Catholic Chronicle

Concert to benefit Servant Leadership Center March 21

Laurie Stevens Bertke — Sun, 14 Mar 2010 05:00:00 +0000

TOLEDO—Recording artist and peace activist Mary Shapiro is to perform a concert to benefit the Servant Leadership Center March 21 at 5 p.m. at Toledo St. Martin de Porres, 1119 W. Bancroft St.

Inspired by artists from Joan Baez to Jack Johnson, Ms. Shapiro’s music spans many genres including Gospel, folk, rock and soul. The Washington, D.C., based singer songwriter has recorded with the Gospel choir Sweet Honey in the Rock, headlined in Japan, shared her musical talents with orphans in Berlin and sung for peace from Palestine to Israel to communities across the U.S. An after-school arts instructor and full-time ambassador for peace, Ms. Shapiro is well known throughout the D.C. area for her performances, activism and recordings.

The event, titled “Concert at the Peace Café” is to feature music from Ms. Shapiro along with prayers and poetry from local artists. Coffee and other refreshments are to be available in the café setting. Call the Servant Leadership Center at 419-476-0941 for tickets, which are $10 for adults and $5 for students.

The Servant Leadership Center is a nonprofit organization dedicated to cultivating servant leaders through the classes it offers for individuals and organizations. For more information, visit http://servantleader.org.

St. Ursula Academy names new principal

Laurie Stevens Bertke — Sun, 14 Mar 2010 05:00:00 +0000

TOLEDO—St. Ursula Academy is to open the 2010-2011 school year with a new principal at the helm: Kimberly A. Sofo.

“I am looking forward to being a part of St. Ursula Academy,” says Mrs. Sofo. “I am very excited about the opportunity to be involved in a culture that fosters the spirit of St. Angela and empowers young women through education.”

Mrs. Sofo’s professional career in education has spanned 12 years in a range of positions including principal, assistant principal and six years as a teacher at three different Toledo Public Schools.

She earned a master’s degree in administration and supervision, and a bachelor’s degree in arts and science from the University of Toledo. She has administrative licensure for grades kindergarten-12 and teaching licensure for grades 1-8.

“I am excited about the experience and energy that Kim brings to this position,” says Scott Savage, SUA board chair.

“We anticipate continued strong academic leadership with enthusiasm as we welcome Kim to St. Ursula,” added Jane Charette, SUA president.

Conference examines growing religious role in public life

Laurie Stevens Bertke — Sun, 14 Mar 2010 05:00:00 +0000

VATICAN CITY (CNS) — The role of religion in public life, long written off by many in secular societies, is growing steadily around the world and demands closer attention by civil authorities, speakers at a Rome conference said.

"Religion has been and will continue to be a powerful force that shapes and is shaped by historical experiences," said Miguel H. Diaz, U.S. ambassador to the Vatican.

"In our times, we have all witnessed the positive as well as the negative impacts of religion at the level of national and international relations," Diaz said. "Today, consensus is on the rise that no nation can bypass the contribution of religion if we are to address successfully the signs of our time."

The ambassador spoke at a conference March 11 on Christians, Muslims and their relationship with civil authority, sponsored by the Italian Catholic magazine "30 Giorni."

Fred Dallmayr, who teaches political theory at the University of Notre Dame, told participants that today's "post-secular" society offers a role for religion that was foreseen when Christ urged his followers to be the "salt of the earth" — a term that Dallmayr said rejects religion's retreat from the world as well as its complete assimilation with the political order.

Modern societies and faiths are struggling to achieve this balance, and avoid the "derailment" of religion through its privatization or its politicization, he said.

A recent report recommending more positive and sensitive U.S. engagement of religions around the world briefly took center stage at the conference in a talk by R. Scott Appleby, director of the Joan B. Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies at Notre Dame.

Appleby was co-chairman of a task force that wrote the report for the Chicago Council of Global Affairs. He told the conference that not only government agencies, but also business, educational and energy sectors need to deepen their understanding and respect for religious values and communities if they want to be successful in their global objectives.

"Some people would rather that religion go away," said Appleby. "Our realistic appraisal is that it's not going away, and in fact in many areas religious communities can be positive partners."

"Those who predicted that religion would become privatized across the board globally and would decline were wrong," he said. In most parts of the world, religion is an important part of daily life, "and every data we have indicates that religiosity is growing," he said.

Religion is also changing, he said, because of globalization and related trends of intermarriage, interaction between people of different faiths and more fluidity in religious affiliation. The world is not neatly divided into the secular realm on one hand and the religious on the other, but these two realms interact with each other and shape each other, he said.

"We won't be able to address questions like economic development, health care or women's rights without taking into account religious people who are also technocrats, who are middle class, who are very well educated, and who are movers and shakers in their societies," Appleby said.

In an interview with Catholic News Service, Appleby said there needs to be better appreciation of religion as a constructive force around the world. News media tend to emphasize religious violence and intolerance, and to depict Islam, for example, as a destructive and terrorism-inspiring religion, while ignoring the many progressive developments among Muslims.

Religions have a much more positive effect in society than is generally acknowledged in the West, he said. For example, he said, in sub-Saharan Africa, between 40 and 60 percent of health care is delivered by either Christian or Muslim organizations.

"We need to address religion in a constructive way, recognize religion's influence and bring some nuance to U.S. foreign policy on the role of religion," he said.

Ralph McInerny and the tragedy of Notre Dame

Angela Kessler — Sat, 13 Mar 2010 05:00:00 +0000

In late February, Professor Marjorie Garber of Harvard came to the University of Notre Dame as the Provost’s Distinguished Lecturer for 2009-2010. Among other engagements, she spoke to a class on “Breaking the Code: Transvestism and Gay Identity,” the subject of chapter six of her book, “Vested Interests: Transvestism and Cultural Anxiety.”

Ralph McInerny, an Olympic-class punster who taught at Notre Dame for 54 years before his death on Jan. 29, might have appreciated the sly title of Professor Garber’s book; he almost certainly would have regarded her topic as an example of everything that had gone wrong at the university to which he had dedicated his professional life.

Ralph McInerny was arguably the most distinguished scholar ever to work at Notre Dame. His scholarly publications outstrip those of other Notre Dame philosophers by orders of magnitude — and that’s before we get to his popular fiction, his magazine work, and his encouraging of generations of younger Catholic academics.

Yet a university that does not hesitate to boast of its accomplishments as measured by the U.S. News and World Report ratings seemed curiously reticent about celebrating the life and accomplishments of Ralph McInerny. The university Web site posted a nicely written obituary three days after his death, but there was little sense in the university’s official recognition of its loss that a gigantic figure had left the scene.

One cannot help suspect that this has something to do with the fact that Ralph thought Notre Dame had gone off the rails in its dogged and relentlessly self-promoting attempts to measure itself against what it likes to term “peer schools,” such as Dartmouth and Yale.

What Ralph understood, and what the man who brought him to Notre Dame, the legendary Father Theodore Hesburgh, has never seemed to understand, is that that’s the wrong plumb-line by which to measure a Catholic university’s accomplishment. Or indeed any university’s accomplishment, given the intellectual chaos, political correctness, decadence and madcap trendiness that has afflicted those “peer schools” since the late 60s.

Ralph McInerny knew, and could demonstrate with acute philosophical rigor, that there are truths built into the world and into us: truths we can know by exercising the arts of reason; truths that, known, lay certain moral obligations on us, personally and in our civic lives. With the rarest of exceptions, they don’t know that, and in fact they deny that, at the “peer schools” to which Notre Dame is addicted to comparing itself.

And therein lay the tragedy of Notre Dame and Catholic institutions of higher education of a similar cast of mind, as Ralph saw it: they had sold their intellectual and moral birthright — the true excellence that comes from an immersion in the Great Tradition of western higher learning — for a mess of pottage.

I’ve long thought that all of this had something to do with the misreading of a 1955 essay by Father John Tracy Elis, “American Catholics and the Intellectual Life,” which justifiably criticized the shabby condition of too much of Catholic higher education in the United States in those days. Fr. Hesburgh and others influenced by one reading of Ellis’s critique decided that the thing to do was for Notre Dame to become Harvard, so to speak.

Ralph McInerny thought that this didn’t make much sense at a time when those “peer schools” were awash in pragmatism and utilitarianism. Rather, he believed (and I think this was the more accurate reading of Ellis) that Notre Dame and other premier Catholic universities should play to strength, emphasizing a demanding liberal arts education while bringing the best of the mid-20th century Catholic philosophical, theological and literary renaissance to bear in the U.S. Doing that, Catholic universities would model a form of higher learning that was truth-centered, character-building, and life-inspiring.

There is indeed some of that going on at Our Lady’s University today, thanks to students, younger faculty and some reform-minded members of the Congregation of the Holy Cross. Those true reformers lost a happy warrior for their noble cause with the death of Ralph McInerny. Perhaps someday the university’s board and administration will understand that.

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George Weigel is distinguished senior fellow of the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington, D.C.

Liturgy and social justice

Angela Kessler — Sat, 13 Mar 2010 05:00:00 +0000

There is a Latin liturgical maxim that goes: “Lex orandi, lex credendi.” It’s very basic translation and meaning states that the words we pray in the liturgical rites of the church are what we believe at the foundation of faith; just as those things we hold in faith are what we pray as a community of believers. I mention this expression to segue a reflection on the topic of liturgy and social justice.

We don’t immediately associate our public worship with the mandate of Jesus Christ to attend to the social matters of the world around us. Part of that understanding may come from an attitude that what goes on in our worship has little or no connection with the world because our personal sanctification and the glorification of God are the aim of all Christian worship. Because there is such an abrupt change in the environment surrounding our public prayer, the hymnody we sing and prayers offered in a space designated for holy ritual compared to the secular marketplace of American culture, we tend to separate the two.

But if we reflect for a moment on the act of worshipping the Triune God and the words that accompany that ritual act as we do each Lord’s Day at Mass and during the celebration of the sacraments, everything we offer to God in praise and thanksgiving is a matter of social justice. The entire celebration of Mass possesses a movement to attend to the matters of the world.

The Liturgy of the Word, for instance, provides God’s faithful members the understanding of what and how justice is to be addressed. We peer through the lens of women and men of faith from the beginning of time, our religious ancestors, how they acknowledged injustices in their time and how the God and provider of all inspired in them the way and means to address those issues.

During the great prayer of thanksgiving at Mass, the Eucharistic Prayer, we recall how God, from the beginning of time, loved us into being and attended to every turning on humanity’s part in bringing us back. And how, in sending us His only begotten Son, God established a once and for all covenant with the human family which the church on earth recalls every time Mass is celebrated.

Having followed the Lord’s command to eat and drink in memory of him, we are nurtured to go forth into the world to attend to the injustices of our time.

Latin phrases have a way of expressing the deepest and clearest meaning for us. “Ita Missa est” is the final commendation given the faithful at every Mass. It could not be any clearer in expressing the fact that we are to “Go, the Mass is ended!” The charge “go” is the key to the whole celebration of Mass.

Having heard the story of faith and its meaning and application, and recalled how, in all of the significant moments in the history of salvation, God has sustained us and saved us, we have work to do. Everything we do in our worship, every word spoken, every hymn sung, every ritual gesture aims to bring several things to focus: God’s glorification and humanity’s sanctification.

This divine exchange likewise has a bi-product: a justice that is of God’s prompting and our response to active faith. Thanks be to God!

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Father Charles E. Singler, D. Min., is director of worship for the Diocese of Toledo.