Month: August 2023

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Retired judge visits Nunavut to hear about Inuit sexual abuse claims against priest

— The leader of a new Oblate Safeguarding Commission has begun investigating the handling of clergy abuse allegations in Nunavut.

Joannes Rivoire

By Kathleen Martens

A retired judge was in Nunavut this week to hear more about historical allegations of child sexual abuse against an Oblate Catholic priest.

André Denis, formerly of the Superior Court of Quebec, was hired by the Oblates of Mary Immaculate, OMI Lacombe Canada and the Oblates of the Province of France to lead the Oblate Safeguarding Commission and review their handling of the accusations against Joannes Rivoire.

Rivoire, who served 30 years as a missionary in Nunavut, has denied the allegations.

The Oblates say Denis has until next spring to complete his report, which is independent of their Order.

“While we have supported the process by providing him with guidelines and trying to promote awareness of the Commission, I am unable to speak in detail to his ongoing work,” Rev. Ken Thorson of OMI  Lacombe in Ottawa said in an email to APTN News.

Tanya Tungilik met with Denis in Rankin Inlet, Nunavut, earlier this week, but said it wasn’t clear what he is trying to achieve.

“He asked a lot of questions,” Tungilik said in a telephone interview Thursday. “I don’t think it’s going to get anything actionable done.”

The allegations against Rivoire, who worked in three remote Arctic commnunities, have dragged on for years.

It was the 1990s when four Inuit filed complaints with the RCMP in Nunavut accusing Rivoire of sexually abusing them as children between 1963 and 1993.

Marius Tungilik (in glasses) as a young boy in Nunavut.

Tungilik’s late father, Marius Tungilik, was one of the complainants.

However, Rivoire had returned to France by the time RCMP charged him in 1998 with five counts of indecently assaulting four Inuit children, including Marius.

In 2017, the charges were stayed, citing a lack of cooperation from France, which refuses to extradite its citizens.

Rivoire is now in his 90s and living in a Catholic nursing home in Lyon.

He told APTN in an exclusive interview in June 2022 that he would not return to Canada to fight the most recent charge RCMP laid against him in 2021 after an Inuk woman came forward with a new allegation.

Undeterred, a delegation of Inuit – that included Tanya – travelled to France a few months later to seek Rivoire’s extradition.

Again, France refused.

Tanya said Denis told her he is interviewing numerous people and has obtained church records relating to Rivoire’s career as a missionary in the Arctic. This is of interest to her as she has been denied a copy of her dad’s complaint to the RCMP.

“I really want to see my dad’s statement. But they [RCMP] won’t give it to me,” she said despite filing an Access to Information request.

Nunavut Tunngavik Inc.
Jesse Tungilik (left), his sister Tanya Tungilik (centre), and Steve Mapsalak (right), speak about Catholic clergy abuse while in Paris.

Denis declined to comment on the commission when reached by APTN.

“Out of respect for the process, I have committed that I will only take part in media interviews after the report is complete,” he said.

Nunavut Tunngavik Inc., an Inuit advocacy and land claim association that led the delegation to France in 2022, did not respond to a request for comment on the commission.

It has urged more complainants to come forward, however, because there is no statute of limitations on sex crimes in Canada.

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Maryland can disclose more names from Catholic sexual abuse report, court rules

— An interim report released in April on decades of sexual abuse claims within the Archdiocese of Baltimore found more than 600 victims

Maryland Attorney General Anthony G. Brown (D) in April in Baltimore.

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Maryland’s attorney general can disclose additional names of Catholic clergy accused of child sexual abuse in the Baltimore Archdiocese, a state judge in Baltimore has ruled.

The ruling by Baltimore City Circuit Court Associate Judge Robert K. Taylor Jr. also affects clergy who have held prominent positions in the Archdiocese of Baltimore and allegedly helped enable abusers or covered up abuse claims, and other people whose names surfaced in the investigation but were not accused of abuse.

Under the ruling — which was issued Aug. 16 and unsealed Tuesday — all but three names can be revealed next month when Attorney General Anthony G. Brown (D) is scheduled to make public a revised version of its report on decades of sexual abuses in the archdiocese.

“It’s good news that the judge has sided with survivors and understands the significance of releasing all the names of the predators but three,” said David Lorenz, Maryland director of the Survivors Network of Those Abused by Priests (SNAP). “Survivors get a sense of justice when their perpetrator is named. And it also helps survivors come forward.”

In deciding whether to disclose identities, the judge sought to parse responsibility between the archdiocese — which, he said, was clearly the intended focus of the attorney general’s investigation — and individuals within it.

“These names are being released because the key to understanding the Report is understanding that this did not happen because of anything ‘the Archdiocese’ did or did not do. It happened because of the choices made by specific individuals at specific times,” the judge’s opinion says. His opinion also notes that although some powerful officials appeared to willfully cover up or enable abuse, others found themselves caught in a difficult situation.

“To be clear: the Archdiocese did not sexually exploit children. Individuals did. The Archdiocese did not fail to report abuse. Individuals did. The Archdiocese did not transfer alleged abusers to positions where they could abuse again. Individuals did,” the opinion says. “Some of the individuals whose names were redacted were simply doing their job, as best they could, under trying circumstances.”

For Lorenz, however, that was going too far in defense of the church.

“He kind of tries to excuse the church,” Lorenz said. “The incontrovertible history uncovered by this investigation is one of pervasive and persistent abuse by priests and archdiocesan personnel. It is also a repeated dismissal or coverup by Catholic Church hierarchy.”

The four-year investigation — which began under Attorney General Brian Frosh (D) — found that more than 600 young people, ranging in age from preschoolers to young adults, were sexually abused at the hands of more than 150 clergy members from the mid-1940s to 2002. The investigation included interviews with victims, abusers and witnesses, and thousands of archdiocese records obtained through a grand jury subpoena into behavior that occurred at least 20 years ago. One person was charged as a result of the investigation but later acquitted at trial.

Owing to the presumption of secrecy in all grand jury proceedings, the attorney general’s office sought a court order allowing publication of the report, saying disclosure would amount to a measure of justice regarding many allegations too old or otherwise impossible to bring against the accused. After a lengthy court battle — much of which was conducted under seal and behind closed doors — an interim version was released April 4 that shielded the identities of 46 people.

By court order, the interim report redacted the identities of 10 alleged abusers who had not previously been publicly accused of child abuse, the attorney general said in a statement. The interim report also withheld the names of five clergy who played an important role in the archdiocese’s handling of abuser clergy and reports of child abuse, as well as the names of other people who were named in the report but not accused of child sexual abuse.

“We are committed to continuing all of our efforts to keep safe the children in our care, and we recognize that the Attorney General’s report is a reminder of a sad and deeply painful history tied to the tremendous harm caused to innocent children and young people by some ministers of the Church,” archdiocese spokesman Christian Kendzierski said in a written statement. “We ask all to join us in praying for all victim-survivors of abuse and for all who have been affected by the scourge of child sexual abuse.”

The new version of the attorney general’s report, which is based on thousands of subpoenaed documents, is expected to be made public Sept. 26.

Complete Article ↪HERE↩!

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Synod raises hopes for long-sought recognition of women in the Catholic Church

Digital art pieces created by Becky McIntyre after Philadelphia-area higher education Synodal listening sessions

By Claire Giangravé

When Pope Francis called two years ago for a worldwide discussion among rank-and-file Catholics about the main challenges and issues facing the church, the question of women’s ministry and leadership echoed loudly in parishes and bishops’ assemblies.

The question is resounding more loudly as the summit of bishops and lay Catholics known as the Synod on Synodality, scheduled for October, draws near. Participants and observers alike recognize that any conversation about reforming church hierarchy or promoting lay involvement, Francis’ twin goals for the synod, has to include honest exchanges about the role of women.

“It’s not just one issue among others that you can tease out,” said Casey Stanton, co-director of Discerning Deacons, a group committed to promoting dialogue about the female diaconate in the church. “It’s actually kind of at the heart of the synod and we need to take a step forward that is meaningful, and that people can see and feel in their communities.”

Stanton believes that opening the door for women to become deacons — allowing them to oversee some aspects of the Mass but not consecrate the Eucharist or perform other duties reserved for priests such as anointing the sick — could send an important signal to Catholics that the Vatican is listening to their concerns.

The upcoming synod already gives a greater role to women, who will be allowed to vote for the first time in any such meeting. Of the 364 voting participants, mostly bishops, more than 50 will be women. But women were never the intended focus of the synod, a project Francis hoped would inspire discussion of a “new way of being church,” which was interpreted to mean a focus on church power structures and rethinking the privilege enjoyed by clergy.

But by the end of the last phase of the synod, when gatherings of bishops divided by continents examined the topics brought up at the grassroots level, it was clear that the question of women had taken center stage. The document that emerged from those discussions, with the telling title “Enlarge Your Tent,” spoke to the “almost unanimous affirmation” to raise the role of women in the church.

The document described the peripheral role played by women in the church as a growing issue that impacted the function of the clergy and how power is exercised in the historically male-led institution. While it made no mention of female ordination to the priesthood, it did suggest that the diaconate might answer a need to recognize the ministry already offered by women all over the world.

“It’s remarkable the shared cry that came through in ‘Enlarge the Space of Your Tent’ around the deep connection between creating a new synodal path in the church and a church that more fully receives the gifts that women bring,” Stanton said.

When, in June, the Vatican issued its “instrumentum laboris,” or working document that will guide the discussion at the synod, it explicitly asked: “Most of the Continental Assemblies and the syntheses of several Episcopal Conferences call for the question of women’s inclusion in the diaconate to be considered. Is it possible to envisage this, and in what way?”

Attributing the question to the continental assemblies and avoiding the words “ministry” and “ordination” in asking it, said Miriam Duignan, co-director of Women’s Ordination Worldwide, constituted a “preemptive strike” against open discussion of priestly ordination.

This avoids a direct challenge to the Vatican, which has shut down the possibility of women’s ordination many times.

In 1976, the Pontifical Biblical Commission established that Scripture did not prevent the ordination of women and voted that female priests did not contradict Christ’s vision for the church. But soon after, the Vatican’s doctrinal watchdog, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, intervened to state that the church was not authorized to ordain women.

Pope John Paul II had the final word on the issue when he definitively stated that “the Church has no authority whatsoever to confer priestly ordination on women,” in his 1994 apostolic letter “Ordinatio Sacerdotalis” (“Priestly Ordination”).

Francis and synod organizers have emphasized that the synod has no intention of opening that door. “For the Catholic Church at this moment, from an official point of view, it’s not an open question,” said Sr. Nathalie Becquart, undersecretary at the Vatican’s synod office, in an interview.

The question of the female diaconate, however, remained open. Pope Benedict XVI changed canon law in 2009 to clarify the distinction between priests and bishops, who act as representatives of Christ, and deacons, who “serve the People of God in the diaconates of the liturgy, of the Word and of charity.”

“Benedict predicted that the call for women priests and ministry was going to get stronger and stronger,” Duignan told Religion News Service on July 25 in a phone interview.

The demand for women deacons was an underlying topic during Francis’ previous synods on young people, the family and the Amazonian region. Francis created a commission to study the possibility of women deacons in 2016, and when no clear results emerged, he instituted another in April 2020.

According to Duignan, the commissions were “set up to fail,” since a decision on the matter required a unanimous vote. While it’s undeniable that women deacons existed in the early and pre-medieval church, theologians and historians remain divided on whether women were ordained deacons or if they occupied the role in a more informal way.

“There were women deacons in the past. We could do it again,” Stanton said. “Let’s just settle that.”

The division on the question means that Francis will likely have to decide. “Our prediction is that there is going to be a bit of a stalemate between those bishops who fear a diaconate role for women, and those who say now it’s the time, let’s give them the diaconate,” Duignan said.

Advocates for female deacons hope the pope will finally welcome the demand felt by many Catholic women. “For many young people it has become untenable,” Stanton said, “an obstacle to feeling the gospel.”

The pope could leave the decision to individual bishops, which would create a patchwork of policies. Stanton, who has witnessed many experiments for new ministries for women, said that while one bishop may open new opportunities for women, the issue will “wither on the vine” if another bishop doesn’t see it as a priority.

In the end, she added, “it’s one cleric getting to determine the scope of a woman’s vocation and ministries.”

“There were women deacons in the past. We could do it again. Let’s just settle that.”
— Casey Stanton

Historically, the path to priestly ordination follows the steps of lector, acolyte and deacon. In January 2021, Francis allowed women to become lectors and acolytes; a decision in favor of female deacons could signal a cautious opening for the cause of women priests.

“The glacial pace for change in the modern Catholic Church means we have to accept any steps forward as progress,” Duignan said. The female diaconate would in her opinion offer some recognition for the women who catechize, evangelize and assist faithful all over the world.

“Once they start seeing women at the altar in an official role and seem to be leading the Mass there will be more calls for women priests,” she added.

Advocacy groups such as Women’s Ordination Worldwide will be in Rome in October to make their demands known through vigils, marches and conferences. The Synod on Synodality will draw the attention not just of Catholics but women everywhere, putting the question of female leadership in the church and beyond in the spotlight.

“The women are coming,” Duignan said. What remains unknown is whether the Vatican is prepared.

Complete Article ↪HERE↩!

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San Francisco archdiocese files for bankruptcy amid child abuse lawsuits

St. Mary’s Cathedral, the principle church of the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of San Francisco, in 2010. The archdiocese filed for bankruptcy Monday.

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The Roman Catholic Archdiocese of San Francisco on Monday filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy, saying it is necessary to resolve the more than 500 lawsuits of child sexual abuse dating back decades, prompting victim advocates to call the decision an attempt to deny justice and transparency for survivors.

The petition was filed in the U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the Northern District of California, Archbishop Salvatore J. Cordileone said Monday, arguing that it was the “best solution for providing fair and equitable compensation to the innocent survivors who have been harmed,” he said on the archdiocese website.

Archbishop of San Francisco Salvatore Joseph Cordileone attends the mass and imposition of the Pallium at the Vatican Basilica on June 29, 2013 in Vatican City.

“The unfortunate reality is that the archdiocese has neither the financial means nor the practical ability to litigate all of these abuse claims individually,” he said.

“It is the best way to bring much-needed resolution to survivors while allowing the Archdiocese to continue its sacred mission to the faithful and those in need. We must seek purification and redemption to heal, especially survivors who have carried the burdens of these sins against them for decades,” the statement added.

Cordileone said the majority of the alleged abuses occurred from the 1960s into the ’80s and involved priests who are deceased or no longer in the ministry.

The announcement prompted criticism from advocates who argued it could “stonewall survivors of clergy sexual abuse from receiving proper justice under the lawsuits filed under the California Child Victims Act,” said Jeff Anderson, an attorney who represents more than 125 people suing the archdiocese.

In a statement posted on his firm’s website, Anderson called the archbishop’s decision “dangerous” and said it demonstrates his preference for “secrecy and self-protection.”

The archdiocese did not immediately respond to The Washington Post’s request for comment on Anderson’s accusation Monday afternoon. When asked about the bankruptcy filing, it deferred to the statement on its website.

Dan McNevin, a representative of the nonprofit Survivors Network of Those Abused by Priests, had also previously warned against harmful consequences of such move.

“San Francisco’s bankruptcy will stiff-arm survivors who have the courage to tell their stories,” he told the San Francisco Chronicle this month, when the newspaper reported on the archdiocese’s intent to seek the protections. “If it is allowed to stand, bankruptcy halts trials, testimony, legal discovery, and the release of the files of priests and other perpetrators that, if released could be used to assess who in the organization helped to cover up crimes.”

“It’s a double bottom line benefit; they keep their secrets and they keep more of their wealth,” McNevin told the Chronicle.

Anderson and other advocates have also questioned the archdiocese’s refusal to publish information about members of clergy accused of child sexual abuse.

A barrage of lawsuits came after California passed a 2019 law allowing people to bring claims for childhood sexual abuse that otherwise would have been barred due the statute of limitations. The law opened a three-year window allowing cases to be filed against nonprofit organizations through Dec. 31, 2022, leading to more than 500 civil lawsuits against the San Francisco Archdiocese, according to a Los Angeles Times article from late last year, and more than 3,000 lawsuits against the Catholic Church in the state, The Post reported last month.

In 2003, California became the first U.S. state to temporarily lift statutes of limitations for childhood sex abuse in the wake of the Catholic Church scandal.

>If approved, the Chapter 11 process would freeze legal actions against the archdiocese while it restructures its finances.

The archbishop said bankruptcy would cover only the corporate legal entity, the Catholic Archbishop of San Francisco, and not its 88 parishes and schools, which are independently managed and will continue to operate as usual. The archdiocese serves more than 442,000 parishioners in the counties of San Francisco, San Mateo and Marin.

The San Francisco Archdiocese’s move follows that of the Santa Rosa Diocese, which filed for bankruptcy in March amid sex-abuse lawsuits from 200 people. The Oakland Diocese announced in May that it had filed for bankruptcy amid more than 330 lawsuits.

According to the Catholic News Agency, more than two dozen dioceses in the United States have entered bankruptcy proceedings, most of them in the past decade.

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I left the church

— And now long for a ‘church for the nones’

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I ’m currently a “none” or, more precisely, a “nothing in particular.” But I want to be a something.

“None” is the term that social scientists use to describe Americans who say they don’t belong to or practice a particular religious faith. This bloc has grown from around 5 percent of Americans in the early 1990s to nearly 30 percent today. Most nones aren’t atheists, but what researchers call “nothing in particulars,” people who aren’t quite sure what they believe.

The majority of nones once identified themselves as Christians. About 40 percent of adults between 18 and 29 are nones, and so are plenty of people over 65 (around 20 percent). About one-third of those who voted for President Biden in 2020 are religiously unaffiliated, as are about 15 percent of people who backed Donald Trump. Nearly 40 percent of Asian Americans and more than 25 percent of White, Black and Latino Americans are nones. People without and with four-year college degrees are about equally likely to be nones. This group includes Americans from all regions of the country, including more than one-fifth in the “Bible Belt” South.

In their new book “The Great Dechurching,” Jim Davis, Michael Graham and Ryan Burge estimate that about 40 million Americans used to attend church but don’t now.

I could not have imagined when I was a kid or even a decade ago that I would be in this group.

During my childhood in Louisville my father was one of the assistant pastors at a small Charismatic church that my uncle still runs. Our family was at church every Sunday. Members often stopped by our house during the week to get advice from my father. His way of teaching me to drive was sitting in the passenger’s seat as we went to the midweek Bible studies he led.

Before I left for college, the congregation passed around a collection plate where they gave me several hundred dollars to congratulate and support me in my new adventure.

Once on campus, I attended church more than my peers, while enjoying the freedom of not being in services every Sunday. But in my 20s and into my 30s, I developed a religious life that wasn’t based on my father’s. I was a member of a few different nondenominational churches. (These were much smaller but similar in style to the churches run by prominent pastors such as Joel Osteen and Rick Warren.) I was at times quite involved: acting as a chaperone when the church youth group went on a trip; hosting a church-based small group at my house; even giving a sermon once.

I was never totally confident that there is one God who created the Earth or that Jesus Christ was resurrected after he was killed. But belonging to a congregation seemed essential. I thought religion, not just Christianity but also other faiths such as Judaism and Islam, pushed people toward better values. Most of the people I admired — from the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. to my parents — were religious. And I figured I might as well stick with Christianity, the creed I was raised in.

The churches I attended avoided politics, but I wasn’t out of step with them ideologically. Women served as pastors; there wasn’t any overt opposition to, say, gay rights or abortion. I suspect they were full of people who voted for Democrats. My childhood church in Louisville is overwhelmingly Black; the churches I attended as an adult are in the heavily left-leaning D.C. area and had a lot of attendees who worked in government and nonprofit jobs.

>The weekend after Donald Trump was elected in 2016, I remember one of the pastors declaring in his sermon that our church would remain a place that welcomed refugees and other immigrants. Everyone clapped.

But in the years after Trump entered office, left-leaning Gen X and older millennial Americans in particular abandoned church in droves, according to Burge, a political scientist at Eastern Illinois University and an expert on the nones. And I eventually became part of that group.

I didn’t leave church for any one reason. Inspired by the Black Lives Matter movement, I was reading more leftist Black intellectuals. Many of them either weren’t religious or were outright skeptical of faith. They didn’t view Black churches as essential to advancing Black causes today, even though King and many major figures in the 1960s civil rights movement had been very devout. I started to notice there were plenty of people — Black and non-Black — who were deeply committed to equality and justice but were not religious.

At the same time, my Republican friends, many of whom had been very critical of Trump during his campaign, gradually became more accepting and even enthusiastic about him. While my policy views had always been to the left of these friends, our shared Christianity had convinced me that we largely agreed on broader questions of morality and values. Their embrace of a man so obviously misaligned with the teachings of Jesus was unsettling. I began to realize that being a Democrat or a Republican, not being a Christian, was what drove the beliefs and attitudes of many Christians, perhaps including me.

And I couldn’t ignore how the word Christian was becoming a synonym for rabidly pro-Trump White people who argued that his and their meanness and intolerance were somehow justified and in some ways required to defend our faith.

I also came to a more nuanced understanding of my own life story. I had adopted the view from my parents and relatives that my rise from a middle-income household in which neither parent had a bachelor’s degree to Yale University and prestigious journalism jobs could have happened only with divine intervention. Perhaps that’s true. But an alternative explanation for my success was that I was the child of supportive, middle-class parents; they got me into some of the best schools in Louisville; and I did well in grade school, college and my jobs afterward.

Finally, something happened at church itself. One of the men who had been in the church group I hosted had sought to lead one himself. But a church higher-up told him that he could participate in church activities but not lead anything because he is gay. I had not realized the church had such a policy. I learned that my church would also generally not conduct weddings for same-sex couples

So between early 2017 and early 2020, I went from someone who clearly defined himself as a Christian and attended the same church most Sundays to someone who wasn’t sure about Christianity but was still kind of shopping for a new religious home and going to a service every few weeks. I wasn’t fully comfortable with the idea of vetting churches by their views on policy issues. I had never really done that before. (Perhaps I should have.)

“Your experience is very typical. Most people who disaffiliate do not cite a single precipitating factor. It’s more of a fading away from religion rather than a dramatic break,” said Daniel Cox, director of the Survey Center on American Life.

On this front, the pandemic was kind of a relief. Churches were mostly closed. I couldn’t continue my halfhearted search for a new one. I watched an Easter service online in April 2020, during the early stages of the pandemic. But over the past two years, I’ve been to church only a handful of times — even skipping Easter services.

What’s kept me away is having a child. If I were childless, I think I would join a church to be a part of its community, and I would ignore the theological elements I’m not sure about. But my 3-year-old is getting more inquisitive every day. I don’t want to take her to a place that has a specific view of the world as well as answers to the big questions and then have to explain to Charlotte that some people agree with all of the church’s ideas, Dad agrees with only some, and many other people don’t agree with any.

I know I’m missing out on a lot, and I worry about denying Charlotte the church experience. Most sermons, theology aside, emphasize universal values such as kindness and generosity. I try to be a nice person, but weekly reminders and being part of a group that’s also trying to act in a compassionate manner is helpful. The churches I belonged to as an adult didn’t have a ton of Republicans, people in blue-collar jobs or people without college degrees, but there were some. So I met people who aren’t like me. People under 30 aren’t really in churches, but being a member of a church would be a great way for me to connect with more people over 50. (I’m 42.) I love live music and people singing collectively.

I know I could be a member of a congregation if I really wanted to. I could attend a Christian church on Sundays and teach my daughter about other beliefs the rest of the week. Or make churchgoing something I do alone.

People have told me to become a Unitarian Universalist. Unitarian churches that I have attended had overwhelmingly White and elderly congregations and lacked the wide range of activities for adults and kids found at the Christian congregations that I was a part of. But they have a set of core beliefs that are aligned with more left-leaning people (“justice, equity and compassion in human relations,” for example) without a firm theology.

I’ve also thought about starting some kind of weekly Sunday morning gathering of nones, to follow in my father’s footsteps in a certain way, or trying to convince my friends to collectively attend one of the Unitarian churches in town and make it younger and more racially diverse.

But I’ve not followed through on any of these options. With all my reservations, I don’t really want to join an existing church. And I don’t think I am going to have much luck getting my fellow nones to join something I start. My sense is that the people who want what church provides are going to the existing Christian churches, even if they are skeptical of some of the beliefs. And those who aren’t at church are fine spending their Sunday mornings eating brunch, doing yoga or watching Netflix.

An organization called Sunday Assembly, founded in Britain in 2013, has tried to launch nonreligious congregations around the world, including in the United States, but has struggled to gain much traction.

America today is a nation of believers (about 70 percent say they have some religious faith) who don’t regularly attend religious services (only 30 percent go to services at least once a month.) I’m the reverse: a person without clear beliefs about God who wants to go to something like church frequently anyway.

The Saturday farmer’s market in my neighborhood and a weekly happy hour of Louisville-area journalists provide some of what church once did for me: consistent gatherings of people with some shared values and interests. I’ve made new friends through both. And there are plenty of other groups and clubs I could join.

But none of those gatherings provide singing, sermons and solidarity all at once.

My upbringing makes me particularly inclined to see a church-sized hole in American life. But as a middle-aged American in the middle of the country, I don’t think that hole is just in my imagination. Kids need places to learn values like forgiveness, while schools focus on math and reading. Young adults need places to meet a potential spouse. Adults with children need places to meet with other parents and some free babysitting on weekends. Retirees need places to build new relationships, as their friends and spouses pass away.

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