Free Republic

Former Massachusetts congressman Robert Drinan, a Jesuit priest who supported legalizing abortion when he served in Congress, still uses the authority of his collar to cheerlead for evil causes. On Easter Sunday, he turned up at various television studios to praise the starvation to death of Terri Schiavo. Drinan was apparently Tim Russert's idea of a sturdy Catholic authority on this matter. Even as Drinan praised the killing of a disabled woman he mused nostalgically about passage of the "Americans with Disabilities Act," a glorious piece of legislation, he said. A host not willing to play the stooge to a...

One reads in the papers that the Pentagon expects the war in Iraq to continue till 2010. Donald Rumsfeld will not guarantee that it will be over by 2009. How many dead and maimed Americans by then? How many sad obituaries? How many full pages in the papers with pictures of all the casualties? Why? The reasons change: weapons of mass destruction, war on terror, freedom and democracy for the people of Iraq, American credibility. All are deceptions. This cockamamie and criminally immoral war was planned before the Sept. 11 attack in which Iraq was not involved. It has nothing...

It didn't take George Bush long to become a lame duck president. While he was off in South America, two congressional Neanderthals, Representatives James Sensenbrenner and Duncan Hunter, at the urging of the Pentagon, scuttled the intelligence reform bill. All the years of work in establishing the committee and producing its lengthy report went down the drain, though it was supported by the president, the vice president and, somewhat weakly, by the secretary of defense.There were plenty of votes in the House to pass the bill, but Speaker J. Dennis Hastert, something of a Neanderthal himself, refused to permit a...

The Catholic Church is in deep trouble. The more immediate problems are the sex abuse scandal -- which has not gone away and won't for a long time -- and the clumsy efforts of some bishops to deliver votes for the Republican Party. There are three chronic problems in the Catholic Church to which it is not even trying to respond -- the decline in mass attendance, the decline in vocations, and the decline in parochial school attendance. Ask what is causing the problems and you'll hear personal opinions and cliches, most of which blame the laity. They're materialist, consumerist,...

The election is over and so we can forget about the Iraq war. It is no longer a political issue and hence matters to no one. The American electorate has followed the tradition of standing by a wartime president and thus endorsing the president's war. It was once his war. Now the election has made it our war. The issue is closed. A recent report suggested that if one compares the number of deaths that usually occur in Iraq per year with the number since Bush's invasion, the cost of the war in dead Iraqis may be more than a...

Today President Bush came to Greeley , Colorado The rally was great even if we stood for four hrs to see him. It was worth ever minute to see him and Rudy Gulliani give their speech's. Freeper's in attendance were Fire enigne red , Card carring vast right wing, Trteamer, Weld gop, scaled capitan justice, and others I did not see I'm sure.

Bush to visit Greeley Sherrie Peif President Bush will be the first sitting president to visit Greeley in almost 70 years. Weld County Republican officials confirmed Wednesday night that President Bush will speak Monday at the Island Grove Regional Park Events Center. Registered Republicans in Weld started receiving computer-generated phone messages Wednesday night. The exact time of Bush's appearance is not known. White House officials are expected to officially announce the details later today. Jon Reynolds, a volunteer at the Republican headquarters in Greeley, confirmed the pres- ident will make an unprecedented stop here Monday morning, just eight days before...

Just got a call from the Colorado GOP. President Bush is going to be in Greeley, CO on the 24th.

"When asked if he agreed with Father Greeley’s assessment of Cardinal Ratzinger’s statement, Bishop Bruskewitz conveyed through his Vicar General, Monsignor Timothy J. Thorburn, J.C.L., the following assertion: .... “My advice to any Catholics who would ask me about that Greeley article would be to give it the same view as you would the words and acts of a clown.”

Sheila Schreiber-Parkhill, a noted Catholic attorney who currently resides in Bismarck, North Dakota, has challenged priest-author and sociologist Father Andrew Greeley to reveal the information he claims to have in “safekeeping” about the activities of a clergy sex/pedophile ring that may have been involved with the 1984 unsolved murder of Chicago musician and professor Francis E. Pellegrini. The following is a significant portion of the letter that Parkhill e-mailed to Greeley on May 6 regarding the aforementioned matter. To date, Greeley has not responded. Dear Father Greeley: I have followed your career and writings for many years now, reading the...

"What this book is about can be seen by adding a few words to its title: The Catholic Revolution was caused by New Wine being poured into Old Wineskins, and not by The Second Vatican Council." .... "The book is ambiguous and contradictory in its attempt to “refute the current tendency to blame” Vatican II. So the fact to be retained from Greeley’s arguments is that Vatican II represented a Revolution that destroyed the structures of the Church, as well as her dogmatic and moral doctrines, her liturgy and her habits. The metaphor he uses is creative: the conciliar Bishops...

Two Colorado FReepers put together an awesome Float in the Greeley Independence Day Parade. A lot of hard work was put into fielding this float and the result was seeing all the support our troops are getting from home. This is a large parade and seen by thousands, little kids lined the streets for more than a mile, and the pictures will make you smile......

Few are swayed by a candidate's pro-choice policy. "Will Catholics vote against Gov. Carter, Mr. Mayor, because of his abortion stand?" The mayor of Chicago stared at the reporter with the bemused frown he reserved for silly questions. "They don't vote that way." Twenty-eight years later, they still don't vote that way. Nevertheless, in the run-up to the last seven presidential elections, experts on both sides have predicted that the "Catholic anti-abortion" vote would cause trouble for the Democrats, especially given the drift of Catholics from Democratic alignment. Both these "theories" — a Catholic anti-abortion vote and a Catholic realignment...

This was a worthy thread. --aragona

www.suntimes.com Back to regular viewhttp://www.suntimes.com/output/greeley/cst-edt-greel21.html Zero tolerance also should apply to bishops June 21, 2002BY ANDREW GREELEY American Catholics are not likely to be convinced that the reforms the bishops voted for in Dallas last week mean anything unless there are resignations in the hierarchy. Surveys by both Gallup and the Wall Street Journal indicate that Catholics want the pope to remove bishops who have reassigned pedophile priests to parish work. The position is logical: If there is to be zero tolerance for offending priests, then there should be zero tolerance for offending bishops. There apparently weren't enough votes for...

Criticism of pope no cause to quit church August 16, 2002 BY ANDREW GREELEY Why are you still a Catholic, many people demanded of Northwestern University Professor Garry Wills after the publication in 2000 of his controversial best-seller Papal Sin. If you don't like the Catholic Church, why don't you leave, asked reviewers, pious Catholics and pious secularists alike. In his new book Why I Am a Catholic, Wills responds. In effect, he says that, like many of the rest of us, he likes being a Catholic and has no intention of leaving. That the reviewers refuse to understand what...

After the Bay of Pigs disaster when the CIA tried to invade Cuba, President John F. Kennedy took personal responsibility and ordered an independent investigation. In fact, the invasion had been planned during the Eisenhower administration, and JFK could easily have blamed the mess on his predecessor. After the Pearl Harbor attack, President Franklin D. Roosevelt established an investigative commission chaired by Supreme Court Justice Owen D. Roberts, a Republican who had been the prosecutor for the notorious Teapot Dome scandal. Patently, President Bush is not going to assume responsibility for the World Trade Center catastrophe. His political allies blame...

Fr. Andrew Greeley continues to chastise the Catholic Church for its handling of the clergy sex abuse scandal. The soft-porn novel-writing priest has always been part of the solution, you see. Not that he doesn't have some valid points. After all, no reasonable Catholic can deny that certain bishops have been, at the very least, grossly negligent in their duties. And this doesn't even take into account the widespread dissent and lack of orthodoxy in the American church. But, alas, Greeley is a liberal. He's quick to point out the "hypocrisy" of the "right-wing" whenever it makes an assertion, whether...

The priests in Wisconsin who recently voted for a married priesthood to respond to the shortage of priests won for themselves what our Protestant brothers and sisters would call cheap grace. They did something that addressed a serious problem, which made them feel good, and earned for them a lot of public attention. Hence they earned ''grace.'' However, it accomplished nothing, and required no effort. Hence it was ''cheap grace'' -- grace that was easy to earn but had no impact on anything or anybody. I wonder how many of the priests really thought that the Roman Curia, which is...

The following is a recent e-mail letter sent by attorney Sheila Schreiber-Parkhill of Bismarck, North Dakota, to sociologist and author Father Andrew Greeley (I wrote a commentary on this very subject some time back; but Sheila has acquired a few additional details that I find very interesting.): Dear Father Greeley: I have followed your career and writings for many years now, reading the many stories you've written about the sexual abuse crisis in our Church, the problems, the solutions, stories you have written denouncing the bishops and their cover-ups. "Are the bishops sorry at all?", you asked 8/3/2003. They all...