Quote:A South Dakota family went unexpectedly viral after filming a 7-year-old during her first communion ceremony.

Stefanie Heidebrink said her daughter was nervous before going up and kept asking her how much wine should she should drink.

Brynley went up and took more than a sip. The whole church laughed as the child kept drinking and then nonchalantly walked back to her seat.

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nati...626988002/

(May 4, 2022 at 12:08 am)Fake Messiah Wrote: It must be a cultural thing where it is apparently cute to give seven-year-old girls alcohol if it's by a priest in a church.

Quote:A South Dakota family went unexpectedly viral after filming a 7-year-old during her first communion ceremony.

Stefanie Heidebrink said her daughter was nervous before going up and kept asking her how much wine should she should drink.

Brynley went up and took more than a sip. The whole church laughed as the child kept drinking and then nonchalantly walked back to her seat.

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nati...626988002/

Yeah, it's so funny how children don't know how to drink alcohol.

(May 4, 2022 at 10:39 am)The Grand Nudger Wrote: Never met my cousins, huh?

(May 3, 2022 at 9:13 am)HappySkeptic Wrote: The Pope doesn't have a dog in this fight.  This is the Russian vs. Ukrainian Orthodox churches, with Kirill salivating over those churches that he can save from the devil, and bring back into his corrupt fold.

Quote:Canadian panel urges not hiring military chaplains of religions that exclude women from their priesthoods

Bishop Scott McCaig, the Catholic military ordinary for Canada, called the section on redefining the chaplaincy “deeply problematic and regrettable.”

“Many of the pejorative remarks would appear to be directed to Catholics, as well as some other Christians, and amounted to mere caricatures of what we actually profess,” he wrote. He said the advisory panel’s report was full of “errors and oversimplifications.”

https://www.americamagazine.org/politics...ain-242934

Quote:The beginning of the fall of the Catholic Church in Ireland

“We can no longer ignore the fact that much of what the church has built up in Ireland over the last two centuries is crumbling before our eyes,” said Bishop Duignan, the 13th man to hold the position in Ireland’s youngest Catholic diocese.

“Many no longer believe the message. Many of our parishes are struggling,” he said. “Despite great work done by generations of priests, religious and lay people now, at times, it feels like we have been out all night without a single catch.”

Galway holds a key place in the recent history of the Catholic Church since Duignan’s predecessor, Eamonn Casey, came to grief 30 years ago after it emerged he had fathered a son, Peter, with American Annie Murphy.

“He presented as not at all remote or distant like many bishops which made the revelations of his double life, his cover-up, his hypocritical preaching on fidelity and responsibility and family planning all the more galling, all the more difficult to credit,” she went on.

In 1992 when Casey fell, Ireland was still comparatively innocent, even with realities hiding in plain sight, such as the Magdalene laundry on Dublin’s Sean McDermott Street which did not close until 1996.

It meant the exhumation of the remains of 133 women with a further 22 discovered later. All were former workers at the laundry but only 75 death certificates existed for them, despite it being a criminal offence not to register a death.

Back then, of course, no one had yet heard of Tuam and the almost 800 children buried there without trace. Many years would pass before Catherine Corless began her work to remind all that they, too, had once lived.

It followed a three-month investigation during which a friendly priest, also a canon lawyer, advised then editor Conor Brady: “If you’re wrong or if you can’t prove it, the church will destroy The Irish Times.”

Within five years a priest would have to be buried at night to escape the wrath of abused Irish Catholics and their relatives when Fr Brendan Smyth was laid to rest at 4.15am in late August 1997 at a graveside in the Cavan countryside.

Among the hidden realities to emerge in his case was the discovery that former Catholic Primate Cardinal Seán Brady had questioned children abused by Smyth in a 1975 inquiry and sworn them to silence.

Years later, it became clear that this was standard Catholic Church practice worldwide.

Soon more such revelations unleashed powerful waves of suffering and emotion across Ireland, so many the result of casual, sometimes merciless cruelties compounded by the indifference of those with power.

https://www.irishtimes.com/news/social-a...-1.4871562