Word: monsignors
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...less but profiting from it more. In the past two years, U.S. parish priests admit, attendance at the confession box-once a Saturday ritual for legions of devout Catholics-has fallen noticeably. "I would say that confessions are at least a third less than they used to be," says Monsignor James A. Davin of St. Bernard Church in Mount Lebanon, Pa. At the same time, many renewal-minded Catholics are approaching the confessional in a more meaningful way-not as a mechanical means of cleansing their souls of sin but as a life-giving encounter with a forgiving...
...priests now report that Catholics entering the confessional are more serious about the experience. "Where we used to get 'I swore, I lied, I disobeyed,' now we're getting more conversation about the problems of life," says the Rev. Frederick Collins, Catholic chaplain at Harvard. Adds Monsignor Joseph Alves of Boston: "I find that people are more concerned about justice and charity than they ever were before. Their concentration is on recognizing the serious sins of racial bias and paying money for political jobs." Priests who work with college students report that boys are less worried about...
...early 20th century, the Roman Catholic Church had its own secret police. A zealous Vatican functionary, Monsignor Umberto Benigni, set up a group of trusted clerical informers, called the Sodalitium Pianum, to spy on priests and even bishops suspected of heresy. Benigni's ecclesiastical...
...with rising costs, many dioceses have shut down or combined marginal and inefficient schools, and some administrators are beginning to wonder whether it might ultimately be necessary to abandon parochial school education entirely. "If it comes to a point where we couldn't pay a living wage," admits Monsignor Donald Montrose, superintendent of Los Angeles' archdiocesan high schools, "maybe we shouldn't be in the education game." Noting that the expense of maintaining the U.S. church's century-old parochial school system is "becoming a real problem," St. Louis' Joseph Cardinal Ritter recently told...
There is some limited dissent even from this almost univer sally held view. According to Lateran University's Monsignor Ferdinando Lambrushchini, the destruction of military objectives with nuclear weapons might be morally more justifiable than the bombing of cities with TNT. However, the moral condemnation of nuclear war is relatively obvious and easy. What is often overlooked is the fact that the very horror of using nuclear weapons may have inaugurated a new era in which limited, conventional wars are likelier than before. It is precisely in such limited conflicts that the old just-war principles seem pertinent again...