The Good Catholic Life

Summary of today’s show: Archbishop Alfred Hughes notes eight times in his life–from his hometown of West Roxbury to the Archdiocese of New Orleans – where God led him in ways he resisted at first, but which later turned out for the good (of course). The archbishop-emeritus of New Orleans talks with Scot Landry and Fr. Mark O’Connell about growing up in West Roxbury; how his father’s example led him to the priesthood; when he wanted to be a missionary but ended up a diocesan priest teaching in the seminary; the talk he had with Pope John Paul II when he first balked at being asked to be a diocesan bishop; and the Church’s response to Hurricane Katrina and how it held the fabric of New Orleans together in the aftermath. Listen to the show: Subscribe for free in iTunes Today’s host(s): Scot Landry and Fr. Mark O’Connell Today’s guest(s): Archbishop Alfred Hughes, archbishop-emeritus of New Orleans Links from today’s show: Archdiocese of New Orleans Today’s topics: Archbishop Alfred Hughes 1st segment: Scot Landry and Fr. Mark O’Connell talked about having a holiday in the middle of the week and how they celebrated their Independence Day. Fr. Mark talked about having a separated shoulder after his recent fall. Today’s guest confirmed Scot about 25 years ago and was rector of the seminary when Fr. Mark was there. Archbishop Alfred Hughes became archbishop of New Orleans after being a priest and auxiliary bishop in Boston. 2nd segment: Scot and Fr. Mark welcome Archbishop Hughes. Archbishop Hughes expressed concern for Fr. Mark’s shoulder. Scot said he and his twin brother, Fr. Roger Landry, had their confirmation names Theophilus and Deodatus. They had lost a bet with Fr. Lenny O’Malley and so he got to name them and Archbishop Hughes wanted to call Scot by Theophilus during the show. He said he’s disappointed because he’d thought Scot and Fr. Roger had come to those names by intense study. Archbishop Hughes was born in Boston. He grew up in St. Theresa’s parish in West Roxbury. It was during the post-Depression times, but everyone was going through the same thing and he didn’t see himself as any poorer than anyone else. His father had lost his job as head of sales for the new automatic washing machine. He was out of work for a couple of years and then worked for the WPA for 10 years. But never knew about the stress they were going through. They were tremendous parents, evidencing faith in an explicit way. He recalls finding out how his father got up every morning before everyone to pray and it led him to a contemplative wisdom about life that he passed on and this was formative to Archbishop Hughes being open to the priesthood. Every Friday night, before religious education on Saturday morning, his father would sit down with the four children and go over the Catechism lesson. He would then set it aside and ask them what their answers meant. then he would go on to tell them what that teaching meant to him, using examples from family life, in the neighborhood, or in his work. That left a deep impression on the archbishop that were was not intended to be any gap between God’s teaching and the living of ordinary life. He went to Boston College High School, which was his first Catholic school. His parents scraped together the tuition. He’ll be forever grateful in both the classical education and the opportunity to learn a lot more about the faith. One of the Jesuits had just returned from being a missionary in Jamaica and they used to draw him out about his experiences. Archbishop Hughes considered becoming a Jesuit, but his brother eventually did go on to become one. He entered the diocesan seminary because he wanted to stay close by his mother who was sick. But then he was asked to go to Rome to study, but his spiritual director told him that the greater gift to God might be to say Yes to what his superiors were asking him to do. After ordination, he got a doctorate in spiritual theology. When he came back to Boston, he became a professor and then rector of the seminary. He was also an auxiliary bishop. Scot said it probably wasn’t what the archbishop expected for his priesthood. Archbishop Hughes can count eight other times in his life when his superiors asked something of him that given his own preferences he would not have chosen. Yet each one of them is a way in which God has worked in his life and stretched him beyond what he thought he was capable of. He said the irony is that after Hurricane Katrina, the Archdiocese of New Orleans was declared by the US bishops to be a missionary diocese to qualify for aid. God eventually allowed him to become a missionary. Also his mother died one month before he left Boston, so he’d been able to care for her. Fr. Mark noted that Archbishop Hughes’ closest friend in the priesthood is Msgr. Connie McCrae. Archbishop Hughes said no matter where each has been, they’ve talked on the phone once per week. Later this month, they will vacation together in Marshfield. He’s also been able to visit Msgr. McCrae in Rome during his assignment there. They talked about the racquetball rivalry between the archbishop and the monsignor. They’ve been playing since the mid–1970s. The Archbishop still plays a couple of times per week even at 78 years old, while he think Msgr. McCrae is getting rusty living in Rome where they can’t play. The archbishop now lives in the seminary in New Orleans and plays against the seminarians. Scot said for his first 60 years the archbishop either was living in Boston or studying in Rome. He asked what it was like to live Boston to go become bishop of Baton Rouge. Archbishop Hughes said there are a lot of similarities between Louisiana and Boston despite the differences. He said the greatest challenge was going to Rome to study: He didn’t know Italian, he was going to have take his classes in Latin, he didn’t know any of the other students. After that, every other adjustment, including the one to Louisiana pales in difficulty. After that he was convinced he could live in anyplace. When he got the call from the nuncio to go to Baton Rouge, he asked him if the pope knew how different the two areas are and said it would be difficult for the people to accept him. He was leaving that night with four busloads of kids to go to Denver for World Youth Day, so the nuncio told him to talk it over with the Pope. He did in fact and the Pope assured him that he wanted him to go to Baton Rouge. Going to Baton Rouge was a wonderful experience. Louisiana is different in terms of history–originally a French colony and influenced by the Acadians–but there are many similarities, especially in New Orleans where there are historically ethnic neighborhoods like Boston and a rich Catholic history. The culture of south Louisiana was originally Catholic where in Boston it was originally Protestant. So even the Baptists and Evangelicals think like Catholics, unlike what has happened in the Northeast. It is a rich town for the arts and music and food and sports, much like Boston. Fr. Mark asked if the archbishop going from Baton Rouge to New Orleans helped out in having Baton Rouge help out New Orleans after Katrina. His successor in Baton Rouge had been vicar general in New Orleans. For the first four months after Katrina, he could not get back into New Orleans so they set up the diocese-in-exile in the offices of the diocese of Baton Rouge. In that 4 month period, they distributed almost 40 million pounds of food to people who had next to nothing. Because of the generous national collection, they were distributing basic, fundamental subsistence help at the rate of $200,000 per week through 12 centers they set up. The priests were encouraged to see themselves as pastors of virtual parishes and to be in contact with parishioners wherever they might be, to let them know they were still connected and see to their new needs. Archbishop spent half his time in Baton Rouge administering and the other going down to New Orleans to celebrate Mass with people and provide a sense that God was present and cared. After getting the fundamentals of food, clothing and shelter, people craved meaning and to know that God was there to work together to rebuild. The partnership was an extraordinary collaboration between the dioceses. Scot asked how New Orleans stands compared to right before the Hurricane in 2005. Have people generally returned to where they lived? Archbishop Hughes said 85% of active Catholics are back in the archdiocese on the basis of the annual October census of parishes. They’re not necessarily in the same parishes. A number of people have relocated elsewhere. One of the great losses in Katrina were middle-class Catholic blacks. A number of those who had gone to the Catholic schools had moved to the middle class. After Katrina many were offered attractive jobs elsewhere in the country and lost a fair percentage of the the black Catholic leadership. About 20% of Catholics in New Orleans historically have been black. This is in large part because French plantation owners baptized and catechized the black slaves. It’s also due to some free blacks who came from the islands in the Caribbean who came to live in New Orleans. The public schools have a sad record in New Orleans, although post-Katrina even there they have made good progress by rebuilding the school system. Eighty percent of public schools are charter schools. They are making progress every year, even though they started far behind. The charter schools have a two-year sunset clause in that they have to show progress in student achievement or lose their charter to someone else. This is now being extended by the state government to the rest of the state. Ninety-eight percent of those who went to Catholic schools went on to college and better jobs. He looks at the diaspora as a gift to the rest of the country. Scot noted that political commentator, Mary Matalin, who lives in New Orleans with her husband James Carville, said that New Orleans would not have had the recovery it did without the Church. Matalin recently became Catholic. Archbishop Hughes said Matalin and Carville didn’t move back to New Orleans after Katrina and didn’t see the immediate aftermath, but he agrees that what the Church was able to do by the grace of God made a huge impact. For example, the public schools didn’t open for a year, while Catholic schools began to open in October, just a month or two after the hurricane, one at a time. They welcomed public school students free of charge. Later a bill was passed that allowed the government to reimburse schools that accepted the students, but they had no idea at the time they would get reimbursed. Fr. Mark asked the archbishop about what he’s up to today. Archbishop Hughes is a spiritual director for seminarians in New Orleans. He’s also active in Vox Clara, the liturgical commission created by the Vatican to provide assistance with translation of the liturgical texts for use in English. They discussed the new translation of the Mass and the perceived complexity of the texts. Archbishop Hughes also teaches a course each semester at Notre Dame seminary. He also does retreat ministry for laypeople, priests, and bishops. He really enjoys very much being able to focus on those dimensions of life that I couldn’t always focus on the administrative roles he had. He hopes it’s a way of God preparing him for his final days, that through this ministry it helps him to keep God first and foremost and make that final gift to God. Scot thanks Archbishop Hughes for always saying Yes to God and for sharing his story with the listeners of The Good Catholic Life. 3rd segment: Now as we do every week at this time, we will consider the Mass readings for this Sunday, specifically the Gospel reading. First Reading for the 14th Sunday in Ordinary Time, July 8, 2012 (Ezekiel 2:2–5) As the LORD spoke to me, the spirit entered into me and set me on my feet, and I heard the one who was speaking say to me: Son of man, I am sending you to the Israelites, rebels who have rebelled against me; they and their ancestors have revolted against me to this very day. Hard of face and obstinate of heart are they to whom I am sending you. But you shall say to them: Thus says the Lord GOD! And whether they heed or resist–for they are a rebellious house– they shall know that a prophet has been among them. Gospel for the 14th Sunday in Ordinary Time, July 8, 2012 (Mark 6:1–6) Jesus departed from there and came to his native place, accompanied by his disciples. When the sabbath came he began to teach in the synagogue, and many who heard him were astonished. They said, “Where did this man get all this? What kind of wisdom has been given him? What mighty deeds are wrought by his hands! Is he not the carpenter, the son of Mary, and the brother of James and Joses and Judas and Simon? And are not his sisters here with us?” And they took offense at him. Jesus said to them, “A prophet is not without honor except in his native place and among his own kin and in his own house.” So he was not able to perform any mighty deed there, apart from curing a few sick people by laying his hands on them. He was amazed at their lack of faith. Scot said both reading speak of rebellion: the rejection by the Israelities and the rejection of Jesus by the people who should have been the most receptive to him. Jesus models for us how we overcome rejection to keep bringing the good news to people who will receive it. Fr. Mark said Moses had to put up with the hardheartedness of the Egyptians and then 1,000 years later it’s the Lord’s own people who are hardhearted, but Ezekiel preaches anyway. Fr. Mark say the reason Jesus can’t perform a miracle in his own town is that the people lack faith. Usually in the Gospel Jesus says to the receivers of the miracles that their faith has healed them. Fr. Mark says we too can be hardhearted. We can treat Jesus for granted in the miracle of the Mass. Scot asked us to imagine someone who comes to our parishes because of what they’ve heard and to ask what they will experience. Many converts talk about how they don’t see fervor in the people. Scot and Fr. Mark compared how Archbishop Hughes went where he didn’t expect to go and it turned out great.

Summary of today’s show: Scot Landry, Gregory Tracy, and Fr. Roger Landry discuss the news headlines of the week, and despite the holiday and the Pilot being on hiatus, it’s been a busy week. This week the Fortnight for Freedom ended with a Mass in Washington, DC, in which Archbishop Charles Chaput gave a remarkable homily; bishops reacted to the Supreme Court’s decision on the healthcare reform law; a significant appointment at the Vatican; an expression of papal confidence; and the Vatican gets media savvy. Listen to the show: Subscribe for free in iTunes Today’s host(s): Scot Landry Today’s guest(s): Gregory Tracy, managing editor of the Pilot, the newspaper of the Archdiocese of Boston, and Fr. Roger Landry, pastor of St. Bernadette Parish in Fall River Links from today’s show: The Anchor The Pilot Some of the stories discussed on this show will be available on The Pilot’s and The Anchor’s websites on Friday morning. Please check those sites for the latest links. Today’s topics: Fortnight4Freedom ends; Healthcare lawsuits; Vatican news 1st segment: Scot Landry noted that Susan Abbott is out on vacation. He offered Gregory Tracy a happy end of Fortnight for Freedom. Scot and Fr. Roger Landry wished their parents a happy 43rd wedding anniversary Scot said the Fortnight for Freedom ended yesterday and the big closing event was a Mass in DC at the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception. Archbishop Charles Chaput of Philadelphia delivered the homily. “Thousands Attend Closing Mass of ‘Fortnight for Freedom’ at Washington Basilica”, Zenit.org, 7/4/12 “Government cannot take away true freedom, Archbishop Chaput teaches”, CNA/EWTN News, 7/4/12 “Archbishop Chaput’s Homily at Close of Fortnight for Freedom”, Zenit.org, 7/4/12 Greg said Chaput focused in on “Render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s and render unto God what is God’s”. In the end it’s not about trying to strike a balance between the two worlds. We belong entirely to God and that is where our allegiance belongs and from which we get our freedom. Scot said a lot of people focus in that reading on rendering to Caesar, but the real focus is we should render ourselves in our entirety to God. Fr. Roger Landry said Chaput went far beyond his book on the same subject. Because we are made body and soul in God’s likeness and image, and because we owe the icon to the original, we owe ourselves to God. He said freedom is not just independence, but also a dependence. We have both freedom from, but also freedom for. We have to use our real freedom for God’s cause. Fr. Roger thought it was a theological tour de force. He was calling Catholic Americans to use their freedom for good in such a way as to revolutionize our country anew and return us to what made us great in the first place. Scot quoted from the CNA/EWTN story: While religious liberty “is a foundational right” and “necessary for a good society,” it is not “an end in itself.” Rather, it must be used to find and live out the truth in order to attain to holiness, the highest form of freedom. This higher form of freedom, found through God’s grace, “isn’t something Caesar can give or take away,” Archbishop Chaput taught. “In the end, we defend religious liberty in order to live the deeper freedom that is discipleship in Jesus Christ,” he reflected. The right to religious freedom only finds its fulfillment when believers “use that freedom to seek God with our whole mind and soul and strength.” Scot’s favorite part was from the end of the homily: We live in a time that calls for sentinels and public witness. Every Christian in every era faces the same task. But you and I are responsible for this moment. Today. Now. We need to “speak out,” not only for religious liberty and the ideals of the nation we love, but for the sacredness of life and the dignity of the human person – in other words, for the truth of what it means to be made in the image and likeness of God. We need to be witnesses of that truth not only in word, but also in deed. In the end, we’re missionaries of Jesus Christ, or we’re nothing at all. And we can’t share with others what we don’t live faithfully and joyfully ourselves. When we leave this Mass today, we need to render unto Caesar those things that bear his image. But we need to render ourselves unto God – generously, zealously, holding nothing back. To the extent we let God transform us into his own image, we will – by the example of our lives – fulfill our duty as citizens of the United States, but much more importantly, as disciples of Jesus Christ. Scot said every generation needs public witnesses who alert people. We need to speak out. Greg said he was struck that beyond speaking out, we need to draw ourselves closer to Christ and thus be an example to others. There was a way in which Mother Teresa’s way of being Christ-like changed the minds of people she encountered without speaking a word. Scot clarified said “render” means to return or to give back. For all the blessings we’ve been given by God, we need to give it all back to God 100%. Scot asked Fr. Roger about “Either we’re missionaries of Christ or we’re nothing at all.” Fr. Roger said if we’re a true disciple then we’re trying to bring Christ and his kingdom to others. Fr. Roger said “surrender” is an intensified “rendering”. The biggest aspect of the Fortnight for Freedom is that if we’re going to be defending religious liberty, we need to be a religious people. Turning to the next story, Scot said last Thursday the Supreme Court decision about the Affordable Care Act, Obamacare, came down, and some commentators thought the bishops’ response should have been stronger. The bishops’ statement said they support universal healthcare and asked for modifications to the law. “More to come: Lawsuits over HHS mandate keep health reform law in court”, Catholic News Service, 6/29/12 “Bishops urge Congress to fix health law flaws after high court decision”, Catholic News Service, 6/28/12 Greg said the bishops’ have been consistent in their message; it just hasn’t been well understood. The bishops have urged for an expansion of healthcare without dictating how it should happen. But they said it should be done in a way consistent with respecting conscience and freedom of religion. The reason they’ve been speaking out so much is that this lack of exemption for religious conscience is sour of character of every other law that’s been passed. The way the narrow exemption has been written in such a way that the only major institution affected by this is the Catholic Church. Fr. Roger said when you look back over the whole debate, the bishops have always been in favor of most of the provisions of the law, so when they came out against it, it was for the specific lack of exemption. That’s why they hadn’t joined the lawsuits that resulted in last week’s decision. The other lawsuits from Catholic organizations over the HHS mandate continue on. Fr. Roger said there are many issues in play and the US bishops have always been clear in what parts they favor or oppose, but that doesn’t always show up in newspaper articles. 3rd segment: This week’s benefactor card raffle winner is Charles Ford of East Walpole, Mass. He wins the book To Whom Shall We Go? by Cardinal Timothy Dolan of New York. If you would like to be eligible to win in an upcoming week, please visit WQOM.org. For a one-time $30 donation, you’ll receive the Station of the Cross benefactor card and key tag, making you eligible for WQOM’s weekly raffle of books, DVDs, CDs and religious items. We’ll be announcing the winner each Wednesday during “The Good Catholic Life” program. 4th segment: Scot said there were some big appointments in the Vatican recently. One of the biggest was the appointment of a new prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, Bishop Gerhard Mueller of Regensburg, Germany. “Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith Gets New Prefect” Zenit.org, 7/2/12 Fr. Roger said Mueller had been mentioned for the past year as a candidate. He’s brilliant and written 500 books on theology. He’s a very clear writer, just like Pope Benedict is. Recently, he’s been editing the complete works of Pope Benedict’s articles and books into a definitive edition that will be read by scholars for centuries. He’s also been controversial for his friendship with on the leading liberation theologies in South America. Liberation theology has been criticized for preaching political revolution, especially of the Marxist variety, for spiritual salvation. Cardinal Ratzinger had been very influential on suppressing the bad liberation theology. Fr. Roger thinks it will help Bishop Mueller engage liberation theology and other theologies that are outside orthodoxy. Pope Benedict’s last proferrship was in Regensburg and his brother served in that diocese. Cardinal Levada, who was head of the CDF from 2005 to now, had been brought in for expertise in dealing with abuse cases. Fr. Roger said Bishop Mueller will be able to take on a lot of the theology work that Pope Benedict has been continuing and now he will be able to move on to a new agenda for himself. Scot noted that this is someone who will know Pope Benedict’s writings better than anyone else. Greg also said it was notable that a German pope has picked a German bishop to head the CDF. He said ultimately we want to see someone who acts as Pope Benedict would act. We don’t want a curia full of people working toward their own goals with their own agenda. Scot said most people would say this CDF is the number 3 position in the worldwide Church, after Pope and Secretary of State. Fr. Roger said the Secretary of State has influence throughout the world through the foreign ministry, as well as all the Vatican administrative staff. He said the work of the CDF will have the most influence in the future over the centuries. Scot said before going on Vacation Pope Benedict released an unusual letter affirming the work of Cardinal Bertone. “Pope Benedict reaffirms confidence in Cardinal Bertone”, CNA/EWTN News, 7/4/12 On the eve of my departure for a period of summer rest at Castel Gandolfo, I would like to express my deep gratitude for your discreet closeness and enlightened advice, which I have found particularly helpful in recent months,” said the Pope in a brief letter dated July 2 and released to the media July 4. “Noting with regret the widespread and unjust criticism against your person, I intend to renew my statements of personal confidence in you.” This is in response to the Vatican leaks scandals and accusations of mismanagement or other incompetence of Cardinal Bertone. Greg said Americans generally don’t appreciate the doggedness of the European tabloid press. Fr. Roger said it was unprecedented, especially in that Pope Benedict has never released a personal letter he’d written to anyone else expressing personal confidence in them. Cardinal Bertone is very Italian and there is within the curia, a lot of Italian prelates with an old boys’ network and some have said the scandals have attacked this network. Fr. Roger said he thinks there needs to be a personal defense of Cardinal Bertone if the press would focus not on the person, but on the principles being questioned in the Vatican leaks. Fr. Roger said Bertone has been well regarded in the past. He was Cardinal Ratzinger’s righthand on the CDF. He was talented enough to do color commentary on Italian TV about professional soccer. Fr. Roger said the story has been shifted away from the leaks themselves to the person of the cardinal. Scot said the Secretary of State has created a new position of media adviser and hired Fox News reporter Greg Burke. “Media adviser role is positive step for Vatican, says new US appointee”, Catholic News Service, 6/25/12 Scot said he’s surprised that the Vatican has recognized the need for this; that they’re hiring an American; and that the position is placed within the Secretariat of State. Greg said it’s understandable they hired an American with the leadership role that America takes in communications principles and that English is the common language of the world. He sees the need for this because the Church can become insulated from the world and not savvy enough to know how something outside of its context can be misunderstood. Fr. Roger said the Vatican press spokesman said the Press Office reports to the Secretary of State already so that’s why the media adviser is in that dicastery. Fr. Roger said he knows Greg Burke and recently ran into him in an airport a few weeks ago. Greg didn’t say anything at the time. Fr. Roger said Burke will help with crisis communications and will help with breaking news, for example, helping members of the media can get the embargoed documents in advance so the breaking news stories are less shallow. Fr. Roger also said Americans think differently about crisis news. We acknowledge that reporters will eventually get the story so we need to be able to frame the narrative in advance. Scot noted Greg Burke said No to the job at least once. “I had a great job at Fox, just the right mix of time in Rome and travel; I was in my comfort zone,” he said. It took him some time to “get the courage up” and take the chance rather than risk living with the nagging feeling he could have been able to make a difference, he said. In the Anchor this week, the Fall River diocese offered its third annual Quo Vadis retreat for teen boys. Fr. Roger said it’s a help to the young men to be formed in order to have the inner strength to listen to the Lord’s call for their lives. That last few years they had good numbers and they’re expecting to exceed the numbers this year. There have been 30 or 40 ordinations in other dioceses from these days. In Harrisburg, they have 150 young men at their retreats. Quo Vadis comes from early Christian tradition about St. Peter escaping from persecution in Rome. Peter encountered Jesus on the road and asked him, “Lord, where are you going?” (Quo vadis, in Latin). Jesus said he was going to Rome to be crucified again. Peter knew that Jesus was to be crucified in him. The Quo Vadis retreat helps the men ask the question of where the Lord is going in their lives. Scot and Greg talked about the Pilot being on hiatus this week and the next and what they’ve been up to. The Pilot’s website is being updated with current news during the hiatus.

Summary of today's show: Scot Landry and his guests discuss religious freedom, the HHS Mandate, and the conclusion of the Fortnight for Freedom. Subscribe for free in iTunes Today’s host(s): Scot Landry Today’s guest(s): Cardinal Sean O'Malley, Kim Daniels, Dr. John Garvey, Dr. Angela Franks, and John Monohan Links from today’s show: Watch the full Fortnight for Freedom Town Hall Meeting on CatholicTV.com USCCB Fortnight for Freedom homepage Our First Most Cherished Liberty full text Today’s topics:The US Conference of Catholic Bishops recognizes that our religious freedom as Americans is under threat - today, July 4th, marks the end of a Fortnight for Freedom, a time of prayer, education, and activism to assert our first most cherished liberty to our elected representatives. Our show today features four addresses on the topic of religious freedom and the "HHS Mandate," as well as a reading of the USCCB document "Our First Most Cherished Liberty." 1st segment: Scot welcomed everyone to the program and wished all a happy 4th of July. He explained that we are now at the end of the Fortnight for Freedom. To cap it off, we'll hear addresses from Cardinal Sean O'Malley, Kim Daniels, Angela Franks, and John Garvey. Cardinal Sean opened by thanking all for listening and watching. He emphasized that today, Independence Day, we celebrate certain inalienable rights that God has given to us - one of which is our freedom of religion. The HHS Mandate the Church is fighting, Cardinal Sean continued, would violate our deepest convictions, restricting ministry and employment only to those of our own faith. Unless we work hard and speak frankly when our freedoms are threatened, Cardinal Sean said, we will lose this cherished freedom, as has happened in other parts of the world. Historically, the cardinal concluded, the USA has been a strong defender of religious freedom - we need to remember that this mandate is not a Catholic or Protestant issue, but an American issue that all citizens must speak out on. Kim Daniels echoed the Cardinal's words, reminding listeners that American Catholics are standing up for a basic American principle. She pointed out that attempts have been made to negotiate with the administration to avoid this fight, but all failed. Now, Kim said, 43 institutions, from Catholic Colleges to soup kitchens, schools to Archdioceses, are suing to keep the government from defining what a religious ministry is. The Catholic commitment to religious freedom, Kim continued, is not a partisan issue - anyone who has listened to a dinner-table argument between Catholics knows not everyone holds exactly the same views on politics. The USCCB has always maintained that affordable healthcare is a good for society, and bi-partisan consensus used to exist on it too! If anything, Kim said, it is the Obama administration who has politicized the universal health care issue by ignoring conscience protections for Catholics, both institutionally and individually. Dr. John Garvey made three points in his address. First, he said that the legal protection of religious liberty is waning - it has slowly degraded over the years, giving protection to priests but not teachers, or religious orders but not hospitals. Catholics and Catholic organizations exist to provide every citizen with services. Catholic Charities does adoptions, Dr. Garvey continued, because the Gospel tells us to care for the weak and vulnerable. Catholic schools and colleges exist to educate because the Gospel tells us to teach all nations. But even that basic mission is under attack - Dr. Garvey said that Catholic University itself would have to pay almost $2.6 million per year in penalties should it follow Church teaching and refuse to offer contraception, sterilization, and abortion services on health plans. Lastly, Dr. Garvey emphasized that the framers of the Constitution protected religious freedom because they thought it important for human flourishing and happiness. Dr. Angela Franks opened by listing what the mainstream media says the HHS mandate is about - a "Catholic war on women," contraception, the Church "imposing values" - none of this is true, Angela affirms. The issue cannot be contraception, Angela argues, because it is already ubiquitous and cheap; any woman who can afford a few lattes a month can buy birth control. The issue is not the Church forcing people to do anything, Dr. Franks continued, but rather about the government trying to force a policy of secularization on the Church. The biggest lie, Angela concluded, is that the Church is waging a war on women or is anti-woman. As a woman, she said, it offends her that Speaker Pelosi, SEcretary Sebelius, organizations like NOW or Planned Parenthood, or even the President should think they speak for all women. Angela mentioned a petition initiative about this point, located at WomenSpeakForThemselves.com. 2nd Segment Scot welcomed everyone back and explained that the second half of the show would be a reading of the USCCB document "Our First Most Cherished Liberty." You can access the full text at this link. For Scot Landry, our Producer Rick Heil, and our team of Dom Bettinelli, Karla Goncalves, and George Martell, happy Independence Day!

Summary of today’s show: Msgr. John McLaughlin has seen a wide variety assignments as a priest of the Archdiocese: urban parish, suburban parish, a parish that includes the New England Patriots, first vocation director for the Archdiocese of the Military Services, now priest-chaplain for campus ministry at Boston University, and the first new monsignor the Archdiocese of Boston has seen in years. Msgr. McLaughlin joins Scot Landry and his old friend Fr. Chris O’Connor for a laughter-filled hour in which the monsignor tells his fascinating story of ministry to young people that took so many different forms. Listen to the show: Subscribe for free in iTunes Today’s host(s): Scot Landry and Fr. Chris O’Connor Today’s guest(s): Msgr. John McLaughlin Links from today’s show: Catholic Center at Boston University Archdiocese of the Military Services, USA Today’s topics: Priest Profile: Msgr. John McLaughlin 1st segment: Scot welcomed everyone and discussed preparing for Independence Day and the final day of the Fortnight for Freedom. Scot said to Fr. Chris that last weekend we had an ordination of a man to the transitional diaconate. Fr. Chris said Deacon Tom McDonald was ordained at St. John Seminary. He’s been studying in Rome and just came back. He now declares ordination season is over until September when they will ordain some permanent deacons. Fr. Chris said Tom wanted to be ordained here now instead of in St. Peter’s in Rome in October mainly so that more of his family and friends could attend. Other men have made the same decision for similar reasons. They also have an another summer in order to carry out the duties of deacons, baptizing, marrying, and their other roles. Deacon Tom has been assigned to St. Paul’s in Cambridge for the summer. Today’s guest is Msgr. John McLaughlin, who was a military chaplain last year until returning to Boston to become chaplain at Boston University’s Catholic Center. 2nd segment: Scot noted that Msgr. McLaughlin wants to be called Father. He asked about his background. He grew up in St. Anthony’s parish in Woburn and when he was ordained he was the sixth man from that parish in six years and three of them were ordained at the same time. Fr. John thinks it was a coincidence that three were all together. He said Woburn is a good, close, faith-filled community that produces many vocations. He was about 30 years old when he started thinking about the priesthood. He had worked for 10 years after graduating Boston College. He was also coaching Woburn high school wrestling when a car accident killed some of his young men and injured to hers, working with them made him look at life a different way. He also traveled to Medjugorje with one of the men. He went there in 1989 for the first time.(It was reported that children were seeing the Blessed Mother.) There were 250,000 were in the little Bosnian village of about 3,000, where people prayed and sang about their faith very openly. It made him re-think his life. Later, after his second trip in 1990, he went to talk to the vocations director. Scot asked if it was a surprise to him that God might be calling him to the priesthood. Before the accident Fr. John never would have thought about it and it was a surprise to friends, family, and co-workers too. Scot asked how it was returning to college after 10 years out. Fr. John said the most difficult adjustment was moving out of his own house into a small room without a phone or a bathroom of his own. Fr. John said their class was about 18 ordained together, plus another 30 from other dioceses. He said they had a lot of fun. Scot said the class of 1995 was the largest in a lot of time. Fr. John said after ordination he went to St. Clements in Somerville for 5 years and then after that to St. Mary’s in Foxboro, which was so different. He was there for 5 years. While he was there he started LifeTeen there. They had 1,800 kids in religious education. Scot asked what it was like on Patriots Sundays in the fall. Fr. John said they had very large 4pm crowds. The Patriots won three Super Bowls while Fr. John was there. He also blessed the stadium 10 times and the Patriots never lost when he blessed the stadium. Fr. Chris said he once celebrated Mass for a visiting team. Fr. John then moved to St. Monica in Methuen for three years as pastor. It went very well. It’s a very large parish. They started LifeTeen there as well, and they have one seminarian from that who will be ordained next year. Fr. John said when you go to a parish, you don’t often see teens, although you see all other ages. He’d learned about LifeTeen and recognizing that there wasn’t a lot in the Church to bring in teens, he wanted to do that. It’s not perfect, but it is Eucharist-centered. The results were phenomenal. The kids loved coming. Scot asked if LifeTeen is a lot of work for the pastor and parish. Fr. John said it’s a lot of work and there is a financial aspect as well. There’s an evening Mass on Sunday plus the Life Night after. There’s a need for good music for the kids with a particular kind of band. From parish ministry, Fr. John was assigned to the Archdiocese of Military Services. Fr. John recalled getting a call one night asking him if he wanted to be the vocations director for the Archdiocese of the Military. He wasn’t sure at first about leaving St. Monica’s so early. Later on he found out that Cardinal O’Brien who was Archbishop for the Military Services had known Fr. John in Rome and recommended him. Archbishop Broglio, he followed Archbishop O’Brien, eventually signed him up for the job. Fr. John said he went to Washington, DC, where he had to figure out what to do as the first vocation director of the military. The archdiocese of the military is all over the world, so he relied heavily on the chaplains of the different military services. They understood that they had to be proactive in finding replacements for themselves in the priesthood. Fr. John said there was a great fraternity among chaplains. Boston has always ranked among the top three dioceses in giving chaplains to the military. He said spent a lot of time getting to know all the chaplains on retreats or convocations. Scot pointed out that Fr. John wasn’t in the military but was working for the military archdiocese. Scot asked if there seems to be an affinity for the priesthood among particular services. Fr. John said he was never in the military so he didn’t focus on one more than the others. He did note that the Marine Corps has more Catholics than any other branch, but overall the seminarians were spread out among the branches. He once did an interview with EWTN on the Fourth of July. He got a call the next day from a young Marine, a Major helicopter pilot stationed in Cherry Point, N.C. The man had some doubts, but Fr. John pointed out that he was already living and acting in a priestly way. He told the man that he was acting like he couldn’t handle the truth. The major called him back in the middle of the night and agreed. He was the first man he recruited. Fr. Chris asked what the Archdiocese of the Military is. Fr. John said it’s like the pastoral center in Boston: It takes care of the records of sacraments, it has a tribunal, takes care of the canonical and sacramental needs of chaplains. Archbishop Broglio traveled the world for confirmations and the like. He was archbishop for Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines, and Coast Guard. Scot said in the military service Fr. John wasn’t recruiting men to become military chaplains, but to help dioceses get new seminarians because he had access to so may young men who could have vocations. Fr. John said it started because a study showed that 10 percent of the men in the seminaries had military experience so they thought there might be more. The Military Archdiocese doesn’t have priests itself. They are all lended from dioceses. If the men he recruited want to be chaplains, they would be co-sponsored–each diocese paying half–and after ordination they would be in the diocese for three to five years and then go to the chaplains, where they could serve up to 25 years. Fr. John said he always tried to keep the men in the dioceses where they were from in order to be closely connected to their family and friends for life. But there are men who come from military families who have no home, so he worked with them to find a bishop who was open to the chaplains corp. He said they brought in 40 vocations over three years, including a couple into religious orders. They were able to send a seminarian to the Capuchins and one to Boston. He did that for three years and then came back to Boston to become campus minister at Boston University. He had been expecting to come back as a pastor. As a Boston College grad, he thought it was a joke at first. But the kids are great, a wonderful group of young people. Fr. John said he hasn’t had any kids from his old parishes at BU yet. As the priest-chaplain at BU, there’s no real typical day, especially when working with young people. There are money problems, family problems, problems with roommates, etc. He celebrates Mass and hears many confessions. They run five retreats per year, including two graduate retreats. They have Fellowship of Catholic University Students who run Bible studies. FOCUS are young people who are missionaries who come to campus to reach out to other young Catholics and teach them the faith, so when they go out they can instruct others. Scot recommended listeners to listen to last Wednesday’s show on FOCUS. Program #0328 for Wednesday, June 27, 2012: Curtis Martin, evangelizing on campus, and the New Evangelization Scot said last year the campus ministry team at BU turned over completely. Mother Olga had been there several years and the Brotherhood of Hope even longer. Fr. John said it was a difficult change for the students and for him, especially since he’s not done college ministry. He has to do fundraising for the program now. Also, the students are up very late every night, past midnight, and doesn’t usually get to bed past 1 or 2am. He lives in East Boston at Sacred Heart Parish with Fr. Wayne Belschner. They have three Masses on Sundays, 12 noon, 6pm, and 10pm. He likes being with young people filled with hope with a positive outlook on life. It’s exciting to be with them at this time as they prepare for life. Scot asked what it’s like being a priest at a secular college in the city. BU is the fourth largest private school in the country and is 40% Catholic. They have 30,000 or 40,000 students total. Cardinal Seán calls it the largest Catholic school in Boston. Fr. John said they have a lot of weddings of graduates who come back to Marsh Chapel. Fr. Chris filled in for Fr. John at a wedding last weekend. Fr. John said they are grateful to be able to use Marsh Chapel, which was a Methodist chapel, and Boston University lets them have Mass there. The Catholic Center is a four-story brownstone owned by the Archdiocese of Boston on Granby Street. For Mass on weekends, they see 700 to 1,000 students. They have anywhere from 30 to a few hundred people in the building daily. They do spaghetti suppers on Tuesday open for anyone on campus where they feed several hundred. After the supper they do something called Spirit Night Live. Other times in the week they have adoration that is well attended. Scot asked what activities besides Mass helps the kids go deeper in their faith. Fr. John said Adoration is very powerful in the kids and the students are serious about. They also get 90+ at the retreats and they plan it all themselves. Fr. John congratulated Camille, one of his interns, on getting engaged to Danny Menardi and they will be married next year. They have also had two BU alum ordained in recent years and there are several alums in the seminary right now. Scot asked Fr. John for his hopes as he goes into his second year. Fr. John said they are looking at a new retreat site, Camp Fatima in Gilhmanton, NH, which they hope will give them some new opportunities. They will do the undergrad and grad retreats at the same time there while keeping them separate. They will also be purchasing breviaries – if anyone would like to contribute to Catholic Center, 211 Bay State Road, Boston, MA for the breviaries–for use by the students. They plan to start doing the Liturgy of the Hours with the students during the school year. Scot suggested that people could support the work of the Catholic Center, which gets only about half its budget from the Catholic Appeal.

Summary of today’s show: Ross Douthat’s new book “Bad Religion” looks at how the landscape of American spirituality has changed over the past 60 years–from traditional orthodoxy to individual spiritualism– and what that means for our society and culture. Scot Landry and Douthat talk about the American religious revival after World War II in a common Christian orthodoxy and then splintered into a series of heresies that hold sway today. Listen to the show: Subscribe for free in iTunes Today’s host(s): Scot Landry Today’s guest(s): Ross Douthat, columnist for the New York Times and author Links from today’s show: Ross Douthat’s columns for the New York Times Bad Religion: How We Became a Nation of Heretics Today’s topics: Ross Douthat and Bad Religion 1st segment: Scot welcomed everyone to the show. He recalled as a father how time flies past when raising kids andy ow it’s tough to see trends when living in the present. This is true of our faith and it can be tough to see how much has changed in our faith over the past 40 years and to understand why. The new book “Bad Religion: How We Became a Nation of Heretics” has helped Scot to understand how Catholicisicm has changed in the past 40 years. Scot welcomed Ross Douthat to the show. He’s the youngest-ever op-ed columnist in the history of the New York Times. He was previously at The Atlantic. He’s also authored two other books “Privilege: Harvard and the Education of the Ruling Class” and “Grand New Party: How Republicans Can Win the Working Class and Save the American Dream”. Scot asked Ross about his background. He’s from southern Connecticut originally. He grew up in the 1980s and was baptized in the Episcopalian church. When he was about 8 or 9, his family started attending charismatic healing ministries conducted by this particular woman and they became introduced to Pentecostalism and Evangelicalism, until at about 15 years old, when they started attending a Catholic church. He formally converted at 17. He took a tour of American Christianity when he was young. It gave him a slightly broader perspective on American religion than most journalists certainly. Ross said he wasn’t pressured to convert, but with his mom converting he kind of moved in the wake of his parents’ spiritual journey. He didn’t take an unconventional path into the faith. He also found it a relief to enter a church where nothing unexpected happened during worship, like in Pentecostalism. He said his parents spent a lot of time at a startup Evangelical church at Yale university and were involved in several smaller Protestant churches. For his mother, she always said she had an encounter with Jesus through Evangelical Christianity, but was looking for the Church that was the fullest expression of Jesus on earth. For her, the absence of final authority in Protestantism was a mark against it. The Catholic mystical tradition provided a bridge for her from Pentecostalism. They were also still Episcopalian enough that Catholic liturgy wasn’t foreign either. Scot said that as a cradle Catholic going to Harvard he found defending his faith as a spur to growing deeper in it. He asked Ross what it was like for him at Harvard about a decade later. Ross said intellectually it was a great experience. As a Christian entering such an environment, you either abandon your faith immediately or you hold onto your faith and end up getting the best possible education because you’re working even harder as someone outside the academic mainstream. You’re more likely to challenge and be challenged by the experience. In terms of the practice of his faith, he doesn’t think an Ivy League education is not necessarily the best thing because the culture of the elites in this country is oriented around achievement for achievement’s sake and success at any cost. It’s not so much atheism as worldliness. He started writing in high school and in college he worked on the conservative campus newspaper and wrote a conservative column for the Harvard Crimson, but he didn’t really decide on becoming a journalist as a career until he needed a job after graduation. He was hired at the New York Times at 29 years old. He said it wasn’t much of a choice to move from The Atlantic to the Times. He loved The Atlantic, but the Times–even in this age–is a unique institution with an unparalleled reach. Maybe particularly for someone with his conservative, Catholic vies, it makes him distinctive among their columnists. He mostly writes about American domestic politics. Mostly he’s been writing about the presidential campaign. He most recently wrote about healthcare. But he also writes about religion and religious issues, plus pop culture, sociology, and topics like that. Ross said the idea for the book Bad Religion came to him during George W. Bush’s second term when the battle in American politics and culture seemed to be between the Irreligious Left and the Religious Right. Ross took part in the debates and dismissed claims that America was about to turn into a theocracy. He also thought the binary division in that approach didn’t come close to reflecting religion in America today. He wanted to write about where Americans were getting their spiritual ideas and beliefs from. The thesis became that America has become less institutionally religious and less overall Christian, but just as religious. He writes a lot about people like author Elizabeth Gilbert, Joel Osteen, and Dan Brown. He argues that you need to look closely at pop spirituality: books, TV shows, and the like because that’s where people are getting their religion from, not churches. Scot said the religious cultural history Ross documents was helpful. After World War II, orthodox Christianity was at the center of American culture. Ross said the books start after WWII which historians of American religion call the post-war religious revival: People were attending church at higher rates, church construction was booming, there were more movies of Bible stories and depicting Catholic priests. There was a broad revival, but he also says that it coexisted with an intellectual revival. The experience of totalitarianism led to a reassessment and a new willingness to look back at traditional sources of wisdom to understand what had gone wrong in the modern age. So he started the book with the poet William H. Auden,who returned to his Christian faith after being confronted with the evil of the Nazis. Ross argues that this kind of reassessment happened in al to of places. There was a new interest in religion on college campuses. It didn’t mean America had turned into a land of orthodox Christians. America has always been a land of many competing definitions of what Christianity is, but in this time the institutional churches were stronger then than any other time. It also seemed to be a times when various branches seemed to be merging, when Bill Graham would do a crusade in a city and a Catholic bishop would write an op-ed in support. Scot said Ross writes that in 1930, 37% of Americans were formally affiliated with a church and it rose to 69% in 1960. Also in 1950, Americans spent $24 million on church architecture. By 1960 it was $1 billion. Ross said there are many reason all that went away. He tried to look at the more structural factors because there’s often a heavy focus on personalities, like High Hefner or Betty Friedan or Gloria Steinem. He said the trends start with political polarization. In the early 1960s, when you look at how Christianity interacted with politics, you see that religious believers were intimately involved in politics. The Civil Rights movement was explicitly Christian. But because the two parties weren’t completely polarized into conservative Republican and liberal Democrat, something like the Civil Rights wasn’t completely partisan. But Christian interventions became identified with the religious left and later with the religious right. It became harder to become a Christian first and a liberal or conservative Republican or Democrat. After Roe v. Wade, there was a moment when it seemed the pro-life movement could be bipartisan, but then it became polarized. Then there is the sexual revolution, which makes the link between middle class norms and Christian sexual ethics seem weak, out of date, and repressive. American society has severed sex from reproduction and to divorce it from Christian morality. There’s also money as America becomes a much wealthier country. Just as the New Testament play on chastity doesn’t play in post-sexual revolution America, so too did the Christian suspicion of wealth gets lost too. America becomes a worldlier society. Then with globalization, the world in all its diversity is beamed into living rooms as never before, while the West becomes associated with imperialism and repression. So people begin to question how their church could be the One, True Church in such a big, diverse world, plus the association of Christianity with European crimes and oppression. Ironically, the areas experiencing decolonization have Christianity take off because Christianity becomes less Western. Scot said Ross writes that the Christian response is to become more relevant to the culture or become more resistant to the changes. 2nd segment: Scot said Ross charts four main heresies in American Christianity today: the search of the historical Jesus; the prosperity Gospel; spiritual, not religious (i.e. against organized religion); and the nationalism of our destiny of the United States as that shining city on a hill. Scot asked Ross to describe what he means by orthodoxy. Ross said it’s a kind of Christian consensus shared by the Catholic Church, much of Eastern Orthodoxy, and most of the mainline Christianity, i.e. Christianity as it coalesced in the 3rd of 4th century. He contrasts that with heresy, which he says is something deeply influenced by Christianity, but takes on aspect of Christianity emphasizes it out of balance with the rest. Christianity is willing to speak in terms of mystery and to always be balancing one side with the other: e.g. the world is both good and evil or the balance between faith and works. Heresies try to make the faith more rational, saying mysteries or paradoxes aren’t rational and need to be made cleaner. Heresies are easier to accept and easier to explain than the true mysteries of faith. For example, there is the prosperity Gospel. He spends a lot of time looking a Joel Osteen, a successful TV preacher and author of many books. He’s a lot like Billy Graham in his preaching a message of God’s universal love, traveling about and selling out stadiums. But the difference is that Graham’s preaching was always balanced between love and the need for repentance in the face of damnation. But you can listen to Osteen for a long time without hearing much at all about human sinfulness and God’s judgment. Graham is more in the orthodox tradition because he’s balancing love and justice, while Osteen only takes one piece of the story and emphasizing it. Scot said he sees sometimes that the harder demands of Catholicism aren’t perched because it’s thought it will help people come back to faith, even though experience shows the opposite. Ross spends a fair amount of time talking about how institutional churches are good for our society and in fact make it all work. But if a more do-it-yourself form of spirituality becomes dominant, then it becomes harder for churches to do the social part of their job. It’s hard for a religion of people praying on their own to help society. If you’re your own church then it becomes hard to run a soup kitchen on your own. People aren’t as much joiners as we used to be, plus even more children are born out of wedlock making the social fabric weaker. You can see that younger Americans are more narcissistic, more self-centered, less empathetic. DIY religion makes it easy to come into something that never challenges. Thus the prosperity Gospel is very comforting to people who upwardly module in a materialistic society. But maybe what America could have heard in the housing bubble was that you can’t serve both God and mammon, for example. Scot said one of the tougher heresies is the DIY religion, cherry picking the beliefs you want. This is tough because we’ve been bombarded by messages from Oprah and others that we don’t need to balance our needs and wants. Ross said it’s a case that takes something good in the Christian message–that you can encounter God within yourself–but then makes it the whole of religion. So if the “god within” contradicts your Church’s voice, then the god within trumps all. Sometimes that voice of god becomes your ego or libido, so people use that to bless their own desires and impulses. The book and movie Eat, Pray, Love depicts a spiritual journey where God seems to exist to bless the author’s decision to divorce her husband for her own self-fulfillment. Scot strongly recommends this book for Catholic discussion groups and for individuals.

Summary of today’s show: Earlier in June, Msgr. Robert Deeley and Msgr. William Fay traveled from Boston to Ugandan in Africa for the feast of St. Charles Lwanga and Companions, martyrs for the faith who are highly revered in that country. Scot Landry and Fr. Mark O’Connell talk with Msgr. Deeley about the trip, how it came about, the story of the martyrs, and the remarkable faith of the Ugandans today, where one parish has 100,000 people and a Mass will typically last three hours. Listen to the show: Subscribe for free in iTunes Today’s host(s): Scot Landry and Fr. Mark O’Connell Today’s guest(s): Msgr. Robert Deeley, Vicar General of the Archdiocese of Boston Links from today’s show: St. Charles Lwanga and Companions, Martyrs of Uganda Today’s topics: The Ugandan Martyrs and Catholicism in Uganda Today 1st segment: Scot welcomed Fr. Mark to the show and noted that the end of June marks the end of the fiscal year for the Archdiocese, which means goodbyes to people leaving and hellos to new people. Fr. Mark said they said goodbye to Sr. Peggy who was working as a judge in the Metropolitan Tribunal. Also, Mary Ryan, who worked in the finance department, is retiring after 20 years in service. Scot recalls that Mary was at the 8:15am Mass at the Pastoral Center every day. He said she worked in the Revolving Loan Fund, which functions like the Archdiocesan bank for parishes. Fr. Tom Foley’s farewell Mass was yesterday. He leaves the post of Secretary for Parish Life and Leadership and is going to become an Air Force chaplain. Also, Bishop Arthur Kennedy is leaving as rector of St. John Seminary to take up a new office as vicar for the New Evangelization. Also today, Scot asked listeners to pray for Cardinal Seán on his 68th birthday. He celebrated the noon Mass at the Pastoral Center and was joined representatives of the Orthodox Church to celebrate the feast of Saints Peter and Paul. Today, Msgr. Robert Deeley is joining us to talk about a recent trip he took to Uganda to talk about the Ugandan martyrs. 2nd segment: Scot and Fr. Mark welcomed Msgr. Deeley to the show. Scot said June 29 makes him think of the feast of Sts. Peter and Paul and how it’s a big holiday in Rome. Msgr. Deeley spent many years in Rome and said it marks the two great apostles upon whom the Church was founded. It’s also traditional for the Pope to give the pallium, the symbol of the metropolitan archbishop’s office, to new archbishops from around the world. It reminds us of the unity of the Church and its expanse around the world. There were four Americans this year, three from the Roman rite: Archbishop Charles Chaput of Piladelphia; Archbishop Samuel Aquila of Denver; and Archbishop William Lori of Baltimore. They note that the Archbishop wears it only in his own diocese and the diocese’s of his province. Pallium on Wikipedia Moving to another topic, Msgr. Robert Deeley recently traveled to Uganda along with Msgr. William Fay at the beginning of June for the feast of the Ugandan martyrs. Msgr. Deeley went to Uganda because so many priests from Uganda come to Boston, especially to study at Boston College and other local colleges. While here, they live in our rectories and help out in our parishes. One Ugandan priest lived with Msgr. Fay for two years before returning to Uganda. Fr. Paul is rector of the cathedral in Lugazi, Uganda, and he invited Msgr. Fay and Msgr. Deeley to come and be there for the great feast of the Ugandan martyrs. Diocese of Lugazi Msgr. Deeley said they didn’t go on safari so they saw no animals. It’s a beautiful country. They visited Lake Victoria and saw the source of the Nile, which travels 4,000 miles through Africa. Scot said he was surprised that as little as 200 years ago there were practically no Christians in Uganda, but it was the martyrdom of St. Charles Lwanga and his companions in the 1880s led to the great growth of Catholicism. Msgr. Deeley said he wanted to go back a few steps. The king around 1850 wrote and asked Queen Victoria to send missionaries to impart values and morals they had. The first were Anglican and then Catholics followed. The king who succeeded the first about 6 or 7 years after the Catholic missionaries arrived was a selfish and immoral man. He murdered a group of young men who wouldn’t acquiesce to his immoral demands. The youngest of them was 13 or 14 years of age. Charles Lwanga was their leader. They were burned to death. There 13 Catholics and 11 Anglicans and shrines maintained by both Catholics and Anglicans are maintained at the site of the martyrdom. The missionaries were expelled from Uganda, but the Catholic laity continue to teach and preach and catechize one another. Scot said the king gave all the martyrs the chance to renounce their Christian faith, including a few who were only baptized at the last minute, but all chose to keep their faith even though they knew they would die in a horrible way. At the time of the martyrdom, there were only about 200 Christians in the country and now there are millions, which shows how the blood of the martyrs become the seed and fertilizer for faith. Msgr. Deeley said one of the eyewitnesses recalled how the martyrs pointed to the sky as they went to their death to signal that they were going to Paradise for their faith. The celebration of this feast is a spectacular representation of the culture and faith and music and more. He said there were 1 million people at the celebration. Meanwhile, one of the bishops was here in Waltham to celebrate with a Ugandan community here as well as another in Germany doing likewise. Otherwise, every bishop in the country was there at the celebration. The Mass is celebrated on an artificial island in the middle of the lake and the people surround. People were singing in Swahili, Buganda, and Gregorian chant. The full representation of the whole Church, all ages, all vocations, was a spectacular view. Fr. Mark asked for Msgr. Deeley’s experience. Msgr. Deeley said the Mass was five hours long, three hours for the Mass itself and two hours for the speeches at the end. This is the longest Mass he’d ever attended, including Easter vigil at St. Peter’s. The next day he went to the funeral of a local priest and that was three hours. People love to celebrate their faith and they do it with great joy and solemnity. He said they were blessed because Maureen Heil of the Propagation of the Faith in Boston had contacted the head of the episcopal conference in Uganda who got excellent seats at the Mass on the island and they were announced as honored guests. Msgr. Deeley said the country is very poor and it’s still very young at only 50 years of independence. But their hospitality is tremendous. Scot asked about the Church’s role in society in Uganda. Msgr. Deeley said in the cathedral parish they have 26 outstations or parishes in villages. They visited one parish where they met the pastor and his two associates. They had a parish school and a high school, built by people from Canada and the United States. He also had 30 more outstations with 12 schools and 100,000 people all in one parish. They had tea with Bishop Matthias Ssekamaanya of Lugazi one night, and he told him that they believe that every parish needs a school and that as the outstations grow they will also become parishes with schools. The government funds some of the education. He said the vicar general of the diocese is also in charge of schools. The government’s funds are limited, and they also control what you can do. The government doesn’t allow the Church to take any fees whatsoever, including having children pay for lunches during the day in order to make it appear the education is completely free. There are also private schools, which aren’t run by the government or the Church. Scot asked what Msgr. Deeley’s sense is of the freedom of the people to live their faith as Catholics, in light of the Fortnight for Freedom. He said the Church plays an important role as the voice of the poor, the needy and families. The country is 87% Christian, 13% Muslim; 40% Catholic, 30% Anglican. The Church is a very important force for the betterment of people and building of systems that are just and honest. Fr. Mark asked how modern the area is. Msgr. Deeley said many buildings are indeed modern. They are building a new center for the episcopal conference, which the Archdiocese of Boston contributed to. He noted that they don’t use metal frameworks, but wood, and then add concrete and brick and the like. He said it’s a tropical climate so most places don’t have windows. He said bananas are an important part of their diet, several different varieties they eat in many different ways. Back to schools, he noted the dedication of teachers in the schools. They visited a school where one classroom had 75 students. They are trying their hardest to make education and opportunity available to the children of their communities. Many of the teachers are catechists. In each of the outstations, there is a catechist who is often a teacher or other professional. When they can’t have Mass with a priest, they gather for prayer and study. They try to get a priest to the outstations at least once per month. Scot said there are several thousand Ugandans living just in Waltham. He asked how his experience helps Msgr. Deeley appreciate and welcome Catholics who come to our Archdiocese from all over the world. He said he saw how the faith is central to their lives. It’s not just something they do on Sunday, but their whole lives. Scot said most people living in this area wouldn’t be able to say they personally someone who died for their faith, except perhaps people who’ve come here from other places around the world. He said he’s been moved by the stories from Vietnamese priests who tell of how the martyrdom of someone they knew inspired them. Msgr. Deeley said he met a priest from Kenya who’d only been ordained a few days who was walking with his parish and they’d been walking 21 days to go to the shrine of the Martyrs. He told a story of being beaten and left by the side of a road because he’d been preaching about morality and faith. He only survived because another priest found him in time. The pilgrimage to the shrine was his way to thank God a year later. He was filled with joy and faith and was excited to go on this pilgrimage with the people of his parish. Now as we do every week at this time, we will consider the Mass readings for this Sunday, specifically the Gospel reading. First Reading for the 13th Sunday in Ordinary Time, July 1, 2012 (Wisdom 1:13–15; 2:23–24) God did not make death, nor does he rejoice in the destruction of the living. For he fashioned all things that they might have being; and the creatures of the world are wholesome, and there is not a destructive drug among them nor any domain of the netherworld on earth, for justice is undying. For God formed man to be imperishable; the image of his own nature he made him. But by the envy of the devil, death entered the world, and they who belong to his company experience it. Gospel for the 13th Sunday in Ordinary Time, July 1, 2012 (Mark 5:21–43) When Jesus had crossed again in the boat to the other side, a large crowd gathered around him, and he stayed close to the sea. One of the synagogue officials, named Jairus, came forward. Seeing him he fell at his feet and pleaded earnestly with him, saying, “My daughter is at the point of death. Please, come lay your hands on her that she may get well and live.” He went off with him, and a large crowd followed him and pressed upon him. There was a woman afflicted with hemorrhages for twelve years. She had suffered greatly at the hands of many doctors and had spent all that she had. Yet she was not helped but only grew worse. She had heard about Jesus and came up behind him in the crowd and touched his cloak. She said, “If I but touch his clothes, I shall be cured.” Immediately her flow of blood dried up. She felt in her body that she was healed of her affliction. Jesus, aware at once that power had gone out from him, turned around in the crowd and asked, “Who has touched my clothes?” But his disciples said to Jesus, “You see how the crowd is pressing upon you, and yet you ask, ‘Who touched me?’” And he looked around to see who had done it. The woman, realizing what had happened to her, approached in fear and trembling. She fell down before Jesus and told him the whole truth. He said to her, “Daughter, your faith has saved you. Go in peace and be cured of your affliction.” While he was still speaking, people from the synagogue official’s house arrived and said, “Your daughter has died; why trouble the teacher any longer?” Disregarding the message that was reported, Jesus said to the synagogue official, “Do not be afraid; just have faith.” He did not allow anyone to accompany him inside except Peter, James, and John, the brother of James. When they arrived at the house of the synagogue official, he caught sight of a commotion, people weeping and wailing loudly. So he went in and said to them, “Why this commotion and weeping? The child is not dead but asleep.” And they ridiculed him. Then he put them all out. He took along the child’s father and mother and those who were with him and entered the room where the child was. He took the child by the hand and said to her, “Talitha koum,” which means, “Little girl, I say to you, arise!” The girl, a child of twelve, arose immediately and walked around. At that they were utterly astounded. He gave strict orders that no one should know this and said that she should be given something to eat. Scot said he was struck by the long interruption in the story of Jairus and his daughter with the afflicted woman. The message was that our faith can heal us. Msgr. Deeley said it’s a good opportunity to remind us to avail ourselves of the opportunity to receive the Sacrament of the Anointing of the Sick before we go to the hospital. It is a healing sacrament. It can be difficult because of privacy laws to find out who is in the hospital and to visit them. He said it’s not Extreme Unction anymore and it’s not just the Last Rites. Fr. Mark noted Jesus’ kindness, noticing the one woman in the crowd. He reached out to her with kindness and love. He also made sure the crowd knew the girl was not dead, but he told them she was just sleeping so people wouldn’t treat her like a zombie. St. Mark also puts in the Aramaic words that show Jesus’ gentleness in awakening the girl from death. Scot said Jesus wants us all to arise in our faith and that was the name of our program of renewal. Jesus then asked the people to give her something to eat to prove that she is alive and not a ghost. Msgr. Deeley said it’s so important for us to have the freedom to work with the sick and feed the hungry because we are following the example of Christ.

Summary of today’s show: On our Thursday show, Scot Landry, Susan Abbott, Gregory Tracy, and Fr. Roger Landry consider the new headlines of the week, including the Supreme Court’s ruling on the Affordable Care Act; Cardinal Seán’s Fortnight for Freedom town hall; last Saturday’s ordination Mass; the Redemptoris Mater Seminary gala dinner honoring Rabbi David Rosen; the Catholic Appeal passing a milestone; and Catholic Press awards for the Pilot. Listen to the show: Subscribe for free in iTunes Today’s host(s): Scot Landry and Susan Abbott Today’s guest(s): Gregory Tracy, managing editor of the Pilot, the newspaper of the Archdiocese of Boston, and Fr. Roger Landry, pastor of St. Bernadette Parish in Fall River Links from today’s show: The Anchor The Pilot Some of the stories discussed on this show will be available on The Pilot’s and The Anchor’s websites on Friday morning. Please check those sites for the latest links. Today’s topics: Supreme Court ruling; Fortnight for Freedom town hall; Ordination Mass; Redemptoris Mater dinner; Catholic Appeal; Catholic Press Awards 1st segment: Scot said big tech news from Susan. She finally got an iPhone and is turning to producer Rick Heil for help in learning how to use it. She has already added the ICatholicRadio app. List of great Catholic apps It’s been a busy week between the ordinations, the Fortnight4Freedom live,interactive town hall, the Redmeptoris Mater Seminary. They brought in Gregory Tracy and Fr. Roger Landry, who has just completed his move to St. Bernadette Parish. Scot said the live town hall was the first of its kind to his memory. BostonCatholic.org/Freedom Fortnight4Freedom.org Town Hall photos Susan said she was impressed by the production values as well as the guests, Jim Garvey, president of Catholic University of America; Kim Daniel of CatholicVoices USA; and Angela Franks of Theological Institute for the New Evangelization. Greg said he liked it very much especially toward the end with the question and answer period. He liked the give and take among the panelists. Scot said that for those who hadn’t been up to speed on these issues this town hall provided a lot of good background. Fr. Roger said he was also very impressed by the Q and A. He thought President Garvey looked like Christopher Plummer and speaks like a movie star. Angela Franks was incredibly powerful on how this isn’t a war on women. Fr. Roger also thinks this is the kind of thing we should do more often, not just when we’re in crisis. It’s a great opportunity to learn a lot in one hour. Scot said Cardinal Seán very much liked it too and he thinks the cardinal would like to do similar things on other issues, like the Year of Faith this fall on what it’s about and what he’s asking Catholics in the Archdiocese to do. Scot said the Pilot article did a good job on getting quotes from the panelists, including Angela Franks: “You may have heard some in the secular media advance certain myths about the HHS mandate, which is the latest infringement on our religious liberty. For example, you might have heard that this issue is about access to contraception, or that this is just a Catholic issue, or that the Church is imposing her values on the rest of society. You might have heard that the Church is waging a war on women,” she said. “All are false, blatantly false. Clearly this issue cannot be about access to contraception, which is inexpensive and broadly available. If a person can afford a cell phone or even three lattes a month, she can quite likely afford to pay for contraception. Instead this issue is about forcing Church organizations and every Catholic to provide contraception and abortion-causing drugs and subsidize them, which are actions against public teaching,” she said. Susan said the comparison to phones and coffee grounds it in reality. Angela was succinct and refuted the major points we keep hearing in the popular press one by one. Susan also liked Angela’s comment that it’s up to the laity to take the lead on the front lines at the water cooler. Scot also quoted John Garvey’s third point: “The framers of our constitution and the Bill of Rights protected the free exercise of religion because they thought it was important for human flourishing and happiness, but our society will not care about protecting religious freedom for long if it doesn’t care about God. That is where we must begin to reform. We won’t have and we probably won’t need religious exemptions for nurses, doctors, teachers, social workers, if no one is practicing their religion. The best way to protect religious freedom might be to remind people that they should love God,” Garvey said. Scot said when we look at the Church as a family, many of our family members have stopped practicing their faith and we have to look in the mirror and see if we are still practicing our faith as strongly. If we don’t care about our faith, then why should it be protected? Greg said the ambivalence of some Catholics was one of the arguments used against our religious liberty. Fr. Roger said the point illustrates how we got here. As for the how to move in the future, we have to grow in the importance of religion not just to society, but to each of us individually as well, which is why the Year of Faith is so important. Moving to other news, the ordination Mass took place at Holy Cross Cathedral last Saturday. The new priests are Fathers Eric M. Bennett, 31; Eric F. Cadin, 31; Felipe de Jesus Gonzalez, 34; John J. Healey, 62; Adrian A. Milik, 30; and Michael F. Sheehan FPO, 31. Father Michael Sheehan, a member of the Franciscans of the Primitive Observance, a religious community in the archdiocese, described the feeling of finally becoming a priest after completing his studies. “It is awesome. It is awesome in all of the senses of that word. On the one hand, there is the joyful thrill of knowing that you will be acting as Christ for people, and then on the other hand, there is the chilling responsibility that you will be acting as Christ for people,” he said. Father Sheehan’s parents said their son felt the call to the priesthood from an early age. “I am extremely proud of Michael and all his accomplishments. It all culminates today in his ordination. We are very pleased and excited for him,” the new priest’s father Gary Sheehan, 59, said. His mother Diane Sheehan, 57, said she knew her son would find success in his pursuits. “Michael has been a leader his whole life. We knew in second grade that he was going to do well whatever he did. God bless him. It has been a long time coming to this day,” she said. His grandmother, Anne P. Shannon, 83, said she knew her grandson had a calling since he was young. “I was attending the quarter of seven Mass every morning. He was with me, so I always knew that Michael was special, and that he indeed had a calling — and I was right,” she said. Scot said the ordination is the highlight for all the families, not just the new priests. Susan said she didn’t attend the Mass, but watched it on TV and found herself compelled to watch the whole thing. She said she took notes on Cardinal Seán’s homily in which he talked about St. Peter’s denial, which he said wasn’t made to a soldier with a knife, but to a waitress with an attitude. She talked about the images of the imposition of hands and how the CatholicTV coverage allowed for the sacred silence that occurred at several times during the Mass. Fr. Roger said the words of the sacrament are a continuing call to conversion 13 years after his own ordination. He looks at his hands differently now because of the sacraments he now performs with them. His hands are an extension of his body as he is an extension of Christ’s Body. Fr. Roger talked about how as a priest he is now on call 24/7. He recalled a conversation with actor Jim Caviezel who played Jesus in the Passion of the Christ about the pressure that’s on him all the time now to live up to that image and how he wondered how priests lived up to that their whole lives. Greg said he thought how fortunate he’s been able to go to the last 10 out of 11 ordination Masses. What he recalls is the sense of emotion among the ordinands both before and after the Mass. One of his favorite moments was when the Cardinal blesses the hands of the new priests and then kisses them. The six men are starting their new assignments today. Breaking news this morning is that Archbishop Fulton Sheen has been declared Venerable, which is the second big step toward canonization. Fr. Roger said when he was in the diocese of Peoria, he’d heard about a miracle attributed to Sheen, which could advance him to the next step of beatification. He also called attention to the cause of Servant of God Alvaro del Portillo y Diez de Sollano, who was also declared Venerable, and was a major contributor to Vatican II as well as a close collaborator with Pope John Paul II. Ordination Photos Archdiocese of Boston 2012 Ordination to the Priesthood - Cardinal Seán O’Malley OFM Cap from Archdiocese of Boston on Vimeo. Also in the Pilot this week is a story about the Redemptoris Mater Seminary gala dinner last Sunday. Susan said her first close-up experience of the NeoCatechumenal Way and the seminary was the big concert this past May at Symphony Hall and so she wanted to come to this dinner. She said it was a great dinner, honoring Rabbi David Rosen, the International Director of Interreligious Affairs of the American Jewish Committee and Director of its Heilbrunn Institute for International Interreligious Understanding. He is also the former Chief Rabbi of Ireland. He is a past chairman of the International Jewish Committee on Interreligious Consultations and is also Honorary Advisor on Interfaith Relations to the Chief Rabbinate of Israel. He serves on its Commission for Interreligious Dialogue, and represents the Chief Rabbinate on the Council of Religious Institutions of the Holy Land. Susan said he spoke about the struggle of the Jewish people for survival as well as the teaching of the Church in the Second Vatican Council on our Jewish elder brothers in faith. He also spoke about Pope John Paul II’s friendship with the Jewish people. After the rabbi spoke, the seminarians of Redemptoris Mater sang “Shema Israel,” a song based on one of the most important Jewish prayers, to honor the speaker and the message. … The archdiocesan liaison to the Jewish community, Father David C. Michael gave his thoughts on the speaker and the meaning of the night for Catholic and Jewish communities in Boston. “Reaching out in love and understanding to one another, that is an important place to begin. Then we have to deepen that relationship, that’s where the hard work begins. The hard work begins in the deepening,” he said. “I think that his quote of John Paul II was absolutely on target where the pope says before we can be a blessing to the nations we have to be a blessing to one another,” Father Michael said. Greg said Rosen is very significant in terms of Catholic-Jewish relations. When the Holy Father calls inter-religious meetings, it’s Rosen who is called to stand next to the Pope as a representative of the Jewish faith. The audio of Rosen’s speech will be on the Pilot’s website on Friday. Scot said June 30 is a milestone date for the Catholic Appeal, because it’s the end of the fiscal year and the end of the parish campaign. Scot said they are within $100,000 of making their fiscal year goal of $14 million but still have a long way to go to make the calendar year goal of $14 million in 2012. BostonCatholicAppeal.org Scot also noted that the Pilot won seven Catholic Press Awards among 64 total awards given. Greg won an award for a photo he took to illustrate a story on the new Roman Missal. They also won an award for their editorial on the Maria Talks website as well as another on the Defense of Marriage Act. The Anchor also won an award for the columns written by Fr. Timothy Goldrick. The award was given by the Society for the Propagation for the Faith. Scot also profiled the obituary of Fr. Joseph Moynihan who was a pastor for 22 years in Westwood. 3rd segment: cot said the Supreme Court decision this morning was surprising, that Chief Justice Roberts sided with the so-called liberal wing. Scot read from the statement of the USCCB: Today the United States Supreme Court issued a decision upholding as a tax the provision of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) that requires individuals to purchase a health plan—the so-called “individual mandate.” For nearly a century, the Catholic bishops of the United States have been and continue to be consistent advocates for comprehensive health care reform to ensure access to life-affirming health care for all, especially the poorest and the most vulnerable.Although the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) did not participate in these cases and took no position on the specific questions presented to the Court, USCCB’s position on health care reform generally and on ACA particularly is a matter of public record.The bishops ultimately opposed final passage of ACA for several reasons. First, ACA allows use of federal funds to pay for elective abortions and for plans that cover such abortions, contradicting longstanding federal policy.The risk we identified in this area has already materialized, particularly in the initial approval by the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) of “high risk” insurance pools that would have covered abortion. Second, the Act fails to include necessary language to provide essential conscience protection, both within and beyond the abortion context.We have provided extensive analyses of ACA’s defects with respect to both abortion and conscience.The lack of statutory conscience protections applicable to ACA’s new mandates has been illustrated in dramatic fashion by HHS’s “preventive services” mandate, which forces religious and other employers to cover sterilization and contraception, including abortifacient drugs. Third, ACA fails to treat immigrant workers and their families fairly. ACA leaves them worse off by not allowing them to purchase health coverage in the new exchanges created under the law, even if they use their own money.This undermines the Act’s stated goal of promoting access to basic life-affirming health care for everyone, especially for those most in need. Following enactment of ACA, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) has not joined in efforts to repeal the law in its entirety, and we do not do so today.The decision of the Supreme Court neither diminishes the moral imperative to ensure decent health care for all, nor eliminates the need to correct the fundamental flaws described above.We therefore continue to urge Congress to pass, and the Administration to sign, legislation to fix those flaws. Scot said it seems a measured statement. If the whole act had been struck down, the 50-plus lawsuits filed against the HHS mandate wouldn’t have been needed, but today we’re in the same position we were in yesterday. Greg noted that the justices in the minority would have struck down the whole law. He said the bishops were always in favor of expanding healthcare for the poor, just in a way that doesn’t violate consciences. Scot said these lawsuits filed Catholic institutions continue and it is another constitutional issue about religious liberty. Today’s decision was on the government’s authority to enact an individual mandate. Scot said his analysis is that this clearly expands federal power, even if it’s a tax on those who won’t buy federal healthcare. Roberts said you can’t force someone to buy healthcare, but you can tax someone for almost anything. Greg said Roberts also said he wasn’t saying that this tax is a good idea. He’s essentially saying that we need to respect the will of the people through their elected officials in passing a law if it’s constitutional. It may not be a good law, but it’s constitutional. It also means it can be repealed by the representatives as well. Scot said this is the second biggest court decision in his lifetime, second only to Bush v. Gore. Greg noted that this is different from Roe v. Wade when it invented something that didn’t exist before. In this case, the court was only giving deference was being given to the elected representatives.

Summary of today’s show: The Fellowship of Catholic University Students (FOCUS) has been present on college campuses around the country for 14 years, reaching out to tens of thousands of Catholic students to introduce them to Jesus Christ. Scot Landry and Fr. Matt Williams talk with Curtis Martin, the founder of FOCUS, about the FOCUS difference, the intense training and strategic plan they give their missionaries, and how they call people to live heroically for something bigger than themselves. Also, they discuss Curtis’ appointment as a consultor to the Pontifical Council for the New Evangelization in Rome. Listen to the show: Subscribe for free in iTunes Today’s host(s): Scot Landry and Fr. Matt Williams Today’s guest(s): Curtis Martin Links from today’s show: Fellowship of Catholic University Students focusequip.org Crossing the Goal FOCUS / Curtis Martin Intro Vid from FOCUSNational on Vimeo. Today’s topics: Curtis Martin, evangelizing on campus, and the New Evangelization 1st segment: Scot Landry and Fr. Matt Williams talked about the annual Middle School Harbor Cruise. They started at Our Lady of Good Voyage chapel on the harbor, where they had a catechesis on the Eucharist and a little bit of Adoration. He said toward the end of the evening the thunderstorms hit and the light show was pretty spectacular. Tomorrow is a youth ministry gathering, a beach day for those who work in ministry, starting with Mass at St. Thomas Aquinas in Nahant followed by a beach party. Scot welcomed Curtis Martin to the show. Curtis is founder and president of Fellowship of Catholic University Students, which has presence on several local college campuses, Boston University and MIT. They will be adding Harvard this fall. Scot said Curtis spoke at the Boston Catholic Men’s Conference a few years ago. Curtis said there are a lot of exciting things going on in Boston. He said there is a great local parish near Harvard in St. Paul’s, which helps their efforts greatly. Scot said FOCUS missionary is said to be the toughest job they will ever have because they have to raise their own funds and talk in sometimes hostile environments on college campuses. Curtis said being a missionary is awesome and you’re paired with great people, but it’s really tough. Curtis said they are right on the front lines and they don’t pull punches. This young generation wants to do great things for great reasons. The New Evangelizations is a great cause. They just completed their training with 110 new missionaries to become part of 450 missionary staff around the country. Scot said FOCUS is about 14 years old. People often lower their expectations for young people. Do young people respond because Curtis sets expectations so high? Curtis said secular culture treats them like consumers and the Church is sometimes tempted to talk down to them too. Christ is calling us into a life of holiness and greatness. He sees young people making heroic decisions one after another and we need a nation full of young people like that. Fr. Matt asked what qualities does he see in the missionaries that makes them successful. Curtis said friendship and broke it down to friendship with Jesus Christ personally; friendship with peers, like the students on campus just a couple years younger than them; and friendship with leaders in the Church, like local pastors. Curtis said there are great Catholic colleges and Newman Centers around the country. What makes FOCUS different is that it’s a lay outreach. Most are in their early 20s on campus engaged with students. They go out onto to campus to meet students in libraries, athletic fields, and everywhere to draw them back to the Newman Center. That’s where they can engage a vibrant Newman Center. Scot said he’s amazed at how the missionaries have to raise a significant amount of money themselves to support their mission. Curtis said they raise their basic living expenses from friends, family and parishioners. They raise about $2,000 per month. He said they don’t want them going broke serving FOCUS. They ask for a two year commitment and the average is 3-1/2 years. When they raise money, they want them to talk about what’s going on with the Church, what’s going on with young people, and what’s going on in the donors’ lives. It’s a form of evangelization. They also find the donors tend to pray for the missionaries in addition not giving money. Where your heart is, there is your treasure. Scot asked Curtis what inspired the idea. He grew up Catholic but drifted in his adolescence. He said he had a come to God experience his sophomore year in college. He came to know Jesus personally along with some Evangelical friends. As he grew in his faith, questions arose about his faith and it led him back to the Catholic Church. He realized then that there was no outreach on college campuses for Catholics like there were for Evangelicals. They build a new model and bishops wherever they’ve gone have been very receptive. Scot said they are receptive because FOCUS has a proven impact wherever they go. The witness of FOCUS missionaries on campus makes a difference. Curtis said they go wherever they are welcomed and so they serve both secular and Catholic colleges. They’re even going to Baylor in Texas, which is the largest Southern Baptist college in the country. Ninety percent of Catholic college students don’t go to Catholic schools and they pretty much have followed that ratio in their efforts. Fr. Matt asked why FOCUS is the place the Church should put its efforts. Curtis said there’s not a part in the human lifecycle in this culture that isn’t in desperate need for renewal in Christ, from before birth to death. If you have to go everywhere, where do you start? They think it’s universities. You can go to 2nd graders, but they don’t autonomy to serve. You can go to nursing homes, but they won’t be able to serve long. University students have the rest of their adult life to serve and can begin immediately. No other institutions gathers young people in the numbers that universities do, 10,000 people, 20,000 or more. They can influence the next generation of parents, priests, and religious. Almost all of our future leaders will pass through universities. Scot said on the FOCUS website, they don’t have a mission statement, but a “main thing”. Inviting College Students into a growing relationship with Jesus Christ and His Church. Inspiring and Equipping them for a Lifetime of Christ-centered Evangelization, Discipleship, and Friendships in which they lead others to do the same. Curtis said FOCUS launches college students in lifelong Catholic mission. Whether it’s the new working document for the upcoming synod this October or the almost daily comments from Pope Benedict, there is a growing sense we have to talk about our faith in terms of our relationship with God. It is in real deep friendship that we love. The Church exists to people into right relationships with God, one another, and ourselves. The reason we need Christ, because we find ourselves desperately lonely without Him. If we don’t have the ability behave how a friend would behave, we won’t have friends. Young people today have thousands of “friends” on Facebook, but not many real, good friendships with people they share life with. They may come from a broken home and no or one sibling they are close with. The average young Italian doesn’t have a brother, sister or first cousin because they are only children of only children. Fr. Matt said rules without relationship equals rebellion. Friendship with Christ helps us to understand his teachings.He said he downloaded the FOCUS app on his iPhone and asked him about it. Curtis said there is a website at focusequip.org with resources, including phone apps. He said St. Augustine asked one question: What will make me authentically happy? Pope John Paul II walked through the false ideologies of Nazis and Communists and asked what would satisfy people. It’s Catholicism. Relationship gives us the why. You can give a doctoral dissertation on adultery, but we don’t do it because we love our wives. John Paul II shared his friendship with Christ with those he spent time with. If we’re friends then my friends become your friends. Not everyone is called to do soap-box evangelization, but everyone is called to friendship evangelization. Scot asked what things do well-meaning people do that doesn’t help bring people to Christ. Curtis said he’s met a lot of men in his ministry around the country, and men in particular tend to be successful at work because they are strategic, but in our faith we’re not strategic. Good farmers outproduce bad farmers, but God always causes the growth. But he gave us rules to live by. You need a strategic plan: Win, Build, Send. Win people into relationship by going out and doing things you love to do with other people and do things they love to do. Build them up: what do you need to know to think like a Christian? What do you need to be formed in to act like a Christian? What skills do you need to be an effective leader? Now send them out to win more people. The most central form of leadership is self-control, to lead oneself. Curtis said one of the reasons they ask for a two-year commitment because that’s how much time they need to train them. They start with a five-week training session from the very beginning. They are trained in prayer, leading bible study, apologetics, fundraising. After that five weeks, all of the missionaries serve on teams and for the whole next school year, they are mentored by a veteran missionary. In the following summer they come back for five more weeks of training. Only then do they consider the initial training is finished. At this pint they are committed lifetime learners. Scot asked about the resources it takes for the overall national organization. Howcan people support FOCUS or a particular missionary. Curtis said it’s essential that people who work for the Church are cared for. Go to FOCUS.org and adopt a missionary or to support a particular project. Scot said Curtis is one of two Americans appointed to serve as consultors for the Pontifical Council for the New Evangelization in Rome. 2nd segment: This week’s benefactor card raffle winner is Maria Ippolito from Reading, MA She wins a Glory Stories CD: Be Not Afraid, the Story of Blessed John Paul II and a “Gospel Champions” computer game. If you would like to be eligible to win in an upcoming week, please visit WQOM.org. For a one-time $30 donation, you’ll receive the Station of the Cross benefactor card and key tag, making you eligible for WQOM’s weekly raffle of books, DVDs, CDs and religious items. We’ll be announcing the winner each Wednesday during “The Good Catholic Life” program. 3rd segment: Scot read the prayer for religious liberty from the Fortnight for Freedom campaign. He then said the Vatican has called a Synod of bishops for the New Evangelization in Rome this October as well as the Pontifical Council. He asked what it was like for him and Ralph Martin, no relation, to be two Americans called to assist the Pontifical Council. Curtis said he would never guessed when he was elected that Pope Benedict would make the new evangelization am ajar theme of his pontificate. Curtis said his major role will be to listen and to share it with others and when asked to give his two cents. The Pontifical Council has only been around for about a year. He said the synod will be an exciting time. After the synod, Pope Benedict will issue a papal document to the world on the New Evangelization that will give the marching orders for the New Evangelization, who is supposed to be involved and what we are supposed to do. Curtis said it’s an exciting time in the Church’s history when he vigor for the faith incoming back with tremendous power. Scot asked Curtis to compare evangelization in the US to what’s going on around the world. Curtis said the message he’s been receiving as a consultor is that there’s a sense the Church is looking to America, North and South, for inspiration. In the Americas there is the family-centered devotional life of the Latino communities plus the entrepreneurial drive and if we could bring those together, we could bring about a major change in the New Evangelization effort. In Europe, they are looking for the Americas to re-evangelize Europe. There is a real Catholic wealth living in the two halves of our continents and if we can bring them together, we could be a real blessing to the world. Curtis said to look at the apostles. They lived with Jesus for three years, but even after the Resurrection, they were hiding in the upper room until the Holy Spirit was sent. Without the Holy Spirit we can’t bring the faith to the world. We need to learn to rely on the Holy Spirit and to live in a state of grace. The Holy Spirit takes up residence in us to give us the power to live the life of Christ. In can’t be about us, but God working through us. We have to be open to the Spirit’s promptings. Scot asked for his hopes for the Year of Faith in the US. Curtis said it’s a call to come back to the foot of the Cross to live a life for Christ. We don’t live very differently from the rest oft he world as Catholics. If Christ lives within us, then we should living radically different lives. Many Catholics have allowed the secular culture to speak to them more loudly than the Church has. Faith is the gift that allows you to see things that aren’t visible: the Trinity, grace, the Eucharist. If you have faith, you will live differently. Scot said one of FOCUS’s two missionaries at Boston University has entered religious life. How important is that to FOCUS in terms of its impact? Curtis said it’s wonderful to see people responding to their vocation. FOCUS is calling people to hear how Christi is calling them to live their lives. In 14 years, they’ve seen 75 women in their programs go on to religious life and 270 men have entered seminary, more than half of them in the last 4 years. There is snowball of people going on to live lives in which they are hearing God’s call for them.

Summary of today’s show: Msgr. James Moroney will assume the mantle of rector of St. John’s Seminary on July 1 and Scot Landry and Fr. Chris O’Connor talk with him about his background, his work at the US bishops conference and with the Vatican on liturgy, and what it takes to form a “Swiss Army” priest for today’s Church. Listen to the show: Subscribe for free in iTunes Today’s host(s): Scot Landry and Fr. Chris O’Connor Today’s guest(s): Msgr. James Moroney, incoming rector of St. John Seminary Links from today’s show: Msgr. Moroney’s blog St. John Seminary Today’s topics: Msgr. James Moroney and Formation of Priests 1st segment: Scot welcomed Fr. Chris O’Connor to the show. There’s been a lot going on over the last three days, starting with the Ordination Mass on Saturday an on up to the live, town hall on CatholicTV last night. Fr. Chris said the cathedral was filled with people celebrating thesis new priests. Slideshow of the Ordination (with audio from the liturgy) Photos (BostonCatholicPhotos) CatholicTV Broadcast Fr. Chris preached the homily at Fr. Eric Cadin’s first Mass on Sunday night at St. Mary’s in Dedham. This was during the Life Teen Mass and he thought there will be some more vocations coming from among the teens who were there. Vocations come from families, from moms and dads, including asking them if God was calling to them to the priesthood or religious life. Fr. Chris said on Monday, the men went to Regina Cleri to celebrate Mass with the retired priests. They will also be with Cardinal Seán on Wednesday with their families and the faculty of St. John’s Seminary for a luncheon. Last night was the live town hall meeting and CatholicTV will be re-broadcasting it several times, including tonight at 8pm. Scot encouraged everyone to get more involved. 2nd segment: Scot and Fr. Chris welcomed Msgr. James Moroney to the show. Scot said formation of future priests is one of the most important ministries in the Church. Msgr. Moroney has been involved in formation before, but now he will become rector of St. John’s Seminary. It was a different perspective this year for him at the ordination Mass. He looked at the men and thought to himself how good how God is to us. Fr. Chris and Msgr. Moroney were both very moved during the Mass. They know how beauty it is, even in the cross that it comes with. Msgr. Moroney said Fr. Chris has taught him to survive in this new job. As the vice-rector he’s the one the monsignor relies on. He said day to day you come to know these men like a pastor knows his people. Scot recalled that the greeting of the priests at the Mass to the newly ordained is a fraternal embrace, a brotherhood even if they have just met. Msgr. Moroney said we are not saved individually, but by being baptized into the body of Christ. In the same way, the presbyterate is all of the priests joined to the archbishop. The men were ordained into that presbyterate, now sharing the three part ministry of being shepherd, teacher, and sanctifier. Scot asked Msgr. Moroney about his background. He grew up in Milbury, Mass. in Our Lady of Lourdes parish and then St. Bridget’s parish in the same town. He didn’t go to Catholic school because one wasn’t available. He recalls the town was 80 to 85% Catholic. He recalls his teacher leading the public school kids in prayer every day. As he walked home from school every day, he’d stop in the church to pray and he learned to listen to God, quieting all the problems in his own life. Msgr. Moroney said it’s important that every young man listening pray for God to open up to him what his plan for him is. After high school, he went to a college seminary in Baltimore for one year until it closed. Then he stayed in Maryland for a year, working as a community organizer for the Quakers against the draft. He came back to Worcester and was sent to North American College in Rome. He’s been a pastor in several different places. He’s also worked for the US bishops conference for 13 years as director of the liturgy office. Scot said Msgr. Moroney has prepared two different series on the liturgy for EWTN and CatholicTV, as well as other media. Msgr. Moroney said he had been told that the Church needed someone to explain the liturgy for the average man and that’s why he studied for it in order to promote it. Once he was pastor of two parishes separated by a parking lot and lots of old feelings. They used the promotion of beautiful liturgies and Eucharistic adoration to bring them together so that the two eventually became one parish. Msgr. Moroney was appointed by Pope John Paul II as a consulter to the Vatican Congregation for Divine Worship and the Sacraments. He’s also executive secretary of Vox Clara, a committee of bishops who advise bishops’ conference on English in the liturgy around the world. Fr. Chris noted that Msgr. Moroney is a priest of the Worcester diocese. Msgr. Moroney said Cardinal Seán has promoted St. John’s as a regional diocese. They have seminarians from every diocese in New England and other countries too, including Saudi Arabia. He sees the role of rector as being pastor of the seminary, which is how John Paul II saw it in the document Pastores dos Vobis. Being a pastor of a flock of shepherds is one way to put it. Scot said he’s the first diocesan priest not of Boston to be appointed rector. Scot recounted some of the other rectors over time. Msgr. Moroney said Bishop Arthur Kennedy, the outgoing rector, is an old friend from when they both worked at the US Bishops Conference. Bishop Kennedy working in the Secretariat of Ecumenical and Interreligious Affairs. When Bishop Kennedy became rector in St. John’s, he asked Msgr. Moroney to come teach there as well. He said Bishop Kennedy is the “second founder” of the seminary, expanding the seminary, not just in numbers, but in programs and quality of formation. 3rd segment: Scot asked the essential aspects of forming a priest today. Msgr. Moroney said it’s centering on Christ, a personal relationship with Christ. The same Christ, Cardinal Seán prayed to in the ordination prayer. The same Christ the new priests prayed to on Sunday in their first Masses. Whether you’re a newly ordained priest or a priest living in Regina Cleri, to know Christ personally, to be led deeper into the mystery of Christ. “That I may decrease, that Christ may increase,” is the heart of priestly formation. Msgr. Moroney said every generation faces particular challenges. The challenge we face is that all the demands made of me to look at this and that, to grab my attention, to be able to put that aside and center on Christ. The device and media might be able to help, but it’s a challenge. He noted that book, “I Am Not A Gadget”, asks a lot of philosophical questions about living in a digital world with social media and everything. If Christ is not there, then all the digital stuff is a clanging symbol. Scot said 50 years ago we lived in a much stronger Catholic culture. We had 75% or higher Mass attendance then. Now the new priests will serve where the majority of Catholics don’t attend Mass. Msgr. Moroney said the zeal and purity of vision is just the same as when he was was ordained. However, the men come from a different culture now. Msgr. Moroney came from an atmosphere where everyone was imbued with catechism and devotions were the norm. A few years ago, the US bishops acknowledged that we need two extra years of formation for priests because they’re not getting that like they used to. Msgr. Moroney taught a course on homily preparation. About 5 years he played tapes of Archbishop Fulton Sheen, and the seminarians were not that impressed. Msgr. Moroney realized he was speaking to a different culture and a different world. There’s more skepticism about even the fact of ultimate truths. Fr. Reed of CatholicTV will teach a course next year on media and the new evangelization. Scot said Msgr. Moroney leads days of recollections across the country for priests and to teach in seminaries on many subjects. Scot asked if there’s a vocations crisis. Msgr. Moroney said the crisis is in believing God will take care of us. When we say to young men, “Have you thought about becoming a priest?” the result is magnificent. God only asks us to pray and do a little work. He said he saw a young man at Fr. Cadin’s Mass who looked particularly intent and so he went over asked him if he ever thought of becoming a priest. Scot said in the Archdiocese of Boston on a Sunday morning you can find a Mass every 30 minutes within a 15 minute drive. In other places in the country, you have to drive 1-1/2 hours to get to the next church. Msgr. Moroney said the numbers of priests in the 60s was a result of the baby boom. We are doing very well for priests in the United States today. Fr. Chris asked about the type of priest to ordain from St. John’s. Msgr. Moroney said they want to form the Swiss Army priest. They want a priest who could go to a parish centered around the Extraordinary Form of the Latin Mass or a Life Teen parish or a Brazilian parish or whatever. The priest has such a pastor’s heart and skills to go beyond himself, he’ll be able to minister wherever he goes. Like St. Paul who was able to be all things to all men wherever he went. Scot said there’s a pressure on young priests to be defined by their parishioners as a type of priest. Msgr, Moroney said the biggest obstacle to the Swiss Army priest is the self-confidence of the young man. The temptation is to compromise in order to get people to like you. We should preach Christ, not just tickle people’s ears with what they want to hear. He said they should preach in kindness, but in truth. Fr. Chris said the Gospel is meant to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable. Scot noted that the age of new priests is creeping upward. In the past they would have to be 25 at least. Fr. Chris said most men coming into seminary are 23 to 24 or so. Fr. Chris said when men come in right from college, they often left soon after. Now men who have been out in the world are leaving something behind, and have already thought long and hard about this step, so they are less likely to leave. The men are generally ordained in late 20s/early 30s. Scot asked if it’s easier or tougher to have men that are older who more experience as well as more habits to break. Msgr. Moroney recalled one of the first seminary classes he taught had a former doctor, a former lawyer, a former engineer. They were very accomplished and used to calling the shots. Now they are living a simple life and having to listen to others tell them how to grow and improve. Fr. Chris said seminary is meant to stretch and challenge the men because priesthood will do the same. Msgr. Moroney said during the ordination Mass the men lay flat on their face while the litany is prayed around them. In reality, they laid down on their face when they entered seminary by embracing the humility of openness to formation. Scot asked Msgr. Moroney how his background on liturgy will affect the formation of seminarians. Msgr. Moroney said over the last five years he’s monied into a reflection on priestly spirituality. Without a conformity to Christ on the Cross, the people will see it as inauthentic. It is from hearts that hearts learn. He said we’re on the cusp of a revival of spirituality among priests today. Msgr. Moroney asked people to pray for seminarians every day. Go to the St. John’s website, pick a seminarian, and pray for him every day.

Summary of today’s show: The HHS mandate of the Affordable Care Act is an unprecedented infringement on religious liberty, according to a wide cross-section of religious leaders and political observers. Scot Landry talks to Kim Daniels, an attorney who specializes in religious liberty issues and coordinator for Catholic Voices USA, about the HHS mandate and other attempts to infringe on religious liberty during this Fortnight for Freedom called by the US bishops. Daniels will be one of the panelists on the Fortnight for Freedom town hall airing on CatholicTV and WQOM tonight at 8pm. Listen to the show: Subscribe for free in iTunes Today’s host(s): Scot Landry Today’s guest(s): Kim Daniels, Coordinator for Catholic Voices USA Links from today’s show: Fortnight for Freedom Fortnight for Freedom on BostonCatholic.org Catholic Voices USA “Solidarity for In-the-Pews Catholics”, by Kim Daniels, RealClearReligion.org “Here We Are”, Helen M. Alvare & Kim Daniels, National Review Online Today’s topics: Religious Liberty and the HHS Mandate 1st segment: Scot said tonight Cardinal Sean will be hosting on the live town hall meeting at CatholicTV at 8pm on the topic of religious liberty. On of the presenters joining is Kim Daniels, an attorney working on religious liberty issues and is a coordinator for Catholic Voices USA and lives in Maryland. Scot said he met Kim when he attended a meeting in Washington, DC, of Catholic Voices USA. Kim said the group is lay Catholics who stand up and talk about our faith and why we love it, making the Church’s presence felt in the public square. They don’t speak on behalf of the bishops, but do speak authoritatively because they know their faith well. It’s an outgrowth of a similar successful group in England last year that began before the Pope’s visit. Scot said Catholic Voices is launched while we’re fighting to defend our religious freedom. Kim said they saw a need for lay Catholics to be out there on this issue.They want as many lay Catholics talking about it as possible because it’s important we tell everyone how it’s under siege today. Scot asked Kim to provide background on the HHS mandate. She said it’s part of the Affordable Care Act. Last August, the Dept. of health and Human Services put out a regulation that all employers provide insurance for contraceptive services under the ACA or face a fine. The only exemption was for a narrow definition of churches. Church-related organizations were not exempted. In January this year the president affirmed that this was going to be the rule and then later proposed an “accommodation” which was only an accounting trick. For the first time, religious believers would be forced to provide a good or service that violates their faith. Kim said the problems with the “accommodation” includes the idea that insurers would be forced to provide the coverage rather than the employers, but of course the costs would be passed along to employers. The employers would still be forced to participate. Also, many church organizations are self-insurers. Kim said religious liberty is our first freedom. One of the central reasons people came to this country was to escape religious persecution and that’s what the first amendment was about. For Catholics especially, it’s important, because it it’s the glue that holds civil society together. Catholics found civil society institutions that stand between individual and government and provide the glue for society. Scot asked what makes the HHS mandate so bad. Kim said the mandate has an extremely narrow definition of what counts as a religion. You’re a religious organization if you primarily employ people of your faith and promotes your faith. If reduces religion to freedom of worship within the four walls of the house of worship, not freedom of religion. Mother Teresa would not qualify for the exemption. Scot said we don’t serve other because they’re Catholic. We serve others because we’re Catholic. That’s what defines us as Catholic. Free exercise isn’t freedom of worship, but freedom of religion, which is prayer, belief, and action, and more. Kim said look at the list of the Catholic organizations that have signed on to lawsuits against the HHS mandate: publishers, colleges, nursing homes. For every corporal work of mercy, you can find an organization that has signed on. Scot said some people believe Catholics have been targeted specifically. Cardinal George of Chicago said this is an unprecedented requirement that we be forced to act contrary to what we believe. This has never happened in the US. Kim said we know there’s been plenty of religious bigotry in history. It’s important to remember here that what’s going on is that people are being forced to pay for something that violates their deeply held religious beliefs. Once this precedent is set, you can violate beliefs in other places as well. A good example is conscientious objection to serving in war. That could be threatened. Scot said when there are laws passed, there’s usually a robust set of exemptions for different groups. Scot said the Affordable Care Act has many exemptions, but the exemption for Catholics was so narrow it violates our religious liberty. Scot asked Kim how exemptions work in laws like these? Kim said we have a longstanding bipartisan census in favor of religious liberty and exemptions for religious conscience. President Clinton signed int o law the religious freedom restoration act. Ted Kennedy had written to Pope Benedict that he was in favor of strong exemptions for Catholics. But what happened here is the Obama administration has set all that aside. Scot said the troubling part of this is that the Secretary of HHS came out with a list of preventative care that’s covered under the law that included contraception and abortifacients, when real preventative care wasn’t included. Kim said wouldn’t it be great to have free health club memberships or blood pressure medicine or the like? But instead contraception, sterilization and abortifacients are. That shows they are presenting pregnancy as a disease to be prevented. Kim noted that the Amish got an exemption from the Affordable Care Act as did millions of people who were grandfathered. 2nd segment: Scot said on this issue, Catholics of all stripes were all united that this was a massive violation of religious freedom. Kim said when the mandate first came down, she heard people talking about in her parish in a way that you don’t see normally. They saw it as an attack on them and it’s created a solidarity. The lawsuits show a wide array of groups participating from small to large and across the viewpoint spectrum. An important development last week saw the Catholic Health Association, which had supported the Affordable Care Act, came out against the HSS mandate and the supposed accommodation. Kim said the institutions that will not provide the objectionable goods and services will be subject to fines of $100 per day per employee. For large organizations and small ones that is significant. It will lead some to shut their doors. Others will reduce their services. It will have a big impact on our network of schools and social service providers. Scot has asked if there’s a precedent for fines that are so crippling? Kim said this is what’s unprecedented: That the government is forcing us to make that choice between our religious beliefs and paying these crippling fines. Because we are an institutional church, we work through groups we form, not just through individuals, it affects us uniquely. It’s not just a Catholic issue, but it particularly affects us. Scot said there are about 200 Catholic universities in the US, about 7,000 secondary and elementary schools, 1,400 long-term healthcare centers, and hundreds of hospitals. The most important thing for the common good is not the the number of institutions, but the people who are served here. Kim said the key issue to remember is that at the end of the day this will harm the poor, kids in schools, those served by Catholic services. Kim said when the government says to some that they are not meeting the narrow exemption, it involves the government coming in and defining whether they are religious. The government becomes entangled in the practice of our religious faith. Scot said this violates the separation of church and state. Kim said it goes to the Establishment clause. It’s setting up a regulation that determines what it means to be religious. Scot asked Kim to respond to the claim that the Church is trying to impose its views on others, including employees who don’t agree. Kim said the Church only seeks to retain the constitutional right to propose it’s views as a full participant in public life. It’s the government is coming in to tell the Church what it should believe about contraception and abortion.Kim said contraception is cheap and widely available and the government could take many steps to provide it easily without forcing religious believers to violate their beliefs. People coming to work for the Church know or can easily know what the Church believes coming in the door. Kim said when the Catholic Health Association came out against the mandate, they made this argument. Scot said he’s also heard that the Catholic Church is trying to hurt Obama’s re-election campaign. Kim said the plaintiffs in the lawsuits have all different political views. If anyone is trying to politicize this issue, it’s the Obama administration. Scot said that’s another slogan he’s heard, that this is a War on Women. Kim said it’s clear that it’s a manufactured war. It’s patronizing for the administration to claim that religious freedom isn’t as important to women. 30,000 women have signed up for an inititiative to say this. WomenSpeakforThemselves.com Kim and her neighbor Helen Alvare, who is a prominent pro-life Catholic, started this initiative on the grassroots level, sending it out to their friends without a big budget or infrastructure. She’s heard of women taking up the initiative on their own to stand up for their religious liberty. Scot read the open letter from the website called “Don’t Claim to Speak for All Women”: We are women who support the competing voice offered by Catholic institutions on matters of sex, marriage and family life. Most of us are Catholic, but some are not. We are Democrats, Republicans and Independents. Many, at some point in our careers, have worked for a Catholic institution. We are proud to have been part of the religious mission of that school, or hospital, or social service organization. We are proud to have been associated not only with the work Catholic institutions perform in the community – particularly for the most vulnerable — but also with the shared sense of purpose found among colleagues who chose their job because, in a religious institution, a job is always also a vocation. Those currently invoking “women’s health” in an attempt to shout down anyone who disagrees with forcing religious institutions or individuals to violate deeply held beliefs are more than a little mistaken, and more than a little dishonest. Even setting aside their simplistic equation of “costless” birth control with “equality,” note that they have never responded to the large body of scholarly research indicating that many forms of contraception have serious side effects, or that some forms act at some times to destroy embryos, or that government contraceptive programs inevitably change the sex, dating and marriage markets in ways that lead to more empty sex, more non-marital births and more abortions. It is women who suffer disproportionately when these things happen. No one speaks for all women on these issues. Those who purport to do so are simply attempting to deflect attention from the serious religious liberty issues currently at stake. Each of us, Catholic or not, is proud to stand with the Catholic Church and its rich, life-affirming teachings on sex, marriage and family life. We call on President Obama and our Representatives in Congress to allow religious institutions and individuals to continue to witness to their faiths in all their fullness. Scot said it’s a beautiful letter. He’s said the issue can turn in this country if women stand up and say that NARAL and NOW don’t speak for them. Women aren’t one-issue voters who only care about abortion and contraception. Kim said it’s patronizing for the Obama administration to call this a women’s issue because it involves contraception, abortion, and sterilization. Scot said 43 Catholic institutions filed a lawsuit on one day in late May, adding to 11 previous lawsuits. Kim said it was an unprecedented coordination of lawsuits among Catholic groups. As a civil rights matter it’s striking to see organizations come together to file suit across the country to show that it matters to all of us. It’s also important it was filed then because the Supreme Court’s decision on the Affordable Care Act is imminent. Plus the clock is ticking: Catholic organizations need to purchase insurance. Scot said some in Boston thought the Archdiocese of Boston should have filed a lawsuit too. There are 195 dioceses and parches in the US. He asked what about groups that didn’t file a lawsuit? Kim said the suits are directed against just the mandate. There are lots of reasons while you would have some plaintiffs sign on and others not sign on and why you would file in the some places and not in others. It’s mainly a tactical question. Scot asked how long it will take to see this resolved. Kim said it depends on what happens in the next few weeks and months on these issues. You could see them happening in the next year. Scot asked how the 43 lawsuits might be affected by the Supreme Court decision on the Affordable Care Act itself. If the Court rules the law constitutional or only part of it is unconstitutional, the lawsuits will move forward. If the court rules against the whole Act, then it’s an immediate win for the plaintiffs and we return to the status quo of strong religious freedom protections. Scot asked what the likelihood for that is. Kim said her sense is the Court will strike down part of the Act and these cases will move forward in court and they will win. Scot asked Kim what she hopes to come from the Fortnight for Freedom. She wants her own kids to see Catholic standing together on an important issue. It’s also a wakeup call about what’s going on with religious liberty. Even if it seems like it’s removed in Washington, the Fortnight can bring this home to parishes. Scot said he’s been thinking about those who gave their lives in our history for the sake of religious freedom. What message would Kim have to the listeners on why we should educate ourselves and do something about this now? Kim said religious liberty isn’t always attacked in a grand way, like bombing of churches and Christians being murdered. What we have here is the slow whittling away of our religious liberty. But this will really affect all os u. It will set the precedent in the law that religion is what happens within the four walls of a house of worship.