Word: priesthoods
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DIED. CARDINAL JOHN BAPTIST WU, 77, head of Hong Kong's Catholic Diocese who guided the territory's 350,000-strong Catholic community through the handover from British to Chinese rule; in Hong Kong. Ordained to the priesthood in 1952, Wu was named a Bishop in 1975 and appointed Hong Kong's first Cardinal...
...remain a Catholic, despite his many doubts about Church doctrine. Kirkus is reverent, giving the book a starred review. "The prolific historian offers a timely confession of faith and an apology in the true sense of the term. Wills is not just any Catholic: he studied for the priesthood, has worked in Jesuit and papal archives, and has written many books on moral matters and the intersection of politics and religion. For having dared question the Church's positions on matters of doctrine great and small, he has been nearly stripped of his membership as one of the faithful...
...liaison with Lisa Minnelli, the daughter of Judy Garland and Italian-American auteur Vincente Minnelli; and he was married for a time to Isabella Rossellini, the loveliest co-production of Rossellini and Bergman. But we also know that he had a shy boyhood, and long considered studying for the priesthood. Then too, we know Scorsese's films. He makes serious, explosive ones about men loving and betraying each other. Women are usually on the periphery. This doesn't make him unique among directors. Indeed, it is in his concentration on guy dynamics that this unique film artist most resembles...
...surprise that we are hardly flocking to them. Annual vocations to the priesthood in America have halved in the last few decades from around 1,000 in 1965 to around 500 today. As the priesthood has become older, it has also become sparser: there were just under 59,000 priests in 1965, and there are only 45,000 today. In 1972, 49% of Catholics reported attending church weekly; in 2000, a mere 26% did. The number of men and women entering religious orders, primarily as nuns or monks, has also collapsed--by well over half since 1965. The number...
...birth control--reaffirmed by fiat by Pope Paul VI after many leading theologians and church officials seemed poised to reverse it--is not an issue as vital as, say, the divinity of Christ, the fact of the Resurrection or the miracle of the Mass. A celibate priesthood--one of the many reasons why vocations have collapsed--is an administrative matter. It was not mandatory for the first 11 centuries of the church's existence, and was imposed primarily to rescue the church from the corruption of priests bequeathing church property to their heirs. Several past Popes have been married. Mandatory...