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Saturday, December 21, 2013

Friday, December 20, 2013

"God is with us" by Rev. Beverly Bingle, Pastor of Holy Spirit Catholic Community


Today’s readings tell us that Advent is about “God-with-us”—about
recognizing God in human history, about acknowledging the fact that
God is present in us today.

To King Ahaz, “God-with-us” is bad news. He’s in peril, politically
and militarily, so his advisors tell him to form an alliance with
pagan Assyria. The prophet Isaiah tries to get Ahaz to turn to God
instead. Ahaz won’t listen. He’s already made up his mind. He won’t
ask Yahweh for a sign because he knows he has already cast his lot
with Assyria, not with Yahweh. Ahaz has turned his back on God, so he
understands that Emmanuel—God with us—the active presence of God here
and now, is very bad news for him. So Isaiah gives Ahaz a sign: one
of his wives will bear a child who will lead the people in the ways of
Yahweh, who will shepherd the people wisely.

We know that, when Matthew crafted his infancy narrative, he cited
this piece of the Hebrew scriptures as a foreshadowing of Jesus’
birth. Matthew shows Joseph behaving like his ancestor Ahaz, with a
decision to make; but unlike Ahaz, Joseph listens to God’s messenger.

From time to time we reach a point where we must make decisions that
are life-defining. How do we make those decisions?

Paul tells us that he has decided to follow Jesus, and he describes
himself as the servant of Jesus Christ. He devotes all of his energy
to that servanthood. He gives his life away. It’s life-defining.
We define ourselves by how we spend our lives. We can live as
prisoners of our habits and desires and addictions—entertainment,
houses, clothes, stuff. We can live as lovers of self, as lovers of
power. Or we can live as followers of the Way. The choices we make
define us.

It’s easy for me to see the results of life-defining choices that
other people have made. Over at Claver House Tuesday Yo-Yo—that’s her
street name—came in ranting and raving. Monday she had been pleasant
and smiling, but she was off her meds. I’m told she was a very bright
in high school, an A student. Then she made some bad choices, and her
life fell apart. Those choices define her life now, and it will be
very hard for her to change.

And then there’s Matt—he spent four years in prison, an angry young
man who also made bad choices. For him the story changed—he decided
to change. He got out of prison and worked his way to the point that
he’ll graduate from UT next spring. He decided to do without the
immediate gratification from his life of crime. He decided to be
responsible and worked to get his children together and raise them.
He breakfasts at Claver House, then heads off to class.

It’s not just one choice. We’re works in progress. We’re faced with
many choices along the way, and each of them forms us in a good or bad
way.

The coming of Emmanuel shines a light on us, on who we are, on who we
are becoming. It shows us what we put our faith in, which signs we
choose to believe in. It is up to us whether or not Emmanuel’s coming
is good news for us.

Now, three days before Christmas, we are invited to take stock, to
look once more at the choices we’ve made and the choices that are
ahead of us. Are we open to the signs of God’s presence among us? Are
we living as servants of God? If we can say “Yes,” Emmanuel is indeed
good news for us.

--
Holy Spirit Catholic Community
Mass at 2086 Brookdale (Interfaith Chapel):
Saturdays at 4:30 p.m.
Sundays at 9 a.m.
Mass at 3535 Executive Parkway (Unity of Toledo)
Sundays at 5:30 p.m.
www.holyspirittoledo.org

Rev. Bev Bingle, Pastor
419-727-1774

Thursday, December 19, 2013

Cardinal Burke dropped from key Vatican agency


 UNITED STATES
John Thavis
"Pope Francis’ plan to reform the Roman Curia is primarily a two-pronged approach: changing the bureaucratic structures and changing the members of Vatican agencies.
Today we saw yet another sign that the new pope wants people in synch with his more pastoral vision of the church, and in particular with his views on what makes a good bishop.
U.S. Cardinal Raymond Burke has been dropped from the Congregation for Bishops, an office that wields tremendous influence in shaping the world’s hierarchy. Burke has been a kind of folk hero to conservative Catholics, in particular for his statements criticizing Catholic politicians who support legal abortion. Moreover, he has said that bishops who refuse to withhold Communion from such politicians are weakening the faith.
It was significant that the new American named today to the Congregation for Bishops, Cardinal Donald Wuerl of Washington, has publicly defended his decision not to deny Communion in such situations."

Tuesday, December 17, 2013

"Our God Is With You Sister Megan Rice Facing a Possible Thirty-Year Sentence for Anti-Nuclear Activism at 83"

http://judyabl.wordpress.com/2013/12/18/our-god-is-with-you-sister-megan-rice-facing-a-possible-thirty-year-sentence-for-anti-nuclear-activism-at-83/


Here is the prelude to the Article on Sister Megan Rice in Al Jazeera America, 12/16/13-An Open Letter to Sister Megan Rice
Dear Sister Megan, 
Your life of courage and conviction moves us and convicts us. Thank you for your Plowshares Now action with your friends.  You took “extreme” and courageous action and face living out your days in jail where you bear the light in the darkness of our penal system. Your caring for your fellow inmates is life-giving to them. Your anti nuclear actions are life-giving to all of us. You are right that most our young people do not understand the cause of justice and peace interconnected and the meaning of what you did. All we can do is promise you, and God, that we will work to remedy this. We will teach them about you and others who have risked their lives for peace and justice.  We instruct our youth to “study war no more”. You are the light on our path. The least we can do is walk in it toward peace and bring our young people along with us.
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It is for them and for their future that we will “study war no more”
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In our church the story is a little different,our young people do know about you and your activism and about earlier Plowshares actions as well. Our co-Pastor, Judy Beaumont also a Plowshares activist, She was imprisoned for several months for her part in Plowshares Nein. How blessed they are to have a living example of peace activism in their Roman Catholic Woman priest. She too worked on prison reform from within the walls of prisons in Rhode Island and Connecticut. When you attended our priest sister, Diane Dougherty’s, priestly ordination in Georgia you were brave to do so. But that is who you are a woman of courage who is not afraid of speaking the truth to power no matter where that power lies. It is beautiful that you mention her ordination and the existence of Roman Catholic Women Priests in the interview we are sharing below.
Dearest sister Sister Megan, thank you for your peace and anti-nuclear activism and for your public stance recognizing women priests as in the present as well as the future of the church. Thank you for your witness, thank you for your love. We love you and want you to know that we appreciate what you are doing. We still pray for a merciful sentence and we know that your witness will remain strong whether or not you are in prison. If they keep you in, they’d better watch out for reform will be on the way!
Much love and peace,
Rev. Dr. Judy Lee, ARCWP
Rev. Judy Beaumont, ARCWP
Co-Pastors of The Good Shepherd Inclusive Catholic Community
Fort Myers, Florida,
Here now is the beautifully written  article in Al Jazeera America by Lisa DeBode

Sending a Nun to Prison to Die

By Lisa De Bode, Al Jazeera America
16 December 13
83-year-old Sister Megan Rice continues her anti-nuclear activism in jail, pleads for a Catholic Church ‘of the streets’
ister Megan Rice presses the palm of her hand against the glass in greeting, her blue eyes welcoming her visitor in a cell opposite hers. Lamps illuminate her oval face framed by cropped hair like a white halo. Her uniform – a green-striped jumpsuit, sneakers and a gray blanket that covers her slender shoulders – is not the norm for a Roman Catholic nun, but she sees her presence in Georgia’s Irwin County Detention Center as answering her Christian calling.
The 83-year-old Rice has chosen to spend the final chapter of her life behind bars.
She faces a possible 30-year prison sentence on charges of interfering with national security and damaging federal property, resulting from an act of civil disobedience she committed in July last year.
Exhausted after hiking through the woods adjacent to the Y-12 National Security Complex in Oak Ridge, Tenn., that once provided the enriched uranium for the Hiroshima bomb, Rice, along with Michael Walli and Gregory Boertje-Obed splashed blood against the walls, put up banners and beat hammers “into plowshares” – a biblical reference to Isaiah 2:4, “They shall beat swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks.”
Breaking into a sensitive nuclear facility to stage a protest, the three activists were prepared for the worst. “We were very aware that we could have died,” Rice said.
They were not killed but found themselves incarcerated. Now she spends her days answering letters from supporters and educating other detainees about the dangers of nuclear weapons – and the connections she draws between militarism and the poverty she believes has landed so many young women behind bars. Rice accuses the U.S. government of denying citizens such basic rights such as medical care and access to education because it invests so many billions of dollars in military equipment.
“Every day is a day to talk about it,” she told Al Jazeera, raising her voice a bit to be heard through the glass wall that separates her from the outside world. “It’s not time lost by any means.”
Citing backgrounds of poverty from towns “where there are hardly any other options,” she blames a capitalist economy for not investing more in social services available to the underclass and effortlessly connects nuclear weapons to the “prison-industrial complex.” They’re not bad people, she says of her fellow inmates, but were unfortunate enough to be born into a society that gave them few choices.
“They know that they are the human fallout and the victims of the profiteering by the elite and top leaders of the corporations that are contracted to make the nuclear weapons. It’s (the money) denied to human services that should be the priority of any government,” she said.
She coughs slightly, her nose running from the cold inside the jail. Every morning, she stands in line to receive her daily dose of antihistamines, but others receive pills for conditions far worse than what she has to endure, she said. “So many should not be here,” she sighed, edging closer to the glass wall in which a talking hole was partly blocked.
“I don’t see them as perpetrators but as the victims. People are being warehoused in detention centers all over the country.”
Walli, a 64-year-old Vietnam veteran, also spends long hours talking to inmates, veterans from Iraq with post-traumatic stress disorder, whom he said should be getting proper treatment. “We try to do missionary work here,” he said. “We’re trying to instill the idea that human life is sacred.”
Mushrooms clouds in Nevada
Unlike most of her fellow inmates, Rice was born to an affluent family, on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, whose next-door neighbor was a physicist secretly involved in the Manhattan Project, which created the world’s first nuclear weapons. Her passion for social justice came early. She followed her parents to meetings of the Catholic Workers Movement with Dorothy Day, the social-justice activist currently on course for beatification. Her mother wrote her doctoral thesis at Columbia University on the Catholic view of slavery, and her father helped serve the city’s poor as an obstetrician. “I just happened to have very conscientious parents,” she said.
At 18, she joined the Society of the Holy Child Jesus and started teaching science to girls in rural Nigeria in 1962. During summer holidays, she visited her sister’s home in upstate New York, where she would ride a horse in her habit, looking “different, not a typical nun,” said her niece, who was named after her and is now 52. Wherever Rice went, she inspired people to follow her example, such that six to eight letters reach her cell every day. “I just get this feeling that the action she did with Michael and Greg is a culmination of her life,” her niece said.
As malaria and typhoid began to take their toll, Rice permanently returned to the U.S. in 2003 and took up a position with the Nevada Desert Experience, a nonprofit organization advocating against nuclear warfare at a former test site. Ghastly visions of giant mushroom-shaped clouds became tourist attractions from hotel rooftops in Las Vegas, near which about 1,000 nuclear weapons were detonated since the 1950s.
Rice’s uncle, a former Marine who watched Nagasaki being leveled, befriended a Jesuit bishop whose mother and sister were incinerated in Japan during a Mass. They were among the estimated 60,000 people immediately killed by the blast. He devoted the rest of his life to nuclear disarmament.
“That’s how close I’ve been in touch with the reality,” Rice said.
She was pleased to report that, nearly 70 years later, Japanese media reported on her arrest and lauded her action.
Hypocrisy in disarmament?
Rice and her friends were arrested for acts of civil disobedience they devoted to global nuclear disarmament at various stages of their lives. She feels a special responsibility to draw attention to the U.S nuclear arsenal, she said.
The logic of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty under which Iran is currently being held accountable, for example, requires that the existing nuclear-armed states take steps toward disarmament. Yet in 2008, for example, almost two decades after the end of the Cold War, the U.S. was spending at least $52 billion a year on nuclear weapons, according to the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. And only 10 percent of that spending is devoted to disarmament.
“It’s extremely hypocritical to demand disarmament (from Iran),” Rice said, recalling an anecdote involving former Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who reportedly honored the activist trio during a dinner in New York City last year, where he held a photo of them close to his heart. “It showed that he honored the effort to call the U.S. to its legal obligations.”
The activists decided to stage a protest to draw attention to the U.S. nuclear arsenal. Defunct cameras and fences couldn’t prevent the three elderly people from damaging what some call the country’s Fort Knox of uranium, raising questions about how they might restrain professional thieves with less idealistic intentions. Some members of Congress even thanked Rice and her accomplices for bringing the Y-12 facility’s security problems to the nation’s attention – the latest in a series of nuclear security breaches in recent years.
The U.S. nuclear weapons program has become the backwater of military services. In 2010 the Pentagon concluded that“the massive nuclear arsenal we inherited from the Cold War era of bipolar military confrontation is poorly suited to address the challenges posed by suicidal terrorists and unfriendly regimes seeking nuclear weapons.”
Paul Carroll, program director at the Ploughshares Fund, a foundation that supports the elimination of nuclear weapons, said, “Sitting in a missile silo in the middle of the country, waiting for the day when the Soviets (attack) is a throwback. So they have moral problems. They’re rusty.”
Paul Magno, a fellow plowshares activist and loyal friend of Rice’s, said a generational disconnect pushed the nuclear issue into relative obscurity in recent years. A guest lecturer at a University of Tennessee sociology class, he said it’s become increasingly hard to impress his student audience with the gravity of nuclear warfare.
“For decades there was duck and cover and you would climb under your desk at school,” he said. “Kids today never had that moment. They don’t have any idea about nuclear winter.”
Occupy Church
Rice may see her actions as inspired by her faith, but she has had little support from within the Church establishment. Retired Bishop Thomas Gumbleton, a renowned peace activist, laments the Church’s tepid stance on Rice’s detention and nuclear weapons. Citing official doctrine that explicitly condemns the use of weapons of mass destruction as “a crime against God and man himself,” he calls on colleagues to take up her cause as an exemplar of someone who stood up for what is right.
“They’re supposed to be leaders on something like this. There hasn’t been any kind of statement from Catholic bishops on what Megan has done,” he said. To be frank, Gumbleton added, “in the official church, I have to say most people don’t even know about her. And that’s really sad.”
Rice doesn’t expect much from the establishment – not even from the new pope, whose recent pronouncements have raised many eyebrows. She isn’t interested in institutions but swears instead by a grass-roots church. “The church is where the people are,” she said. The church matters only “on a local level.” She is skeptical of Pope Francis but feels encouraged by his choice of a less extravagant lifestyle than those of his predecessors, who she said had been living like “princes in their palaces.”
Her order, the Society of the Holy Child Jesus, offered the lone voice of support from within the Catholic establishment.
“While we do not condone criminal activity, we would like to point out that Sister Megan has dedicated her life to ending nuclear proliferation. With the Catholic Church, she believes nuclear weapons are incompatible with the peace so desperately needed throughout the world and therefore cannot be justified,” Mary Ann Buckley wrote in a statement emailed to Al Jazeera.
Pope Francis certainly seems inclined to rebrand the Church as an institution that fights for social justice and is not afraid of protesting. “I prefer a church which is bruised, hurting and dirty because it has been out on the streets rather than a church which is unhealthy from being confined,” Francis wrote in the mission statement for his papacy issued last month. That’s a message that has resonated with many young people in different parts of the world who have taken to the streets to protest austerity and vast economic inequalities.
“American Christians have been far too polite, too quiet and too accommodating of both the injustice and the blasphemous use of Jesus’ name in committing atrocities in our nation and our world,” wrote a group styling itself Protest Chaplains in a manifesto that coincided with the Occupy movement of which they formed a part. “That’s why we want to protest with all those who, like us, know in the deepest places of our souls that another world is indeed possible.”
Rice met with Occupy activists discussing nuclear issues in New York City, “when it began in September.” She described their work as “religion doing what it’s meant to be doing.”
“The church is where the people are,” she said. “It is the people.”
A similar message has been echoed in Barcelona, where street activists known as Indignados took their cues from Sister Theresa Forcades, a Roman Catholic nun and activist who believes the current economic policy consensus among governments of industrialized nations perpetuates inequality. And like Rice, Forcades has been skeptical of Francis’ pronouncements, arguing that the new pope should be judged by his attention to women’s rights, which so far has been lacking.
Still, Rice is confidence that “it will come,” referring to the ordination of women. Last year she attended the unofficial ordination – not recognized by the Vatican – of Diane Dougherty in Atlanta. “They are preparing the way and are receiving great acceptance from lay Catholics.”
Lessons from prison
Her supporters say Rice’s life exemplifies the social activism needed to revive the church’s appeal among young people. Still, she’s reluctant to be cast as a hero. Her heroes, she said, are ordinary people who act “according to our conscience.”
As she awaits sentencing on Jan. 28 - facing a possible maximum term of 30 years – she borrowed phrases from Dr. Martin Luther King in a letter she sent to Al Jazeera. In it she reflected on her life, which may very well end in prison.
“On some positions, cowardice asks the question, ‘Is it safe?’ Expediency asks the question, ‘Is it politic?’ And vanity comes along and asks, ‘Is it popular?’ But conscience asks the question, ‘Is it right?’” she wrote.
“And there comes a time when one must take a position that is neither safe nor politic nor popular, but one must do it because conscience tells one it is right.”
At a court hearing in May, she told the public prosecutor her only guilt is that she waited 70 years to break into the facility “to be able to speak what I knew in my conscience.” Seven months later she said, “This is a very positive experience. It’s getting better and better.”
She remains uncomfortable being in the spotlight, looking to deflect attention to others. She settles on her fellow inmates in this prison, the ones she is helping prepare for a life outside prison bars – a life to which she herself might not return.
With them in mind, she smiled, noting simply, “I’m not alone in being misjudged.”
We thank God for you, Sister Megan!!

Mary Mother of Jesus Inclusive Catholic Community Celebrates Third Sunday of Advent/ Katy Zatsick and Marjorie Alaimo, Co-Presiders

Mary Mother of Jesus Inclusive Catholic Community Celebrates Liturgy

Katy Zatsick and Marjorie Alaimo co-preside at liturgy

Katy Zatsick and Marjorie Alaimo co-preside at liturgy

Katy and Marjorie hold up bread at Preparation of Gifts

Marjorie Alaimo shares reflection with community

Katy and Marjorie co-preside, MMOJ Community pray Eucharistic Prayer around altar where all are welcome
to receive Eucharist.
 

From right to left, Bridget Mary Meehan, Katy Zatsick, Dena and John O'Callaghan
Dena, Katy and Bridget Mary are women priests and John is a priest. Dena and John visited MMOJ, they are from Ocala, Fl.
where they minister as a married couple in a house church.


Come home to Christmas to a community that welcomes all to receive Eucharist.
Mary Mother of Jesus Inclusive Community celebrates liturgy at 4 PM on Sat. 
at St. Andrew UCC at 6908 Beneva Rd. Sarasota Florida
www.marymotherofjesus.org


Pope Francis Celebrates Birthday By Sharing Liturgy and Breakfast with Homeless

http://iglesiadescalza.blogspot.be/2013/12/while-pope-francis-keeps-door-shut-more.html

"While Pope Francis Keeps Door Shut, More Women Seek Ordination"

http://iglesiadescalza.blogspot.be/2013/12/while-pope-francis-keeps-door-shut-more.html
Great article, highlighting growth of Roman Catholic Women Priests Movement.
Bridget Mary Meehan

"Sending a Nun to Prison to Die" By Lisa De Bode, Al Jazeera America


 83-year-old Sister Megan Rice continues her anti-nuclear activism in jail, pleads for a Catholic Church 'of the streets'
"Sister Megan Rice presses the palm of her hand against the glass in greeting, her blue eyes welcoming her visitor in a cell opposite hers. Lamps illuminate her oval face framed by cropped hair like a white halo. Her uniform - a green-striped jumpsuit, sneakers and a gray blanket that covers her slender shoulders - is not the norm for a Roman Catholic nun, but she sees her presence in Georgia's Irwin County Detention Center as answering her Christian calling.
The 83-year-old Rice has chosen to spend the final chapter of her life behind bars.
She faces a possible 30-year prison sentence on charges of interfering with national security and damaging federal property, resulting from an act of civil disobedience she committed in July last year.
Exhausted after hiking through the woods adjacent to the Y-12 National Security Complex in Oak Ridge, Tenn., that once provided the enriched uranium for the Hiroshima bomb, Rice, along with Michael Walli and Gregory Boertje-Obed splashed blood against the walls, put up banners and beat hammers "into plowshares" - a biblical reference to Isaiah 2:4, "They shall beat swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks."
Breaking into a sensitive nuclear facility to stage a protest, the three activists were prepared for the worst. "We were very aware that we could have died," Rice said.
They were not killed but found themselves incarcerated. Now she spends her days answering letters from supporters and educating other detainees about the dangers of nuclear weapons - and the connections she draws between militarism and the poverty she believes has landed so many young women behind bars. Rice accuses the U.S. government of denying citizens such basic rights such as medical care and access to education because it invests so many billions of dollars in military equipment.
"Every day is a day to talk about it," she told Al Jazeera, raising her voice a bit to be heard through the glass wall that separates her from the outside world. "It's not time lost by any means."
Citing backgrounds of poverty from towns "where there are hardly any other options," she blames a capitalist economy for not investing more in social services available to the underclass and effortlessly connects nuclear weapons to the "prison-industrial complex." They're not bad people, she says of her fellow inmates, but were unfortunate enough to be born into a society that gave them few choices.
"They know that they are the human fallout and the victims of the profiteering by the elite and top leaders of the corporations that are contracted to make the nuclear weapons. It's (the money) denied to human services that should be the priority of any government," she said.
She coughs slightly, her nose running from the cold inside the jail. Every morning, she stands in line to receive her daily dose of antihistamines, but others receive pills for conditions far worse than what she has to endure, she said. "So many should not be here," she sighed, edging closer to the glass wall in which a talking hole was partly blocked.
"I don't see them as perpetrators but as the victims. People are being warehoused in detention centers all over the country."
Walli, a 64-year-old Vietnam veteran, also spends long hours talking to inmates, veterans from Iraq with post-traumatic stress disorder, whom he said should be getting proper treatment. "We try to do missionary work here," he said. "We're trying to instill the idea that human life is sacred..."

Pope Does Not Know Where Idea of Women Cardinals Came From/ Full equality of women is the will of God that Church Must Address

http://www.examiner.com/article/pope-doesn-t-know-where-idea-of-women-cardinals-came-from

The real issue here that Pope Francis must address is the full equality of women in the Catholic Church which includes ordination in an inclusive, egalitarian community where all are called to live the fullness of their baptism. Women are spiritual equals and therefore excluding them from ordination is a violation of fundamental human rights. Sexism is always wrong. Right now, women are excluded from the top jobs in the church because governance is connected to Holy Orders by Canon Law. Roman Catholic Women Priests are a renewed priestly ministry that is rooted in Jesus' vision of Gospel equality. I agree with Pope Francis that clericalism is not what priestly ministry is about, rather it is about service and liturgical leadership in a church where all are welcome to receive sacraments including the divorced and remarried and others on the margins of church and society. That is where Jesus stood, that is where women priests stand today- on the margins with Jesus welcoming all into God's loving embrace, not just the rule-keepers in the Catholic Church. We are bringing a "holy shakeup" in the church today that is welcome news to millions! Bridget Mary Meehan, www.arcwp.org


Monday, December 16, 2013

Janice Sevre-Duszynska, ARCWP Visited 93 Year Old Jesuit Priest Bill Brennan Who Was Suspended for Co-Presiding with Her at Liturgy for Justice Advocates


http://ncronline.org/news/people/jesuit-penalizedafter-eucharistic-liturgy-woman-priest


Janice Sevre-Duszynska, ARCWP visits Jesuit Bill Brennan in Milwaukee, Wisconsin

Max. Janice and Fr. Bill Brennan


"Jesuit, 92, penalized after eucharistic liturgy with woman priest"
Joshua J. McElwee | Dec. 3, 2012
A Catholic priest who participated in a eucharistic liturgy with a woman priest last month has been
ordered to no longer celebrate the Mass or perform any other priestly duties.
Jesuit Fr. Bill Brennan, a 92-year-old Milwaukee-area priest, said the superior of his religious
community told him of the restrictions Nov. 29, saying they came at the request of Archbishop
Jerome Listecki.
Brennan, a retired parish priest and former missionary to Belize, participated in a liturgy Nov. 17 with
Janice Sevre-Duszynska, a woman ordained in the Association of Roman Catholic Women Priests
movement.
Brennan said he was hesitant to confirm the news regarding his loss of faculties because he was also
ordered not to talk to the press.
"I'm risking my existence in the Jesuit order by talking to you," Brennan told NCR. "But if I've
committed a serious sin, [the archbishop] is supposed to be responsible for condemning me ... he's
supposed to stand up and be responsible for that."
Brennan said the restrictions include:


• Suspension of priestly faculties, prohibiting him from performing any priestly duties in public;
• Refraining from contact with media, "through phone, email, or any other means";
• Not appearing as a Jesuit at any "public gatherings, protests or rallies";
• Not leaving the Milwaukee area "for any reason" without his superior's permission.
Brennan said he hasn't had any formal communication with Listecki.
Jeremy Langford, the director of communications for the Jesuits' Chicago-Detroit province, which is
merging with the Wisconsin province, said in a statement Monday the order removed Brennan's
priestly faculties "after conversation with the Archdiocese of Milwaukee."
The Jesuits "did not approve or sanction" the November eucharistic liturgy and "regrets Fr. Brennan's
participation in it," read the statement.
"The Wisconsin province has no plans to take any further action," Langford said in an interview,
calling Brennan a "wonderful Jesuit" who has "fought for great causes his whole life."







 

Homily: Gaudete Sunday Advent 2013 by Deacon Mary Weber, ARCWP

First, I want to ask each of you to raise a hand of blessing over me blessing me silently as this is my first homily as a newly ordained deacon. (May the words of my mouth and the meditations of my heart be pleasing to you my God, my Beloved!)
I feel so blest to be able to speak on these beautiful Advent scriptures today. (Isaiah 35:1-6a, 10) Let’s look at Isaiah first Isaiah knew the landscape that was familiar to his audience: desert sands, harsh, barren and parched. We don’t live in the desert but we know drought conditions. Remember the summer before last? That drought certainly left us in a similar situation. Think about that last drought. Now close your eyes and recall one of the lushest scenes that you have seen: a forest, a flower garden, or a meadow green and fragrant. Isaiah is promising these exiled Israelites the likes of Carmel and Sharon. They were known for their flowers and forests. The Israelites were being enticed to believe that which was promised to them. They had lost their hope, abandoned their vision and refused to accept Yahweh’s promise. Isaiah was more concerned about their spiritual landscapes than the natural landscapes.
Isaiah was able to look beyond their banishment.  He knew that the deprivation that the exiles experienced came from their ignoring God’s plan for them. So, he wanted to give them light and hope. They were weakened and fearful but they would be restored to great vigor: “Strengthen the hands of the feeble, make firm the knees that are weak, say to those whose hearts are frightened: Be strong, fear not, here is your God…….”Rejoice and be glad, your God comes!
(James5:7-10) In the second reading from James, we are encouraged to be patient like the one who plants the seeds, the farmer and the gardener plant then wait for great things to happen in time. A grandmother waiting for the birth of that first grandchild knows this patience. The homeless family helping to lay the foundation of the Habitat for Humanity Home that will be their very own, experiences this patience. The immigrant who finally receives notice of citizenship understands this kind of patience.
 Did you know that” impatience ranks as one of the most confessed sins in the church?” How many of us can relate to struggles with patience? I certainly can. Learning patience takes a lot of patience. Patience is not the same as putting up with things that irritate us. Other words for patience are: endurance. tolerance, lack of complaint, persistence and serenity. (Thesaurus) Perhaps these other ways of looking at patience are why James exhorts us not to complain about each other. He sees the connection between impatience and complaining. Rejoice and be glad, our God comes!
(Matt.11, 2-11)In the gospel we find John the Baptist in prison. He sends his trusted followers to Jesus to find out if Jesus is the one. Jesus answers by focusing on his works, his ministry to the suffering. Isaiah, today’s psalm (146:6-7, 8-9, 9-10) and the gospel all elaborate on the work of the Messiah. He is the one who will touch the suffering and make them whole. And the poor will have the Good News proclaimed to them. Then Jesus talks to the crowds about John the Baptizer, the prisoner. He tells those gathered that John is a prophet but that he is more than a prophet, that he is a messenger who will prepare the way for Jesus. My thoughts turn to the prophet, Nelson Mandela who spent 27 Advents in prison preparing for the peace, reconciliation and justice so needed in South Africa and in the world. This work is not completed.
Rejoice and be glad, our God comes!
I have a friend, a woman priest who says that we are to be Jesus’ twin. We are to duplicate his work, his ministry. We are to touch and relieve suffering and inequality today in his name. I look out at this community and know that I am seeing the twins of Jesus. I am seeing those who are proclaiming the good news to the poor, and, I am seeing those who are strengthening the family of God, I am seeing the twins of Jesus who are hastening his return and showing his face to those around us.  Be mindful during this third week of Advent that we are to be the twins of Jesus. Rejoice and be glad, our God comes!      Amen






Sunday, December 15, 2013

Janice Sevre-Duszynska Reports on Peace Activists Trial in Kansas City and Sentence/ Photo of Liturgy with Male Priests, Woman Priest

Update of our trial yesterday in Kansas City.



Nine of us pled not guilty. After hearing our testimony of our July 13 witness at the KC nuclear weapons part plant, the Judge, Ardis Bland,(who asked to preside at our trial) gave us the sentence of answering six essay questions -- one page each single-spaced plus court costs of $41 each. Money and essays are due within 30 days.


It was a very busy day beginning with 30 supporters meeting with us and marching with to court house where we walked thru an open door that said "open the door to a nuclear- weapons free world." 



I said that we celebrated Eucharist before crossing the line and that we were the body and blood of Christ as we crossed the line for the people of God.
That evening I led the celebration of Eucharist at the Cherith Brook Catholic Worker House, a service of God's service in all. Photos will follow.





Are You The One? Homily for the 3rd Sunday in Advent A-Rejoice! By Pastor Judy Lee

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This is the Sunday of Joy in waiting for the coming of Christ-for the fullness of Christ within us so that we reflect Christ; for the Christ born in relative poverty and shepherds rejoicing on Christmas day; and for the Christ who will return when the kin(g)dom is close to fruition. The pink candle of joy is lighted and we are only one week away from the birth of the baby in the manger.
Isaiah tells us ((35:1-6,10)  that when our God comes to save us, the blind will see and the deaf will hear, the lame will leap and the mute will sing for joy.  I take this to mean, beyond the miraculous, that finally we will all understand and see and hear what the kin(g)dom of God is about, love and justice-and joy. We will get up off of our comfortable seats and walk and dance this kin(g)dom into existence.   The faithful will enter Zion with joy, sorrow and lament will flee and there will be everlasting joy on their faces. For Isaiah’s exiled people freedom will bring that joy even as Mandela’s triumph brought a lasting joy to South Africa. Yet that joy is there despite the poverty that exists among the poorest for whom little has changed in South Africa. The work of the kin(g)dom is not anywhere near done there or here or anywhere.  The Psalm also assures us of God’s love and provision for the poor- “You secure justice for the oppressed- You give food to the hungry”. And at the same time we whose eyes are open know that our work is intense- there is so much work to be done so that there is justice for the poor and all are fed. And we know this even though we do our part in feeding the poor and working for justice regularly. The epistle reading today (James 5:7-10) asks us to wait patiently for the kin(g)dom to come even as the farmer waits for the crops to grow. And yet we know that we must work to bring forth the crop and the kin-dom- to unite all of us as God’s family. James wrote about that strongly –faith without works is dead! (James 2:26)
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Good Shepherd Church-Pearl Cudjoe and Debbie Carey serving the Sunday Meal
But we know this (that our work is needed) only if we have indeed found the One that leads us into this kin(g)dom and asks us to work together to bring it here. John the Baptist was Jesus’ cousin, his Mom Elizabeth and Jesus Mother Mary were close friends. John knew who Jesus was from the start-from the womb as it were. John knew that his own job was to prepare the way for Jesus.  John’s preaching did this and he had already baptized Jesus and experienced the Spirit of God affirming Jesus. And yet in today’s Gospel (Matthew 11:2-11) John seems confused. Perhaps we would be as well if we were in prison and it looked like there would be no reprieve and if we could not see the works that Jesus was doing, but only hear about them second hand. (And that is how it is for us, isn’t it? So we can look around and see the pain in the world and ask John’s question too. ) John sends a messenger to ask: “Are you the One who is to come, or do we look for another”?  Maybe John’s Messiah was to literally free the Jews from the Romans, maybe he was to overturn the political establishment by whatever means necessary. Yet John knew the holiness and greatness of Jesus saying “I’m not even worthy of latching up his shoes”. Maybe John was just confused. I can resonate with that-we see Jesus, the Christ, filtered through so many eyes old and new, traditional theology and contemporary theology,  that tell us who Jesus is or isn’t, it can be very confusing. All do it with great authority as if they finally have God in the box. But God just doesn’t fit in any box.  So if we are honest we too may ask Jesus, “Are you the One?”
Do you remember a time in your life when you were looking for “the one?” I don’t mean for the Messiah, the Anointed/Chosen one, but for the one you would love and cherish and want to spend your life with? The one who would be your lover and beloved forever? I remember that time. It was more than one time. Finding the love of your life is so complicated and so much mutuality is needed and people change so much that you don’t always get it right. I remember wondering if this one, or that one was “the one”.
The African American people also had a long period of time and sometimes still ask when a child is born: Is this the one? Meaning the one who will lead the people to freedom who will show the way. I wonder if they knew when Martin Luther King Junior was born that he would at least be one of the ones who would lead the way, or Rosa Parks, or Sojourner Truth? Is this the one? Did Nelson Mandela’s mother know he was the one to lead his people to freedom? Maybe not, they say he changed in prison to become the gentle forgiving leader that galvanized a country-not only by his great courage but by his love.
Well, the answer Jesus gave is a really good one. He answered with what he DID not with what he was supposed to be. He referred to the passage in Isaiah about the reign of God and pointed out that he has been making the blind to see, the lame to walk, the unclean clean/lepers cured, the deaf to hear and even the dead to be raised to life. And the “have-nots” have the Good News preached to them-by him. So blessed are they who can see this and not take offense. Offense at what- at the man who is fulfilling prophecy and bringing on the kin(g)dom? Yes, this would offend the powerful and also the traditionally religious who can’t believe that this is happening in their midst. “Can’t” because they may be expecting someone else a military leader for example.  “Can’t” because he comes from a small not powerful town, though one that was prophesied for the Savior’s birth. “Can’t” because they just don’t get who he is or what he’s doing. “Can’t” because his being and preaching, his inclusion of women and outcasts threatens the status quo, including their religious establishment power.
For those who seek the one to love and settle down with-the answer is also in his or her deeds. Is this the one for me? It is if their actions not just their words show their love for you. And if you in turn reciprocate this love with loving deeds. With love it is a two way street. Well, it’s the same with loving Jesus, the Christ. If we love Christ our deeds will show it. We will become Christ-like-we will become like our Beloved. We will work hard to feed, shelter, cry for justice with and for, and love EVERYBODY.  And Christ might just ask us too “Are you the one?”  It is all about love after all. And that love brings us great joy-it also brings on the kin(g)dom of God on earth and forever. So do you know this Christ, is this the One for you? If it is, REJOICE!
Pastor Judy Lee,ARCWP