Word: priestly
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Raymond Belknap, 18, was excited about the Christmas present he was giving his best friend, James Vance, 20: a heavy-metal rock record by the British band Judas Priest. For five hours the young men listened to the raucous, apocalyptic throb of the music while they smoked marijuana and split a dozen beers. Violent fantasies were nothing new to either of them. Vance had choked his mother on one occasion and hit her with a hammer on another; Belknap had stolen money and a van and exposed himself to women; both talked of leaving their hometown of Sparks...
...shooting, Vance used hand gestures to tell the police that he mutilated himself because "life sucks." Yet within a couple of months he started making a claim he persisted in for the rest of his days: that he and his friend were driven by the lyrics of Judas Priest. "All of a sudden," he said, "we got a suicide message, and we got tired of life." Last week his family and Belknap's mother brought that eerie charge to trial in Reno. Four of the five members of Judas Priest, who perform in metal mesh and studded leather...
...Richard Schoenherr, of the University of Wisconsin, and his former student Lawrence Young, now at Brigham Young University, released the results of a six-year study of the trends for clergy in 86 dioceses. The 163-page report, titled The Catholic Priest in the U.S., which was prepared for the U.S. bishops' conference, makes a gloomy assessment: if current directions are not reversed, by the year 2005 there will be 74 million Catholics and fewer than 34,000 priests, or one priest for every 2,200 parishioners. The causes for the continued decline: fewer and fewer men are finding...
...hierarchy has been appointing lay people, nuns and ordained deacons to take charge of parishes that lack priests. And last November Catholic bishops approved rites for Sunday worship that can be led by nonordained parish leaders in priestless congregations. To Schoenherr, a former priest, such measures are no more than stopgaps. As he sees it, the chief problem is celibacy. Eventually, he maintains, the church "will have to accept the ordination of married men in order to recruit and retain." But that is not likely to happen any time soon. Although a majority of American Catholics believe that priests ought...
...stage with Farrakhan was the other fringe minister, George Stallings Jr., excommunicated Roman Catholic priest, accused pederast, founder of his own ersatz Catholic Church called the Imani Temple. Stallings marked his entry into the political arena with the declaration that Barry, "the greatest mayor this city has ever had," was brought low by a racist government because he is "too intelligent and too black...