Word: sexuality
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Struggling with dwindling congregations and battered by massive payouts to victims of clergy sexual-abuse scandals, dioceses in many parts of the U.S. have been closing or merging hundreds of churches to save costs. Now, however, the faithful are fighting back: the Friends of St. Stan's are part of a growing movement among Catholics who reject their dioceses' reform plans and are waging campaigns to stop them. Churchgoers at St. Frances Xavier Cabrini in Scituate, Mass., have been occupying the sanctuary for more than four years--one of four such vigils in the Boston area. In New Orleans...
Peter Borré, head of the Boston-based advocacy group Council of Parishes, disagrees. "The dioceses are using these parishes as a milking cow," he charges. "They need the cash to pay for sexual-abuse settlements. That is why more parishes are willing to go against their leadership: they want to stand up against such injustice." Borré, 70, a Rome-born, Jesuit-educated former energy executive, started the council to advise churches facing closure after his own parish in Charlestown, Mass., was shut in 2004. Borré has been involved in the Boston vigils from the beginning and is leading their appeal...
...randomly selected 500 MySpace profiles belonging to self-described 18-year-olds in the U.S. to determine what sort of information the average teen was sharing online. Their conclusion? The kids are not alright. Well, half of them anyways. Nearly 54% of the selected profiles revealed details about risky sexual lifestyles, drug addictions and violent encounters with peers...
...more than 200 million profiles worldwide, with one in four of those profiles belonging to someone younger than 18. As a result, the website has become what the researchers dub a "media superpeer" that promotes and establishes norms of behavior among teens. So as more kids openly discuss their sexual and drug experimentation, it becomes less and less taboo to join in. The article also notes that merely presenting oneself as a wild child invites "unwanted online attention from individuals such as cyberbullies or sexual predators...
...self-described 18- and 20-year-olds whose profile contained information about risky lifestyles or habits, Dr. Megan Moreno, one of the study's authors, sent messages to half of them about the dangers of sharing such personal details online. Moreno also provided information on regional testing centers for sexually transmitted diseases. Three months later, nearly 14% of the 95 teens who were contacted by Moreno had removed sexual references from their profiles, while just 5% of those who were not contacted took it upon themselves to clean up their accounts...