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Catholic priest donated $1000 to gay ‘marriage,’ diocese mum

A Catholic priest’s donation to support redefining marriage in Minnesota has been revealed, deepening a rift between a conservative Catholic hierarchy and more liberal subordinates in the blue state over gay ‘marriage.’

The Duluth News Tribune reported Sunday that Rev. Peter Lambert of St. Louis Catholic Church in Floodwood had donated $1,000 to Minnesotans United for Families, the group fighting a constitutional marriage amendment, in March.

The Diocese of Duluth, where Lambert is stationed, has donated $50,000 to support the traditional marriage amendment. Duluth Diocese spokesman Kyle Eller told the Tribune that Lambert didn’t intend the donation to be a public statement.

“It was my understanding that Father Lambert wasn’t aware that the contribution would be made public, and it wasn’t intended to be a public statement,” said Eller, who declined further comment.

The diocese didn’t immediately respond to an email from LifeSiteNews.com requesting comment Tuesday.

The bishops in Minnesota have ranked among the most outspoken Catholic defenders of traditional marriage in the country in recent years. In 2010, the prelates backed a comprehensive six-week campaign to re-catechize their flock on the Church’s moral teaching on marriage and sexuality.

In January, Archbishop John Nienstedt of St. Paul and Minneapolis emphasized to clergy under his purview, which includes the Duluth diocese, the importance of their adherence to Church doctrine on the marriage question.

“The gravity of this struggle, and the radical consequences of inaction propels me to place a solemn charge upon you all,” he said. “On your ordination day, you made a promise to promote and defend all that the Church teaches. I call upon that promise in this effort to defend marriage. There ought not be open dissension on this issue.”

Nienstedt again urged the Catholic faithful this Sunday to support the proposed marriage amendment that will appear on the general election ballot this November.

Supporters of redefining marriage have meanwhile been targeting Catholics with their own message.

An openly homosexual religious priest from St. John’s Abbey in Collegeville, Minn. told a crowd of 200 in June that Catholics are permitted to vote against the amendment as a matter of freedom of conscience.

“I believe this amendment violates an important principle of Catholic teaching, and that as Catholics, we can vote no,” Rev. Bob Pearson said.

Complete Article HERE!

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Catholic bishop says church’s credibility on sexual abuse is ‘shredded’

The U.S. Catholic bishops’ point man on sexual abuse has said that the hierarchy’s credibility on fixing the problem is “shredded” and that the situation is comparable to the Reformation, when “the episcopacy, the regular clergy, even the papacy were discredited.”

Bishop R. Daniel Conlon of Joliet, Ill., last month told a conference of staffers who oversee child safety programs in American dioceses that he had always assumed that consistently implementing the bishops’ policies on child protection, “coupled with some decent publicity, would turn public opinion around.”

“I now know this was an illusion,” Conlon, chairman of the bishops’ Committee for the Protection of Children and Young People, said in an address on Aug. 13 to the National Safe Environment and Victim Assistance Coordinators Leadership Conference in Omaha, Neb.

His talk was published in the Aug. 30 edition of Origins, an affiliate of Catholic News Service.

Conlon said that the conviction of a high-ranking church official in Philadelphia for covering up clergy abuse and the upcoming trial of a bishop in Missouri on charges of failing to report a priest on suspicions of child abuse have contributed to a widespread impression that the bishops “have failed to keep their commitments.”

The bishop disputed that view, but said even close friends “turned almost hostile” over dinner recently when he said the hierarchy has adopted “an entirely different spirit of openness and accountability.”

Conlon told the conference that the bishops still needed to clarify emerging questions about how to deal with issues like child pornography and “boundary violations” in which church personnel might engage in inappropriate interactions with children that don’t yet cross the line into physical abuse.

But he said that the bottom line is that the bishops “are gravely weakened and in need of assistance” in developing policies and changing public perceptions. He told the child safety workers to think of themselves “as an extension of your bishop.”

“Our credibility on the subject of child abuse is shredded,” Conlon said. “You may have a better chance. People — in the church, outside the church, and hanging on the edge — need to know that real progress is being made.”

Complete Article HERE!

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Cardinal Carlo Martini says Church ‘200 years behind’

Italian Cardinal Carlo Maria Martini has described the Roman Catholic Church as being “200 years behind” the times.

The cardinal died on Friday, aged 85.

Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera has published his last interview, recorded in August, in which he said: “The Church is tired… our prayer rooms are empty.”

Martini, once tipped as a future pope, urged the Church to recognise its errors and to embark on a radical path of change, beginning with the Pope.

Cardinal Martini
Thousands of people have been filing past his coffin at Milan’s cathedral, where he was archbishop for more than 20 years.

The cardinal, who had retired from the post in 2002, suffering from Parkinson’s Disease, is to be buried on Monday.

‘Old culture’

Martini, a popular figure with liberal stances on many issues, commanded great respect from both Pope John Paul II and his successor Pope Benedict XVI.

The cardinal – a member of the Jesuit religious order – was often critical in his writings and comments on Church teaching, says the BBC’s David Willey in Rome.

He was a courageous and outspoken figure during the years he headed Europe’s largest Catholic diocese, our correspondent says.

Cardinal Martini gave his last interview to a fellow Jesuit priest, Georg Sporschill, and to a journalist at the beginning of August when he knew his death was approaching.

The cardinal had returned to Italy from Jerusalem, where he had settled on retirement in 2002 to continue his biblical studies.

Catholics lacked confidence in the Church, he said in the interview. “Our culture has grown old, our churches are big and empty and the church bureaucracy rises up, our religious rites and the vestments we wear are pompous.”

Unless the Church adopted a more generous attitude towards divorced persons, it will lose the allegiance of future generations, the cardinal added. The question, he said, is not whether divorced couples can receive holy communion, but how the Church can help complex family situations.

And the advice he leaves behind to conquer the tiredness of the Church was a “radical transformation, beginning with the Pope and his bishops”.

“The child sex scandals oblige us to undertake a journey of transformation,” Cardinal Martini says, referring to the child sex abuse that has rocked the Catholic Church in the past few years.

He was not afraid, our correspondent adds, to speak his mind on matters that the Vatican sometimes considered taboo, including the use of condoms to fight Aids and the role of women in the Church.

In 2008, for example, he criticised the Church’s prohibition of birth control, saying the stance had likely driven many faithful away, and publicly stated in 2006 that condoms could “in some situations, be a lesser evil”.

Complete Article HERE!

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Rev. James Nowak, Montini Catholic High School board member, former west suburban pastor, on leave after sex abuse allegation

A member of Montini Catholic High School’s board of directors is on leave from the Diocese of Joliet amid allegations that he sexually abused a minor more than 25 years ago.

The Rev. James Nowak, a retired Roman Catholic priest who served in parishes in Lombard, Romeoville, Westmont and most recently Naperville over a 40-year career, is no longer allowed to celebrate a public Mass or to administer other sacraments, diocese officials said, as he is on temporary administrative leave.

In a statement the diocese has dated Aug. 28, Bishop Daniel Conlon, head of the Diocese of Joliet, said he has “determined that abuse likely occurred,” and that the case has been forwarded to the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith in Rome for further review.The statement also says parishioners where Nowak was assigned are being notified of the allegations against him through their local parish.

James Segredo, president of Montini Catholic High School in Lombard, confirmed he was aware of the allegations against Nowak, but directed all other questions to the diocese.

Doug Delaney, a spokesman for the Diocese of Joliet, said the diocese does not know when the alleged sexual abuse occurred or what church Nowak was serving at the time of the alleged incident. The Diocese declined to say on what basis it made its decision to place Nowak on leave.

Nowak, 75, retired in 2007 after serving five years as pastor at Saints Peter and Paul in Naperville, Delaney said.

Prior to that tenure, he was assistant pastor at Sacred Heart Church in Lombard, St. Mary Nativity in Joliet and St. Andrew in Romeoville from 1971 to 1974, according to information from the Diocese of Joliet.

After studying church law in Rome and an eight-year tenure in the Diocese of Joliet’s offices — where he worked with marriage annulments, according to the diocese — Nowak was named pastor of St. Anthony in Joliet in 1988.

He went on to serve as pastor at Holy Trinity Catholic Church in Westmont from 1993 to 2002 and Saints Peter and Paul in Naperville from 2002 to 2007, when he retired.

The diocese statement asks that individuals with relevant information to the allegations should contact Judith Speckman, Dioecesan Victim Assistance Coordinator, at (815) 263-6467, as well as law enforcement authorities.

Complete Article HERE!