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The New York Times this weekend offered something surprising, a profile of the popular vestment manufacturer CM Almy, which is creating new fashions for female clergy: Stephen Fendler, president of CM Almy, shows off a rack of samples from his brand-new women’s collection, pointing out a piece he’s particularly proud of: a black blouse in a stretchy jersey knit.But Mr. Fendler’s collections won’t be seen on the runways anytime soon. CM Almy says it is the largest, and one of the oldest, American producers of clerical clothing, and its models are hitting the pulpit instead of the catwalk. Their designers...

OTTAWA, September 27, 2013 (LifeSiteNews.com) - Canada's Department of National Defence (DND) has appointed an openly homosexual Anglican priest as Chaplain General of the Canadian Armed Forces in a ceremony earlier this month in Ottawa. According to a DND news release, Brigadier-General John Fletcher was appointed Chaplain General of the Canadian Armed Forces in a ceremony at the Beechwood Memorial Centre in Ottawa. The event was presided over by the Chief of the Defence Staff, General Tom Lawson, with Fletcher taking over responsibility for the religious needs of Canadian Armed Forces (CAF) members and their families from the outgoing Chaplain...

Des Moines police arrested a former youth pastor and charged him with sexual abuse. “This has been going on for a brief period of time, but I can’t go into details as exactly how long,” says Des Moines Police Sgt. Daniel Blom. Police were contacted Monday by a teenage girl and her parents. The girl reported an alleged sexual assault perpetrated by 27-year-old Ryan McKelvey. “Looking into it, doing their investigation, they discovered there might be a second victim. They made contact with the second victim and confirmed that there was an inappropriate sexual contact,” says Blom. McKelvey is a...

Fun times at the Immanuel Baptist Church of Skiatook, Oklahoma. Recent video shows pastor Jim Standridge throwing what can only be described as an uncomfortably epic hissy-fit upon discovering one of his younger churchgoers had fallen asleep during his sermon. “Don’t you go to sleep while I’m talking?” Standridge said from his pulpit, looking directly at the snoozing churchgoer. “Hey! Hey! Don’t you lay your head back!” “I’m important. I’m somebody,” the pastor continued as he stepped down from the pulpit and walked directly over to the unidentified sleepy male. “You may do your English teacher that way, but I’m...

Q: In the medieval and renaissance periods, the Church had many problems with nepotism. We hear nothing about this issue any more, but I’m wondering whether this is still a potential problem, at least in theory. Are there canons which prevent ecclesiastical officials from legally giving powerful church positions to their relatives? Or do bishops and cardinals avoid this unilaterally, without the need for actual laws? —Thierry

As we all know, in far too many cases in years past, priests were accused of sexual abuse by genuine victims—and these crimes were simply swept under the rug, by church officials who eschewed their God-given responsibility to take appropriate action. This is an established, ugly fact that is not up for debate! It’s true that there’s often more than one legitimate way for an ecclesiastical superior to deal with these problems; but doing nothing, preferring to ignore the issue in the hope that it will simply go away, never has been or will be an option, ever. Note that...

The heart-wrenching photographs taken in the moments after the Boston Marathon bombings show the blue-and-yellow jackets of volunteers, police officers, fire fighters, emergency medical technicians, even a three-foot-high blue M&M. Conspicuously absent are any clerical collars or images of pastoral care. --SNIP-- When the priests at St. Clement's, three blocks away, heard the explosions, they gathered sacramental oils and hurried to the scene in hopes of anointing the injured and, if necessary, administering last rites, the final of seven Catholic sacraments. But the priests, who belong to the order Oblates of the Virgin Mary, weren't allowed at the scene. The...

A church deacon has been arrested on charges he raped a 13-year-old girl at a Bensalem motel two years ago, police announced Thursday. District Judge Leonard Brown arraigned Humberto Cervantes, 34, of Coatesville, on nine offenses and ordered him held on $1 million bail. Police said Cervantes was a deacon at a Trenton Pentecostal church when he befriended the alleged victim, now 15. Police said Cervantes met with the alleged victim several times in Bensalem. The two "went to a few parks and talked about church, life, and family," police said. "On the final visit, when the victim believed they...

It is not surprising that a crowded field of candidates is courting the same kind of clergy support in a Feb. 26 special primary election to replace Mr. Jackson, who resigned his Second Congressional District seat 15 days after winning re-election in November. Now facing a short campaign sprint, those candidates say the backing of ministers and invitations to stump at multiple church services each weekend remain the sacraments of any good election ground game in the district, which includes parts of Chicago’s South Side and southern suburbs. Like in many districts across the country where African-Americans are the majority,...

Human Rights Travesty By Kenneth R. Timmerman FrontPageMagazine.com | July 23, 2007 If human rights abuses were ranked like baseball careers, Iran’s ruling clerics and the mighty midget they’ve installed as president would deserve honored places in the 21st Century’s Hall of Shame. On July 10, Iran’s Interior ministry confirmed the sentence, handed down ten days earlier by a court in the north of the country, condemning a man to death by stoning. If you’ve never witnessed a stoning (and most of us haven’t, I trust), you can get a flavor for the barbarity of this Koranic punishment from a...

The passion of American ministers for political freedom in 1776 reflected their belief in religious toleration.On Sunday morning, Jan. 21, 1776, at a church in Woodstock, Va., Rev. Peter Gabriel Muhlenberg brought his sermon to a dramatic and unexpected crescendo. His text was taken from the book of Ecclesiastes. "The Bible tells us 'there is a time for all things,' and there is a time to preach and a time to pray," said Muhlenberg. "But the time for me to preach has passed away; and there is a time to fight, and that time has now come." Stepping down from...

A Los Angeles Times article exposed part of Big Labor’s undisclosed labor persuader scheme that uses the pulpit to promote compulsory unionism. The Times’ Stephanie Simon reported that the AFL-CIO “… hired more than three dozen aspiring ministers, imams, priests, and rabbis to spread the gospel …”of Compulsory Unionism. Her article provides a solid example of years of labor union bosses’ hiring religious leaders to act as labor persuaders; here the persuaders are attempting to use their religions to cloak the Big Labor message. AFL-CIO, the nation’s largest federation of labor unions, paid seminary students to organize “… security guards...

"I believe today's hearing is a sham," said Rep. Gerald Connolly, D-Va., of the first of two session held by the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee during the day. His tone sharp and finger pointed, Connolly went on to declare the witnesses -- who included a Catholic bishop, a Lutheran reverend, an Orthodox rabbi, and two Baptist theologians, all opposed to the administration's recent ruling -- "complicit" in the Republicans' "trampling" of House traditions that would, if observed, have produced a more balanced panel. "You are being used for a political agenda," Connolly told the holy men, after Republicans...

Since the U.S. Supreme Court issued its unanimous decision in Hosanna-Tabor v. EEOC on January 11, 2012, there has been a lot of discussion regarding whether the court did the right thing when it upheld the ministerial exception and denied jurisdiction in a case involving the termination of a ministerial employee. For reasons outlined below, I believe the Court made the right, albeit difficult, decision. This was the case of the parochial school teacher who in addition to teaching on secular subjects also performed religious functions, Chery Perich, who was fired for threatening to file a lawsuit under the Americans...

It's hunting season, and with all the clamor about "guns and Christian men" in the previous post about "manly Christmas gifts," I did a quick search and found an interesting article about "hunting" in the Catholic Encyclopedia over at NewAdvent.org. There has never been a prohibition against hunting for laymen. However, there is quite a controversial history concerning clerical hunting. The Council of Trent, for example, made the formal distinction between clamorous (clamorosa) hunting and quiet (quieta) hunting. (Session XXIV, 12). "Clamorous hunting" is forbidden to priests. However, "quiet hunting" is allowed. Clamorous hunting likely refers to the large...

Today, the Obama administration will invite the Supreme Court to open a new front in the culture wars. Hosanna-Tabor Evangelical Lutheran Church and School v. EEOC concerns a commissioned minister, Cheryl Perich, who taught elementary school and led chapel devotions at a small Lutheran school outside Detroit. Ms. Perich became ill and was replaced in the classroom by a substitute. In the middle of the school year she sought to return and then, instead of attempting to work out the dispute through the church's reconciliation process, she threatened to sue. As relations broke down, the church congregation voted to withdraw...

WICHITA, Kansas -- He came to fame as a passionate political activist. For years, Father Roy Bourgeois has tried to shut down the School of the Americas in Columbus, Georgia. He and his thousands of supporters claim it trains Latin American soldiers to defend American backed governments. But in more recent years, Bourgeois has taken on a new target, the Vatican. "Sexism is racism," said Bourgeois on a visit to the Wichita area this week. He is a staunch supporter to have women ordained as Catholic priests. "God created men and women of equal worth and dignity," said Bourgeois. "There's...

From Orwell’s A Clergyman’s Daughter (h/t Hitchens): Nowadays, a clergyman who wants to keep his congregation has only two courses open to him. Either it must be Anglo-Catholicism pure and simple – or rather, pure and not simple; or he must be daringly modern and broad-minded and preach comforting sermons providing there is no Hell and all good religions are the same. Incidentally, Jesus would agree. While poking fun at effeminate religious types in robes, he would also have little time for dumb men absolutely opposed to absolutes (a contradiction in terms). But I digress. In his book review for...

A former youth pastor in Council Bluffs, Iowa, says he had sex with teenage boys because it was his pastoral duty “to help (the teen) with homosexual urges bypraying while he had sexual contact with him.”But law enforcement has a different view of his actions. Earlier this month, Brent Girouex, 31, was arrested on 60 counts of suspicion of sexual exploitation by a counselor or therapist, reported The Daily Nonpareil.In February, Girouex told Council Bluffs police detectives that he had sexual contact with four young men starting in 2007 in order to help them gain “sexual purity in the...

The Presbyterian Church-USA, one of the nation’s oldest and largest mainline Christian denominations, is in the middle of a crucial vote among its leadership to determine whether or not open homosexuals will be allowed to fill the church’s pulpits. At the denomination’s General Assembly in July 2010, delegates approved by a 373 to 323 vote a measure that would allow open homosexuals to pastor and minister in the flagship Presbyterian denomination’s 11,000 congregations and serve its estimated 2.3 million members. A vote on the amendment is now making its way through the church’s 173 regional presbyteries, a process that must...