Jerry Filteau's blog

GAITHERSBURG, Md. -- Just two days after Maryland's Legislature passed a bill to legalize same-sex marriage, a Gaithersburg priest reportedly denied Communion to Barbara Johnson, a former Catholic school teacher, during her mother's funeral Mass because Johnson is a lesbian living in a same-sex relationship.

In response to the controversy that erupted over Saturday's incident, the Archdiocese of Washington, in which the Gaithersburg parish is located, said, "Any issues regarding the suitability of an individual to receive Communion should be addressed by the priest with that person in a private, pastoral setting."

The priest who reportedly refused Communion to Johnson was Fr. Marcel Guarnizo, a parochial vicar at St. John Neumann Church in Gaithersburg, a city in Montgomery County about 25 miles northwest of Washington, D.C.

"Why is this important?" asked Robert, a seminarian in the 1960s and a longtime parish music minister, when he was asked for his reaction to the changes in the liturgy introduced Nov. 25-26 in parishes across the United States.

"We'll get used to it," he added, although he found some of the language changes in the Mass prayers -- such as the creedal change from "one in being with the Father" to "consubstantial with the Father" -- "awkward."

Kathleen, a member of St. Thomas à Becket Parish in Reston, Va., objected strongly to the new formula at the end of the consecration of the wine, which has Christ saying the cup of wine is his blood given up "for you and for many" instead of "for you and for all."

In his homily on the changes, she said, the current parish administrator tried to explain that change as a reflection that all are called to salvation but not all respond to the call -- but in a way that suggested to her that it meant "many are called but few are chosen."

That, she said, seemed to her to "initiate a fear tactic [about who can be saved]. … I found that disconcerting."

WASHINGTON -- A George Washington University law professor noted for his groundbreaking legal campaigns against smoking and obesity has declared war on The Catholic University of America's recent decision to change its co-ed residences on campus to single-sex housing.

The professor, John H. Banzhaf III, has filed a complaint with the District of Columbia Human Rights Office claiming that CUA President John Garvey violated the DC Human Rights Act's prohibitions against sex discrimination when he decided to place all incoming freshmen who live on campus in single-sex residences this fall. Over the next three years the rest of the current co-ed residences are to be converted as well, as new incoming classes follow the same pattern.

American Catholic Council logoDETROIT -- "Baptism unites the church, not ordination," theologian and author Anthony T. Padovano told more than 1,800 reform-minded Catholics gathered June 10-12 at Detroit's Cobo Hall.

Addressing the inaugural national meeting of the American Catholic Council June 11, he said, "The pope does not unify or sanctify the church and make it catholic or apostolic. This is the work of the Spirit and the community. The pope is an institutional sign of a unity already achieved by the faithful. The pope does not create a community of believers or validate baptisms or make the Eucharist occur."

WASHINGTON – The Catholic University of America March 14 honored an alumnus and former U.S. ambassador to the Holy See, Thomas P. Melady, for a lifetime of achievement in service to his church, his country and the academic world.

The university's Institute for Policy Research and Catholic Studies presented Melady with it first Bishop John Keane medallion, which bears the Latin inscription, "Academia, patria, ecclesia" – "Academia, country, church." It is intended to be awarded annually from now on.

WASHINGTON – The Council on Mental Illness of the National Catholic Partnership on Disabilities said the recent tragedy in Tucson, Ariz., highlights the lack of adequate U.S. treatment of those with mental problems.

Jared Loughner has been charged in the Jan. 8 shooting spree that left six dead and 14 wounded, including U.S. Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, the apparent primary target of the attack.

WASHINGTON -- At a teleconference this morning introducing a review report on the funding rules of the Catholic Campaign for Human Development, a reporter asked what happens if CCHD faces a “hard choice” or trade-off that involves a funding request for a valuable project fully in accord with CCHD principles, but the group making the request is in conflict with church teaching in some other area unrelated to that grant request.

I got a strange e-mail alert Oct. 11 that Pope Benedict XVI has apparently changed his original papal coat of arms. Most notably, he has replaced his original episcopal miter atop the shield or escutcheon with the more traditional papal tiara – a triple crown associated for centuries with the temporal as well as spiritual authority of the papacy.

I’ve gotten a small flood of e-mails and referrals to blogs about the final Vatican approval of the new Roman Missal, Third Edition, for liturgical use in the United States.

Cardinal Francis E. George of Chicago, president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, announced Aug. 20 that the final approval of all Mass texts for the U.S. had been received.

In a blog Aug. 17 I reported receiving a news release from Thomas Field, a member of a gay and lesbian alumni club of Notre Dame, in which Field said he had been informed by an official of the Fort Wayne-South Bend Diocese that Bishop Kevin C. Rhoades, head of that diocese, would discuss the club’s request for official recognition by the university when he meets with the president of Notre Dame this fall.

If you go back to that blog, you will find Field has posted a note there saying that after he sent out the news release he received a voice mail response from Rhoades saying the news release was wrong – the bishop will not be discussing the club’s request with Holy Cross Fr. John Jenkins, Notre Dame’s president.

Last April, when I attended a Tridentine Mass in Washington and wrote a critical commentary on it for NCR, I knew it would provoke some interesting reader reaction.

But I was a bit surprised to find a reference to it four months later in a petition by gay and lesbian alumni of the University of Notre Dame and St. Mary’s College seeking official recognition of their alumni club.

WASHINGTON – Bishops and other church leaders should rely on research and make better use of it, Bishop Gerald F. Kicanas of Tucson, Ariz., said March 24 at the Catholic University of America.

Decision-making based on “one’s instincts, hunches and untested opinions” rather than on sound research “can lead to tragic results,” he said.

Bishop Kicanas, who is vice president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, delivered the inaugural Dean Hoge Memorial Lecture, sponsored by CUA’s Institute for Policy Research and Catholic Studies, formerly known as the Life Cycle Institute.

Hoge, who died in 2008, was one of the nation’s leading sociologists of religion. He taught at Catholic University for more than 30 years and headed the Life Cycle Institute from 1999 to 2004.

Kicanas focused his talk on Hoge’s extensive research on Catholic priests and its implications for bishops.

WASHINGTON -- Fr. Larry Snyder, president and CEO of Catholic Charities USA, said the U.S. health care system needs to be fixed because it has become "an underlying cause for the proliferation of poverty in America."

He linked health care reform to the fight against poverty in a statement released Feb. 25 as President Obama and other top government officials held a seven-hour bipartisan summit on health care reform with leading Republicans and Democrats in Congress.

As the legislators and administration officials were meeting on the issue, he said, "it is essential that they recognize the implications of inaction."

The burdens of health care costs are "pushing a new generation of Americans into poverty," he said.

He urged the leaders to "recognize the moral imperative of addressing the need for affordability and accessibility of health care that respects the dignity of life."

"CCUSA believes the call for health care reform represents a national moral crisis, but recognizes that the nation's poor are living this reality as an economic crisis," he said.

As the U.S. Senate moved toward a Christmas Eve vote on the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act -- apparently with the 60 senators on board that are needed to block a Republican filibuster and pass the bill -- I was again struck by the key role that 31 Catholic Democrats in the House have played so far and are likely to play in the final outcome of the legislation.

Read the full story here: To pass, health reform needs House Catholic Democrats
Blue Dogs, Catholic, Democrats: What's it all mean for health reform?

Fr. Emmanuel Charles McCarthyWhile reporting for NCR at the Fall General Assembly of the U.S. Catholic Bishops, Bishop John Michael Botean mentioned to me that Frs. Ted Hesburgh and Emmanuel Charles McCarthy will concelebrate a Mass of reconciliation at the University of Notre Dame today. The Mass marks the 40th anniversary of the university's suspension of 10 students for their protest of CIA and Dow Chemical recruitment activities on campus.

Botean reminded me that the students' suspension led McCarthy (a Melkite priest, strong pacifist and father of the girl whose cure was later the miracle leading to sainthood for Sister Benedicta of the Cross -- Edith Stein) to resign from the ND faculty.

The students who were suspended had lain down in front of an administration building to prevent others from interviewing with a CIA recruiter.

WASHINGTON – "The term 'working poor' is no longer acceptable," said Fr. Larry Snyder, president of Catholic Charities USA, at a teleconference launching a national interfaith campaign to promote environmentally green jobs for the poor.

Rabbi Steve Gutow, president of the Jewish Council for Public Affairs, said the campaign, Fighting Poverty With Faith, brings together two common concerns of people of all faiths: Care for the poor and care for God's earth.

The coalition seeks to have Congress approve the Gulf Coast Civic Works Act, a bill currently in the House that would create 100,000 green jobs to rebuild America's Gulf Coast communities.

It also seeks Senate passage of the American Clean Energy and Security Act, including House-approved provisions to fund extensive job training in green construction for targeted groups of the poor and unemployed. It wants the Senate version of the bill to go beyond the House version by extending funding for the Green Jobs Act past 2013. The House version allocates about $860 million a year to the Green Jobs Act, but would extend that funding only up to 2013.

WASHINGTON -- When President Barack Obama was declared this year's Nobel Peace Prize winner Oct. 9 for his work to create a world free of nuclear weapons, U.S. Evangelical leaders gathered in the Washington suburb of Landover, Md., congratulated him, calling the abolition of nuclear weapons a moral issue of highest importance.

Here is the news release from the Evangelical Leaders Forum of the National Association of Evangelicals:

Christian leaders gathered at the National Association of Evangelicals (NAE) Evangelical Leaders Forum at the First Baptist Church of Glenarden congratulated President Barack Obama for the announcement that he will receive the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize. In their cons ideration of the award, the Nobel Committee cited “special importance to Obama's vision of and work for a world without nuclear weapons.”

Leith Anderson, President of the NAE, said: “I first heard the call for a world free of nuclear weapons from President Ronald Reagan when he addressed the National Association of Evangelicals over twenty-five years ago. The Nobel prize for President Obama acknowledges and perpetuates the Reagan vision.”

PORTLAND, Ore.
David Gergen, longtime political commentator and advisor to four presidents, lauded the national Catholic Charities campaign to reduce poverty in America Sept. 25 but warned that “progress is hard work; politics is hard work. It just takes a long time.”

Gergen, a senior political analyst for CNN and director of the Center for Public Leadership at Harvard University in Boston, addressed the Catholic Charities USA 2009 Annual Gathering on the second day of its Sept. 24-26 meeting in Portland.

On the first day of the Sept. 24-26 Catholic Charities USA 2009 Annual Gathering, one of the most inspired and inspirational commentaries on Catholic social justice themes came not from one of the convention’s major featured speakers, but from a local lay Catholic Charities leader on a group panel – Michael Reichert, president of the Seattle Archdiocese’s Catholic Charities office, Catholic Community Services of Western Washington.

What he said basically was that Catholic Charities personnel ought to realize they speak for disenfranchised people they know through personal experience. The humility that marks their service to those people in the church should not interfere with or limit the strength of their public advocacy for them, he said.

PORTLAND, Ore.
The day before the Catholic Charities USA 2009 Annual Gathering opened Sept. 24, there were the usual pre-convention leadership meetings – and a bicycle ride through Portland dubbed the “Cycling for Change” Fun Ride.

One of the cyclists, Jesuit Fr. Matthew Ruhl, is a more serious biker. One of the purposes of the Sept. 23 ride was to publicize the priest’s plan to cycle across America next summer – from Seattle to Key West, Fla. – to draw attention to CCUSA’s efforts to cut poverty in half in the United States within the next few years.

U.S. Catholic catechism changes language on covenant with Jews

The Vatican has approved the U.S. bishops' 2008 decision to change a sentence in the United States Catholic Catechism for Adults that called God's covenant with the Jewish people "eternally valid for them."

The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops announced Aug. 27 that approval of the change had come from the Vatican Congregation for the Clergy, which oversees catechetical activity in the church.

President Barack Obama will participate Aug. 19 in a national teleconference on health care reform sponsored by an interfaith coalition.

The 5 p.m. (EDT) conference call will also be available as a live audio stream on the Internet at www.sojo.net/obamacall or at http://faithforhealth.org.

Health care reform “is a theological, biblical, moral issue,” said the Rev. Jim Wallis, executive director and CEO of Sojourners, a progressive evangelical organization that is hosting the teleconference. “Our health insurance system is broken. Our system is sick. It is a threat to the nation’s soul.”

In an Aug. 10 conference call with journalists Wallis and other faith leaders expressed dismay at what they termed the lies and misinformation being spread widely by opponents of health care reform.

“Moral people can disagree” on details of the proposed reform, said Rabbi David Saperstein, director of the Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism, “but this is not going to be about the details, but on the moral imperative to act.”

In a letter to leaders participating in the G8 Summit in Italy, July 8-10, the presidents of the Catholic bishops’ conferences of the G8 nations urged Summit leaders to “take concerted actions to protect poor persons and assist developing countries.”

Calling President Obama "a Christian with a deep respect for the role of faith in public life," 20 leading U.S. Catholic theologians and scholars have sharply criticized those who are attacking the University of Notre Dame for inviting Obama to deliver the university's commencement address May 17.

Most of those protesting Obama's appearance cite his support for legalized abortion as grounds for denying him a platform or honors at any Catholic university.

The scholars said Notre Dame "has a long tradition of honoring presidents from both political parties." They urged those who opposed Obama's appearance not "to disrupt these joyous proceedings or to divide the church for narrow political advantage."