Word: priestly
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...Michael Shanahan is struggling to find the Spanish word for pedophilia. First, he ad libs, referring in Spanish to the "crimes of the priests." Then, seeing the rows of blank faces, he resorts to saying pedophilia with a Spanish accent--which turns out to be right. A white Roman Catholic priest of Irish descent ministering to a mostly Hispanic congregation, Shanahan, along with his flock, is the picture of the Roman Catholic Church's future in the U.S. For a year and a half, he has been the only full-time pastor for the 600 families, most of them Puerto...
...That would be a good example of when I had to dig deep," says Shanahan, 39. Apart from being publicly profiled as pedophiles, priests have a job that is harder than ever. As always, people expect their priest to deliver inspiration on Sundays and know the name of every parishioner, to show up at the hospital at 4 a.m. and to keep the church financially solvent. And let's not forget he is supposed to be the face of Jesus. But now most Catholics have only one full-time priest, instead of the three or four their parents...
Simultaneously, the priesthood has become the most countercultural profession in America. "We live the last of the medieval lifestyles," author and priest Donald Cozzens said. Isolation is a constant threat. Fewer nuns and fellow priests means less peer support in an increasingly secular and sexualized society. "When I got ordained," says the Rev. Tom Pelton, 61, who became a priest in 1966 and is a mentor for Shanahan, "it was much easier to hide in the priesthood. You live in a fishbowl...
...calm blue eyes and a faint goatee and caps many sentences with a hopeful "You know what I'm sayin'?" On Sunday nights he goes to a downtown steak house to play piano--a lifetime passion he calls his "salvation." He has known he wanted to be a priest since he was a teenager. He spent 10 years "testing" himself, he says. He dated, got an engineering degree at the University of Illinois and went to work. But "the call" persisted. Since his ordination in 1992--during Chicago's pedophile-priest scandal--he has had to do things differently from...
Colm o'gorman is suing the Pope. Although his allegations of abuse against Father Sean Fortune led to legal proceedings against the priest on 66 counts of sexual, indecent assault and sodomy, O'Gorman has yet to receive an apology from the Catholic Church. He is also suing Fortune's bishop, Father Brendan Comiskey, who was reportedly first informed about allegations against the priest in the early 1980s, but nevertheless allowed him to continue to minister in the southern Irish town of Fethard...