Archive for September, 2005
Programs Address Same-sex Attraction
Thursday, September 22nd, 2005
“The Catholic Miscellany”
By Jeffrey Kirby
CHARLESTON – Two groups within the Diocese of Charleston are reaching out to assist persons with same-sex attraction. It is a difficult attraction to talk about. Many people in the church, both clergy and laity, are uncomfortable with the subject.
Oftentimes, it is not spoken of and people with this attraction go neglected and unassisted by the church. Meanwhile, our society seems overrun with talk on gay lifestyles, gay marriages, and gay rights.
Bishop Robert J. Baker addresses same-sex attraction in his recent pastoral letter, “The Redemption of Our Bodies.” He places his explanation within an overall summary of Pope John Paul II’s “Theology of the Body.”
Bishop Baker begins by explaining traditional Catholic teaching on homosexuality. A homosexual orientation is not of itself a sin. The church teaches that homosexuality is a disordered inclination and involves disordered affections.
Any homosexual act is gravely sinful because it violates the dignity of the person and human nature. Since the homosexual person’s sexual desires cannot be morally fulfilled, the attraction can cause deep and serious suffering within the person. It is not a minor disorder.
While affirming this teaching, Bishop Baker concurrently stresses the unique identity of each human person. He argues: “We are never defined by our disorders. We are persons with dignity and inexhaustible value before God, despite our disorders.” He further stresses the responsibility of the church to minister and care for homosexual persons. He writes, “We, as a Christian community, should reach out to those suffering from a homosexual inclination so that they might be surrounded by the love of friendship. Those who suffer from a homosexual orientation should not be abandoned to loneliness and despair. We, broken images in our own right, must invite such individuals to make full recourse to the resources of our faith to learn how to live chastely.”
In line with this teaching, Deacon Ed Peitler hopes to initiate a clinical service for those who have unwanted same-sex attraction. He plans to provide individual and group counseling that is consistent with the church’s teachings. Deacon Peitler is a licensed professional counselor with more than 30 years of experience.
The deacon explains that same-sex attraction “has been a neglected ministry in the church and it’s important that the church openly confront it … and provide assistance to those who desire it.” He elaborates that the church recognizes this omission and is “anxious to offer this
assistance” to those who need and want it.
This local effort is within the same ministerial outreach as the international spiritual support group Courage.
The work of Courage with persons who struggle with a same-sex attraction is also done within the framework of Catholic teaching and practice. It seeks to have local chapters, which offer chastity education and a support group to its members. Founded by Franciscan Father Benedict Groeschel and Oblate Father John Harvey, the group celebrates its 25th anniversary this year. Local chapters can be found on its Web site. As Peter, a member of Courage, expressed it, “As I began to strive toward living a chaste life, a new world opened up around me.
Healthy friendships with men began forming, and I felt a greater and deeper sense of maturity and love.”
Almost every Christian knows a family member or friend who struggles with a same-sex attraction. It is a difficult dilemma. Bishop Baker’s pastoral letter and the efforts of the Catholic Church are working to assure everyone that these persons are not abandoned by the church.
The church is not outraged by these members, but truly wants to embrace them and help them to live a morally healthy life – a life marked by a love which is ordered according to nature and truth; a love which gives life and grace, and allows the person to be free from fear, depression, and anger; and a life which is fully and abundantly lived.
For more information
Deacon Ed Peitler can be reached at (803) 384-3967. Courage’s Web site is: www.couragerc.org. Local chapters can be located through this Web site. The Charleston area chapter is run by Sister Jane Livingston, who may be contacted at (803) 577-0175 or at jane_livingston@juno.com.
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Two Bishop England Graduates Become Novices
Thursday, September 15th, 2005
“The Catholic Miscellany”
By Paul Barra
GREENVILLE, S.C. – Two Bishop England High School graduates have entered the religious life. On Aug. 6, the feast of the Transfiguration, Katie Vaughan and Katherine Melton were received into the novitiate of the Dominican Sisters of St. Cecilia. In the ceremony, 16 postulants received the Dominican habit and new religious names in the motherhouse chapel in Nashville, Tenn.
“It was a wonderful day for us,” said Sister Mary Emily Knapp, vocations director for the congregation. “Our congregation is humbled to see the generosity of these young women, who with their habit symbolize their witness of Christ in the world.”
Vaughan is now Sister Maris Stella; Melton’s religious name is Sister Marie Chrysostom. The novices now enter a yearlong period of formation, according to Sister Mary Emily. Their college work is temporarily put on hold, and they concentrate on learning the practice of their new vocation. The novitiates study the Dominican constitution, the Rule of St. Augustine, the Church documents on religious life and the true meaning of the vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience. They prepare intellectually and spiritually for their future life as Dominican religious.
“They live quietly in the novitiate,” the vocations director said. “We call it their cloister year. All of this is a process, during which the Church gives them time to prepare for their vows. It really is an important year for the sisters – one that is meant to form a strong foundation for their religious life.
At the end of the first year (officially known as their canonical year), the novices take their first vows and resume their studies in the world-at-large career in Catholic education.
The order is, perhaps, one of the more successful ones in the United States. The average age of the Dominican Sisters of St. Cecilia is only 36. The sisters dress in distinctive habits, so there is no mistaking their purpose in life, and they adhere to traditional Catholicism. The constitution of the 145-year-old congregation calls for respect for the priesthood and the magisterium of the Catholic Church, claims fidelity to the faith and reveres Mary as both mother and model.
The Dominican website calls the order of St. Cecilia a teaching order with a contemplative dimension. The nuns live in cells, eat most meals in silence, chant the Liturgy of the Hours three times a day – as well as compline and vespers – and their prayer life revolves around the Eucharist.
Sister Mary Emily cited that authentic Catholicism as the reason for the congregation’s appeal.
“Young women want to be authentic witnesses,” she said. “They are responding to God’s call and are very generous in giving their lives for what they believe.”
The vocations director called them the John Paul II generation and said that the late pope challenged them to live countercultural lives in the service of the faith.
Jeffrey F. Kirby, a seminarian for the Diocese of Charleston, first introduced the Charleston novices to the countercultural Dominicans of St. Cecilia. Kirby was one of their teachers at Bishop England, the diocesan high school of the Lowcountry. He is a third year theology graduate student at the North American College in Rome who hopes to be ordained a priest in 2007.
When he went off to the seminary after the girls’ junior year at Bishop England High School, he referred them to their pastor for continuing counseling and further discernment of possible vocations. But he kept in touch.
When the girls had become women and felt a real call to a consecrated life, Kirby talked to them about the different charisms and apostolates available in the Catholic Church.
“I suggested they look around and try to find ‘their place,’” he said. “One possible place I brought up was Nashville. For Katie, it was an immediate fit.”
Melton, who converted to the Catholic faith from Greek Orthodoxy during her senior year at Bishop England, looked around some more but determined God was calling her to the St. Cecilia Dominicans, the real community of the convent and the apostolate of Catholic teaching. They both liked the idea of wearing a distinctive habit.
Sisters Maris Stella and Marie Chrysostom are supported in their calling by their parents, Carol and John Vaughan and Toby Melton and Eugenia Kolkas, respectively. Both were parishioners of Stella Maris Church on Sullivan’s Island.
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Charleston Diocese, Sierra Leone have Connections in Bishop Barron
Thursday, September 8th, 2005
“The Catholic Miscellany”
By Jeff Kirby
This is the final article of the three-part series on the relationship between the church in South Carolina and the African nation of Sierra Leone.
CHARLESTON – During a recent pastoral visit to South Carolina, Archbishop Joseph Ganda of Sierra Leone frequently spoke of one of his predecessors, a bishop with ties to the Diocese of Charleston.
The predecessor was Bishop Edward Barron, a 19th-century missionary to Africa. Bishop Barron was born in Ireland in 1801, and after earning a law degree discerned a priestly vocation and entered the seminary. He studied at the Propagation of the Faith in Rome and was ordained a priest there in 1829. When he returned to Ireland, Bishop Barron felt a strong call to evangelize and volunteered to come to the United States as a missionary. He went to Philadelphia, where he served as a parish priest, seminary rector, and later as vicar general of the
diocese.
In 1822 many American religious and philanthropic groups, especially the American Colonization Society, supported the creation of Liberia as a colony for freed slaves. Bishop John England of the Diocese of Charleston wrote to Pope Gregory XVI in 1833, suggesting that missionaries be sent to the free blacks of Liberia. Bishop England had hoped that the mission would receive its own bishop. The pope, however, tried to place the African mission under the care of the American Jesuits. Having recently been given the Indian missions, the Jesuits could not sustain both efforts. In 1841 the Holy See asked the bishops of Charleston, Philadelphia, and New York to send missionaries without delay. This was the United States’ first foreign mission.
The Diocese of Charleston, which at the time encompassed North and South Carolina and Georgia, was suffering from a drastic shortage of priest and could not send a missionary. Bishop England, however, traveled and preached to raise spiritual and financial support for the mission. It was an effort he was deeply committed to and hoped to see prosper.
Father Barron knew of Liberia’s deadly climate and the difficulties involved in missionary work there, but nevertheless volunteered to serve. He left for Africa in 1841, along with Father John Kelly of New York and a lay catechist from Baltimore. On Feb. 10, 1842, Father Barron offered the first Mass in west Africa since the Jesuit missions of 1604. The mission was soon raised to an apostolic vicariate and Father Barron was named a bishop.
His jurisdiction was later extended to include Sierra Leone and the whole of western Africa. Barron became known as the “Bishop of the Two Guineas,” the generic name of the region. As such, he is the predecessor of Archbishop Joseph Ganda, the current Archbishop of Sierra Leone.
Bishop Barron received additional missionaries from France’s renewed Holy Ghost Fathers. The group of missionaries preached the Gospel and attempted to teach the faith, but their efforts were hampered by disease and the difficult climate, and many died.
Bishop Barron worked tirelessly to sustain this first Catholic mission to black Africa in modern times. He sought to raise funds and resources, recruit new missionaries, and extend avenues toward evangelization. By 1845, nearly all of the missionaries had died. Many were buried in the mission.
Bishop Barron himself became seriously ill and sadly resigned his jurisdiction to the Holy Ghost Fathers, whom he knew would persevere in the missionary work. He went to his “other mission post” of the United States, and labored in the Indian missions of Missouri and the Catholic missions in Florida. He returned to Philadelphia in 1854, but when he heard of a yellow fever epidemic in Georgia, he hurried to Savannah to help.
Savannah had become an independent diocese in 1850. Its first bishop, Bishop Francis Gartland, joined Bishop Barron in administering the sacraments to the sick. Both contracted yellow fever and died in this heroic service.
Bishop Barron is buried in Savannah, and the Bible verse on his tomb summarizes his life. It reads: “I most gladly will spend and will be spent myself for your souls” (2 Cor 12:15).
The writer is indebted to Father Peter Clarke of the Diocese of Charleston for his pastoral interest and research on the life of Bishop Edward Barron.
Jeff Kirby is a seminarian of the Diocese of Charleston.
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Lowcountry Family Finds its Heritage in Sierra Leone
Thursday, September 1st, 2005
“The Catholic Miscellany”
By Jeff Kirby
This is the second article in a three-part series on the relationship between Catholics in South Carolina and the African nation of Sierra Leone.
NORTH CHARLESTON – What does an African-American Catholic family from North Charleston have in common with a predominantly Muslim, West African tribe of 700,000?
In matter of history and spirituality, a lot.
The connections between the Polite family of the Lowcountry and the Mende tribe of southern Sierra Leone converge in a young girl. That 10-year-old was captured – 249 years ago – in Sierra Leone and sold into slavery on a Berkeley County rice plantation. She was called Priscilla.
In a rare paper trail of slave ship and plantation records, Thomalind Martin Polite was able to document her relationship with the child who was her ancestor.
The connection led to a West African homecoming for Thomiland and her husband, Antawn. As Priscilla’s seventh generation great-granddaughter, Thomaland visited the Mende tribe and was greeted and received as family, not as a tourist or a guest.
The homecoming was the result of the academic labors of many scholars, principally Joseph Opala, PhD, from James Madison University in Virginia. Opala wanted to intensify his research and find individuals who could personally trace their lineage back to African slaves. He had done this with specific tribes, linguistic associations, and cultural arts and customs, but he wanted to narrow the search.
It was an immense undertaking that required tedious reviews of historical documents and collaboration with other scholars including Edward Ball, author of “Slaves in the Family.”
Opala discovered the information about Priscilla and contacted the Polites, which led to the ancestral family reunion. The news of her ancestor and the idea of going to West Africa was overwhelming for Thomaland, who described herself as enjoying being behind-the-scenes.
However, this 31-year-old educational therapist and mother of two packed her bags for Sierra Leone to learn more about her heritage. She went with her husband and an entourage of scholars and journalists.
While there, the Polites spent time with the Mende tribe, of which Priscilla was a member. They were given tours of various parts of the country, met with the president and political leaders, and were hosted by Archbishop Joseph Ganda, the Catholic metropolitan of Sierra Leone.
The Polites also attended cultural events, had a song written for them, and dances performed around them. Thomaland was made an honorary member of the Catholic Ladies’ Guild and lavished with additional honors.
“The people are poor, very poor, but they all gave gifts,” Thomaland said. “They don’t have much, but they are humble and honorable.”
In an interview with The Catholic Miscellany, Thomaland was asked how the experience changed her. She paused reflectively and responded, “No one changes overnight. It’s going to take awhile to understand and process. But I have a deeper appreciation for Sierra Leone and their culture. I see slavery differently now – something very personal.”
Returning home, the Polites shared their stories with Faith, their 3-year-old daughter. Faith was sad to have her parents away, but named her baby doll Priscilla, in honor of her ancestor.
Thomaland and Antawn, a licensed clinical counselor at the Medical University of South Carolina, said that their visit to Bunce Island was one of the more powerful moments of their journey.
In was there that people of Sierra Leone, including Priscilla in 1756, were forced aboard ships headed for the slave markets of the American continent. Ruins of buildings from that time period still exist on the island.
“Remembering what happened there made it an emotional experience,” Thomaland said.
As Catholics, Thomaland and Antawn said the trip affected their spiritual lives.
“Our faith was expanded and deepened,” Thomaland said. “The Catholic churches were packed, and the Mass went on for hours, and no one cared.”
Sierra Leone has more than 13 cultural groups and has both Muslim, Christian, and animist groups who live peacefully together.
“Everyone just knows everyone,” Antawn said. Knowing and helping your neighbor brings unity, he added.
In recounting their travels and insights, the Polites said that they remind Catholics that we are all in one faith.
“Whatever race or color we are, we have one faith,” Thomaland said. “We can’t see each other as different.”
Antawn agreed. “We have to educate and enlighten ourselves,” he said. “We have to try to appreciate and respect each other in our common beliefs.”
The Polites elaborated on the need for greater tolerance within the church, and for the need of developed programs to assist our African sister dioceses.
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