At installation, Baltimore archbishop affirms faith’s role in national life

Baltimore, Md., May 16, 2012 / 01:20 pm (CNA/EWTN News).-

At his May 16 installation in the “Premier See” of the U.S. Church, new Baltimore Archbishop William E. Lori urged believers to proclaim their faith to the nation while standing up for the Church’s freedom.

“Let us not shrink from entering the public square to proclaim the person of Christ, to teach the values that flow from reason and faith, to uphold our right to go about our daily work in accord with our teachings and values,” he told the 2,000-strong congregation at the Cathedral of Mary Our Queen.

“By its nature, the profession of faith is a public matter,”  said the archbishop, who also leads the U.S. bishops’ religious freedom committee.

He indicated that the Catholic faith cannot be confined solely to privately-held beliefs and acts of worship, since it is “meant to be spread far and wide and acted upon, in and through Church institutions and in the witness of individual believers.”

“Let us never imagine that the faith we profess with such personal conviction is merely a private matter,” he said to the congregation.

Instead, he told them, “we must be loyal Americans by being bold and courageous Catholics.”

Known for his religious freedom advocacy during his past appointment as the Bishop of Bridgeport, Conn., Archbishop Lori was installed amid ongoing controversy over the federal government’s contraception mandate and other moves seen as hostile to religion by Catholics and other believers.

Over 300 priests and bishops, joined by representatives of 150 parishes and 70 Catholic schools, heard Apostolic Nuncio Archbishop Carlo Maria Vigano proclaim the decree establishing the new archbishop, a 61-year-old Kentucky native, as the leader of the archdiocese’s 500,000 Catholics.

Archbishop Lori’s installation homily drew inspiration from the public witness of Saint Paul, as well as the missionary journeys of Blessed John Paul II and Pope Benedict XVI. He recalled Bl. John Paul II’s own words, delivered at Baltimore’s cathedral during a 1995 visit to the city.

In words delivered on that occasion, and quoted by Archbishop Lori, the late Pope spoke of America’s “precious legacy of religious freedom,” telling Catholics “to defend that freedom against those who would take religion out of the public domain and establish secularism as America’s official faith.”

The archbishop also paid tribute to those who led the nation’s first Catholic diocese before him –  including Archbishop John Carroll, the United States’ first Catholic bishop; and Cardinal James Gibbons, who led the Church in Baltimore during a period of anti-Catholic suspicion.

Archbishop Carroll, he said, led a “generation of believers and patriots,” whose legacy “has enabled the Church to worship in freedom, to bear witness to Christ publicly, and to do massive and amazing works of pastoral love, education, and charity in ways that are true to the faith that inspired them.”

Archbishop Lori also recalled how Cardinal Gibbons, Baltimore’s archbishop from 1877 to 1921, opposed “those who said it wasn’t possible to be a practicing Catholic and a loyal American.”

He recalled Cardinal Gibbons’ description of the U.S. as a country “where the civil government holds over us the aegis of its protection, without interfering with us in the legitimate exercise of our sublime mission as ministers of the Gospel of Christ.”

As he reaffirmed the Second Vatican Council’s teaching on the human right to religious liberty, Archbishop Lori made it clear that the U.S. bishops “do not seek to defend religious liberty for partisan or political purposes, as some have suggested.”

Rather, the religious freedom committee chairman said, “we do this because we are lovers of a human dignity that was fashioned and imparted not by the government but by the Creator.”

“We defend religious liberty because we are lovers of every human person, seeing in the face of every man and woman also the face of Christ,” he explained. “We uphold religious liberty because we seek to continue serving those in need while contributing to the common good.”

As he reflected on a variety of public and internal challenges, Archbishop Lori urged the faithful to pray for his leadership and the good of the Church.

He asked the congregation to pray “that, as the Year of Faith announced by Pope Benedict XVI, unfolds, I shall not only teach the faith but bear witness to it in a manner that helps to heal the breach between faith and culture.”

“Pray that, in God’s grace, I might foster that unity of faith which makes the Gospel credible,” he urged, “ so that together, we may always warmly invite those who have left the Church … and together may we continue to invite and welcome those sincerely searching for the truth.”

Tags:
Religious freedom, Bishop Installation

Will The Independent please apologise for publishing slander against the …

The mainstream media seems determined to misrepresent the Catholic faith

On Tuesday morning, the Independent’s blogs section posted a comment piece that slandered the Catholic Church. Not that you’d know it, because a few hours later the offending remarks were quietly edited out.

The post is by journalist Ruth Whippman, who is all-whipped up about the fact that the Catholic Education Service has “sent a letter to all of the schools in their network urging them to encourage their pupils to sign a petition against gay marriage.” That’s right, Catholics don’t just send their kids to Catholic schools but they also insist that those Catholic schools teach Catholicism, too. The rotten nerve.

In fact, Whippman is upset about nothing. To use her own words, the Catholic Education Service is only “urging” teachers to “encourage” their pupils to sign a petition. Compliance is clearly left up to the school’s staff, and you can make a safe bet that very few of them will follow through. It’s a classic liberal misunderstanding about the Catholic Church that all its “employees” bother to promote natural law, or that any of its worshippers listen to them. They probably ought to, but this isn’t the 13th century and Catholics are perfectly capable of obeying or ignoring doctrine at will.

But what should really offend about Whippman’s piece is its claim that the Church lacks the moral authority to preach about homosexuality because it somehow tolerates child abuse. In the original version, she made two absurd statements. First, she implied that the Church only recently decided there was anything wrong with raping a child. I don’t have a copy of the pre-edited text, but here’s a screengrab for the quote: “Paedophilia was a latecomer to the mortal sin party, only having been formally added to the list by Pope John Paul II in 2001.” The content of her second argument I’ll have to cull from a Tweet, but the wording matches my memory of the statement: “In the official hierarchy of sin issued by Catholic Church, homosexual acts are at the top, with murder, rape and terrorism.” You read that correctly – Catholics think Graham Norton and Osama bin Laden are morally equivalent.

All of this is a gross distortion of Catholic theology. The Church has always regarded the sexual abuse of children as a “grave matter.” Aside from the fact that it’s obviously wicked, it also constitutes rape as outlined in the Ten Commandments and condemned by Catholics for centuries. The implication that the Church only came to regard paedophilia as a sin in the 21st century – and that it only condemned it as a public relations exercise – is an obscene slur. Moreover, Catholics certainly do not think that homosexual acts are a sin of equal weight with terrorism. Taking the Lord’s name or “eating all the pies” are sins, too – but they don’t rank alongside 9-11.

Given that Whippman has elsewhere written that religion and politics don’t mix and that UK abortion laws need to be liberalised, we can presume that her mistakes are involuntary acts of prejudice. But what is shocking is that The Independent published her piece as written in its original form. If I wrote a post saying that Islam has an “easy-come-easy-go” attitude towards child rape, I’d hope that my editor would point out that this is offensive nonsense and sack me on the spot. If he didn’t and it was published and my mistake was pointed out to me, I trust I’d have the decency to publish a correction rather than just edit out the offending sentences at the earliest opportunity.

But I wouldn’t write something as stupid as that because a) I have the wit to know it’s not true and b) I have a profound respect for faith in all its forms. Here’s why I take great personal offence at Whippman’s original post. I am a Catholic and I have only ever found the Church to be tolerant, compassionate and overwhelmingly concerned with relieving human suffering. And yet, I have also seen the spirits of ordinary priests crushed by the persistent slur of either paedophilia or homophobic bigotry. Both exist within the hearts of individual clerics, of course. But for the vast majority attempting to minister to the poor, the sick, the despised and, yes, to victims of child abuse or homophobic bullying, life is only made tougher by the constant stream of anti-Catholic bias coming from the liberal press.

Recognizing all the beauty and splendour of The Faith – and all that it has done for me – I have an obligation to defend it in the public sphere. Just like I’m sure Ruth Whippman would do for her own family. So, I’m calling on The Independent to ‘fess up to the original errors in its article and print a proper apology. After all, it doesn’t want another Johann Hari on its hands.

‘Catholic identity is a priority.’

Teach the children well, was the Sunday message from Fifth Avenue.

From Timothy Cardinal Dolan’s homily:

there is no more tried-and-true way of passing on our Catholic faith to our kids than by sacrificing to put them in a Catholic school. Data proves they persevere in the faith at higher rates, pray better, are more faithful to Sunday Mass, live gospel values, are more generous to their parish, even have happier marriages, volunteer more, and transmit the faith to their own children, than those not in a Catholic school.

In our nation’s history, Catholic schools had two goals: to educate excellently, and to form children in the faith. Both are essential.

I recently had the pleasure of meeting with leaders in our Catholic high schools. They observed that, in some of their areas, the public schools were, thank God, offering a good education. Lord knows, they remarked, their facilities, and the frills in the government schools, were more dazzling than the Catholic high schools.

So, they asserted, there was only one reason for a parent to sacrifice financially to send his/her son/daughter to the Catholic high school: formation in faith, values, character, discipline, and religion . . . along with a first class education.

In other words, Catholic identity is a priority.

If our schools are not visibly and robustly Catholic, let’s save a lot of money and close them in areas where our children can get a decent academic education free of charge.

Our Jewish neighbors have come to know that; we had best rediscover it!

Audio here.

Catholic education is an issue close to my heart — it is what I grew up on, and if it is truly Catholic — teaching, serving, rooted in Christ — it makes all the difference. In saving lives. In saving souls.

Minnesota Catholic Students Angry About Mandatory Anti-Gay Lecture

Even among the virulently anti-gay American bishops, Twin Cities Archbishop John Nienstedt stands out. More than perhaps any other prelate in the country (with possible competition from New York Cardinal Timothy Dolan), Nienstedt has turned the fight against marriage equality into an all-out crusade. He’s inserted a prayer for marriage discrimination into the Catholic Mass; turned that church’s holiest sacrament into a weapon against LGBT people; ordered his priests to organize grassroots political committees in their parishes — at parish expense — for the express purpose of drumming up support for Minnesota’s proposed constitutional marriage discrimination amendment; and essentially told those same priests that if they opposed the Minnesota Catholic Church’s war on LGBT people, couples, and families, they had darn well better keep their traps shut about it. (And incidentally, Nienstedt’s spiritual bullying was recently endorsed by none other than the Pope himself.)

With so many malicious anti-gay attacks to his credit, one could be readily forgiven for overlooking another one that I mentioned only briefly in a previous post: “Nienstedt also spoke about sending teams consisting of ‘a priest and a married couple’ into Catholic schools to discuss marriage discrimination with schoolchildren.” That’s right: Nienstedt planned to send teams of adults into Catholic schools to teach children that, if the Minnesota Catholic Church has its way in November, only some of them will be worthy of marriage when they grow up.

Awful, no? Well now, thanks to Jon Tevlin of the Minneapolis Star Tribune, we know that these mandatory marriage discrimination lectures are indeed taking place at Catholic schools across the archdiocese. But in at least some of those schools, students are very unhappy about being forcibly subjected to such a decidedly un-Christian message. Tevlin interviewed Matt Bliss, a senior at DeLaSalle High School in Minneapolis, about what happened at his school’s assembly:

“The first three-quarters of the presentation were really good,” said Bliss. “They talked about what is marriage and how marriage helps us as a society. Then it started going downhill when they started talking about single parents and adopted kids. They didn’t directly say it, but they implied that kids who are adopted or live with single parents are less than kids with two parents of the opposite sex. They implied that a ‘normal’ family is the best family.”

“When they finally got to gay marriage, [students] were really upset,” said Bliss. “You could look around the room and feel the anger. My friend who is a lesbian started crying, and people were crying in the bathroom.”

I don’t know about you, but reading stories like this makes my blood boil. But check out what happened next:

Bliss was one of several students who stood up to argue with the representatives from the archdiocese. One girl held up a sign that said, “I love my moms.”

Mike O’Keefe, a spokesman for the school, said that other students were mad that some of the students spoke out and thought that some of them were “rude” to the visitors from the archdiocese.

“We weren’t being rude,” countered Lydia Hannah, another student who spoke out. “But people were upset, and we weren’t just going to sit there.”

The students had ample reason to be angry. According to Hannah, she and her fellow DeLaSalle students were suspicious when they found out that only current seniors would be required to sit through the marriage lecture. She said, ”We put two and two together — all of us will be able to vote next fall [on the constitutional amendment that limits marriage to same-sex couples].” These suspicions were confirmed when the presenters directly addressed the proposed amendment, albeit briefly due to the angry reaction it elicited from the students.

The priest-couple team didn’t stop there, though. Bliss told Tevlin that when someone in the audience stated that two men, for example, were perfectly capable of enjoying a loving, committed, stable relationship, the diocesan couple onstage equated that loving same-sex relationship with bestiality. Hannah was shocked by these comments, and she was equally shocked to hear one of the presenters characterize adopted children as “sociologically unstable.” Hannah herself is adopted.

Bliss eventually decided he’d had enough:

At one point, Bliss raised his hand and, “as politely as I could,” began to argue with the presenters. He used his knowledge of history to refute many of their points, and explained that various cultures have accepted and embraced homosexuality going back hundreds of years.

“I think they were surprised by the history I gave them and surprised that I was so calm,” said Bliss. “I don’t think they expected the response they got from the students.”

Since the diocesan priest and DeLaSalle administration officials abruptly ended the assembly after it became clear that the students weren’t exactly drinking the punch, Bliss’ assessment appears to be accurate. Angry students were allowed to stay afterward and continue the discussion with archdiocesan officials, which resulted in a more civil atmosphere, at least temporarily. However, Tevlin wrote that ”the more questions the presenters tried to answer, the worse it got.”

And it didn’t end well. Said Bliss, ”It was a really awful ending. It was anger, anger, anger, and then we were done and they left. This is really a bad idea.”

Predictably — as you probably deduced from the above comment by school spokesman Mike O’Keefe — the school appears to be relatively unconcerned about the lesbian student reduced to tears after being told her sexual orientation renders her unfit to love in a meaningful way, the traumatized teens crying in the restroom after hearing their LGBT friends slandered and humiliated, the adopted children accused of having mental problems, the boy calmly refuting anti-gay lies with historical facts, or the girl bravely standing up for her moms even as she’s forced to hear them belittled in a public forum. No, the school thinks they were being a nuisance, being rude.

I beg to differ. Far from being rude, these kids are standing up for justice and equality. They are speaking truth to power, even when that means challenging the teachings of the very church that many of them presumably have spent their whole lives in. I wouldn’t call that rudeness. I’d call it courage.

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Laura Marreel: Why Pacelli Middle School? – Post

Pacelli Middle School is a warm, welcoming transition into young adulthood. Our strong focus on academic excellence, service and faith make it an excellent choice for any sixth-, seventh- or eighth-grade student. We offer students an academic and growth opportunity that cannot be matched by any other middle school in our area. Children enter our program, and through our focus on academic excellence, service and faith, they enter High School as young, responsible adults.

Pacelli Catholic Schools are focused on academic excellence. We help students grow in their God-given gifts, stretch their dreams and realize their impact on the world around them through:

• Small class sizes: Because of our dedication to each student, Pacelli Middle Schoolers benefit from our small class sizes and close “family” feel. Each students is heard. Each student has a place.

• Technology immersion: Pacelli Middle Schoolers are connecting with each other and the rest of the world through technology with 30 Apple laptop computers, Google mail accounts for each student and creative, progressive teachers.

Church schools with a valuable lesson

THIS morning and every Sunday morning, parents will have their babies baptised into the Catholic faith.

The majority of these families will not be once a week church-goers, but most will be there at Easter and Christmas. They’ll baptise their kids because their parents had them baptised and they’ll also have another goal in mind: a fine education.

The Catholic Church has its challenges but Catholic schools are overwhelmed with demand for places. Today The Sunday Telegraph reveals an ambitious $1 billion expansion plan, under which the church will buy land in NSW to expand its existing schools and build new ones.

Parents’ demand for Catholic places is the best possible endorsement of Catholic education, and a worrying sign for the public education sector.

As this newspaper has repeatedly reported, parents are taking out personal loans and maxing out credit cards to pay for private education, because they are worried about the state of the public system.

The Sunday Telegraph revealed a fortnight ago the O’Farrell government’s package of reforms to improve the public sector. Predictably, it is facing a backlash from the unions.

The Church’s $1-billion plan should be encouragement to the Premier to push ahead — or face the prospect of public schools being left far behind.

Archbishop of Sydney, Cardinal George Pell, may be too discreet to say so, but this is also an incredibly savvy business move by the Church.

With dwindling attendance figures for churches of all denominations, the Catholic Church has realised it has one extraordinary asset the others could only pray for: a network of schools that are trusted and appreciated by believers and non-believers alike.

By refining and expanding the school network, the Church is guaranteeing itself a fresh generation of baptised Catholics with a first-hand appreciation of the benefits of a religious education.

The lesson for the secular education system is this: today’s parents are applying a critical eye to the schools their children attend. They expect the best; and that means our mainstream public school system must match the high standards set by the religious and independent schools.

Every child in NSW, regardless of faith or family circumstances, deserves a first-class education.

CONGRATULATIONS to Candice Falzon for her bravery in speaking about the darkest time of her life.

In 2007, Falzon should have been Australia’s sweetheart: a beautiful and talented athlete with a great future.

She made a big mistake: to have a toilet-cubicle tryst with a rising star of football, Sonny Bill Williams.

A mobile-phone camera photograph was taken and, predictably, became an internet sensation. This was one of the first episodes of an image ‘going viral’ in Australia, and in the ensuing frenzy, most of NSW saw the picture.

Falzon’s reputation was trashed and it was her, not Williams, who faced the insults and put-downs.

After hitting the lowest of lows, Falzon took control of the situation. She moved away from Sydney, reined in her lifestyle and focused on her sport and, ultimately, redemption in the ocean with victory in a Nutri-Grain Ironwoman race last month.

She has, as her brother Pat so brilliantly put it, “gone from the s. . .house to the penthouse”.

She has rebuilt her mental and emotional resilience, and proved herself as an athlete.

Falzon’s story could easily have ended in tragedy.

She turned it into triumph.

Responsibility for election comment is taken by the editor, Neil Breen, 2 Holt St, Surry Hills 2010

Gehlen plans for future faith-filled education

A planning process is underway with a goal of making Gehlen Catholic School in Le Mars an even stronger success for the future.

The Rev. Kevin Richter, Gehlen Catholic School President, shared that goal at a town hall meeting last week.

The meeting was part of a the process to develop a long-range plan for Gehlen for the next five to 10 years.

The Diocese of Sioux City Office of Education has asked each of the 17 Catholic schools in the diocese to complete a long-range plan, according to Dan Ryan, diocese superintendent.

Richter estimated 100 people attended the Gehlen town hall meeting.

“I think we’re pleased overall with the turnout; we’d always like to see more,” he said. “You can never have enough in terms of people giving input.”

Part of the plan for the next decade includes a new mission statement for the Le Mars school, said Lisa Niebuhr, development director.

The mission may be stated with the words “Gehlen Catholic School– Excellence in Education, Leadership through Christ,” Niebuhr said.

She emphasized the importance of the school staying true to its founding principles from 130 years ago.

The principles of the past she listed were faith, academics, values, service.

Catholic identity was discussed at the Gehlen town hall meeting.

Richter reflected on the discussion in an interview.

“It’s always refreshing to hear, see people get excited about that and to keep sharing the passion for their faith and to want to draw more people into that,” Richter said. “That’s always our question — ‘how can we keep awakening more?’”

He said Pope Benedict, the leader of the Catholic faith, is also talking about evangelization, the awakening of people to their faith.

Ideas presented at the town hall meeting for Gehlen’s Catholic identity included a mentoring program for new families, involving children more in weekend masses and more faith education for parents.

A long roll of of paper was used to write down a list of Catholic identity ideas suggested by those at the town hall meeting.

The same process was used in break-out sessions later in the meeting to gather ideas in the areas of academic excellence, finance, buildings and grounds, governance, teachers and enrollment management.

Gehlen’s lowest enrollment within the last 20 years was 395 students compared to this year’s student count of 459.

Population projections from the Diocese and information gathered by Niebuhr, the Siouxland Interstate Metropolitan Planning Council (SIMPCO) and the U.S. Census Bureau are being used in the planning process, Richter said.

“The nice thing in the Le Mars area, by and large, the projections are for the population to maybe increase slightly,” he said.

That’s in contrast to other parts of the Diocese where 22 of the 24 counties had a decrease in population overall, Richter added.

“We have what appears to be a stable population so how do we continue to invite more people to take advantage of the opportunities we have at Gehlen?” Richter said.

Some issues diocese schools are discussing are similar, while others are different, the Catholic priest explained.

“If I’m in Sioux City, their issues with buildings and grounds would be very different than ours as they are looking at building a new Bishop Heelen Catholic High School,” Richter said. “For us, buildings and grounds are not as big of an issue.”

Finances are an issue for all the Diocese schools, he noted.

Other issues in common are academics and the Catholic identity.

“Hopefully that (Catholic identity) will always be the first one we look at,” Richter said.

Attracting and keeping quality teachers are other general areas of planning most any school will have, he said.

Among those who helped plan the Gehlen town hall meeting for the long-range strategic plan was Tom Schuch, who is a six-year Gehlen school board member and board president.

Schuch described the meeting as a successful one and said he liked the interactive format.

“It wasn’t a meeting where you just sat and listened,” Schuch said. “As we reviewed topics with people (attending the meeting) they had a lot of ideas for the long-term outlook of our school.”

Those who came to the meeting were engaged and active in the planning process, he said.

In addition to Schuch, long-range planning committee members include chairmen Rick Kneip and Jerry Ripley; the Rev. Dan Greving; Jeff Alesch; Mike Donlin; Margaret Fuentes; Pam Hutchins; Mark McCarty; Lorie Nussbaum; Dave Palmer; Jamie Spangler; Mindy Scheitler, Niebuhr and Richter.

Putting the thoughts and ideas from the town hall meeting together in categories is the next step in planning for the next five to 10 years for Gehlen, according to Richter.

“We can’t do everything so we start to consolidate, distill it down and come out with a concrete plan by May or June,” he said.

Schuch said he hopes there will be continued involvement from parents of current students, alumni and anyone who has an interest in Catholic education.

“I believe in Catholic education, Gehlen is a good school and it’s solid and we want to keep it that way,” Schuch said. “For the long-term growth and longevity of the school, we need people involved in the process of planning now.”

Education: Catholic schools celebrate the importance of Easter

St Clare’s religious education leader Anne Barber says it is vital in their approach to teaching that the death and resurrection of Christ go hand in hand, and are not separated. “Through the whole Easter story we try and get across the message that it is all about the rhythm of life,” she says.

The school encourages its pupils to represent the various key events in the Easter cycle, using musical performance, drama and song. “Then we finish with a prayer where the whole school joins together, with parents and families invited.”

Barber says the idea is to get across the spirit of the story, drawing the school community together, “It’s part of our faith … God’s always with us.”

Anchorage Catholic schools fight secular culture in effort to anchor faith

Anchorage, Alaska, Mar 11, 2012 / 01:06 pm (CNA).- Concerned by a recent finding that more than half of young Christian adults abandon their church in their 20s, educators in local Catholic schools are fighting that trend with a timeless weapon: truth.

“Everyone wants to psychoanalyze and say this generation is unlike any before, but in my opinion, the truth is eternal,” said theology teacher Bob McMorrow, who teaches at Lumen Christi High School in Anchorage.

“Young people are still attracted to Jesus. They’re still attracted to the Catholic Church,” McMorrow added. “We don’t need to repackage it every three years because our culture changes. We just need to authentically teach the truth.”

Knowledge and Love

Teachers must first cultivate in youth a deep knowledge and love of the faith, the church and its traditions, McMorrow noted. Then, they must counter the conflicting messages of secular culture and ingrain moral decision-making skills and apologetics.

“The problem is a lack of formation, a lack of understanding of what the Catholic faith is,” said McMorrow, who is also the youth director at St. Benedict Church. “If you understand what the church is, the history and the foundation; and you understand all the things that make us truly Catholic — the sacraments, our saints, our connection to Mary and her ability to intercede for us; and you understand the Eucharist, even partially, you can’t abandon that. You can’t go someplace else. There are so many things that are beautiful about our faith, and if they understand it at a real level, they will never let it go.”

Catherine Neumayr, principal of Holy Rosary Academy in Anchorage, agreed.

“We have such a rich, beautiful heritage. Most of the early popes lost their lives for the faith,” she said. “I just try to give them this knowledge that they can remember and draw on so when they’re lonely and sad in their 20s, they remember that church is something beautiful. There is something beautiful in the Eucharist, and they can always come home to the Eucharist.”

Moral Controversies Welcome

The nucleus of the Holy Rosary campus is a chapel containing the Blessed Sacrament so students are always in the real presence of Christ. In previous generations, many former Catholics left the church because they doubted the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist. Today’s Catholics ages 18-29 cite varying problems with their faith, including a third who have experienced significant doubts and 40 percent who believe Catholic teachings regarding sex and birth control are out of date, according to a 2011 study by the Barna Group, a national research organization focused on the intersection of faith and culture.

Neumayr encourages teachers to challenge students by raising provocative questions about Catholicism and then guiding discussions: Are Catholics cannibalistic? Polytheistic? As a confirmation instructor at St. Benedict Church, she also clips news articles about controversial moral topics and instructs students to highlight a few key sentences, then share which statements they highlighted and why.

Lumen Christi principal Tom Sorci said his school proactively integrates moral dilemmas into the curriculum.

“They are being taught to keep their minds clean and their hearts pure, and it’s constantly reinforced in all our classes and Mass,” he said. “We teach them how to make good choices.”

“When you explain the Catholic process of how to make a moral decision, it makes sense and lots of them are very open to that,” McMorrow explained. “Catholic morality is beautiful and logical, and we need to train our young people in it so they can be good decision makers.”

The Age of Tolerance

The lessons are countercultural. Technology and media bombard youth with immorality and provide readily downloadable temptation, be it pornography or violent gaming. Neumayr has observed that younger generations tend to want the Catholic Church to operate like a democracy. If a majority of followers use birth control or support gay “marriage,” for instance, then many would argue the church should adapt to social norms.

“They think truth is dictated by society,” she said. “There’s this general call for tolerance, and few hold convictions as true.”

The Barna Group study reported that half of Catholics ages 18-29 have experienced significant frustration with their religion, and a quarter of them went through a period when they felt like rejecting their parents’ faith.

Another common sentiment Neumayr has perceived among teens and young adults is the sin of presumption — that is, a belief that dabbling in sinful behaviors is acceptable because God loves them unconditionally and wants them to be happy and therefore won’t hold them accountable.

“There are governing principles that are imbued in us by our creator, by our nature and not merely by our environment, and that concept is absent in adolescents, especially in public schools,” Neumayr said. “It’s just not in the (public) curriculum to be taught that man is faith and reason, soul and body. They’ve been taught that all natural law is relative to ‘me and what I consider moral or immoral.’”

Distracted Families

McMorrow, father of six, noted that younger generations are so tuned into technology and so overextended in extracurricular activities that practices like family rosary, daily Mass or community service are rare.

“We lose track of the main goal of the family,” he said. “No wonder it’s not sinking in and taking root. We’re sending them to college just touching on the surface of the one thing they really need, and that’s faith.”

Sending such “at-risk Christians” into the collegiate culture can be perilous for their faith. A Pew Forum survey indicated that nearly three-quarters of Americans who change their religion leave their childhood faith in their 20s, usually by 24.

“In college, students are being challenged on the traditional ideas that their family and their early education taught them, in a hedonistic atmosphere,” Neumayr said. “Religion is challenging and filled with paradox, and that’s just not perceived as useful in college. By the time you graduate, you’re this man of reason, and if you can’t feel it, taste it, see it — it’s not important.”

“If you don’t have the wonder, the love, the attachment to this religion you belong to, and you don’t have anything that ties your faith with your peers or your teachers or the books you read, you can become lost,” she added.

After college young adults are delaying the classic hallmarks of adulthood, such as marriage, children and financial independence. Modern 20-somethings are not settling down, starting families and returning to church by age 30, as was often the case in the past. The Barna Group study indicated that a staggering 56 percent of once-active Catholics left the church between ages 18 to 29.

“I am absolutely concerned,” McMorrow said. “My goal is to do youth ministry effectively so when people are 25 they’re still actively Catholic. You can’t judge a Catholic school or youth ministry by what we’re doing now, but so that when they are at that point in their 20s, they can’t imagine their life without the Catholic faith at the center.”

Posted with permission from Catholic Anchor, newspaper for the Archdiocese of Anchorage.

Why suddenly burning the Quran disrespectful?

I don’t understand all the fracas about U.S. troops in Afghanistan burning Muslim Holy Books that were no longer usable.

As a catholic growing up in the pre-1960s Vatican II days, we were taught in Catholic schools that burning an object that had been blessed by a priest – eg. a Missal, “Holy Cards”, etc. – was the proper and respectful way to dispose of the object when it could no longer be used.

I can remember carefully taking apart an old shabby Bible and burning it in our patio barbecue. To me, it was a religious act. One would never consider throwing it in the trash.

Now why suddenly is a burning considered disrespectful?

How else to dispose of something “holy” but no longer usable?

As I

remember, there was a proper procedure also for non-flammable items such as a religious medal. Those we were to bury in the ground.

What then is disrespectful about burning no longer usable Qurans and what would be the better alternative?

Joan van Ommen

Redlands