Soup Kitchen Miracle

You're probably tired of me writing about the Wildwood Soup Kitchen, but I just can't help myself. I am so wrapped up in this wonderful ministry that it tends to monopolize my thoughts, or at least capture the attention of a majority of my few remaining brain cells.

We are currently in the middle of an internal study on improving the efficiency of our overall operation, to include ways to cut operating costs and yet continue to offer our guests quality, healthful and appetizing meals. (Today, for example, we served 243 meals.) One area that has always troubled me relates to the number of ancient and grossly inefficient freezers we own, freezers that run 7x24 and just suck up electricity. We have a bunch of them -- each donated by an individual or business, usually because the donor had replaced it with a more efficient version. As you might imagine, our electric bills are up in the stratosphere. To address this problem we're considering the purchase and installation of a large, efficient walk-in freezer to replace all those old clunkers that take up space throughout the soup kitchen. This would be a major project for us. Purchasing and installing such a freezer, plus all the other changes we need to make, will likely cost us in the neighborhood of $20,000. This is a very large sum of money for an organization like ours.

And so I've been working on a plan that would appeal to the business community to help us fund this project.We intend to approach local businesses, large and small, plus service organizations like Rotary, Kiwanis and Lions, and ask them to buy "shares" in the project. They would not only help us provide a necessary service to the community, but we would ensure their generosity was well publicized. My plan is to kick off this project within a few weeks, once I have all the details worked out. But then yesterday I received a call from a local business asking me to stop by. This afternoon I did just that and was handed a check for $5,000! They want no publicity for their gift so I won't mention the name of the company, but thanks to their generosity we are now 25% of the way to our goal...and we haven't even started the effort. God is good.

Planned Parenthood Calls Catholics to Rebellion

Cecile Richards, president of the Planned Parenthood Action Fund and Planned Parenthood Federation of America, wants Catholics to rebel against their bishops and their Church's teaching on the sacredness of human life. This is part of what she wrote to her constituents:

“A few days ago, it felt as if we were holding strong in achieving health care reform that would finally ensure comprehensive coverage for everyone. As the legislation began moving closer to a vote, I knew that our job holding on to our reproductive health victories would be hard ... and then I received a copy of a memo that the Catholic bishops sent to their congregations. As I write this, the bishops have asked all the Catholics in the country to contact their legislators, asking them to alter current health care legislation to include anti-choice amendments. The bishops have inserted letters into church bulletins and asked priests to include their call to action in their sermons — and even in their prayers — during Sunday services…. If you're Catholic and you disagree with the bishops, please let your legislators know when you send your message. Your voice as a pro-choice Catholic needs to be heard NOW."

By the way, before taking her job at Planned Parenthood, Ms. Richards was the chief of staff of none other than Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, a Catholic legislator who has consistently ignored the Church's teaching on a wide range of moral issues. The photo above shows Ms. Richards with then presidential candidate Barack Obama. The president, of course, is of one mind with Planned Parenthood as they labor together to pursue their ongoing slaughter of the most innocent Americans.

Deacon Keith Fournier has written an insightful column on Ms. Richards' latest attack on human life and sanity. Click here to read it: Planned Parenthood Calls Catholics to Rebellion: Bishops Speak for Catholics & Children

Archbishop Dolan and the New York Times

Anyone who regualrly reads the New York Times knows full well how little the paper understands the Catholic Church. Sadly, if it were only a matter of a lack of understanding, they could simply be educated. But it appears that their usually negative approach to the Church is driven by something more than mere ignorance. Archbishop Timothy Dolan of New York has also come to this conclusion, and so he wrote an op-ed piece on the subject. But when the Times refused to print the archbishop's column (surprise, suprise!), Fox News agreed to do so.  Archbishop Dolan went ahead and published the piece on the archdiocesan blog, but I have included it below in its entirety:

__________________________

FOUL BALL!
By Archbishop Timothy M. Dolan
Archbishop of New York

October is the month we relish the highpoint of our national pastime, especially when one of our own New York teams is in the World Series!

Sadly, America has another national pastime, this one not pleasant at all: anti-catholicism.
        
It is not hyperbole to call prejudice against the Catholic Church a national pastime. Scholars such as Arthur Schlesinger Sr. referred to it as “the deepest bias in the history of the American people,” while John Higham described it as “the most luxuriant, tenacious tradition of paranoiac agitation in American history.” “The anti-semitism of the left,” is how Paul Viereck reads it, and Professor Philip Jenkins sub-titles his book on the topic “the last acceptable prejudice.”
        
If you want recent evidence of this unfairness against the Catholic Church, look no further than a few of these following examples of occurrences over the last couple weeks:

• On October 14, in the pages of the New York Times, reporter Paul Vitello exposed the sad extent of child sexual abuse in Brooklyn’s Orthodox Jewish community. According to the article, there were forty cases of such abuse in this tiny community last year alone. Yet the Times did not demand what it has called for incessantly when addressing the same kind of abuse by a tiny minority of priests: release of names of abusers, rollback of statute of limitations, external investigations, release of all records, and total transparency. Instead, an attorney is quoted urging law enforcement officials to recognize “religious sensitivities,” and no criticism was offered of the DA’s office for allowing Orthodox rabbis to settle these cases “internally.” Given the Catholic Church’s own recent horrible experience, I am hardly in any position to criticize our Orthodox Jewish neighbors, and have no wish to do so . . . but I can criticize this kind of “selective outrage.”

Of course, this selective outrage probably should not surprise us at all, as we have seen many other examples of the phenomenon in recent years when it comes to the issue of sexual abuse. To cite but two: In 2004, Professor Carol Shakeshaft documented the wide-spread problem of sexual abuse of minors in our nation’s public schools (the study can be found here). In 2007, the Associated Press issued a series of investigative reports that also showed the numerous examples of sexual abuse by educators against public school students. Both the Shakeshaft study and the AP reports were essentially ignored, as papers such as the New York Times only seem to have priests in their crosshairs.

• On October 16, Laurie Goodstein of the Times offered a front page, above-the-fold story on the sad episode of a Franciscan priest who had fathered a child. Even taking into account that the relationship with the mother was consensual and between two adults, and that the Franciscans have attempted to deal justly with the errant priest’s responsibilities to his son, this action is still sinful, scandalous, and indefensible. However, one still has to wonder why a quarter-century old story of a sin by a priest is now suddenly more pressing and newsworthy than the war in Afghanistan, health care, and starvation–genocide in Sudan. No other cleric from religions other than Catholic ever seems to merit such attention.

• Five days later, October 21, the Times gave its major headline to the decision by the Vatican to welcome Anglicans who had requested union with Rome. Fair enough. Unfair, though, was the article’s observation that the Holy See lured and bid for the Anglicans. Of course, the reality is simply that for years thousands of Anglicans have been asking Rome to be accepted into the Catholic Church with a special sensitivity for their own tradition. As Cardinal Walter Kasper, the Vatican’s chief ecumenist, observed, “We are not fishing in the Anglican pond.” Not enough for the Times; for them, this was another case of the conniving Vatican luring and bidding unsuspecting, good people, greedily capitalizing on the current internal tensions in Anglicanism.

• Finally, the most combustible example of all came Sunday with an intemperate and scurrilous piece by Maureen Dowd on the opinion pages of the Times. In a diatribe that rightly never would have passed muster with the editors had it so criticized an Islamic, Jewish, or African-American religious issue, she digs deep into the nativist handbook to use every anti-Catholic caricature possible, from the Inquisition to the Holocaust, condoms, obsession with sex, pedophile priests, and oppression of women, all the while slashing Pope Benedict XVI for his shoes, his forced conscription -- along with every other German teenage boy -- into the German army, his outreach to former Catholics, and his recent welcome to Anglicans.

True enough, the matter that triggered her spasm -- the current visitation of women religious by Vatican representatives -- is well-worth discussing, and hardly exempt from legitimate questioning. But her prejudice, while maybe appropriate for the Know-Nothing newspaper of the 1850’s, the Menace, has no place in a major publication today.

I do not mean to suggest that anti-catholicism is confined to the pages New York Times. Unfortunately, abundant examples can be found in many different venues. I will not even begin to try and list the many cases of anti-catholicism in the so-called entertainment media, as they are so prevalent they sometimes seem almost routine and obligatory. Elsewhere, last week, Representative Patrick Kennedy made some incredibly inaccurate and uncalled-for remarks concerning the Catholic bishops, as mentioned in this blog on Monday.   Also, the New York State Legislature has levied a special payroll tax to help the Metropolitan Transportation Authority fund its deficit. This legislation calls for the public schools to be reimbursed the cost of the tax; Catholic schools, and other private schools, will not receive the reimbursement, costing each of the schools thousands – in some cases tens of thousands – of dollars, money that the parents and schools can hardly afford. (Nor can the archdiocese, which already underwrites the schools by $30 million annually.) Is it not an issue of basic fairness for ALL school-children and their parents to be treated equally?

The Catholic Church is not above criticism. We Catholics do a fair amount of it ourselves. We welcome and expect it. All we ask is that such critique be fair, rational, and accurate, what we would expect for anybody. The suspicion and bias against the Church is a national pastime that should be “rained out” for good.

I guess my own background in American history should caution me not to hold my breath.

Then again, yesterday was the Feast of Saint Jude, the patron saint of impossible causes.
__________________

Click here to visit the archbishop's blog and read some of the comments others have left behind...

Athiest Venom

Christopher Hitchens, one of today's always angry super-atheists, in a display of remarkable bravery, once again took on Mother Teresa. Speaking on Dennis Miller's internet radio show, he attacked the saintly founder of the Missionaries of Charity using language that says far more about Mr. Hitchens than it does about Mother Teresa. Here's a sampling of his venom:


“The woman was a fanatic and a fundamentalist and a fraud, and millions of people are much worse off because of her life, and it’s a shame there is no hell for your bitch to go to.” 


Isn't that nice? Such a pleasant man.

Today Bill Donohue, president of the Catholic League, responded with this statement:

"I once told Hitchens that one of the real reasons he hates Mother Teresa has to do with his socialist ideology: he believes the state should care for the poor, not voluntary organizations, and he especially loathes the idea of religious ones servicing the dispossessed. Indeed, he sees in Mother Teresa the very embodiment of altruism, a virtue he cannot—with good reason—fully comprehend. The fact of the matter is that socialism is the greatest generator of poverty known to mankind, and Mother Teresa did more to heal and rescue its victims than anyone in the modern era. This explains why she is adored by the people who knew her best—the men and women of India (she is second only to Gandhi as the nation’s most revered person).  Hitchens is positively obsessed by Mother Teresa, and that is a very telling commentary on his psyche. She is a constant reminder that reason without faith is a dark hole."


I suggest you let Mr. Hitchens know that you are praying for him and his eventual conversion. Here's his email address: chitch8003@aol.com
 
The battles wages on...

Catholic - Jewish Relations

My visit to the synagogue earlier today brought to mind how dedicated Pope Benedict is to continuing the improvement in Catholic-Jewish relations that we saw under his predecessor, Pope John Paul II. I recalled seeing a video of a Vatican visit by several Israeli rabbis that took place earlier this year, before the pope made his visit to the Holy Land. And so I did a little Google search and was amazed that I actually found it on YouTube. I have included it below:

A Visit to a Synagogue

Today I spoke at our local synagogue (Temple Shalom in Oxford, Florida) to a group of about 50 Jewish women. I came not so much as a Catholic deacon but rather as board president of the Wildwood Soup Kitchen. I was there to tell them about this truly ecumenical ministry made up of nearly 150 volunteers from about 30 local churches, and to ask for their support.

They were absolutely wonderful! Interested and enthusiastic, they peppered me with great questions and provided me with a van-full of canned goods for the Soup Kitchen. Many of the women indicated an interest in volunteering at the kitchen and of sending us financial contributions. One woman suggested that they could join together during the Christmas season and fill in at the soup Kitchen so our Christian volunteers could spend more time at home with their families. What a gracious suggestion! I think we'll take them up on it.

Yes, it was a very satisfying day.

Planned Parenthood Leader Resigns After Watching Ultrasound of Abortion Procedure

Here's one for you...a leader of Planned Parenthood in Atlanta resigns after watching an ultrasound of an abortion. Click here to watch a video of the news story: Planned Parenthood Leader Resigns

Catholic Campaign for Human Development

Once again the Catholic Campaign for Human Development is under fire for its relationships with and support for organizations that work against the teachings of the Catholic Church on such issues as abortion and same sex marriage. This seems to come up every few years, indicating to me that the CCHD just can't help itself. As the domestic anti-poverty, social justice program of the U.S. Catholic bishops, CCHD tends to align itself with community organizing and other activist groups (e.g., ACORN), and many of these same groups also fall on the wrong side of most life issues. A coalition of pro-life organizations has asked the US Bishops to reform the CCHD requiring that it align itself only with those groups that support Catholic teaching. To read the full story, click here: A New Campaign to Reform the CCHD