Big Trouble - A Murder in a Small Western Town Sets Off a Strugg

The clergy abuse scandal has posed the greatest threat to the traditional understanding of the Catholic priesthood since the Protestant Reformation. Now, as then, the deadliest attacks are coming from within the Church. In an attempt to improve a system that allowed a small minority of the clergy to violate children and ameliorate the gross negligence of some bishops who recycled these predators, the American bishops instituted the Charter for the Protection of Children and Young People in 2002. It is, unfortunately, doing the Church more harm than good.

In Hope Springs Eternal in the Priestly Breast, Fr. James Valladares shows how justice and charity have been violated by some bishops in dealing with accused priests. He examines the pertinent canons that guide the Church?s judicial system and finds that these are often ignored or wrongly applied. He provides true cases that highlight the injustice of the process and the agony of priests who have been subjected to the charter?s draconian mandates.

The Church has incurred tremendous financial losses because of settlements rising from both legitimate and false claims. Her image has been marred by the secular media, which has taken advantage of the crisis. Even so, we often fail to understand how trivial these are in comparison to the damage done to the priesthood by the enactment of the charter?s policies. This is the most pressing issue that the bishops need to address.

“My effort here is to give firsthand testimony on the man and president I saw, ‘with bark off,’ as he used to say when he wanted me to describe a difficult situation cold and true, with no punches pulled.…The Lyndon Johnson I knew was brave and brutal, compassionate and cruel, incredibly intelligent and infuriatingly insensitive, with shrewd and uncanny instinct for the jugular of his allies and adversaries. He could be altruistic and petty, caring and crude, generous and petulant, bluntly honest and calculatingly devious—all within the same few minutes.”—Joseph A. Califano, Jr.

THE MAKING OF THE PHILIPPINES

BY FRANK SENAUTH

The Filipino people are a friendly lot of people and in their country of the Philippines, they are very poor. Their great object is to immigrate to other countries that will have them. If they are accepted in another country, they really work hard in their new country.

The majority of the Filipino people are of Malay stock descendents of Indonesians stocks who migrate to the islands long before the Christian era. The most significant ethnic minority group is the Chinese, who have played an important role in commerce since the ninth century, when they first came to the islands to trade. As a result of intermarriage and many Filipinos have some Chinese and Spanish ancestry, and Americans and Spaniards constitute the next largest alien minorities in the country.

Bless all the Filipinos who made it to another countries, and they are helping their families financially. They know what it is to survive and most of them would start their own business in another country. They are hard working and would do anything in their power to make life more enjoyable. The present President Benigno Aquino III is the first president to up-lift his people, just like his late mother Corazon Aquino did, when she used her magic wand to up-lift her people. She may be long gone, but she still left a lot of goodness behind. Bless her soul!