported this week, about one person in 10 expected his or her family’s income to improve, while about one in six expected family income to go down.

As can be seen from the chart, good times in recent years have produced less net optimism than in previous cycles, while bad times have brought more pessimism.

Read it all and the chart to which he refers is there.

(Some earlier information on this may be found here).

The Archbishop used last night’s talk to highlight what the rural Church represents in today’s modern society.

He said: “The rural Church is a reminder of what the human experience is like in this place, in this time.

“The community is not just the people who are there at any given moment. Who you are is bound up by far more than you can see and even imagine. History, death, belonging; great truths of humanity which are encoded in this building.”

The Archbishop also took a swipe at the modern preoccupation with online social networking sites like Facebook.

He said: “There are people who believe their real person is what they concentrate on creating on the internet. There are some really central questions there that we are not considering enough.”

Read it all.

Watch it all (a little over 5 minutes). Always nice to hear an Episcopal Bishop encourage people to memorize Scripture–KSH.

Whether same-sex civil unions become legal in Hawaii is now up to Republican Gov. Linda Lingle, whose office was flooded yesterday with phone calls and e-mails from gay rights and religious groups after the bill won approval in the waning moments of the legislative session.

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Hawaii’s civil union legislation appeared to be dead in January, when the House didn’t take a vote on the measure and postponed it indefinitely out of fears that Lingle would veto.

The issue was revived Thursday after every other bill introduced this year had been acted on. Democratic House Majority Leader Blake Oshiro made the motion to reconsider the bill, although the House fell three votes short of the two-thirds majority needed to override the governor.

The bill was written so that civil unions would be available to both same-sex and opposite-sex couples to avoid claims of discrimination.

“Equality feels really good,” said Suzanne King, who said Hawaii would recognize her Massachusetts marriage to her partner as a civil union if the bill becomes law. “It allows us to strengthen our family.”

Read it all from AP (my emphasis).

Within the 242 pages of Diane Ravitch’s lightning rod of a book, “The Death and Life of the Great American School System,” there appear exactly three references to Catholic education. Which makes sense, given that Ms. Ravitch is addressing and deploring recent efforts to reform public schools with extensive testing and increasing privatization.

Yet what subtly informs both her critique and her recommendations for improving public schools is, in significant measure, her long study of and admiration for Roman Catholic education, especially in serving low-income black and Hispanic students.

In that respect, Ms. Ravitch and her book offer evidence of how some public-education scholars and reformers have been learning from what Catholic education is doing right. What one might call the Catholic-school model is perhaps the most unappreciated influence on the nation’s public-education debate.

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The worldwide financial breakdown has, as we know, demonstrated the fragility of the present economic system and the institutions linked to it. It has also shown the error of the assumption that the market is capable of regulating itself, apart from public intervention and the support of internalized moral standards. This assumption is based on an impoverished notion of economic life as a sort of self-calibrating mechanism driven by self-interest and profit-seeking. As such, it overlooks the essentially ethical nature of economics as an activity of and for human beings. Rather than a spiral of production and consumption in view of narrowly-defined human needs, economic life should properly be seen as an exercise of human responsibility, intrinsically oriented towards the promotion of the dignity of the person, the pursuit of the common good and the integral development ”“ political, cultural and spiritual ”“ of individuals, families and societies. An appreciation of this fuller human dimension calls, in turn, for precisely the kind of cross-disciplinary research and reflection which the present session of the Academy has now undertaken.

In my Encyclical Caritas in Veritate, I observed that “the current crisis obliges us to re-plan our journey, to set ourselves new rules and to discover new forms of commitment” (No. 21). Re-planning the journey, of course, also means looking to comprehensive and objective standards against which to judge the structures, institutions and concrete decisions which guide and direct economic life. The Church, based on her faith in God the Creator, affirms the existence of a universal natural law which is the ultimate source of these criteria (cf. ibid., 59). Yet she is likewise convinced that the principles of this ethical order, inscribed in creation itself, are accessible to human reason and, as such, must be adopted as the basis for practical choices. As part of the great heritage of human wisdom, the natural moral law, which the Church has appropriated, purified and developed in the light of Christian revelation, serves as a beacon guiding the efforts of individuals and communities to pursue good and to avoid evil, while directing their commitment to building an authentically just and humane society.

Read the whole thing.