I’ve never quite heard of this before, but Bishop Zubik is going to have a special service for anyone who has been wronged by the Catholic Church.

There will be nothing expected of you but your willingness to pray with me. No one will bother you

I think it’s a neat idea, although it is sad that such a thing needs to exists.  I sincerely hope that no one is bothered, and even if I did feel like I was wronged in the past, as much as I think this could provide some closure, I imagine it would be hard for anyone to attend.

Truth be told, I don’t know much about Zubik, I did not care for Bishop Wuerhl (I’m also probably spelling his name incorrectly, sorry about that), but so far Zubik seems on par with what I suppose I’ve come to expect from the Catholic Bishop of Pittsburgh (if such an archetype exists in my head).

I’ve been reading Slog lately, the blog of Seattle’s The Stranger, and a few days ago, it erupted with a news story about a girl and her mother being excommunicated in South America.  The whole story is tragic on many, many levels, so it’s nice to counterpoint it with this outreach.  Here’s hoping.

The Most Reverend Katharine Jefferts Schori, Presiding Bishop of the Episcopal Church will be at Calvary church tomorrow at the 11 a.m. service.  All are welcome to come out and see her as she celebrates and preaches.  Bishop Katharine is the first woman elected as presiding bishop (kind of like a cardinal, except there is only one for the country).  She will also lead a discussion at 1:15 p.m. tomorrow in the church nave.

More information: www.calvarypgh.org

Recently, Pittsburgh has been the center of drama for the Episcopal Church.  The bishop was deposed and the then presiding ‘standing committee’ led the diocese in a vote to separate from The Episcopal Church, USA and align themselves with the Anglican province of The Southern Cone.  [Note: I only use quotations around standing committee to help with grammar, without them I thought the sentence was unruly.  Anyway, back to the post.]

Having been the lone Episcopal student at a Catholic college, religious discussions were never hard to find.  In addition, those four years helped me to develop my own view of faith and religion, and it doesn’t necessarily fit easily into any pre-determined cubby hole.  But that’s ok.

A concept everyone invovled should be adopting

Really, it is a sad situation, but so often the debates and conflicts that play out in the Episcopal Church are precursors to what other churches will face and discuss.  So while there is a benefit to the church’s transparency, it is certainly something that will be faced not only by the Episcopal Church, but other communities soon as well.

But like I said above (two paragraphs if you want to take another look), what does this mean?  Well, to me, it’s been drama that I really haven’t wanted to deal with.  Yes, it is interesting, and yes, it is very important, but after a point, you just want to go to church, you know?  No drama.  No finger pointing.  No whirlwinds of rhetoric or semantics.  Just church.

So in that spirit, here are some links that I’ve come across, some fun, some informative, but maybe they’ll help us all out a little bit:

• What would heavy religious discussions be without baseball?  I’m not really sure either, but both are examined in this blog, check it out.
  
• Aside from the Sacraments, can an online church provide everything one made of brick and mortar does?  Check out this article to read more.
  
• And even though the Anglican presence in Second Life (as discussed in the article above) is much bigger, Church of Fools has been around longer, coming out of its predecessor, the online reality show, The Ark.  Also check out its parent site, Ship of Fools.
  
• And of course, bringing it back across the pond to the ‘Burgh, I headed over to Epiphany Catholic Church next to the Mellon Arena for lunch on Friday.  They have a fish fry every week of the year (barring holidays).  The food was great, and the price was amazing.  If you’re nearby Friday, head on over!

As always, I try to remain at least somewhat neutral, so hopefully I did during this post.  But hey, blogs are discussions.  So I have to ask, what are your thoughts?  Has this schism affected you personally?  Let me know in the comments below!

The old joke is that the two biggest religions in Pittsburgh are Catholicism and Lapsed Catholicism. That is a pretty severe exaggeration, but you would never know that from the news coverage here, which never met a story about Catholics it didn’t like. Thus, all the stories about yesterday’s installation of a new bishop, seen here delivering his famous “seven words you can’t say in seminary” bit.

New Bishop David Zubik wants Catholics to “be excited about our faith, and how we live it.” Traditionally Catholics are excited about faith in the same way that Americans are excited about soccer: we pretend when the kids are young, but once the brats are off to college we get to relax and care about what really matters, the Steelers. The only difference is that when Americans age and begin to feel the cold breath of death on the backs of their necks, few turn to David Beckham (some Brits do).

Meanwhile Pittsburgh’s Episcopalian Bishop Robert Duncan, seen here hating fags, was busy making our fair city look bad by starting his own church dedicated to being Episcopalians who hate fags. Post-Gazette:

Bishop Duncan said that forming a separate North American church structure for conservatives is “necessary because of the drift of the church in the West.”

The partnership will include the Convocation of Anglicans in North America, a network of Episcopal parishes that have split from the U.S. denomination and have aligned with Anglican Archbishop Peter Akinola of Nigeria, an outspoken critic of Episcopal acceptance of gay relationships.

The original Reformation was about personal closeness to your deity and the proper relationship of spirituality to secular concerns, with Protestant reformers asking hard questions about how to best serve Christianity’s promise of universal love. Catholic traditionalists responded by digging in their heels and hewing closely to doctrine.

Sadly, Bishop Duncan probably thinks that he is the Martin Luther in this new “reformation” rather than the Grand Inquisitor.

The Post Gazette had an awesome story of a widower who is trying to make his wife and mother of twelve a saint. To me this is an open and shut case– Duh, she sure is!!!

“Some experts say that Mrs. Coniker appears to be the kind of new saint that the Vatican is looking for: She lived and died in a happy marriage. The claim for heroic virtue is based partly on her refusal to abort her 11th child after a doctor warned that the birth would kill her. With her husband, she gave up affluence to found a ministry to families.

That ministry includes Catholic Familyland, which can house up to 1,000 people for swimming, horseback riding and Eucharistic devotion; the Familyland TV network; teaching centers in Mexico, Europe, Russia, Nigeria and the Philippines; and a vast array of books and media on Catholic theology for laity. At Familyland’s annual Totus Tuus Family Conference, which begins Friday, Mr. Coniker will speak about his late wife.

They met at St. Gregory High School in Chicago and married in 1959, when she was 19 and he was 20. He later started a management firm that had Fortune 500 clients, and they bought a six-bedroom house near Chicago.”

Apparently you use a Jewish moose.

Some people might be surprised to learn that moose are Jewish. You shouldn’t be, says Gabe Goldman, educator in Jewish environmentalism:

“The moose is the largest kosher animal roaming the wilds of North America,” said Goldman. And at 7 feet in height, “it makes you say ‘wow!’ Wow is a form of prayer.”

He is absolutely right: all animals that you will eat are co-religionists. That is why you see so many goldfish bowls in Catholic Churches during Lent.

Catholics, one of whom is seen here with a sign (a sign is a form of prayer), then take the fish home and swallow them whole, seen in the photo accompanying my last post.

The Hebraic environmentalist moose’s motto:

“baal taschit” (don’t waste)

A while back the school board of the town of Upper St Clair, seen here represented by their local nuthouse, wanted to get rid of their high school’s International Baccalaureate Program. The problem, you see, was that IB programs promote thinking, an anti-Christian value.

A story in today’s Post-Gazette tells us that not only were the school board members anti-thinking, they were also jerks about it:

Former Upper St. Clair school Superintendent James Lombardo felt so much pressure from certain school board members who were trying to eliminate the district’s International Baccalaureate program in 2006 that he filed a formal complaint accusing them of violating the district’s anti-harassment policy and code of ethics.

At the time that this program was cancelled the claim was that Upper St. Clair didn’t have the money to pay for the it, a farsical claim that is contradicted not only by common sense, but also by this note in today’s story:

Dr. Lombardo said the two board members indicated that the majority would work to get raises for administrators and secretaries and find funds to support his efforts to “put in place an Asian studies and international studies program and beef up an [advanced placement] program if I mildly supported IB and openly supported moving in another direction with their ideas.”

As a result of these moronic claims by the school district, the state ponied up:

Funding will come from a combination of $45,000 raised by families of the students and $85,000 guaranteed by Gov. Ed Rendell to the district, board members said.

As a product of the Pittsburgh city schools, this was immensely offensive to me, and continues to be. If a bunch of nutcases from a suburb that is awash in cash want to get rid of an educational program, let them. If all this money is floating around to be spent on IB programs, how about Philly Ed ignores the willful morons of the Christian suburbs and provides one for my alma mater, where we were too broke to afford windows?

By the way, USC still has an IB program and a big pile of state money to spend on it. Peabody still has no windows.

I learned the secret to this getting people to answer questions thing: don’t count on e-mail, instead go out for lunch and run into them. That is how I got to talk to Bill Peduto, seen here shortly before the moment when that coffee kicks in and he realizes that he is having a conversation in the middle of the street.

He and I chatted briefly about this contraception thing that I and others have been grumbling about. He expressed support for the availability of both contraception and other safe and legal reproductive health whathaveyou (read: leave women who need abortions alone).

I invited him to characterize oppostion to contraception “creepy” and to compare it to witch-burning, both of which he declined to do. He did say that impressing one’s religious beliefs on others showed a problem with one’s “moral compass” and called any effort to outlaw or make it difficut to get contraceptives to hypothetical “orthodox Jews” outlawing “ham sandwiches.” This may have been on his mind because he was buying what looked to me like a ham salad.

He also volunteered his support for safe and legal “health and beauty aids” from Walgreens in a joke that I did not understand.

Additional ammunition for those who would like to claim that this post is just one East End liberal elitist giving a free lectern to another: this happened at Whole Foods.

Gunpowder fizzler: I still intend to dedicate as much space here as the Mayor, seen here shopping for a Snugli with city police officers, would like to make his positions clear as soon as he gets a minute. Perhaps in addition to answering the questions I put to him by e-mail two fridays ago he can explain why contraception is not like a ham sandwich or come out against ham sandwiches.

No doubt his staff is still sleeping off the celebratory champagne they cracked open after yesterday’s landslide endoresement win, so I don’t expect to hear anything today, or possibly even tomorrow, depending how surprised they were by their margin of victory. I am sure a response will be coming by Wednesday.

If not, I am going to have to begin to consider the possibility that the Mayor doesn’t take me seriously.

Despite the best efforts of a lot of people of Croatian heritage who don’t want to go to mass there anymore, St. Nicholas Church on the North Side is in the last stages of being sold to some jags from New York.

How do I know that they are jags? Just ask yourself one question: is that guy from Pittsburgh? If not, he’s probably a jag, a loser, or Jerome Bettis.
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