4:00 – Redeemed: Stumbling Toward God, Sanity, and the Peace That Passes All Understanding
After decades of living on the edge, Heather King settled into sobriety, marriage, and a financially lucrative but unfulfilling career as an upwardly mobile lawyer. As someone who had reached middle age “never believing in much of anything,” she found herself in the last place she thought she’d end up: the Catholic Church. She tells us her unforgettable, fervent, funny tale of an ongoing, stumbling conversion.
5:00 – Kresta Comments – Andrew Sullivan’s Jesus
The most recent Newsweek magazine cover story (published during Holy Week) is entitled “Forget the Church: Follow Jesus,” by pseudo-Catholic pseudo-conservative homosexual commentator Andrew Sullivan. His basic argument is that because of scandal, politics, and other social factors Christianity is on the brink of extinction and we need to embrace HIS version of Jesus to save the faith. Not unlike Deepak Chopra and Eckhart Tolle who each have recently presented their own new definitions of Jesus. Al analyzes this trend.
5:20 – Traditional (Orthodox) Catholicism Is Winning
In his Holy Thursday homily at St. Peter's Basilica on April 5, Pope Benedict XVI denounced calls from some Catholics for optional celibacy among priests and for women's ordination. The pope said that "true renewal" comes only through the "joy of faith" and "radicalism of obedience." And renewal is coming. After the 2002 scandal about sexual abuse by clergy, progressive Catholics were predicting the end of the celibate male priesthood in books like "Full Pews and Empty Altars" and "The Death of Priesthood." Yet today the number of priestly ordinations is steadily increasing. We look at the trends and data which indicates that fidelity is a recipe for growth. Anne Hendershott has done the research and she joins us today.
World-wide, we have twice the number of Catholics today than we had in the 1970s, while the number of priests has remained about the same. This means we have twice as many Catholics per priest. 50,000 churches have no priest. Seminary numbers may be increasing a little here and there but overall, they are declining when we look at national, global, and long term trends. The Holy Spirit is no longer whispering, she is yelling loudly and clearly -we need to expand the priesthood to married and celibate priests to keep God's commands to love God and neighbor and to serve all God's people.
ReplyDeleteI'm no fan of Andrew Sullivan, but thank goodness we have the Holy Magesterium of Al Kresta to tell us who is and who isn't Catholic.
ReplyDelete