Five weeks after the Legislature passed a budget that promised to close a $19 billion budget shortfall, California has sunk back into yet another fiscal crisis, this time facing a $26 billion gap that is posing a major new challenge for the incoming governor, Jerry Brown, and seems almost certain to force deep cuts in a state already reeling from three years of financial turmoil.

The departing governor, Arnold Schwarzenegger, has called a special session of the Legislature for Dec. 6 to begin dealing with one part of the problem: a projected $6 billion shortfall in the $126 billion budget passed in October, a record 100 days late. Mr. Schwarzenegger’s aides said the governor, a Republican who has fought repeatedly with Democrats in pushing through deep spending cuts, will propose another round of reductions to get the state through the end of this fiscal year in June.

“There’s no more easy stuff to cut,” Susan Kennedy, Mr. Schwarzenegger’s chief of staff, said Monday. “We are cutting into bone now.”

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Willy Delsaert is a retired railroad employee with dyslexia who practiced intensively before facing the suburban Don Bosco Catholic parish to perform the Sunday Mass rituals he grew up with.

“Who takes this bread and eats,” he murmured, cracking a communion wafer with his wife at his side, “declares a desire for a new world.”

With those words, Mr. Delsaert, 60, and his fellow parishioners are discreetly pioneering a grass-roots movement that defies centuries of Roman Catholic Church doctrine by worshiping and sharing communion without a priest.

Don Bosco is one of about a dozen alternative Catholic churches that have sprouted and grown in the last two years in Dutch-speaking regions of Belgium and the Netherlands. They are an uneasy reaction to a combination of forces: a shortage of priests, the closing of churches, dissatisfaction with Vatican appointments of conservative bishops and, most recently, dismay over cover-ups of sexual abuse by priests.

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Kathy DeGrego’s T-shirt lets you know right away she isn’t an old-school librarian.

“Shhh,” it says, “is a four-letter word.”

That spirit of bookish defiance has guided the makeover of the suburban Denver library system where DeGrego works. Reference desks and study carrels have been replaced by rooms where kids can play Guitar Hero. Overdue book fines have been eliminated, and the arcane Dewey Decimal System has been scrapped in favor of bookstore-like sections organized by topic.

“It’s very common for people to say, ‘Why do I need a library when I’ve got a computer?’ ” said Pam Sandlian-Smith, director of the seven-branch Rangeview, Colo., Library District. “We have to reframe what the library means to the community.”

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As you know, there are three basic issues in the recent public debate. The first is empirical: does the current legislation permit the funding of abortion beyond the restrictions imposed by the Hyde amendment, that testimony to a faithful Catholic politician from Illinois that has been the firewall keeping public money out of funding almost all abortions and out of insurance plans that fund abortion? What we have is legislation that, by vote, first in the Senate and then confirmed in the House, explicitly removed the Hyde amendment restrictions from this federal law. Lay people who carefully analyzed the contents of the legislation as it was being torturously crafted freed us, the bishops, to make the necessary moral judgments. Some have protested that the legislation is complicated and we therefore shouldn’t pretend to judge it. If you will excuse my saying so, this implies either that no one can understand or judge complicated pieces of legislation, in which case it is immoral to act until sufficient clarity is obtained, or it is to say that only bishops are too dense to understand complicated pieces of legislation! In fact, developments since the passage of the legislation have settled the empirical issue: our analysis of what the law itself says was correct, and our moral judgments are secure and correct. Throughout this public debate, the bishops kept the moral and intellectual integrity of the faith intact, and I thank in your name those who helped us in exercising our obligations as moral teachers in the Church.

The second issue is ecclesiological: who speaks for the Catholic Church? We bishops have no illusions about our speaking for everyone who considers himself or herself Catholic; but that is not our job. We speak for the apostolic faith, and those who hold it gather round. We must listen to the sensus fidei, the sense of the faith itself in the lives of our people, but this is different from intellectual trends and public opinion. The faith has its own warrants in Scripture and tradition, and we consult them and listen to the apostolic voices of those who have gone before us as carefully as we must listen to those whom the Lord has given us to govern on our watch, in our day, as they strive to work out their salvation in the midst of contemporary challenges. The bishops in apostolic communion and in union with the successor of Peter, the Bishop of Rome, speak for the Church in matters of faith and in moral issues and the laws surrounding them. All the rest is opinion, often well-considered and important opinion that deserves a careful and respectful hearing, but still opinion.

The third issue is practical: how should faithful Catholics approach political issues that are also moral?

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The British Columbia Court of Appeal has dismissed appeals of a November 2009 Supreme Court of British Columbia decision. The decision had ruled that the Anglican diocese of New Westminster should retain possession of four church properties in the Vancouver area.

The legal dispute arose after four congregations voted to leave the Anglican Church of Canada to affiliate with the Anglican Network in Canada (ANiC). The disagreement was focused on the issue of same-sex blessings, which have been performed in some parishes in the diocese of New Westminster for several years. Churches in ANiC do not allow the blessing of same-sex relationships.

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(ACNS) The Anglican-Old Catholic International Co-ordinating Council (AOCICC) met in Schloss Beuggen, Germany from 8 to 12 November 2010. The Council welcomed Canon Dr Alyson Barnett-Cowan, Director for Unity Faith and Order at the Anglican Communion Office, as Anglican Co-Secretary.

In its most important piece of work, the Council finalized the text of a common statement on ecclesiology and mission ”˜Belonging Together in Europe’. This version of the text will be the major focus of the International Old Catholic and Anglican Theological Conference to be held in Neustadt, Germany from August 29 to September 2, 2011.

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Neither side in a long, bitter war over Anglican Church property in Vancouver and Abbotsford expects any Christmas services will have to be moved elsewhere this December.

But Vancouver-area Anglican Bishop Michael Ingham began moving Tuesday to replace the dissident priests at four congregations that have failed to obtain legal control of Anglican Church properties valued at more than $20 million.

Since the conservative priests have already resigned from the Anglican Church of Canada to work for a breakaway Anglican organization, the diocese said in a statement, those clergy “will need to continue their ministry in other locations.”

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There will be sovereign defaults in the eurozone, with a default by Greece now inevitable. Ultimately the thing that underpins any country’s debts is its ability to raise enough tax to service and eventually repay them. Greece cannot hope to do that. Ireland will be pushed to do so but probably can. I would, however, worry about the long-term credit-worthiness of Portugal, Spain and Italy.

So then you have to ask whether a default of a eurozone state breaks up the eurozone. I don’t think we know the answer to that yet. We do know that the Germans, who hold the cards, will do absolutely everything they can to stop such a default, even if they have to grit their teeth as they do so. My instinct is that a country defaulting would not of itself lead to that country leaving the euro, but if its costs and prices were totally out of line, that probably would be the least painful way of extracting itself. If that is right in the short-term, things will be patched up and the euro will come through this downturn intact. But the next downturn, in five or 10 years’ time? Surely not.

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Niceness may be enough to carry a measure through an inexperienced and supine General Synod, but it can hardly make the covenant a transformative consciousness raiser, let alone the turbine of a more mutually engaged global denomination. However the General Synod votes, the big issue for the covenant process thereafter will be securing buy-in, confronted by zealots’ disappointment and majority indifference.

It is often observed that individual Anglicans around the world recognise, like and enjoy each other’s company. They generally get on like a house on fire at local level. Their institutional quadrille is where the problems lie. Covenant afficionados may hope beefing up the formal denomination will improve informal relationships. Others fear beefier formalities will sour them.

One Conservative blogger announced this week, tongue slightly in cheek perhaps, that he had believed the covenant useless, until it had been drawn to his attention how much it annoyed Liberals. Et voilà. Even as a kicking foetus, the covenant is already annoying people. This doesn’t imply that once born it will only be used only to promote understanding and harmony. Nice people will use it nicely ”“ others won’t. Real copper-bottomed zealots will almost certainly carry on regardless. The god of unintended consequences will stand in the background, smiling.

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The covenant has been portrayed, and betrayed, by its detractors as a dangerous, monolithic innovation of regulatory control, which will stifle freedom and diversity. But forced assimilation is not on the table, and it is false witness to dress it up as such. Gregory Cameron (secretary to the group who produced the covenant) and Andrew Goddard (Anglican ethicist) have demonstrated that its detractors have seriously misconstrued the text and its intention.

The model of the covenant is drawn from family ties and kinship and bounded by mutually agreed norms of behaviour which benefit everyone. It is not a document of doctrinal specifications, like the conservative Jerusalem Declaration, drawn up mostly by those who boycotted the Lambeth conference. Nor is it a contract, as feared by its liberal critics. It is truly a covenant.

In his address to the Lambeth conference 2008, the Chief Rabbi, Jonathan Sacks, was pithily penetrative and perceptive in drawing out contrasts: “A contract is a transaction. A covenant is a relationship. Or to put it slightly differently: a contract is about interests. A covenant is about identity. It is about you and me coming together to form an ‘us’. That is why contracts benefit, but covenants transform.”

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To be grateful is to recognize the Love of God in everything he has given us ”“ and He has given us everything. Every breath we draw is a gift of His love, every moment of existence is a grace, for it brings with it immense graces from Him. Gratitude therefore takes nothing for granted, is never unresponsive, is constantly awakening to new wonder and to praise of the goodness of God. For the grateful man or woman knows that God is good, not by hearsay but by experience. And that is what makes all the difference.

–Thomas Merton, Thoughts in Solitude (New York: Farrar, Straus and Geroux, 1956), p. 33

Holy God, our greatest treasure, who didst bless Hugh and Robert, Bishops of Lincoln, with wise and cheerful boldness for the proclamation of thy Word to rich and poor alike: Grant that all who minister in thy Name may serve with diligence, discipline and humility, fearing nothing but the loss of thee and drawing all to thee through Jesus Christ our Savior; who liveth and reigneth with thee in the communion of the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.

Take, Lord, and receive all my liberty, my memory, my understanding and my entire will, all I have and call my own. You have given all to me. To you, Lord, I return it. Everything is yours; do with it what you will. Give me only your love and your grace;
that is enough for me.

–Saint Ignatius of Loyola

For from the rising of the sun to its setting my name is great among the nations, and in every place incense is offered to my name, and a pure offering; for my name is great among the nations, says the LORD of hosts.

–Malachi 1:11

The outgoing head of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops vigorously defended the bishops’ opposition to the health care reform bill, asserting that only bishops can speak for the church on matters of faith and morals.

“All the rest is opinion,” Cardinal Francis George of Chicago said on Monday (Nov. 15), “often well-considered and important opinion that deserves a careful and respectful hearing, but still opinion.”

George’s three-year presidential term ends Tuesday, when the bishops will elect his successor.

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Facing a drop in attendance and a shortage of priests, the Roman Catholic Diocese of Brooklyn plans to close two churches, fold six parishes into three and impose strict budget constraints on all 198 of its parishes.

The move, announced from pulpits on Sunday, was described by church officials as the first phase of a broad consolidation that will result in further closings or mergers over the next two years, eventually affecting every parish in the diocese, which serves an estimated 1.5 million Catholics in Brooklyn and Queens.

Coming on the heels of the largest school reorganization in the history of the neighboring Archdiocese of New York, which announced provisional plans last week to close 31 parochial schools and one high school, the Brooklyn announcement underscored a sense of urgency in the church hierarchy about the financial impact of long-term population shifts, changing religious routines, aging church properties and a shrinking work force of priests.

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The spirit of Socrates will be evoked tonight in the IQ2 debate at City Recital Hall, where speakers will argue over the teaching of ethics in NSW primary schools.

Parents who believed their children would benefit from the state government’s ethics program at the expense of attending Special Religious Education were the victims of a populist and uninformed debate, the Anglican Bishop of North Sydney, Glenn Davies, told the Herald yesterday. He will speak in the negative to the proposal that special ethics education should be allowed for children not attending scripture classes.
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Simon Longstaff, the executive director of the St James Ethics Centre that devised the now completed pilot program, will step down from his usual position as IQ2 chairman of the debate to argue for the affirmative.

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A little more than a year ago (Oct. 20, 2009) William Cardinal Levada signaled to the world that Pope Benedict XVI was planning to release an apostolic constitution helping those spiritually disenfranchised Anglicans seeking to reunite with the See of Peter. Less than two weeks later (Nov. 9, 2009) the Vatican published ” Anglicanorum Coetibus “. This paves the way for the eventual establishment of a unique Anglican Ordinariate, for those entering into full communion with the Catholic Church from the Anglican tradition. At the announcement the Anglican world was shaken to its core.

Since that time Anglicans and former Anglicans around the world — including American Episcopalians — have been considering the Pope’s offer to become fully-fledged Catholics and yet retain some of their unique Anglican liturgy, patrimony and ethos in their life and worship as Catholics. Now a year has come and gone. Questions have been raised, meetings have been held, and some answers have been given, well all the while, slowly the face the various proposed national ordinatiates are starting to take shape.

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The New Testament Reign of God welcomes non-Christians as common seekers after a truth fully revealed in Jesus Christ but experienced in different historical settings by other religions as well. The Kingdom was consistently made available to outsiders. Jesus said to a Roman centurion, “Truly I tell you, in no one in Israel have I found such faith.” (Mat.: 8:10) To a Canaanite woman he declared in healing her daughter, “Woman, great is your faith! Let it be done for you as you wish.” (Mat. 15:21-28). Jesus conversed with a foreigner, a Samaritan woman, (Jn. 4:7-15) who sought “living water” and elsewhere cited the example of the “good Samaritan” who had pity on a wounded robbery victim (Lk. 10: 29-37). Pagans, outsiders, or foreigners were consistently welcomed by Jesus, and at the final Passover dinner he told his followers he would not eat the Passover again “until it is fulfilled in the kingdom of God.” (Lk 22: 16).

This, in broad outline, is a reading of what the Reign of God means. Many world theologians of recent decades understand the kingdom to be freely offered to both believers and members of other religions. If their lives and beliefs reflect what Jesus preached, they too are witnesses to the Kingdom in global settings. This moves considerably beyond Rahner’s “anonymous Christians” and the classic confines of Exclusivists and Inclusivists, and affirms that God’s loving reach extends to other religions, most of which the earthly Jesus would not have encountered in the Middle East of his time.

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Many things have already been said in the public arena about the proposed Anglican Communion Covenant. As Provinces around the world continue to discuss this important document I think it worth clarifying some points about it. I am not arguing here for or against the Covenant, merely pointing out that it should be debated fairly, with an accurate reading of the text….

The point of the processes outlined in the Covenant is precisely to encourage one part of the Communion, when seeking to respond responsibly in its own context in mission, to consider how that will affect other parts of the Communion It is not that one Province would exercise a veto over another, but that there would be collaborative discernment. In a globalised world, it is no longer possible (if it ever was) for one church to act entirely for itself; decisions have ramifications, and the intention is for these to be explored together.

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Austria threatened to block its share of the next transfer of aid funds to Greece unless the government meets deficit-cutting goals agreed upon six months ago with the European Union and International Monetary Fund.

Austrian Finance Minister Josef Proell said in Vienna that he lacked assurances from Greece to commit to the payment. He toned down his remarks later, telling journalists in Brussels that Austria was prepared to meet its pledge to Greece and that Greece was “on a good path.”

“We are getting indications that the Greeks can’t stick to their plan in a sufficient manner, in particular on the revenue side,” Proell said according to a government e-mail that confirmed remarks made after a Cabinet meeting today. “The data we have at the moment doesn’t give any reason to approve the December tranche from the Austrian point of view.”

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Eric Schmidt, Google’s chief executive, showed off the company’s next Android-powered phone, which will contain a chip that will allow people to make payments via their handsets.

Opening this year’s Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco, Schmidt showed off the new phone, which had the manufacturer’s label deliberately covered up, but is assumed to be the next Nexus device, following the Nexus One, and will contain a Near Field Communication chip, that will allow people to use their phones like credit cards.

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Even though the B.C. Appeal court ruled in favour of the Anglican Church of Canada, the judges hinted that pursuing an action that would further alienate parishioners was not without consequence.

“[The] Bishop and the Diocesan Synod of New Westminster have chosen to pursue the matter to the extent they have ”” despite the opposition of many of their parishioners,” the judges wrote. “Presumably [they] have chosen to take the risk that the policy allowing same-sex blessings will indeed prove to be ”˜schismatic’; or that clergy in the Diocese will for the foreseeable future find themselves ministering to vastly reduced or non-existent congregations. That, however, is their decision to make.”

Lawyer Cheryl Chang, the special counsel to the Anglican Network in Canada, the umbrella group for conservative Anglican parishes, said there has been no decision yet on whether there will be an appeal to the Supreme Court of Canada.

“I am disappointed that the court concluded Anglican ministry is ”˜as defined by the ACC,’ despite the evidence demonstrating the ACC, in the view of the majority of the world’s Anglicans, have erred in their definition of Anglican doctrine, and in our view, breached their own Solemn Declaration or constitution in the process,” Ms. Chang said.

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Though we may not spend much time consciously thinking about that war, I have no doubt that it has found its way into the America psyche. How could it not but foster a deep seated anxiety. It so easily gives rise to xenophobia. It probably plays into our irrational response to immigrants across our borders, and it contributes to an irrational fear of Islam.

Nothing could symbolize that irrational fear more than the choreographed uproar that was generated around the proposed Islamic Center at Park 51. I found it fascinating that among the most outspoken critics, few were actually New Yorkers. Though we New Yorkers are rarely of one mind on anything, the view is pretty widely held that it is the pluralism of New York that make it the great state and city that it is. It was in that spirit that I was asked to represent the Diocese of New York, and indeed the Episcopal Church, as a part of an interfaith consultation that met in Washington, D.C., in early September.

In that spirit of dialogue and inquiry I have asked Imam Mohamad Bashar Arafat to address us later in the day in order to help us understand more clearly some of the insights and values that Islam and Christianity hold in common.

All in all this has been an eventful year. One important but unanticipated outcome of the financial crisis has struck especially close to home. The General Theological Seminary, one of the most venerable Episcopal Church institutions in this Diocese, an institution of broad importance to the entire Episcopal Church, has come perilously close to bankruptcy. A new interim President and an interim Dean have been recruited to address crucially important and nearly over-whelming financial challenges. As a part of that general turn-around effort I was asked to serve as Chairman of the Board. Though that is not something I ever anticipated, never-the-less I felt I could not ignore such a request at a pivotal moment in the life of seminary to which I personally, and so many others, owe so very much.

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The Rev. Rev. Gene Robinson says his decision to retire in January 2013 as Bishop of New Hampshire was easier to imagine after the election of the Rt. Rev. Mary D. Glasspool.

Both bishops discussed their sexuality openly before they were elected ”” Robinson in 2003 and Glasspool in 2009.

“I had never really considered retiring until Mary’s election,” Robinson told The Living Church in a telephone interview. “That really gave me permission to consider that possibility.”

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Given previous comments by Mr. Smith, taxpayers may soon be longing for the return of acting FHFA director Edward DeMarco. The Journal reports that, at a 2007 Senate hearing, Mr. [Joseph] Smith blamed predatory lenders and a lack of federal regulation for the housing crisis. Blaming the bankers and calling for more bureaucracy will earn Mr. Smith plenty of new Beltway friends, but if he remains unaware of the myriad steps regulators took to inflate the credit bubble and misallocate capital into housing, then no one should expect him to drive reform.

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The Rev. Robert Clements, the newest rector of Christ Church in Roxbury, is a real holy roller. Better yet, he’s a real holy rocker.

The pastor is a sincerely devout man, one who serves as the chaplain at Rumsey Hall School, and for his parish is the kind of guiding figure that will readily spend his Sundays, after church of course, visiting hospitals and rehabilitation centers. As is his calling, Dr. Clements is a caring minister who thoughtfully tends to his and other flocks, more than happy to raise money for earthquake-ravaged Haiti or any other worthy cause.

Yet there is another side to the 25-year Episcopal priest, a seemingly clean-cut and well-spoken husband and father of one adult son. The rector, who has been in Roxbury for a little more than a year, harbors a defiant quality with a slew of hobbies that don’t match the conventional standards of the cloth, hobbies more applicable to standards of a rebellious teenager.

It’s a streak of youthful vigor, his love of rock music and the bass guitar. And he’s parlayed his passion into a positive force for those in need, people like the Nashville musicians whose instruments and livelihoods this year were devastated by flooding waters.

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If left unchecked, government-run health insurance for the poor in the state will start draining the cash South Carolina has to pay for its other top priorities, including public schools and law enforcement.

The state’s Medicaid program is projected to cost $228 million more than lawmakers budgeted to spend on it this fiscal year. And the shortfall at the state Department of Health and Human Services is just a preview of the budget crisis awaiting the state in July. That is when the $1 billion in federal stimulus cash that’s propping up this year’s $5 billion spending plan runs out.

So what happens next? Lawmakers said they will have to find some way to balance the books after they return to session in January, cutting unnamed programs and services to keep the Department of Health and Human Services afloat.

Senate President Pro Tem Glenn McConnell said the Medicaid program will overrun the budget without some cost-controls put in place at the Health and Human Services Department.

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