Ashley Baxstrom: Apparently, the Roman Catholic Church is at risk of death by boredom. Cardinal Gianfranco Ravasi, President of the Pontifical Council for Culture, has told priests they need to pump up their sermons with the scandalous parts of the Bible or face becoming “irrelevant.”  Because, you know, Catholics don’t have enough scandal to deal with already.

Speaking at an event in Rome, the cardinal emphasized the need for priests to keep up with modern media and communicative processes, admonishing them to remember that their congregants are “children of the television and the internet.”

While what that doesn’t means for Ravasi is that Catholics today are better informed, or more curious, or can take in more information faster, he does promote priests’ use of new media. “Communicating faith doesn’t just take place through sermons,” he says, “It can be achieved through the 140 characters of a Twitter message.”  But it seems that the digital age requires a kind of negative adaptation. Don’t challenge your followers – use simple stories to talk to them. In the fast-paced world of new media, he’s saying, there’s no time for thought or argument; rather, “cut to the heart of the matter, resort to narratives and colour.” The Bible is full of stories and symbols – SCANDALOUS ONES, don’t forget – that excite listeners’ passions.  And that, apparently, is how you motivate the spirit.

A statement on the global economy by “a rather small office in the Roman Curia” is causing some interesting commentary–by George Weigel, EJ Dionne and Talk to Action’s Greg Metzger.  At issue is the question: who speaks for the Pope?

Former Revealer managing editor, Kathryn Joyce, is sourced in an article about corporal punishment and Christianity.  The article examines a number of abuse cases in the US that have led to the deaths of children, including the influence of Michael Pearl’s book, Training up a Child. (Here’s a related NYT article.)

Is Socialism the same as Mormonism?  You know, not godly?

by Mary Valle

I don’t think that men and women are the same. I think we have a lot in common, being humans. However, if you look around, you’ll agree that there’s a big difference between us and that difference is testosterone. Skyscapers. The space program, with its great missiles impregnating the silvery, virginal moon. Football. War. The Washington Monument, for Pete’s sake. Guns, archery, race-car driving. Fireworks. Abrahamaic religion, with its cold, lordly sky-gods and “pure” “untainted” virgins. Agriculture. Mono-anything. New cars, and that “new car smell.” Breaking seals on bottles of shampoo and ketchup. Beer caps popping off, and the foamy explosion running over the lip of the bottle. Synthetic pressurized whipped cream products, and anything having to do with them. Onward, into infinity. These are all the byproducts of testosterone, which can really change a person, since we all do start out female.

by Frances Kissling

This past week, criminologists at the John Jay College of Criminal Law released a numbers crunching, statistically dense, spiritually troubling 144 page report which aimed to identify the causes and context of sexual abuse of minors by Catholic priests between 1950 to 2002. The report was commissioned by the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops who have developed a partnership with John Jay College in their efforts to understand and prevent the sexual abuse of children by priests and sisters subsequent to the Boston Globe’s 2002 expose of the extent of sexual abuse and the inaction and cover up of the abuse by church leaders. It cost somewhere between 1.4 and 1.8 million dollars, half paid by the bishops’ conference, the other half underwritten by religious orders and Catholic organizations.

What was once a rallying cry by U.S. evangelical organizations to limit access to birth control here and abroad (see former Revealer managing editor Kathryn Joyce’s 2008 article at The Nation, “Missing: The ‘Right’ Babies”) is now a Vatican topic for discussion at a UN panel.

We’ve been here before. And no, it didn’t work then either.

by Jon O’Brien

Like others, I am deeply concerned about recent moves in Congress that would restrict access to reproductive healthcare services, especially for poor women. The situation reminds me of other experiments where a few people with extreme views sought to pass policy that impacted a significantly wider group of people—with devastating consequences. Below, I will recount how the hierarchy of the Catholic church hijacked a process that was on the verge of overturning the complete ban on contraception. But today, in the U.S. Congress, an antichoice cabal in the Republican Party is seeking to prevent poor women accessing federally funded family planning and other reproductive health services.  There are currently three bills that would do just that: the “No Taxpayer Funding for Abortion Act” (HR 3), the “Protect Life Act” (HR 358) and the “Title X Abortion Provider Prohibition Act” (HR 217). They, along with the budget which passed the House and did not include crucial family planning funding will severely impact the lives of millions of American families. As a Catholic, the fact that the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) has supported these attacks on healthcare services for poor women adds insult to injury.

Read Revealer Jo Piazza’s latest on Gabriella Velardi Ward, a 63 year-old self-described Roman Catholic Woman Priest and her home church, Praxedis, at WSJ’s Metropolis

From the 2004 article “The Truth About Condoms” by Opus Dei Father Martin Rhonheimer, Professor of Ethics and Political Philosophy at the School of Philosophy of the Pontifical University of the Holy Cross in Rome and, according to the Catholic Weekly, America, a member of Cardinal Ratzinger’s inner circle:

But if they ignore this teaching [that homosexuals should "live in continence like any other unmarried person"], and are at risk from HIV, should they use condoms to prevent infection? The moral norm condemning contraception as intrinsically evil does not apply to these cases. Nor can there be church teaching about this; it would be simply nonsensical to establish moral norms for intrinsically immoral types of behaviour. Should the Church teach that a rapist must never use a condom because otherwise he would additionally to the sin of rape fail to respect “mutual and complete personal self-giving and thus violate the Sixth Commandment”? Of course not.

From Michael Miller’s profile of the new Archbishop of Miami, Thomas Wenski, printed this week in the Miami New Times:

Wenski is unlike anything the church has ever seen. He’s a hard-charging, hog-driving cleric and licensed pilot who speaks six languages fluently. In the past seven months, he has come on like a blessed freight train, booting dozens of longtime priests from their too-comfortable parishes and suing the City of Miami for $140 million. He’s risked the ire of Miami Cubans by engaging the island’s communist government and had his phone tapped by the Castro regime. Just two weeks ago, he helped open the first seminary in Cuba since the revolution.

But on social issues, he has become a rabid, Tea Party-style conservative whose ban on even discussing condoms might have led to hundreds of Haitians contracting HIV.

Mary Valle: Nick Kristof continues his “nuns rock!” crusade to convince everyone that it’s not all Catholics that are like that. Just some. Point taken, Mr. Krisof, but this good Catholics/bad Catholics line of thinking is a little worrisome. It’s like “No, you’re not a slut, you’re a real woman,” or “There are black people, and there are niggers,” or “You can be gay as long as you’re not, like, flamboyant.” I agree with him: there are a lot of great people truly doing the Lord’s work under the huge tent that is the Roman Catholic Church. And not everyone’s molesting kids and lying about it. But I think he might be glossing over some stuff in his zeal to prop up the “little ladies” as examples of the “right” kinds of Catholics, an effort which, in itself, is a bit patronizing.