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LGBT flag once hung over sanctuary of gay parish, displayed at Cdl. Bernardin's MassParishioners of Resurrection Parish in Chicago, Illinois, held a rainbow flag-burning event last week, cutting up and setting on fire an LGBT flag that once hung in the sanctuary at the parish's first Mass. The event was originally scheduled for Sept. 29, the Feast of St. Michael and the Archangels, but the Chicago archdiocese — heeding complaints by gay activists — called the pastor, Fr. Paul John Kalchik, and ordered him not to hold the event. A handful of parishioners took things into their own hands and...

I have said it before and I will say it over and over --if we are not living in the days which Christ promised to shorten for the sake of the elect, then I fear what is to come. Confusion is rampant, truth has all but disappeared, apostasy is manifest, and even those who are allegedly Christ's shepherds betray him on a daily basis. In the words of a wise and holy priest --"Today if a person doesn't have extensive theological training or at least access to a holy priest they are toast". FROM THE PROVIDENCE JOURNAL— "Rhode Island’s Islamic...

Why Do So Many Miss Experiencing Jesus in Our Parishes and How Can We Change This? Msgr. Charles Pope • November 9, 2016 • We were blessed this past weekend to have Sherry Weddell, author of Forming Intentional Disciples, visit the Archdiocese of Washington and speak to priests and lay leaders. Her work is a great blessing to the Church in calling us back to “job one,” which is to make disciples. In Catholic parishes evangelization is too often relegated to committees or tossed into the “we’ll get to that next year” file. Weddell’s mission is to create greater...

ROME — Just what is it that the Vatican does not get about predator priests? Apparently a lot. Father Joseph Jeyapaul is a priest from India who admitted to raping two adolescent girls in Minnesota when he served the Crookston diocese from 2004 to 2005. After being charged with the abuse, which included rape and forcing at least one of the girls to perform fellatio on him, he fled home to India, where he was eventually arrested on an Interpol warrant. He was then extradited back to Minnesota, where he admitted his heinous crimes and entered a plea bargain in...

It is a common notion that the number of priests has plummeted in this country. Many speak of the halcyon days when there were four and five priests per parish, and the seminaries were packed. And while some of these memories are accurate, they are drawn from a time in this country that was very brief.The fact is, the number of priests per parish spiked sharply after 1950 and has now leveled back to the levels of 1950 and before.Note the graph at the upper right from the Center for Research in the Apostolate (CARA). It depicts the number of...

<p>PHOENIX (AP) — Police say one priest was shot and killed and another was wounded in an attack at a Catholic church in downtown Phoenix. Sgt. Steve Martos says police received a call about a burglary at the Mother of Mercy Mission near the state Capitol shortly after 9 p.m. Wednesday.</p>

Church officials say they will “combat evil” by hosting a positive worship service to counter a Harvard group’s Satanic mass planned for Monday evening. The Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Boston will host a Eucharistic procession from MIT to a nearby church for an hour of prayer, The Boston Globe reports. The religious procession will end up at St. Paul’s Parish in Harvard Square, just a 10-minutes walk from the Queen’s Head Pub in Memorial Hall the Harvard Extension Cultural Studies Club is set to hold a “black mass.” A black mass is a ritual performed as a parody of the...

Those who are bent on making their own unauthorized changes to the liturgy or who otherwise promote or tolerate various liturgical abuses often fail to appreciate how such an endeavor can constitute grave sin. I know this because some have accused me of making a mountain out of a molehill for my opposition to various liturgical abuses. Dr. Germain Grisez explains: "There are many reasons why it is wrong for priests intentionally to make unauthorized liturgical changes. Two are especially important. First, such changes sometimes embody or imply deviations from Catholic faith; even when they do not, they often omit...

40 Years after a Purple Heart in Vietnam a Veteran Hikes on the Appalachian Trail - YouTube Mark Parish·Published on Dec 13, 2013 A wounded Veterans odyssey 40 years after receiving the Purple Heart in the Vietnam war. Vietnam war Veteran Mark Parish hikes the Appalachian Trail for rehabilitation from delayed stress syndrome. Through this video you willlearn how Mark earned his Purple Heart, learn about his experiences in Vietnam, see some beautiful scenery from the Appalachian Trail and see Marks ending journey to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Wall in Washington DC.

Q: My wife, preschool son and I regularly attend Sunday Mass at the Shrine of –. My wife and I also go to confession there regularly. Our son will be starting school next year… we discovered that there is no CCD of any kind being provided. The priest told my wife that instead, we have to take our son to St. – Church for Sunday School and First Confession/Communion preparation. We were flabbergasted! There aren’t many children who regularly attend Mass at the Shrine, it’s true. But aren’t they still required to provide religious instruction for the ones who do,...

Featured Term (selected at random):ORDINARY JURISDICTION The right to exercise authority when this right is attached to an ecclesiastical office. This is the jurisdiction enjoyed by the Pope over the entire Church, by a bishop over his diocese, and in the internal forum by the pastor over the members of his parish. Jurisdiction can be either personal or vicarious, depending on whether it is exercised by the officeholder or by someone he delegated. All items in this dictionary are from Fr. John Hardon's Modern Catholic Dictionary, © Eternal Life. Used with permission.

This is an opportunity to inform, exchange, and comment on your church and parish. This blog will use church documents for discussion, and real examples to illustrate church life. It's up to you to make your parish a model for emulation. Please contribute where you can.

BRISTOL - Trinity Episcopal Church could be called a house divided: Its defrocked pastor led a heavily attended prayer and song service at the church Wednesday night, while Episcopal Bishop Andrew Smith tried to muster parishioners to meet with a new pastor at a church in Plainville. Smith promoted his meeting in a letter to parishioners last week as a way to discuss the dispute between Trinity and the Episcopal Diocese and "begin to identify new leadership for the parish so that we can move forward in our life in Christ within the doctrine, discipline and worship of The Episcopal...

As part of the scary fringe of society that American liberals call “church-goers,” my family always checks out the local church before deciding to move to a new neighborhood. We have some experience with this, having moved 11 times in 15 years. We’ve also changed churches without moving. If church shopping were a felony, I’d no longer be able to vote. I am a ruthless church shopper, not because my family spends so much time in a sanctuary, but because we spend so little. I figure if we are going to spend only an hour or two each week in...

Alligators living in the sewers of New York City. Remember "Mikey," the kid in the Life cereal television ads in the 1970s? He died when he drank a carbonated drink in the 1980s after eating Pop Rocks candy. Urban legends. Great stories with little if any truth in their makeup. There's what has become a rural legend in parts of Morehouse Parish. There's a monkey in them thar woods. Folks will swear they saw them. Wayne Warner saw one on Knox Ferry Road. Brett Smith saw one too, miles away from Warner's sighting, on Lum Day Road. When you start...

Latin Mass conducted in English twice in last month Linda Rodriguez lrodriguez@southendnews.com South End (Boston) News Thursday, 14 September 2006 For the second time in less than a month, the Latin Mass community at the embattled Holy Trinity (German) Catholic Church came to the noon Mass to hear it celebrated in Latin, only to hear English. Parishioners say they were told by church administrator the Rev. Thomas Naughton that the English masses took place due to scheduling errors. But they also say they don't believe it was a simple mistake. "I don't know whether it's a drive to drive people...

THE CORNERSTONES OF ST. AUGUSTINE PARISH IN REPUBLIC, MICHIGAN are round, flaky pie crust pockets crammed with beef, pork, potatoes, and other vegetables. Monthly sales of pasties (pronounced pass-tees), as the trademark Upper Peninsula culinary creations are called, fund operating costs at this 60-household parish that has been without a resident priest for 20 years.Franciscan Sister Margey Schmelzle, pastoral coordinator at St. Augustine and its neighboring parish, Sacred Heart, works hard to ensure parishioners are physically and spiritually well fed. But while there are pasties-a-plenty in this rural former mining town, priests are in short supply. At times Schmelzle has...

Iconoclasm and Liturgy by Martin Mosebach The case is at first glance a banal one. The church concerned does not rank among the flashpoints of Germany’s ecclesiastical history, nor does it stem from one of the great architectural epochs; the architects and artists who worked jointly on its completion are for the most part unknown. What happened in this Church of Saint Raphael in the Heidelberg suburb of Neuenheim is, however, exemplary for thousands of churches the world over, for masterpieces and anonymous creations, for cathedrals and chapels. Hardly a church remained unscathed in the aftermath of the Second Vatican...

Bishop Howard J. Hubbard of the Roman Catholic Diocese of Albany hopes involving members of the diocese -- from its top clerical leaders to its average parishioners -- will stifle apprehension as the Catholic church begins a two-year pastoral planning process that will reshape the diocese and close some churches. "I believe we have before us ... an opportunity to dream a new church into being; an opportunity to evangelize and re-evangelize," Hubbard said Monday in a prepared speech to diocese leaders in Albany. The meeting was closed to the public, but copies of his speech were provided to the...

SMITH SAYS: ROMAN CATHOLICS.....TAKE BACK YOUR CHURCH The LA Times, west coast media puppet of the ACLU, carried, on 05/26/06, a news item which should be a clarion call as loud as Tom Paine’s "Common Sense." An RC church in Huntington Beach, Orange County (that's the wealthy county that went bankrupt rather than pays its bills) told a parishioner who knelt during part of the Mass (the Agnes Dei to be specific), he had committed a MORTAL SIN, and would no longer be welcome in the Church and could not receive Communion or other sacraments. The church in question is...