Catholic World Report 2009
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Special Report
The strategy of powerful Catholic health care advocates in the debate over reform has left many confused.
By Anne Hendershott
 The battle over health care reform promises to be the most expensive one ever waged in Congress, as armies of lobbyists advance on Washington to demand that new legislation reflect their interests. Recognizing the high stakes involved, hospitals, drug companies, unions, and a host of health care providers ranging from medical device makers to Planned Parenthood have spent nearly $400 million on lobbying. All have a vested interest in “fixing” health care to their advantage.
One of the most visible activists involved in shaping health care reform is Sr. Carol Keehan, president of the Catholic Health Association (CHA), an advocacy organization that represents the interests of Catholic hospitals and large Catholic health care organizations throughout the country. Catholic hospitals and health care facilities pay dues to the CHA, whose stated mission is “to promote the Catholic Church’s ministry in health care and to respond to the members’ need to practice quality health care in the communities where they serve.”
In an attempt to fulfill this mission, Sr. Keehan has been out on the front lines advocating for health care reform from the earliest days of the Obama administration. On what side of the debate Sr. Keehan’s CHA falls, however, has been unclear and a source of concern given that all reform proposals before November permitted an expansion of abortion rights.
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Analysis
Many balk at this element of the Nativity story, but historical and astronomical evidence tends to corroborate it.
By Michael J. Miller
During a 2007 BBC radio interview, the archbishop of Canterbury deconstructed elements of the Nativity story. “Stars simply don’t behave like that,” Rowan Williams said. Asked about the existence of three wise men, he replied, “It works quite well as legend.”
But years ago Father Walter Brandmüller, president of the Pontifical Committee for Historical Sciences, published an essay applying the historical-critical method to the question of the Nativity story. (The essay is reprinted without cumbersome footnotes in Light and Shadows: Church History Amid Faith, Fact, and Legend [Ignatius].) He found that an unbiased examination of the historical evidence for the Nativity does not undermine, but corroborates, Christian Tradition.
Brandmüller cites the Anglican scholar J.A.T. Robinson, whose 1976 study Redating the New Testament challenged the 19th-century “scientific” consensus that the Gospels were written after 70 A.D. The late dating conveniently gave Scripture scholars maximum latitude for their speculations. Robinson points out that the Acts of the Apostles (the sequel to Luke) do not mention the deaths of Peter and Paul (circa 67) or the Roman-Judean war, which started in 66. Based on a careful evaluation of both internal and external evidence, he concludes that all four Gospels were written before 70 A.D.
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Editorial
The release of Anglicanorum Coetibus
By George Neumayr
According to his critics, Pope Benedict XVI’s papacy would alienate, not attract, be rigid, not flexible. But as he presides over an imaginative papacy of growing Christian unity, their predictions fall away.
Unable to compute that disaffected Anglicans had approached Pope Benedict and asked for entry into the Church, they cast his apostolic constitution Anglicanorum Coetibus as an act of aggressive evangelization.
“Vatican Fishing for Disgruntled Anglicans,” declared the Washington Post. The New York Times described it as “an extraordinary bid to lure traditionalist Anglicans en masse.”
The coverage contained an implicit assumption: that the Catholic Church is a man-made sect which steals members from other man-made sects.
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Special Report
Dissenters, now calling themselves the American Catholic Council, plan a 2011 conference in Detroit “to create a new Church.”
By Anne Hendershott
Claiming that they are attempting to address the “serious deterioration of the US Church today,” organizers of a new Catholic reform organization are planning a national conclave in 2011 called the American Catholic Council. In what is being billed as a kind of off-site Vatican Council, the proposed gathering promises “thoughtful discussion” of scholarly papers and presentations by Catholic theologians, scholars, and activists—all directed toward the goal of creating a new Church that is “fully in tune with the authentic Gospel message.”
Promising that the American Catholic Council will “recapture the universal call to ministry,” organizers claim to have launched the call for the national council in an effort to create a more responsive, accountable Church that “calls on the active participation of its people and more closely models the American experience.”
Although council leaders have denied that they are attempting to create their own church, the American Catholic Council website states their mission clearly: “We seek nothing short of a personal conversion of all to create a new Church.” And, while the organizers of the proposed council have appropriated the language and trappings of an authentic Catholic council, the reality is that the American Catholic Council will be conducted entirely outside the purview of the Church, flouting canon law, and ignoring input from current Church leaders.
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New canonical structure will allow union with Rome while preserving Anglican identity.By Catherine Harmon  In an unexpected statement issued October 20, the Vatican announced that Pope Benedict XVI will soon release an apostolic constitution establishing a formal structure through which former Anglicans can enter full communion with the Catholic Church.
The apostolic constitution—a formal document reserved by the pope for the most important declarations concerning canon law and Catholic practice—will allow the institution of “personal ordinariates,” according to the statement released by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. This new canonical structure will enable former Anglicans to join the Catholic Church “while preserving elements of the distinctive Anglican spiritual and liturgical patrimony.” The announcement was made at a press conference held in Rome with Cardinal William Levada, prefect of the CDF, and Archbishop Augustine DiNoia, secretary of the Congregation for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments. Notably absent from the press conference were any members of the Pontifical Council for Christian Unity, the council chiefly responsible for dialogue with other Christian denominations. Cardinal Walter Kasper, president of that council, had previous commitments elsewhere, Levada said; Kasper was scheduled to be in Cyprus attending a meeting of the International Joint Commission for Orthodox-Catholic Theological Dialogue.
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