Princeton Grad Student Commits Suicide after Childhood Sexual Abuse: Implications for Catholic Discussions

The tragedy of Bill Zeller's suicide should sound a warning bell for all those apologists for the current Catholic hierarchy who want to attack the credibility of testimony by survivors of childhood clerical sexual abuse.  Survivors of such abuse have spent much of the last decade desperately trying to educate the Catholic community about the long-lasting, destructive effects of such abuse in the lives of those who have endured it.  Bill Zeller's suicide note illustrates the lifelong, soul-destroying pain with which many people sexually abused as children live.  It also underscores the damage that religious fundamentalists (like his own parents) do, when they put the needs of a religious institution above the needs of children abused by pastoral figures in that institution.

Want to know where the cut-and-dried, theology-lite, rote-memorization catechetical method of the current restorationist Catholic regime ends up?: Bill O'Reilly.

Archbishop Vincent Nichols on Need to Keep Conversation of Sexual Ethics Open: Critical Reflections

Jim McCrea has emailed me (and other folks) information from an interesting article in the latest issue of the British journal The Tablet. I'd link to the article, but it's behind a firewall for subscribers, and I can't direct readers to the article itself. If you'll bear with me, though, as I cite an article that you can't read in its entirety, I'd like to make some comments about this worthwhile essay.

Ramin Setoodeh Steps in It Again, Refuses to Retract Thesis re: Gay Actors Playing Straight

Journalist Ramin Setoodeh is taking heat again for . . . well,  it's difficult to figure out precisely what Setoodeh wants to say in his latest statements about the debacle that ensued last April, when he published a Newsweek essay attacking gay actors who try to play straight, and proposing that the more aware we are that a gay male actor is gay, the less convinced we'll be when he plays a heterosexual romantic lead.  Not only does Setoodeh refuse to retract that thesis, he has now reiterated it in a follow-up essay in which he seeks to claim that Hollywood is responsible for the problem by shutting out openly gay actors.  And that he has been spectacularly misunderstood.

Milwaukee Catholic Archdiocese Files Bankruptcy, Survivors of Clerical Sexual Abuse Call Foul

Following in the footsteps of a number of other U.S. Catholic dioceses, the diocese of Milwaukee has declared bankruptcy as survivors of childhood sexual abuse by Catholic clerics demand justice from the Catholic church.  Leaders of the group Survivors Network of Those Abused by Priests (SNAP), an organization with a long history of following carefully the actions of the hierarchy in response to abuse claims, decry the Milwaukee archdiocese's bankruptcy filing as a ploy to shield the records of the archdiocese--to shield the names of priests who have abused minors, and to prevent for as long as possible legal testimony by church officials who have protected these priests.

New York Times on Scalia's Attack on Equal Protection Clause: "Outlandish"

As I expect many readers of Bilgrimage already know, Supreme Court justice Antonin Scalia began his new year with a bang by declaring that the U.S. Constitution's equal protection amendment, the 14th amendment, does not guarantee women and gays freedom from discrimination.  As a constitutional literalist, Scalia does a mind-reading act to discover (and then reveal to the rest of us) what was in the mind of the writers of the constitution when they wrote the document.  Never mind what the actual words say.

Birds Fall, Fish Die, and Questions Abound

There's nothing intelligent I know how to say about the recent mysterious events in which some 5,000 red-winged blackbirds fell from the skies on new year's eve in the small town of Beebe, Arkansas, and in which 85,000 drum fish died nearby in the Arkansas River a few days before that.  I have heard or read no plausible explanation for either event, or for connecting the two--though how not to wonder if they're connected, when they occur in places very close to each other at nearly the same time?