The Dialog

By Mark Pattison

Catholic News Service

WASHINGTON — The Catholic Campaign for Human Development, the U.S. bishops’ domestic anti-poverty arm, should “resist efforts” that isolate Catholic-funded organizations from effective coalitions that are improving the lives of low-income citizens,” according to a new report examining threats to CCHD’s funding.

The report also assailed what were called, in the words of the head of one CCHD-funded group that had its grant pulled, the “witch hunt” tactics by CCHD’s opponents. The report was published June 11 by Faith in Public Life, which bills itself as “a strategy center for the faith community advancing faith in the public square as a powerful force for justice, compassion and the common good.”

“Lay Catholics concerned about protecting the church’s social justice witness in public life should redouble their commitment to the Catholic Campaign for Human Development through donations, letters of support to bishops and volunteering,” said one recommendation in the report.

The report is titled “Be Not Afraid?: Guilt by Association, Catholic McCarthyism and Growing Threats to the U.S. Bishops’ Anti-Poverty Mission.”

It accuses such groups as the American Life League and the Reform CCHD Now Coalition of “creating a culture of fear around community organizing,” based on interviews with community development experts, nonprofit directors and national philanthropic leaders.

The 10,000-word report was endorsed by, among others, two former presidents of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, six retired U.S. bishops, a former USCCB associate general secretary, two former CCHD directors and seven former CCHD employees. Eighteen organizations, 17 Catholic and one interfaith, also endorsed the report. Retired Auxiliary Bishop Joseph M. Sullivan of Brooklyn, N.Y., endorsed the report before he died June 7, and the report is dedicated to his memory.

“Be Not Afraid?” offered several case studies of groups that had their CCHD funding pulled after the grant had already been awarded, often for having a coalition partner that adopted a political position contrary to Catholic teaching but is not germane to the funded organization’s work.

The Minneapolis-based Land Stewardship Project, founded in 1982, trains new farmers, challenges large-scale factory farms that have poor records on labor rights, and advocates for more sustainable local agriculture. It has received CCHD grants since the late 1980s, and $190,000 since 2007. But after getting a $48,000 grant last year, it was told to resign its membership in two organizations that did not endorse the Minnesota bishops’ efforts for an amendment to the state constitution to ban same-sex marriage or its grant would be yanked.

According to the report, the American Life League had compiled a dossier noting the connections between the nonprofits, posted it online and sent it to Minnesota bishops and to CCHD officials in Washington. Project director Mark Shultz, according to the report, “believes the American Life League’s ‘witch hunt’ tactics created an atmosphere of fear and paranoia that cast doubt about (its) fidelity to Catholic teaching despite its long history of working with CCHD.”

The grant was pulled after the Land Stewardship Project refused to resign its membership. After word spread of the revocation, other donations more than made up for the forfeited grant money.

Companeros, an immigrant rights organization in the Diocese of Pueblo, Colo., had its CCHD grant, more than half of the organization’s revenue, pulled after it was found to be part of a coalition that included One Colorado, a homosexual rights group. Like the Land Stewardship Project, it received donations that more than equaled the lost CCHD funding.

But Companeros director Nicole Mosher told Faith in Public Life that she worries about the organization’s future without the “anchor” of CCHD funding.

CCHD’s current director, Ralph McCloud, told Catholic News Service that the 2010 CCHD “review and renewal” process meant to address shortcomings some saw in its grant funding was “an opportunity for CCHD to look entirely at some of the mechanisms and some of the safeguards to see whether there needs to be any tweaking and changing. I think it was time after 40 years.”

The collection started in 1970, raising $8 million. The 2011 collection, the latest for which figures are available, raised $9.8 million.

The sticking point for CCHD critics appears to be with some of the coalition partners of organizations that get funding from the agency. But “most of the folks, if not all of the funded groups, understand where the Catholic Church comes in,” McCloud told CNS. “They respect that. They’ve made in some ways conscious efforts to be in compliance and they make sure they would never accidentally cross the line. I think it’s given us an opportunity to share that those teaching and those beliefs in a bolder way.”

Some bishops have opted out of the nationwide CCHD collection, preferring instead to conduct their own drives. “Each diocese is different,” McCloud said. “There are no two that are alike. … But we’re open to conversation with anyone” about having them rejoin CCHD.

Michael Hichborn, director of the American Life League’s Defend the Faith project, described the project as “assisting bishops across the country defend the Catholic Church from attacks both from without as well as from within.” He said the report seems “to have a thing on CCHD guidelines on coalitions. We simply applied those guidelines. So if they have a complaint about the guidelines, I don’t know why they’re pointing a finger at us about that.”

Hichborn also dismissed as “totally inaccurate” the “witch hunt” characterization in “Be Not Afraid?” “First of all, we’re not looking for witches, we’re not looking for bad organizations just because” the group wants to, he said. “We’re looking for organizations that receive money that are working directly against the Catholic Church.”

“Unfortunately, there are some folks who really don’t understand it,” McCloud told CNS, referring to the agency’s mission. “There are others who have yet to experience it in a way, and appreciate the way the CCHD has over the years and over the decades worked with groups in low-income communities, to hear firsthand what some of the needs are.”

“It seems like the most zealous guardians of Catholic identity are so busy playing purity police that they miss the larger essence,” said John Gehring, who wrote the Faith in Public Life report. Those groups, he added, should focus on “the spirit of the law more than about the letter of the law.”

By Mark Pattison

Catholic News Service

WASHINGTON — Dolores Hart is about to become a star again, 50 years after her last movie.

Hart, that’s Mother Dolores, the prioress of a Benedictine women’s monastery in Bethlehem, Conn., has just had her memoir published a year after a documentary featuring her life in as a cloistered nun picked up an Oscar nomination for best documentary short subject.

Benedictine Mother Dolores Hart talks with Catholic News Service about her life as an actress and woman religious June 6 in Washington. As a young starlet her acting career was gaining momentum when she left it all behind to join a monastery. (CNS/Nancy Phelan Wiechec)

She is crisscrossing the country this summer to promote the book, “The Ear of the Heart: An Actress’ Journey From Hollywood to Holy Vows.”

The latest rush of celebrity is  “amazing,” Mother Dolores told Catholic News Service June 6 in Washington, where she was scheduled for a raft of interviews and a personal appearance.

“It makes me realize that time is the illusion. We do things in our life, and we constantly do them. It’s only separated by time,” said the 74-year-old nun.

Mother Dolores, in her Hollywood days, made only 10 movies, but she made them count. She was cast twice opposite Elvis Presley, in 1957′s “Loving You” and 1958’s “King Creole.” She starred in the first film celebrating the annual ritual of spring break in 1960’s “Where the Boys Are.” She even did a star turn as St. Clare in the 1961 religious biopic “Francis of Assisi.”

But she’s most proud of playing the title character in the 1962 drama “Lisa,” as a Jewish girl who survived the Nazis’ Auschwitz death camp only to be pursued by traitors after World War II intending to force her into prostitution.

Actor Stephen Boyd “was the man who rescued Lisa and told her he would take her back to Palestine. And of course she had a very hard time hearing him and to believe in him and actually get there. And that relationship with Lisa was for me a relationship with the Jewish women who had undergone that experience,” Mother Dolores said.

After hearing firsthand the death camp experience from one Auschwitz survivor, “I wanted to do that picture. I wanted somehow to be identified with the best possible rescue of these people,” she added. “I loved working with Stephen. I fell in love with Stephen in the middle of it. I was hoping he’d ask me to marry him.”

“Maybe someday,” Mother Dolores mused, “we’ll work it out. We’ll meet and say, ‘What a good thing we did.’”

Born in Chicago, she said her grandfather had a motion picture operator’s license and she’d go into the booth with him and spend days as a youngster watching movies. She said she had always wanted to be an actress but after her successes on screen, she began to think life “had a bigger meaning,” that “every human being has a mission,” and maybe making movies was not the “end-all and be-all.”

When she knew Elvis, she said, “he wanted to do something with his career. He wanted to get rich and interesting parts. They never gave him that. They just kept putting him in one girlie film after the other.”

Mother Dolores was never nominated for her film roles, but she was the focus of the Oscar-nominated HBO documentary “God Is the Bigger Elvis.”

She said Archbishop Pietro Sambi, the late papal nuncio to the United States, summoned her to his office one day and told her, “You are to make a movie about consecrated life.” Mother Dolores protested, saying all her Hollywood contacts were dead. “And he said, ‘No, no, no, no. God will help you do this, because this has to be done,’” she recalled. Four days later, representatives of HBO, none of whom had ever heard of Archbishop Sambi, called to ask permission to film at her convent, Regina Laudis Monastery, for a documentary.

The film was originally set to be two hours long, but an HBO executive, smelling an Oscar, decided to chop the documentary in half.  “That’s when my heart began to sink and I began to think, ‘Oh, no, it’s going to be about me,’ because what (else) are they going to do to cut a two-hour film down to one hour?”, she told CNS.

Dolores Hart and Elvis Presley star in the 1957 movie “Loving You.” The young starlet left a promising acting career at age 25 to join the Benedictine Abbey of Regina Laudis in Bethlehem, Conn., where today she serves as prioress. Her autobiography, “The Ear of the Heart: An Actress’ Journey From Hollywood to Holy Vows,” co-written with Richard DeNeut, was released in May. (CNS photo/courtesy of Ignatius Press)

“God Is the Bigger Elvis” was nominated, although it did not win. “I thought to myself, I hope this film will be of value. That’s all I hope,” Mother Dolores said.

One might think “The Ear of the Heart” was written to capitalize on the documentary’s high profile. Not so.

“Dick DeNeut, who wrote the book with me, asked me 10 years ago if I should do a story of my life,” Mother Dolores said. She added she resisted the idea initially, but eventually consented.

She said that originally, she wasn’t thrilled with the title, either: “I thought it would be a medical journal. But he (DeNeut) said, ‘That’s the first line in the Rule of St. Benedict: “Listen, my son with the ear of the heart to the voice of the master.”

Mother Dolores is the only nun to be accredited as a voting member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, colloquially, the folks who choose the Oscar winners. And it comes in handy for the occasional movie night at the monastery.

Sisters “will put up (notes) on the board saying, ‘Can we see this?’ ‘Can we see that?’ ‘Could anybody bring this?’ We’re in the monastery, but they know,” Mother Dolores said, laughing. “We do have our special movie nights. I think the last was ‘Les Miserables.’ Everybody wanted to see that.”

A CNS video interview with Mother Dolores Hart can be found at http://youtu.be/sIyn0_2GnCE.

By Mark Pattison

Catholic News Service

WASHINGTON — The head of the National Catholic Committee on Scouting said the Boy Scouts’ vote in May to admit homosexual youth into their ranks is “not in conflict with Catholic teaching,” something by which “we should be encouraged.”

Edward Martin, the committee’s national chairman, said Scouting is “still the best youth-serving program available to all youth.” He added, “We need to use this opportunity to show our commitment to making Catholic Scouting a safe environment for all youth in which the Catholic faith is taught, practiced and nurtured.”

Boy Scouts serve as extraordinary ministers of holy Communion during a Catholic Scouting recognition Mass in 2010 at Sacred Heart Cathedral in Rochester, N.Y. The Boy Scouts of America voted May 23 to lift a ban on accepting openly gay Scouts as members. (CNS photo/Mike Crupi, Catholic Courier)

Martin’s message, dated May 29, was posted May 30 on the National Catholic Committee on Scouting’s website, www.nccs-bsa.org. He said he wrote it after reading mails, blogs, Facebook posting and several discussions, including with Bishop Robert E. Guglielmone of Charleston, S.C., liaison to the committee for the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, and Father Michael Hanifin, national chaplain for Catholic Scouting.

Martin said the Catholic committee is not a voting member of the Boy Scouts of America but is a member of the organization’s Religious Relationships Task Force. In that advisory role, he said, the committee had expressed its concerns, including listing references to Catholic teaching, during a “listening period” established by the Scouts after it announced it was considering the policy change.

“The resolution appeared to respect those teachings and BSA’s responses to our concerns were satisfactory,” Martin said. “We felt that the Catholic Scouters selected as voters could, in good conscience, vote either for or against the resolution.”

Martin noted three principles that remain unchanged for the Boy Scouts despite the resolution’s approval.

“Any sexual conduct, whether homosexual or heterosexual, by youth of Scouting age is contrary to the virtues of Scouting,” he said. “The Boy Scouts of America does not have an agenda on the matter of sexual orientation, and resolving this complex issue is not the role of the organization, nor may any member use Scouting to promote or advance any social or political position or agenda,” Martin added.

The third principle is: “The Scout Oath begins with duty to God, and the Scout Law ends with a Scout’s obligation to be reverent. Those will always remain core values of the Boy Scouts of America.”

Martin cited section 2358 of the Catechism of the Catholic Church in accepting the new policy: “Individuals who disclose a homosexual inclination or a same-sex attraction are to be treated with the same dignity due all human beings created by God,” he said. “This teaching is followed in enrollment policies for Catholic schools, for Catholic sports programs, and for all programs of Catholic youth ministry.”

Since, as a result of the new policy, “no youth may be denied membership in the Boy Scouts of America on the basis of sexual orientation or preference alone,” Martin said, “we understand this to mean the following: A youth will not be prevented from receiving a rank award or religious emblem simply for having a same-sex attraction; a youth will not need to hide the fact that he has or experiences this attraction, but a youth also will not be encouraged or pressured to disclose publicly the experience of such attraction; (and) a youth thinking or knowing he has a homosexual inclination should not be afraid that he will be bullied or expelled by the Scouting community by disclosing his sexual orientation.”

Martin said that over the next couple of months, the National Catholic Committee on Scouting will develop a task force to help Catholic Scouters dioceses, parishes and the media understand the change, including an online series of questions and answers to help Catholics understand the issues associated with the policy change.

By Mark Pattison

Catholic News Service

WASHINGTON — The Obama administration told a federal appellate court May 3 that it would not seek to block an injunction the court had granted in November that had allowed a Christian book publisher to not comply with the contraceptive-coverage mandate of the federal Department of Health and Human Services.

Tyndale House Publishers, based in Carol Stream, Ill., won the injunction Nov. 16 in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia.

Tyndale, which has about 260 employees, did not meet the “religious exemption” clause under the proposed rules governing the HHS mandate. The company filed suit to avoid compliance with requirement, under the Affordable Care Act of 2010, that employers include free coverage of contraceptives, sterilization and abortion-inducing drugs in their employee health plans.

Tyndale publishes Bibles and other Christian materials. It is primarily owned by the nonprofit Tyndale House Foundation, which provides grants to help meet the physical and spiritual needs of people around the world.

The company’s most recent win in court is believed to be the first victory at the appellate level for those seeking to be exempt from compliance with the HHS mandate.

“We believe the government essentially conceded that its anti-religious legal position cannot succeed in court under scrutiny,” said Matt Bowman, senior legal counsel for the Alliance Defending Freedom, which represented Tyndale in court.

Tyndale will not have to comply with the HHS mandate “for the time being,” Bowman told Catholic News Service in a May 9 telephone interview. “The company has already asked for a permanent injunction that would fully remove Obamacare’s coercive mandate from the Bible publisher.”

Bowman added, “We think the government knows that it’s ridiculous to argue against religious freedom for anyone doing business, and so all of the people of faith who are doing this should benefit from the recognition that they can practice faith in their daily lives.”

He said there are implications in the Obama administration’s decision to pull back for all those challenging the HHS mandate. There are about 60 organizations and companies that have filed court challenges, including many Catholic organizations.

“We’ve won several injunctions already for those other companies, too, so this is not our only success,” Bowman said. “But we plan to let all of the courts know that (the government is) beginning to realize that its position against religious freedom is absurd.”

Under new rules proposed Feb. 1 to implement the mandate, HHS widened the exemption for religious organizations but said no exemption would be given to “for-profit, secular employers” whose owners have moral objections to providing the coverage. The rules are to be finalized in August.

During the 60-day comment period on the proposed rules, which ended April 8, a group of state attorneys general were among those who said the exemption should include business owners who are morally opposed to complying with the mandate.

When the injunction was granted in the Tyndale case last November, U.S. District Court Judge Reggie Walton said the HHS mandate “affirmatively compels” the company to violate its religious beliefs.

By Mark Pattison

Catholic News Service

When readers write to this column, they generally complain about the vulgarity, sleaze and lowest common-denominator carryings-on they see among the current prime-time network offerings.

Well, to borrow a slogan from an old-time radio show: Return with us now to those thrilling days of yesteryear.

‘I Love Lucy,” with Lucille Ball (right) and Desi Arnaz, can still be found on alternate television cable channels and and online sites. (CNS)

The best thing about going back in time is that you don’t have to fork over a thick wad of bills to buy a DVD collection of some of your favorite shows — although, judging from what’s available in some video catalogs, there’s no shortage of classic TV to be found in handsome multi-DVD sets.

In fact, you don’t even have to subscribe to cable TV. While Nickelodeon first struck pay dirt on the concept with its TV Land channel, other networks have sprung up to offer even more diverse alternatives. The best part of it is that you can get some, if not all, of these networks over the air with your set-top digital-TV box, as the networks appear as subchannels of over-the-air network affiliate stations.

The one drawback: Local channels are passing up the chance to present local programming by showing cheaper, decades-old reruns.

Half of this column could be taken up solely with the series titles, as many of them will bring a fresh wave of nostalgia for a simpler, more innocent time. Granted, there may have been more violence on some of the dramas, but the rare displays of blood in their black-and-white milieu were shown only in a deeper shade of gray.

Now, for a network-by-network listing.

Bounce TV caters to African-American tastes. There are lots of movies and documentaries, but two programming staples are “Fat Albert and the Cosby Kids” and “Soul Train.”

This TV, another channel, also shows a lot of movies, but in the early morning before you head to work or school, viewers can catch episodes of “The Patty Duke Show,” “Mister Ed,” “Green Acres,” “Inspector Gadget” and “Sabrina the Teenage Witch.”

Cozi TV, a new service for NBC-owned and -operated affiliates, shows the occasional flick, but has a deeper roster of TV series, including several that never aired on the Peacock Network. Its shows include “The Lone Ranger,” “The Roy Rogers Show,” “Alias Smith and Jones,” “Marcus Welby, M.D.,” “McCloud,” “Highway to Heaven,” “I Spy,” “Magnum, P.I.,” “The Adventures of Robin Hood,” “Lassie,” “The Six Million-Dollar Man,” “The Bionic Woman,” “Sherlock Holmes,” “The Virginian” and “Wells Fargo.”

RTN, short for Retro Television Network, often showcases classic series from the Universal, MCA and Revue vaults. Its offerings include “Ozzie and Harriet,” “The Adventures of Robin Hood,” “The New Zorro,” “The Bill Cosby Show,” “Movin’ On,” “The Naked City,” “Fat Albert and the Cosby Kids,” “Mr. Magoo,” “Lassie,” “I Spy,’ “Hopalong Cassidy,” “The Beverly Hillbillies,” “The Joey Bishop Show,” “The Real McCoys,” “Highway to Heaven,” “The Saint,” “Route 66” and “The Soupy Sales Show.”

Antenna TV takes material from the Columbia, TriStar and Screen Gems archives and puts it back on the air. Its classic TV series include “Leave It to Beaver,” “Dennis the Menace,” “Father Knows Best,” “Adam-12,” “Dragnet,” “The Partridge Family,” “Sanford and Son,” “Maude,” “Good Times,” “All in the Family,” “Barney Miller,” “It Takes a Thief,” “S.W.A.T.,” “The Monkees,” “Gidget,” “The Flying Nun,” “Circus Boy,” “The Jack Benny Program,” “Burns and Allen,” “Alfred Hitchcock Presents,” “Here Come the Brides,” “Hazel,” “Bachelor Father,” “The Adventures of Rin Tin Tin,” “McHale’s Navy,” “Diff’rent Strokes,” “Benson” and “WKRP in Cincinnati.”

Last but certainly not least, Me TV has convinced the stars of the shows in its stables to make short network-promo ads in which they say, “Watch me, on Me TV.” What’s there to watch? Offerings include: “The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis,” “Make Room for Daddy,” “The Beverly Hillbillies,” “Petticoat Junction,” “My Three Sons,” “The Donna Reed Show,” “Get Smart,” “That Girl,” “I Love Lucy,” “Daniel Boone,” “Perry Mason,” “The Rockford Files,” “Hawaii Five-O,” “Gunsmoke,” “Bonanza,” “The Big Valley,” “The Wild Wild West,” “Emergency,” “The Rifleman,” “M*A*S*H,” “Bewitched,” “I Dream of Jeannie,” “The Mary Tyler Moore Show,” “The Bob Newhart Show,” “The Odd Couple,” “The Dick Van Dyke Show,” “The Twilight Zone,” “Kojak,” “Rod Serling’s Night Gallery,” “Mission: Impossible,” “Combat!” and “12 O’Clock High.”

One network’s roster alone would be impressive, but there are six such stations competing for our eyeballs. This list doesn’t include Ion, a successor of sorts to the ratings-challenged Pax network. Ion, though, tends to show scads of CBS police procedural dramas from the past decade.

Some cable TV subscribers have cut the cord, in a manner of speaking, opting to stick to over-the-air TV because of subchannels like these. However, for TV consumers who want as full a choice as possible and are savvy enough to skip the channels that carry programming they find offensive, these channels might be found on a digital-cable tier. And they’re almost certainly in the lineup of satellite TV’s 500-channel universe.

Information about what local affiliates carry programming of retro networks can be found at: www.bouncetv.com, thistv.com, www.cozitv.com, www.myretrotv.com, www.antennatv.tv and metvnetwork.com.

By Mark Pattison

Catholic News Service

WASHINGTON — Three Republican members of the House of Representatives March 5 introduced a bill to protect conscience rights for both workers in the health care industry and for employers in light of the federal mandate requiring employers to cover contraceptives, sterilization and abortion-inducing drugs.

One of the sponsors, Rep. Diane Black, R-Tenn., said it is possible that the bill, the Health Care Conscience Rights Act, could be folded into a continuing resolution being considered by the House to keep the federal government operating beyond March 27.

Two Catholic women who run businesses and who appeared at a March 5 news conference on Capitol Hill said they do not want to be forced to choose between their conscience or their business.

“Nobody should be asked to make that decision,” said Christine Ketterhagen, a co-owner of Hercules Industries, a heating and air conditioning company her father founded in Denver 50 years ago that now has operations in five states with 320 employees.

“We went to Catholic schools. Our children went to Catholic schools. Our grandchildren go to Catholic schools,” Ketterhagen told Catholic News Service after the news conference. “We’re willing to pay for education,” she added, but not for contraceptives or other mandated health care coverage that goes against their Catholic faith.

Sister Jane Marie Klein, a Franciscan Sister of Perpetual Adoration who is chairperson of the board of Franciscan Alliance, a Midwestern hospital group with 13 hospitals and 3,500 beds that provides an estimated $171.5 million in charity care and community outreach, said, “All I can say is that we will not violate our conscience.”

“I don’t want to deal with” the possibility that the chain could be shut or sold, she added, saying she was counting on “good and faithful” people to “uphold our God-given rights.”

Sister Jane Marie said, “God is good. He’s still in charge. I think he’s going to see us through this. We have sisters who are praying 24 hours a day, seven days a week for this — along with the election of a new people right now.”

The Health Care Conscience Rights Act would offer a full exemption from the U.S. Department Health and Human Services’ mandate for individuals and health care entities that refuse to provide, pay for, or refer patients to abortion providers because of their religious beliefs. The bill had attracted 50 co-sponsors by the time of its introduction.

The bill would have given recourse to one Catholic nurse forced to participate in a 2009 abortion. Cathy Cenzon-DeCarlo was an operating room nurse in a New York hospital. “They threatened my job and my nursing license” if she did not participate in the abortion, she said.

“I still remember the 22-week-old baby,” Cenzon-DeCarlo said. “I had to account for its twisted arms and legs and feet,” she added. “I’ve had nightmares.”

She filed suit in both state and federal courts, but was told that, even if her being forced to participate in the abortion was illegal, she had no standing to sue.

Other nurses have been victimized for their beliefs. “Because of my Christian beliefs, I have been laughed at, marginalized and had loss of employment,” said Susan Elliott, director of the nursing department at Biola University in California, at the press conference.

Rep. John Fleming, R-La., a co-sponsor of the bill, told the story at the news conference of nine nurses at an unnamed hospital who had lost their jobs for their refusal to participate in abortions. “The nine nurses got their jobs back,” Fleming said, “but only after help from their unions.”

“I welcome the Health Care Conscience Rights Act and call for its swift passage into law,” said a March 5 statement by Archbishop William E. Lori of Baltimore, chairman of the U.S. bishops’ Ad Hoc Committee for Religious Liberty.

“While federal laws are on the books protecting conscience rights in health care, this act would make such protection truly effective,” Archbishop Lori said. “This overdue measure is especially needed in light of new challenges to conscience rights arising from the federal health care reform act.”

On Feb. 1, HHS issued proposed new rules on the mandate aimed at accommodating objections raised by Catholic institutions that, among others, the exemption for religious employers was too narrow and that most would be forced to stop providing employee health insurance because they object on moral grounds to the requirement they cover contraception, sterilization and abortion-inducing drugs.

HHS removed three conditions that defined religious employers — as groups whose purpose is the inculcation of religious values, who primarily employ persons of the same faith and who serve those of the same faith. The fourth criterion remains: what is a nonprofit organization under specific sections of the Internal Revenue Code.

No exemption, however, will be given to “for-profit, secular employers” whose owners have moral objections to providing the coverage.

Catholic leaders are studying the new proposed rules, but many have said they do not go far enough. HHS is accepting comment on the new proposed rules until April. Final rules are expected by summer.

At the Capitol Hill news conference, the speakers all decried a threat to conscience rights. Sister Jane Marie said her order had come from Germany to the United States 130 years ago in part because of an invitation by a bishop, but also in part because of restrictions to religious freedom being applied then in Germany.

“In the Philippines, I grew up under the (Ferdinand) Marcos regime, where people were afraid to voice their opinions,” said Cenzon-DeCarlo, adding she did not know until she woke up each day whether her father, a Marcos opponent, had been kidnapped.

Cenzon-DeCarlo became a U.S. citizen in 2011 because of the nation’s constitutional guarantees of religious freedom and freedom of conscience. But with the HHS mandate, she said, it is “not the America of my dreams.”

By Mark Pattison

Catholic News Service

WASHINGTON — The Jesuit-run Woodstock Theological Center, on the campus of Georgetown University in Washington, another Jesuit-run institution, will close at the end of June, a victim of the shrinking number of Jesuits available to staff it.

Hopes are that Georgetown will assume the center’s work and assets. “The trustees made a decision to look at Georgetown first. If that doesn’t work, they’ll look at other places,” said Jesuit Father Thomas Reese, a senior fellow at Woodstock.

Father Reese said the decision to close was the culmination of “a process that’s been going on for the past few months.”

“We’ve been involved in a strategic plan for the past few months, planning for the next five years, and the trustees decided that because of the manpower needs of the Jesuits, it just wasn’t viable to keep the center going as a Jesuit institution with all of the other colleges and universities and institutions and theological seminaries that we run,” he said. “The numbers just don’t add up.”

About the closure, Father Reese told Catholic News Service in a Feb. 15 telephone interview, “I wasn’t all that surprised, but simply sad.”

Woodstock had been supported by the order’s three East Coast provinces: Maryland, New York and New England. “The enormous transformations experienced by the Society of Jesus in the last 40 years have influenced the allocation of human and material resources,” said a Feb. 15 announcement of Woodstock’s impending closure as an independent ministry of the provinces.

“I’m afraid this is just going to continue to happen as time goes on,” Father Reese said. “Across the country we’ve seen parishes closing, schools closing. That’s the new church. And frankly, it’s going to get a lot worse. I’m probably among the generation of the last big classes in the seminaries. And when we go, there’s going to be very few people behind us.”

About a year ago St. Aloysius Gonzaga Parish in Washington, near the Capitol, closed because the Jesuits’ could no longer staff it; Gonzaga High School, an all-boys’ institution, remained open. The congregation merged with nearby Holy Redeemer Parish.

Asked if money was a factor in the Woodstock decision, “money’s always a problem,” he said with a laugh. “But I think that (Jesuit) Father (Gasper) LoBiondo (head of Woodstock’s board of trustees) had increased the number of donors every year and the amount that they were giving. Getting money from foundations is tough these days because they were hit in the stock market.”

Woodstock has maintained programs in social ethics for business, interreligious dialogue, religion and public policy, science and religion, and a number of research fellowships. Father Reese directs the international visiting fellow program; its last two fellows will conclude their projects in May.

The center’s website is www.woodstockcenter.org.

By Mark Pattison

Catholic News Service

After “Bless me, Father, for I have sinned,” even if they get that far, there are millions of Catholics who don’t exactly know what to say next.

This is especially true for Catholics who have not gone to confession in years, or even decades.

At their annual fall meeting in Baltimore, the U.S. bishops issued a call to Catholics to take advantage of the sacrament of penance, especially those who have not gone to confession for some time. (CNS/Mike Crupi/Catholic Courier)

Despite parishes and dioceses inviting inactive Catholics to return to church at Lent, with the sacrament of reconciliation as an incentive, it is likely Catholics are afraid, bewildered or even intimidated at the prospect of returning to the confessional after such a long period away from it.

A rote recitation of sins doesn’t seem quite right. Laundry lists, as some priests call them, are out. In fact, one advises, even devising a game plan before returning to the confessional is out.

“Just come. Don’t prepare. We’ll do it in there. I’ll help you with this. At the end of it, you’re going to think about things we didn’t cover. You can come again,” said Msgr. Richard Lavalley, pastor of St. Francis Xavier Parish in Winooski, Vt. “The more complicated it becomes, the worse it becomes. They (penitents) don’t know what to make of it and they become ashamed.”

The motivations for wanting to go back to confession can be many, said Jesuit Father Jake Empereur, a priest since 1965 and a parochial vicar at St. Matthew Parish in San Antonio.

“It could be because of health issues. It could be because their conscience moves them to finally be able to participate in the church and the liturgy and Communion and things like that,” he said. “People get married. Sometimes it’s someone’s first Communion, sometimes it’s a wedding. It’s all sorts of different reasons.”

And what they have on their mind and want to get off their chest can vary as well, Father Empereur said.

A few things stand out, he said.

“Being in an irregular marriage, they gave up believing in God when they were in their early 20s and now they’re thinking about that. Each case is really, truly different,” he said, adding he tells penitents to focus on “what they came to say” because it “gives me further questioning on what I need to do (as a priest): whether or not they’re married, personal relationships, issues in their life, whatever it might be.”

“They don’t talk about a lot of non-sins, small things and so forth,” Father Empereur continued. “They have a couple of major things, relating to marriage — they got married outside the church, they had a bad experience with a priest, or so forth. Sometimes they’ll talk about taking drugs, adultery, perhaps, or sleeping around. Things like that might come up in the course (of a confession), not the grocery list for things that happen more frequently.”

Msgr. Lavalley said he tells penitents, “If you’re holding back because you’re afraid or you’re frightened or you don’t know what to do or how to say it, say ‘Our Lady sent me.’ I can’t tell you how many times that’s worked.”

He recalled the time one man came into the reconciliation room telling him, “I’m supposed to tell you somebody sent me, but I can’t remember who it was.” He added he told the man it was Our Lady, and that “she sent me, too.”

Msgr. Lavalley said he’s told penitents, “I don’t bite, I don’t kick, I don’t yell and I don’t faint. So let’s start. Can I help you by going through the Commandments? … Is it easier for you to say yes or no with me?” And in doing that, he added, “I get what I need.”

Father Empereur said he asks penitents whether they pray. “Usually they’ll say something like their evening prayers before they go to bed, or they pray before meals. Usually they have not been going to Mass: ‘I say the rosary’ or things like that.

“Then you can talk about participation in the Eucharist. So you have to kind of instruct them, helping them along,” he said. “Encourage them. ‘Are you going to be more involved in the church? Are you going to go to Mass? Are you going to go to confession once in a while?’”

“What’s prominent? What most outstanding in their mind? … They have something on their minds. That’s why they’re coming in the first place. Usually I find my questions have to do with their relationships or to talk about their spiritual life a little bit. After all, that’s the purpose of all this. I can’t say I’ve had two identical confessions.”

Msgr. Lavalley, ordained in 1964, still remembers a confession from his first year as a priest. He was hearing confessions from students at the parish grade school, and one boy was among the last to be brought in.

“This kid’s behind the screen. He’s not talking to me. He’s just breathing. ‘Do you want to go to confession?’(No response.) ‘Do you want to tell me what your sins are?’ ‘No.’ ‘’Why?’ ‘Because you know what my sins are.’ ‘How?’ ‘Because I did them before.’”

Just like that boy, Msgr. Lavalley said, penitents are habitual sinners. “Everyone’s a habitual sinner, and so am I,” he said. “It’s not about sin, it’s about mercy and about God’s love.”

Msgr. Lavalley remembers himself as a grade schooler making comparisons among the priests in his parish about which ones handed out sterner or lighter penances.

But he recalled one experience with a priest that “made me the confessor that I am. He was so kind and so wonderful, and I never forgot the penance he gave me. He said, ‘Can you say the name of Jesus once? I’ll say it for you.’ And he did it without sarcasm.

“That changed my life.”

By Mark Pattison

University of Notre Dame head coach Brian Kelly watches his team during practice Jan. 3 for the NCAA college football 2013 Discover BCS National Championship game against the University of Alabama in Davie, Fla., Jan. 7. Historian Edward T. O’Donnell, an associate professor of history at the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Mass., says Notre Dame’s emergence as a college football power coincided with the emergence of a Irish-American middle and upper class. (CNS photo/Jeff Haynes, Reuters)

Catholic News Service

WASHINGTON — As Notre Dame prepared to play Alabama Jan. 7 in college football’s Bowl Championship Series title game, it seemed like the clash of the titans.

Alabama has won nine titles, first-place rankings in the polls, since the “bowl era” began in the 1930s. Notre Dame has won eight, although its fortunes over the past two decades have waxed and waned. But nobody disputes that Notre Dame was king of the hill in college football before the proliferation of bowl games, when Knute Rockne and the Fighting Irish, with a possible assist from Touchdown Jesus looking over Notre Dame Stadium, took on all comers and beat most of them year in and year out.

Notre Dame’s rise as a football power paralleled the rise of Irish-Americans, an overwhelmingly Catholic population, in U.S. culture both economically and socially, according to Edward T. O’Donnell, a historian and associate professor of history at the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Mass., which, like Notre Dame, is run by the Holy Cross Fathers and Brothers.

Although it’s not a requirement for the job, O’Donnell himself is a Notre Dame fan.

“In the first 60 years of Notre Dame football from the 1920s to the 1970s … it meant a lot to Irish Catholics. This national football team reflected a lot of Catholic aspirations to upward mobility and this inferiority complex that a lot of Catholics, especially Irish Catholics, seemed to carry with them,” O’Donnell said.

As Notre Dame football grew in stature, it coincided with “the emergence of an Irish middle class or an upper class,” O’Donnell told Catholic News Service in a Jan. 3 telephone interview from his home in Worcester.

“Notre Dame kind of becomes this representation of ‘we can beat you guys. We’re getting our slice of the American dream and no one’s going to take it from us. We’re able to knock off your very best — Princeton, Harvard, Army, USC — and to be able to do so year after year,’” he added.

Notre Dame has had a charmed gridiron history. Notre Dame claims 11 mythical national championships based on No. 1 rankings in wire-service polls, and the NCAA recognizes 13 such titles. The Fighting Irish has had more players win the Heisman Trophy (seven) and inducted into the College Football Hall of Fame (44, plus four coaches) than any other college. The school’s football winning percentage is second only to Michigan among schools playing the sport for more than 100 years. It’s the only school to have its own television deal. All home games air on NBC, and the Fighting Irish avoid matchups that would result in the game showing on networks other than NBC, ABC, CBS or ESPN.

The team has played in two games billed as “The Game of the Century” and triumphed over Miami in a 1988 match billed as “Catholics vs. Convicts” en route to a perfect season and its last national title. The standards of excellence are so high that Notre Dame coaches find their jobs in peril if their winning percentage is merely above .500. In the past 15 years, Bob Davie, Tyrone Willingham and Charlie Weis recorded percentages ranging from .565 to .583, and none lasted more than five seasons.

“Success, and sustained success, always breeds a sense of jealousy. Notre Dame has been able to cultivate this image of a squeaky-clean program that maintains high academic standards. And so that annoys people,” O’Donnell told CNS. “They seem to be successful, and they seem to be successful in a way that only a handful of schools, like Stanford, can point to. There are plenty of people who would delight in a (Notre Dame) recruiting scandal, or an academic violation.”

This brings Notre Dame a long way from the earlier image of the Irish in U.S. history, O’Donnell said — the “no Irish need apply” cards in shop windows, the stereotype of brawling, drunken louts from whom the “paddy wagon” derived its name. In fact, he added, Notre Dame leaders had to be persuaded that the use of the name “Fighting Irish,” already in use among sportswriters, wouldn’t conjure up those negative images.

Notre Dame recorded a perfect 12-0 regular-season mark in 2012, earning it a berth in the BCS championship game to be played in Miami. Alabama, with only one loss in the perennially strong Southeastern Conference, claimed the other spot when it won its conference championship game.

O’Donnell said he’d be watching the game on the new 46-inch flat-screen TV the family got at Christmas, replacing a 17-year-old, 20-inch tube model. But it may be a solitary pursuit.

“There will probably be a daughter or two passing through the TV room,” he said. “They’ll sit and watch a (New England) Patriots (NFL) game. They’re much more inclined to watch baseball.”

By Mark Pattison

Catholic News Service

WASHINGTON —The American Taxpayer Relief Act of 2012, and 2013, considering when the House of Representatives passed it, will be known as much by what it doesn’t include as what it does include.

The legislation, among other things, extends the farm bill by nine months, which prevents milk prices from doubling. But the extension also keeps intact other provisions that farming advocates say are wasteful.

The U.S. Capitol dome is seen behind the entrance to the House of Representatives on Capitol Hill in Washington in early November. (CNS photo/Larry Downing, Reuters)

Bob Gronski, a policy analyst for the National Catholic Rural Life Conference, said he was “disappointed with the lack of reform and the lack of money for conservation programs” in the farm bill extension.

“They (Congress) didn’t change the direct payments” that were going to eradicated under the proposed bill. “That didn’t happen. So there was disappointment with that. And the USCCB (U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops) and we have been calling for that.”

Even so, Gronski said, “we were 36 hours away from going over the cliff. So Mitch McConnell and Joe Biden got together and did what had to be done.” Biden, who as U.S. vice president is president of the Senate, and McConnell, R-Ky., the Senate minority leader, brokered the bill that passed 89-8 in the Senate and 257-167 in the House.

The Rev. David Beckmann, a Lutheran minister who is president of Bread for the World, an anti-hunger lobby, said the compromise legislation “isn’t perfect, but it is a good deal that will prevent major economic damage that would have affected hungry and poor people the most.”

He said positive elements in the bill include a five-year extension on improvements made to the earned-income tax credit and child tax credit over the last decade, and the one-year extension of emergency unemployment benefits for one year, which will affect an estimated 2 million out-of-work Americans.

“Budgets are moral documents. Their impact on those whom the Bible refers to as ‘the least of these’ tells the world what kind of country we are,” he said in a Jan. 2 statement.

The legislation includes permanently lower income tax rates for an estimated 98 percent of Americans, no more sliding deadline for cuts originally enacted when George W. Bush was president, but no agreement on how to deal with tax breaks and loopholes.

The bill increases taxes on individuals making $400,000 a year and couples making $450,000 a year that will garner, by White House estimates, an extra $737 billion in revenue in the next 10 years, but there’s no action on a debt ceiling that has already hit the $16 trillion mark.

It puts off for two months the specter of sequestration, the automatic budget cuts that go into effect if no agreement is reached.

There’s a “doc fix” that avoids slashing the reimbursement rates doctors are paid for treating Medicare patients, but no “Sandy fix,” i.e., disaster relief aid for East Coast cities and states hit by late-October Hurricane Sandy.

Anticipating the debt-ceiling battle to come, President Barack Obama said late Jan. 1, 35 minutes after the House’s 10:45 p.m. vote to pass the bill, “We can’t not pay bills that we’ve already incurred.

“If Congress refuses to give the United States government the ability to pay these bills on time, the consequences for the entire global economy would be catastrophic, far worse than the impact of a fiscal cliff,” he said.

In separate remarks Jan. 2, Obama urged the House to vote on Hurricane Sandy relief aid that day, before the 112th Congress adjourns; the new Congress elected in November was to be sworn in Jan. 4.

“The Senate passed this request with bipartisan support. But the House of Representatives has refused to act, even as there are families and communities who still need our help to rebuild in the months and years ahead, and who also still need immediate support with the bulk of winter still in front of us,” he said.

Members of Congress and other elected officials from the affected states lashed out at House leaders Jan. 2 for not having taken a vote. Gov. Chris Christie, R-N.J., said the inaction was another reason why voters “hate Congress.”

Rep. Peter King, R-N.Y., said he was promised by House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, that separate votes on Sandy relief would be held Jan. 4 and Jan. 15 in the new Congress, which would then require a new vote by the Senate.