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  1. Clergy

The Education of a Pro-Life Clergyman

We used to walk to church together, Susan and I, she a junior at St. John’s College in Santa Fe, I a freshman. It was a couple of miles down to the Episcopal church, a couple of miles back—our conversations on these walks were how we got to know each other. I remember her saying, as we . . . . Continue Reading »

My Excommunication

In 1992, a group of dissident bishops of the American Episcopal Church held a meeting after that denomination’s triennial general convention—the notorious convention whose delegates had failed to agree upon a resolution calling for bishops and priests to be sexually continent outside of . . . . Continue Reading »

Briefly Noted

A Field Guide to the English Clergy:  A Compendium of Diverse Eccentrics, Pirates, Prelates and Adventurers; All Anglican, Some Even Practising by fergus butler-gallie oneworld, 192 pages, $20 Ah, the holy fool. Though we often associate such characters with the great tomes of Russian . . . . Continue Reading »

Pope Francis and Zero Tolerance

The outcry against Francis’s appointment of Chilean Bishop Juan Barros, who was long associated with a child abusing priest-to the Diocese of Osorno, has placed the pope’s “zero tolerance” policy against sexual abuse into question.As Pope, Francis has taken many decisive actions against sexual abuse. He created a special Vatican Commission to combat it, in all its forms, and soon thereafter met with a group of victims, expressing his pain over their suffering: Continue Reading »

Worthy of Double Honor

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, in 2013, median clergy income was 14 percent lower than the overall median income in the U.S. This is all the more striking when one considers that most professional clergy received years of specialized religious and theological graduate training after receiving their undergraduate degrees. Indeed, median clergy earnings are 24 percent lower than median earnings of people who hold undergraduate degrees, and 36 percent less than individuals who hold masters’ degrees. Continue Reading »

The Uses of Clerical Scandal

When the Pope visited the United States last fall, the media indulged in a predictably frenzied examination of the general state of “crisis” in the American Catholic Church. Oddly, though, few reporters devoted space to what only a few years previously would have been described as the . . . . Continue Reading »

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