Tom Roberts's blog

In an open letter to President Barack Obama, Sojourner's Jim Wallis and a number of other progressive religious leaders urge the president to take a new approach to the conflict in that country.

19th in the series

Camden, N.J., is a place where a parish holds services to remember the tens of kids killed by gunshot and other violent means, a roll call of the dead of this peculiar urban warfare. Pick any day, any hour and drive past corners where the posture of the kids and their blank eyes say hopelessness.

Read the full story here: A place that breaks the poverty cycle

While most Americans oppose government funding of abortion, a new Pew Research Center survey finds that concern about abortion funding plays only a small role in driving opposition to the health care reform legislation under consideration by Congress.

From the University of Florida comes a report of a new study that sees evidence of a vital "religious left," and one that already has had an effect on national voting.

It is unfortunate that Archbishop Timothy Dolan of New York, new to the national stage and responsible for one of the most visible and potentially most influential sees in the nation, chose to play the tired anti-Catholic card so early in his tenure. His recent blog posting accused The New York Times and the wider culture of indulging in rampant anti-Catholic activity.

In doing so, he wastes the authority of his office by aligning it with such imprudent screamers as William Donohue and his Catholic League, which exists to raise money so it can continue to scream Fire! in the crowded theater of overcharged religionists.

The reality is, of course, that it is increasingly difficult to establish an anti-Catholic case of any substance or depth in the culture when so much -- industry, politics, finance, academia, the Supreme Court itself -- is in the hands of high-profile Catholics.

Arcbishop Silvano Tomasi, the Vatican's permanent observer to the United Nations, recently made a defense of the church's handling of the priest sex abuse crisis by citing suspect numbers and by pointing the finger at other denominations, largely on the basis of an article in The Christian Science Monitor.

Following is a response from Dominican Fr. Thomas Doyle, the canon lawyer who distinguished himself in the mid-1980s by defying the ecclesiastical strategies of the day and strongly coming to the defense of victims of abuse.

18th in the series

For Jesuit Fr. Jeff Putthoff, his ministry at a Camden, N.J., a technology training center, is his declaration about the future of the church as well as his answer, for the moment, to unsettling questions he poses to himself about what it means to be a priest and to be a Jesuit. They become particularly pressing questions in this era of dwindling numbers and resources, a time he refers to as a period of “diminishment.”

Read the full story here: Hopeworks 'n Camden

"The revered reputations of four of the most powerful Irish churchmen of recent times will take a hefty unspiritual nosedive with the imminent publication of most of the horrific findings of the Commission of Investigation into the Catholic archdiocese of Dublin," writes John Cooney, a columnist for the Irish Independent.

17th in the series

Bishop Ricardo Ramirez, 72, a member of the Congregation of St. Basil, was appointed founding bishop of the Las Cruces diocese in 1982. He is widely recognized as a skilled pastoral leader who has great rapport with the people of his diocese, which remains among the poorest in the country. It depends a great deal on financial help from outside the diocese and has had to be creative in tending to parishes with few priests. Ramirez sat down the morning of Aug. 11 for an interview with NCR at the diocese’s Pastoral Center.

Read the full story here: Recognizing lay gifts bears fruit in Las Cruces, bishop says

16th in the series

Though separated in age by at least two generations, and worlds apart in life experience, Sara Nolan and Sr. Bernice Garcia represent some of the strong impulses within the Catholic community that are shaping its future: the growing role of laity in the church, especially women; the conviction reinforced by the Second Vatican Council that Catholics, by virtue of their baptism, have an essential part to play in salvation history; and the rising awareness of the social dimension of a life of faith.

I spoke at length to both women during my recent visit to New Mexico, Garcia in the Santa Fe archdiocese, covering the central and northern portions of the state, and Nolan in the Las Cruces diocese, which stretches across the state's southern tier.

Read the full story here: Old meets new in faith lives of two New Mexico women

The U.S. Supreme Court has turned down an appeal by the Diocese of Bridgeport, Conn., to block release of thousands of documents relating to cases of sexual abuse of minors by priests.

I spent a few days last week in Scranton, Pa., as a participant in that city's first "Pages and Places Book Festival." I was invited to take part in a journalism panel, "Scranton in the 2008 Presidential Election," (reported on here) on the basis of a post-election story I did last year.

15th in the series

ALBUQUERQUE AND LAS CRUCES, N.M. -- New Mexico has about it an austere, out-of-the-way character, long stretches of desert and horizons of abraded, reddish mountains, evocative of the biblical quality of unseen significance. Few might look to New Mexico when conversation turns to the future of the church.

If so, they could be missing something. This land of hidden prospects might hold some answers for the future.

Read the full story: Hidden prospects.

Public relations has never been the Vatican's strong suit, but one would think by now that someone would have sent out the memo advising against defending the church's activity in the sex abuse scandal by pointing the finger at everyone else.

But there was Archbishop Silvano Tomasi, the Vatican's permanent observer to the UN, defending the church's handling of the crisis by citing suspect numbers (only 1.5-5 percent of priests involved), questionable social science (most of the perpetrators were homosexual) and the thin consolation that sex abuse exists not only in the wider culture but in other religions and denominations.

Interesting, breezy profile of New York's new archbishop, Timothy Dolan, in New York magazine cleverly titled, "The Archbishop of Charm."

14th in the series

Albuquerque, N.M. -- Franciscan Fr. Richard Rohr is the founder of the Center for Action and Contemplation and Action in Albuquerque, NM. Rohr believes that the contemplative tradition, the third of what he describes as four pillars of the emergent church and his point of entry into the discussion, is precisely the sort of tradition that allows one to see "with a different set of eyes" and perhaps shift the focus a bit.

Just saw this letter posted on the website of life-after-RC, subtitled Making sense of the Church after experiencing the Regnum Christi Movement, the lay arm of the religious order, the Legionaries of Christ. The letter outlines changes underway in the embattled religious order.

The Scranton Times-Tribune reports today that Bishop Joseph F. Martino is moving out of the traditional downtown residence for Scranton bishops at the rectory of St. Peter’s Cathedral to a rural retreat center that once served as a diocesan seminary.

I’m winding up nearly two weeks on the road, another leg of reporting for the Emerging Church series. I visited the Archdiocese of Santa Fe and the Diocese of Las Cruces in New Mexico, as well as Camden, N.J., locations that are rarely referenced when the conversation turns to the future of the church. But maybe they should be given more serious consideration.

13th in the series

In interviews earlier this year with young Catholics (most were in their 20s and 30s, two were in their mid-40s) at Our Lady of Czestochowa Parish in Jersey City, N.J., it seemed clear that some ideas about church membership are definitely age- or generation-specific. Younger Catholics appear reluctant to use such labels as conservative or liberal in describing themselves or others, while traditional pieties and the church's tradition itself can play an important role in someone's decision to become Catholic.

Those around the table, all of whom had chosen to become active in a particular Catholic community, said they spent little time worrying about hierarchical matters or many of the hot-button issues that might concern those of an older generation. In general terms, they had opted for Catholicism for a host of reasons and, while not ignoring the problems or controversies, did not allow them to get in the way of their participation in church life.

Read the full story: Young Catholics accept the church as is

In the visuals of the verbal muggings that some characterize as debate over health care reform, we (and I am grateful to this point) haven’t seen much of a discernibly Catholic presence. But the same vituperative, over-the-top language is out there on Catholic blogs. In the past it would have become the unchallenged “Catholic” point of view and its perpetrators the “experts” weighing in for the rest of the church.

So we might have seen the priest from pizza magnate Tom Monaghan’s Ave Maria University assert that the U.S. bishops have it wrong when they say that health care is a right -- and not hear a counter argument. Or the personal attacks on the nun who heads the Catholic Health Association might have gone unchallenged. However they are ably challenged here by John Gehring of Catholics in Alliance.

Henry John “Harry” Patch, who at 111 was said to be Britain’s last survivor of World War I, spent the last few years of his life condemning the futility of war and noting, as The New York Times put it in an appreciation today “the common humanity of soldiers who meet as enemies on the battlefield.”

What happens to old Catholic churches that were boarded up because there aren’t enough priests to go around? In Worcester, Mass., as in a number of other cities, Pentecostals step in where Catholics used to tread.

Archbishop Rembert Weakland, throughout his memoir, “A Pilgrim in a Pilgrim Church,” is unrelentlingly critical of the church’s hierarchical structure -- its lack of humanity in applying rules, its refusal to foster a consultative model of governance, and its distance from the experience of ordinary people. He had firsthand experience of hierarchical pettiness and, in many instances, church leaders’ deep opposition to any of the reforms of Vatican II.

Yet Weakland took advantage of the perks of office when his position was threatened, and in the book he mounts a defense of the system in his analysis of the sex abuse crisis.

Appalachia is one of America’s great paradoxes, a region of breathtaking beauty and grinding poverty, coal its blessing and curse. It is also a region easily hidden away among the culture’s pressing problems.

I recently finished reading Archbishop Rembert Weakland’s A Pilgrim in a Pilgrim Church: Memoirs of a Catholic Archbishop, and found it most intriguing for the eyewitness account he can provide of how deep the opposition to Vatican II was in the curia from the very start. He also provides the kind of look behind the curtain at the U.S. bishops and their meetings that only an insider can provide.

I recently finished reading Archbishop Rembert Weakland’s A Pilgrim in a Pilgrim Church: Memoirs of a Catholic Archbishop, and found it most intriguing for the eyewitness account he can provide of how deep the opposition to Vatican II was in the curia from the very start. He also provides the kind of look behind the curtain at the U.S. bishops and their meetings that only an insider can provide.

An interesting opinion piece by Mary Raftery appeared in the July 27 issue of The Irish Times regarding publication of Dublin Report, the result of a government inquiry into clergy sex abuse in the Archdiocese.

The Diocese of Scranton, Pa., finds itself $274,000 short of its annual appeal's $5.3 million goal, according to a report in The Scranton Times.