Men at World Youth Day Pondering Priesthood
, July 28 – After saying Mass for Boston-area Catholics at World Youth Day, Boston's Cardinal Bernard Law invited men to consider priesthood and the religious life – and some 45 young men responded, approaching the altar for a special prayer with the prelate.
According to The Herald: “Their response comes amid not just the steady trend of declining religious vocations nationwide, but also the unusual strain brought upon the Archdiocese of Boston by revelations about how sexually abusive priests were shuffled among parishes by superiors.”
“The drumbeat about bad news has actually increased my interest in parish life, knowing how important it is to get men in the priest-hood,” said 21-year-old Michael Sheehan. Other potential seminarians agreed, saying they had been undeterred or even spurred onward by the recent cleanup in the archdiocese.
Said Law as part of the invitation: “God's good and gracious will is the short path to happiness.”
Young Jews Less Pro-Life, Study Finds
LIFESITE NEWS, Aug. 2 – An important academic study has reiterated the significance of religion in people's attitudes toward life issues.
In a study sponsored by the Jewish campus group Hillel, Linda Sax at the University of California-Los Angeles Higher Education Research Institute collected data from college freshmen at 424 U.S. schools in 1999.
She compared answers from 232,000 non-Jews and 8,000 Jewish students and found that the latter are much more likely to favor legal abortion and same-sex marriages.
She noted that 89% of Jewish students agreed with the statement “abortion should be legal,” compared with 52% of non-Jews. Some 82% of Jewish freshmen said “same sex couples should have the right to legal marital status,” compared with 54% percent of non-Jewish students.
According to Lifesite News, “While only a minority (38.3%) of non-Jewish respondents agreed that ‘If two people really like each other, it's all right for them to have sex even if they've known each other for only a very short time,’ 60.9% of Jewish students agreed with the statement.”
Only 13% of Jewish freshmen reported “frequent” attendance at religious services during the year prior to entering college, compared to almost 47% of non-Jews.
Orders Unlikely to Adopt ‘One-Strike’ Policy
Aug. 4 – The “one-strike-andyou're-out” policy adopted by American bishops at their June meeting in Dallas will likely not be applied within religious orders, to which one of out of three priests in the United States belongs, reported the Philadelphia daily.
Some 250 religious superiors gathered this week in that city for the annual meeting of the Conference of Major Superiors of Men.
The Inquirer cited media comments by leaders of male religious orders, who said the bishops' policy of expulsion from ministry after one credible accusation of abuse was too inflexible for religious communities, to which members take lifelong vows and to whom they usually surrender all personal property and income.