News - April 2019 RSS Feed

SACRAMENTO - If California moves forward with its proposed law trying to force priests to violate the seal of Confession, it is not just Catholicism but all religions that will suffer, said a Dominican priest in a recent op-ed. Writing Sunday in USA Today, Dominican Father Pius Pietrzyk, assistant professor of canon law at St. Patrick's Seminary & University in Menlo Park, warned that “If this bill passes, no religion is safe.”

Elizabeth Seton, America's first saint, revealed through her letters: Biographer O'Donnell likens something Elizabeth wrote about her experiences to what St. Teresa of Avila and Julian of Norwich wrote about their experiences. The depth of Elizabeth's spirituality warrants her being mentioned in the same company as them.

"We double down on our refusal of limits," the Philadelphia archbishop said. "We will not accept the indignity of being creatures. We will not acknowledge a Creator, much less serve him. Our hatred of transcendence, and the obligations we owe to Someone or something greater than ourselves that it implies, grows in direct proportion to our failures to create perfection here and now."

Four members of Our Lady of Mount Carmel Parish, Mill Valley, entered the Catholic Church at the Easter Vigil April 20.

Father Kenan Bernard Osborne, OFM, whose ministry of more than 60 years was devoted to higher theological education and writing, died peacefully in Santa Barbara on April 19.

Almost three months after taking her simple vows as a Dominican nun at Corpus Christi Monastery in Menlo Park, Sister Mary Francis of the Holy Cross sat with four of her fellow sisters behind a windowed partition and talked to Catholic San Francisco April 26 about the joys of her unexpected call to contemplative religious life.

TAPACHULA, Mexico – Pope Francis has donated $500,000 to assist migrants attempting to travel through Mexico, but who are increasingly being impeded by Mexican officials from reaching the U.S. border.

Overcrowded and sometimes inhumane conditions in detention centers for immigrant families seeking asylum in the U.S. are an affront to human dignity that demands Catholics “step up” to help beyond the “bare minimum,” Missionary of Jesus Sister Norma Pimentel, the best-known face of the church’s work with immigrants at the U.S.-Mexico border, said in an emotional talk at Our Lady of Angels Church in Burlingame.

San Francisco’s Epiphany Center, a legacy of the Daughters of Charity’s ministry to distressed women and children dating to the roots of post-Gold Rush San Francisco, is providing extra help to one group most in need today: Those addicted to drugs and alcohol.

As Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris burned and it was unclear if the great church would survive, a family at St. Philip the Apostle Parish in San Francisco’s Noe Valley took action, ringing the church bell in hope and solidarity as the fire raged.

After 25 years of hosting a monthly morning Mass, breakfast and Catholic speaker event for area Catholics, the Catholic Marin Breakfast Club will hold its final meeting May 3 at St. Sebastian Church in Greenbrae.

As the final season of “Game of Thrones” premiered April 14, St. Dominic Parish in San Francisco hosted a panel to discuss a Catholic approach to watching the hit television show.

Four seminarians, including two men preparing for the priesthood in the archdiocese, were ordained to the transitional diaconate April 27 at St. Pius in Redwood City.

The story of the Great Catch of fish is told only twice among the four Gospels, once in Luke and again in John. The Gospel of Luke places the story at the beginning of Jesus’ ministry and links it with the call of His first disciples. The Gospel of John places it at the end and associates it with the Resurrection. In both cases, the story concludes with an exchange between Jesus and Peter that sets Peter apart as first among equals in the apostolic role of both “fisherman” and “shepherd”.

Not long ago at Sunday Mass we heard John’s Gospel about the woman caught in adultery. Jesus does not affirm the woman in her sin of adultery. In fact he tells her to sin no more. An April 18 letter (“Brothers and sisters”) says that Catholic schools should accept children enrolled in Catholic schools from men who are homosexual who adopted a child. God loves everyone but not everything everyone does. Scripture can be used out of context. If interpretation of Scripture is outside of the teaching of the church, Catholics are not supposed to apply it. Catholic teaching is that marriage is a man and a woman in a sacrament for life and its main purpose is the continuation of life.

The philosophical issue underlying Star of the Sea School’s (SSS) closing is similar to that of a public school wanting to reconstitute as an alternative school or as a charter school. First, there is a definition problem. No buts about it. The present SSS will be closed; the new SSS will be created. “Rebooting” is not quite the appropriate word to use here. The present SSS, supposedly, serves the entire Star of the Sea parish. The new SSS will serve a much wider, but less deep clientele, i.e., just those within Star of the Sea Parish who want only a classic education, but, certainly it will not serve ALL SSS elementary students within its boundary.

I don’t know if it was just that I had the time to read over this issue from front to back, but it was certainly one of the best by far. The article by Dr. Timothy Millea regarding Our Lord’s last hours on Earth was so vividly described and extremely moving. I will never spend a Good Friday or gaze at a crucifix in the same way again. Thank you for this heart-wrenching and unforgettable article.

“Wife Returned After Having Fine Funeral.” The headline of a 483-word story in the March 15, 1904, edition of The New York Times bore a sly nod to Tom Sawyer. A man named Ignacio Valente was charging the city with a funeral bill he had been wrongfully issued, according to the Times.

Americans are by far the world's most divided ideologically on the role of religion in society, a new Pew Research Center report says. Asked if they favor a greater role for religion, 71 percent of U.S. respondents who identified as conservatives said yes; only 29 percent said no. Yet, liberal Americans tend to be more moderate than those in most other Western countries.

Many poor Indian women working in cane-cutting fields have their wombs removed because employers are unwilling to hire women who menstruate, an Indian newspaper reported April 8. “You will hardly find women with wombs in these villages. These are villages of womb-less women.” The report was the most recent on gender abuse in India, a country that human rights advocates and the U.N. rank as among the world’s most inhumane toward women and girls.