Essentially I’m ripping off the title from a post of Rod Dreher’s, wherein he discusses “a radical gay rights nun” and what such attitudes have done to religious life in the US in recent decades. Jeanine Gramick, the sister in question, says complying with the Vatican’s desired oversight of the LCWR “would be a repudiation of all the renewal that we’ve done in religious life.” One of Rod’s readers asks, rhetorically, “How can renewal be synonymous with the collapse of religious life?” And collapse it has, at least as measured in numbers. In 2007, there were 60,642 religious women, compared to 46,451 today in 2012. In 1965 there were about 185,000 religious women.

But it’s not just Catholic religious life taking a numerical hit. Catholics in general are declining as well; from 2000-2010, active Catholics declined by 5%. In Buffalo, New York, Catholic numbers have dropped by somewhere between 19% and 35%, depending on who’s doing the numbers. The mainline Protestant decline has been well-documented. Meanwhile, Mormon numbers have increased by 50% in the US since 2000.
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In 2008, Rev. Joel Hunter, pastor of the 15,000 member Northland church in the Orlando, Florida area, wrote a book called, A New Kind of Conservative. Turns out that this “new kind” of conservative is the kind that supports the most liberal president in our nation’s history.

Since then Hunter has become the spiritual advisor to Obama, a job that apparently entails furrowing a concerned brow and turning the other cheek when the President takes yet another position that is antithetical to his professed faith.
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This video has been out for a few days, but since I’ve just watched it, I am encouraged to post it. The more people who see it the better. I know Dawn Eden and have benefited from her friendship, kindness and support of Salvo. (She is responsible for the name, Salvo)

So, my good friend Joe Carter firmly asks President Obama to repent of his blasphemy. Then Bristol Palin’s blog on Patheos ridicules the President for changing his position on homosexual marriage in part because he “evolved” by reflecting on the life experiences of the First Children, who have friends with same-sex parents. So both bloggers got vehement responses to their thoughts and postings. Why the controversy and the vehement reactions? Is it because Our Dear Leader is not to be rebuked?

I, too, wanted to write about something that is important to me, though it could draw ire from Meggie and her ilk. So here it goes: This past Saturday was the fourth anniversary of the passing of Irena Kryzanowska Sendler, who died in Warsaw, Poland, at the age of 98. In most ways and like most of ours, her life was unremarkable. However, during World War II, Ms. Sendler, a Roman Catholic, worked in the Warsaw ghetto. She was a social worker at the beginning of the German occupation of Poland in 1939, and volunteered to go into the ghetto to inspect for typhus. The Nazis feared that typhus and other diseases would spread outside of the ghetto (the Nazis considered all Jews to be disease carriers).
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A dear friend of mine sent me a news article from MSNBC.com and suggested that I consider writing a blog about it. I try to take all of my readers’ thoughtful comments to heart, and so this recent development in New York has troubled me. It has long been a mantra of liberal jurists that serious punishments must conform to an “evolving standards of decency” test. Under this test, courts will look to prevailing opinions in legislatures, judges and legal scholars, the views of the American public and, yes, even to international law, to determine appropriate punishment (or not). Typically, this test looks at death penalty-related cases, but it can also be applied in other contexts as well.

On May 8, 2012, the court of appeals of New York (New York State’s highest court) found that viewing child pornography is not a crime in New York. (Yes, they really did!) In this case, a college professor had more than one hundred illegal images on his computer at the college. Unfortunately for James D. Kent, an assistant professor of public administration, he did not completely dodge the legal bullet, as the court of appeals upheld the conviction of other counts against him. Professor Kent said, at his sentencing, that he “abhorred” child pornography and contended that someone else at the college must have placed the images on his computer. In August 2009, he was sentenced to one to three in the state penitentiary.
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Not only do the not get wet, they aren’t even present. How does one say that an ancestor was in fact “baptized as a Mormon” just because a Mormon in 2012 decides to be baptized in the name of someone long dead? I suppose we will see a lot of stories about Mormons and their religion in the next few months because of the 2012 election.

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At least that’s what one might conclude from the claim of the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention that “under the current administration, the Justice Department has not initiated even one case against obscenity violators.” The story is here. People who live next to open sewers get used to the smell after a while, I’ve heard.

This morning I was called to prayer when I read the latest e-bulletin from Cherie Harder, president of The Trinity Forum (ttf.org). Writing candidly yet graciously as parishioner of The Falls Church (VA), she summarizes the outcome of the legal battle that has been raging for the last several years between the church and its Diocese:

This Sunday is the last that I and thousands of other parishioners will worship at the Sanctuary of The Falls Church in Virginia. Earlier this year, a judge ruled that despite the fact that The Falls Church is older than the Episcopal diocese, and that over 90 percent of the church parishioners voted to leave the Episcopal diocese, the Falls Church—and six other Anglican churches—would be required to turn over its buildings, facilities, and financial assets to the Episcopal Church.

While the court ruling still seems unreal, the language is stark and its execution imminent. In short order, the deed to the sanctuary will be signed over to the Episcopal diocese, and the church property and most of the financial assets—from computers to communion silver, and including tithes given by parishioners earmarked for non-diocese ministries—will be transferred to their ownership. After this Sunday, the congregation will meet in various school gymnasiums—a few weeks at a middle school, followed by a month at a high school – as the schools are able to accommodate, and until a more permanent home can be found.

Not ending on a pessimistic note, she points to the redemptive elements occasioned by this excruciatingly painful process and loss of the physical property:
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