WASHINGTON -- With cohabitation, single-person households and single parenthood on the rise, the percentage of Americans who are currently married has reached an all-time low.
A new report from the Pew Research Center analyzing Census Bureau data found that only 51 percent of Americans 18 and over were married in 2010, compared with 72 percent in 1960. Among Hispanics and African-Americans, the decline is even steeper.
Dennis Coday, 50, National Catholic Reporter managing editor since July 2010, has been named the publication's new editor. In that position he will be responsible for the content of NCR's print and electronic editions. Making the announcement, publisher Tom Fox said Coday is solidly poised to take NCR into a new era. "He has sound editorial judgment, understands the changing electronic tools, and has the character and values needed to lead NCR forward.
NEW ORLEANS -- A Catholic high school that was the country's last refuge of corporal punishment has ended a legal struggle over control of the school and agreed that the days of paddling are over.
"There will be no attempt to reinstate corporal punishment," said Dan Davillier, a board member of St. Augustine High School who helped fashion the out-of-court settlement on Dec. 23 with the Josephites, the Roman Catholic order that founded the school 60 years ago.
"It hasn't been at the school for the last year and a half. We want St. Aug to maintain its track record for strict discipline. I'm confident that we can maintain that high level without paddling."
Whether to paddle or not -- and who would decide the question -- became the issue that roiled the school for most of 2011. The Josephites, with the emphatic support of New Orleans Archbishop Gregory Aymond, wanted it stopped.
But a broad coalition of parents, alumni and local board members, led by former school president Rev. John Raphael, wanted it continued as a key ingredient in the school's character-building tool kit.
The year 2011 offered the Catholic world a number of big news stories: the implosion of the church in Ireland; the first indictments of Catholic leaders, including a bishop, in the tragic clergy sex abuse saga; the initiation of reform movements by Catholics priests in Ireland, Austria, Germany, United States and Belgium; and the Vatican-forced implementation of the new Roman Missal.
WASHINGTON -- When educational leaders look at ways to make Catholic schools more affordable, they are happy about some of the positive steps that have been made but fully aware that there is still a lot to do.
During a recent conference at The Catholic University of America, a group of panelists focused particularly on the status of tuition tax credits and how they have enabled students who would normally not be able to afford Catholic schools to attend them.
Currently, there are 11 school voucher programs in the United States and nine scholarship tax-credit programs. Some states have more than one program.
The school voucher programs in Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Ohio, Oklahoma, Wisconsin, Utah and the District of Columbia offer private school vouchers to low-income students, students with special needs or children in failing schools.
The scholarship tax-credit programs in Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Indiana, Iowa, Pennsylvania and Rhode Island also are primarily for students from low-income families or those with special needs.
In June, Orli Gil, Consul General of Israel to the Midwest, extended an invitation to 11 college presidents of U.S. Midwestern universities to spend a week in Israel. Gil, who is based in Chicago, described the Oct. 22-29 trip as an unparalleled opportunity for the university officials to meet high-level Israeli politicians and leaders of Israeli universities. The itinerary included opportunities to learn of some of the newest Israeli innovations in science, technology, research and development in medicine, alternative energy, agriculture and the environment. The Israel Ministry of Foreign Affairs sponsored and underwrote the costs of the trip, except for each person’s airfare to New York City.
Fr. Thomas Curran, an Oblate of St. Francis de Sales and president of Rockhurst University, a Jesuit school in Kansas City, Mo., accepted the invitation. Upon his return, Curran spoke with NCR about the trip.
NEWARK, N.J. -- A group of 12 nurses who sued the University Hospital in Newark over a policy requiring them to care for patients before and after abortions can no longer be compelled to assist in these procedures, under an agreement reached in federal court.
The nurses in the same-day surgery unit of the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey can remain in their current jobs and will only be required to help patients with abortions in a life-threatening emergency when no other nonobjecting staff members are available and only until someone can be brought in to relieve them, according to the Dec. 22 agreement.
U.S. District Judge Jose Linares, who mediated the agreement, said the nurses would be allowed to remain in the unit and would not be discriminated against because of their stance on abortion. He declined to rule on how the hospital would configure its nursing staff, calling that a contract issue.
Linares will retain jurisdiction over the case to rule on its enforcement or any disputes that arise because of it.
The Center of Concern’s president, Jesuit Fr. Jim Hug, calls the Rethinking Bretton Woods project the “most sophisticated” of his agency’s four priority programs. The others are Ecology and Development, Education for Justice, and the Global Women’s Project.
Rethinking Bretton Woods is working to reform the national and global financial institutions and policies created at an international conference in 1944 in Bretton Woods, N.H., so that they better serve human rights and community well-being, Hug said. The project is in the capable hands of Argentine scholar and international lawyer Aldo Caliari. But Caliari is frequently away from his desk holding workshops with academicians, nongovernmental organizations, government officials and intergovernmental organization staff around the world.
WASHINGTON -- On any given day the Center of Concern wrestles with a number of the world’s most pressing problems. Desperate poverty, depletion of the Earth’s resources, inadequate distribution of food, discrimination and curtailment of human rights occupy its staff of scholars and researchers.
SYRACUSE, N.Y. -- A 65-year-old woman from Chittenango, N.Y., was inexplicably healed of pancreatitis in 2005, Catholic leaders say, and is the source of the second miracle that will make Blessed Mother Marianne Cope a new U.S. saint.
"I'm very happy to be here and I thank the Lord," Sharon Smith said Tuesday (Dec. 20) during a news conference at the Syracuse Motherhouse Chapel of the Sisters of St. Francis of the Neumann Communities.
"I'm very happy to be Mother Marianne's vessel for her to become a saint,"
Smith said.
Franciscan leaders said sisters prayed for Cope's intercession on Smith's behalf.
According to The Associated Press, Smith was hospitalized for nearly a year after pancreatitis tore a hole between her intestines and stomach. A stranger in the hospital waiting room told Smith's friend to pray to Cope for help, said Sister Patricia Burkard, general minister of the Franciscan sisters.
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