A mother of a 5-month-old is pleasantly surprised that a woman would officially baptise her child in a Catholic parish church. The Baptism occurred last Sunday at St Hedwig’s Parish in the Catholic Diocese of Essen, in the Ruhr region of Western Germany. I had no particular expectations on this issue. Still, the fact that Read more
Almost a decade ago, as a young graduate student in theology, I lived for a year in the rectory of a Catholic parish. Like many other parishes in Boston faced with an ever-worsening clergy shortage, St. Mary of the Angels did not have a priest in residence. Rather than allowing the creaky 19th-century Victorian estate Read more
Priest crisis solved – lay people will be leading parishes in Germany, says Cardinal Reinhard Marx. The German cardinal’s motivation is his firm rejection of clustering parishes to resolve Germany’s shortage of priests. The shortfall of priests in Marx’s archdiocese of Munich and Freising is clear. He says of its 1.7 million Catholics, there was Read more