by Bob Braun/Star-Ledger Columnist

Monday April 20, 2009, 8:04 AM

St. Lucy's Roman Catholic Church, an enduring fortress of tradition in a changing Newark, will lose the priest who was its spiritual guide for a half-century. But Monsignor Joseph Granato won't go without a fight -- a fight his supporters say will both maintain that tradition and keep the cleric in the city.

Granato, with the parish since 1955, bowed to demands from the Newark Archdiocese -- first made five years ago -- that he step down from what had been the center of Italian-American heritage in the city's old First Ward.

Amanda Brown/The Star-LedgerMonsignor Joseph Granato, with St. Lucy's of Newark since 1955, will retire in June. Some parishioners fear the longtime monsignor's retirement would end the church's conservative practices.

"That battle is over," says Anthony Rosamilia of Parsippany, a church trustee. "He will retire. The only question now is what happens to him and to St. Lucy's."

Rosamilia says parishioners and other supporters feared Granato's retirement in June would end the conservative practices of St. Lucy's, whose priests still dispense Communion to devout kneeling at an altar railing, offer Latin masses, reserve seats for old families and encourage devotion to obscure, regionally known Italian saints whose statues fill the church -- among other traditions now rejected by most Catholic churches.

The pastor himself is under a gag order and cannot speak for himself, Rosamilia says. At 80, however, he is fit and willing to continue leading the parish.

"I can say nothing," is all he will say.

But parishioners themselves, led by Rosamilia and Michael Genevrino, the executive director of the state Italian-American Heritage Institute, began organizing a protest march from St. Lucy's to the archdiocese's home church, the Sacred Heart Cathedral-Basilica, blocks away. They also encouraged "friends of St. Lucy's" to inundate the archdiocese with calls and letters.

"St. Lucy's is erupting," Genevrino declared. "It's a culture war."

"Save Saint Lucy's" posters went up in stores on Bloomfield Avenue and other streets in what had been the Italian section of New Jersey's largest city.

Within days, Genevrino announced the archdiocese offered Granato assurances he could continue to live in the parish rectory -- the alternative was a home for retired priests -- and that his replacement would respect the church's traditions.

Archbishop John Myers called Granato, Genevrino says, and told him the church's traditions were "devotions he shared and would not want to see changed."

Jim Goodness, an archdiocese spokesman, confirmed Granato would stay as pastor emeritus. He said he was unaware of the contents of the call from the archbishop.

"I think too many people are jumping to conclusions about what might happen at St. Lucy's," said Goodness. "No one has been named to replace Monsignor Granato."

The archdiocese faces a problem by committing the next pastor in advance to maintaining all the church's traditions.

St. Lucy's was established in 1891 at the peak of Italian immigration to Newark. From 1910 to 1920, priests at St. Lucy's performed 10,694 baptisms and 1,495 marriages. Fifty years later, the numbers have shrunk to a fraction of those rites.

It became more of a museum to the city's Italian past and old traditions of worship than a true Italian-American parish -- the parish's community center contains a museum, headed by Genevrino, honoring the neighborhood that is no more.

Change is anathema to St. Lucy's Italian-American supporters, most of whose families moved from Newark long ago but return for weddings, baptisms and funerals.

"Not everyone embraces change," says Genevrino, who lives in Clark.

Many with roots in the neighborhood believe they were refugees displaced by urban renewal and other government projects that, beginning in the 1950s, destroyed their neighborhood -- Columbus Homes, a low-income project since razed; the Colonnades, once a luxury high-rise; Route 280 that sliced into the last viable section of the ward.

In an earlier interview, Granato insisted Newark's Italians were forced out of the city and did not flee the city because it became predominantly African-American -- although the church almost closed in the wake of the 1967 riots.

The priest kept in contact with the families whose children and grandchildren -- many successful professionals -- now live in suburbs throughout the state and country. They became a revenue source that kept the church alive and in sparkling condition. He also raised nearly $2 million to build an outdoor plaza and shrine to St. Gerard Maiella -- an Italian saint considered a patron to motherhood -- as well as nearby low-income housing.

"We stayed," Granato said in the earlier interview. "It's the deal we made with parishioners. We stay if they stay."

The scions of the old families also represent political and financial power within the archdiocese -- and could account for why it has failed in the past to persuade the monsignor to leave. It is almost unheard of for priests -- normally rotated regularly throughout the diocese every few years -- to remain as long as Granato stayed at St. Lucy's.

Genevrino insists the protest has only been "postponed," not canceled.

"We will be vigilant," he says.

by Steven Ertelt
LifeNews.com Editor
April 21, 2009

 By Daily Mail Reporter
Last updated at 2:13 AM on 11th April 2009

Good Friday address: Pope Benedict warned that religious sentiments are increasingly being held up to ridicule in the West

Pope Benedict XVI last night attacked the rise of aggressive secularism in Western societies, warning them that they risked drifting into a 'desert of godlessness'.

He used his Good Friday meditations to compare deliberate attempts to remove religion from public life to the mockery of Jesus Christ by the mob as he was led out to be crucified.

'Religious sentiments' were increasingly ranked among the 'unwelcome leftovers of antiquity' and 'held up to scorn and ridicule', he added.

'We are shocked to see to what levels of brutality human beings can sink,' said the Pope at an evening ceremony at the Coliseum in Rome.

'Jesus is humiliated in new ways even today when things that are most holy and profound in the faith are being trivialised, the sense of the sacred is allowed to erode.

'Values and norms that held societies together and drew people to higher ideals are laughed at and thrown overboard. Jesus continues to be ridiculed.'

The German-born Pope, who turns 82 later this month, prayed Christians would respond by growing in faith. 

By KEN KUSMER – 9 hours ago

SOUTH BEND, Ind. (AP) — Ten priests from the order that founded the University of Notre Dame say the school risks its "true soul" and could distance itself from the Roman Catholic Church by inviting President Barack Obama to campus next month.

The members of the Congregation of the Holy Cross, which helps run the university, asked the Rev. John Jenkins, the Holy Cross priest who is Notre Dame's president, and the university's board of fellows to reconsider the invitation to Obama because he supports abortion rights.

"Failure to do so will damage the integrity of the institution," said the letter published Wednesday in Notre Dame Observer.

Notre Dame announced last month that Obama would deliver the university's May 17 commencement address and receive an honorary degree. The decision by the nation's best-known Catholic university sparked widespread anger among many Catholics who said Notre Dame should not honor someone whose policies on abortion and embryonic stem-cell research clash with core church teachings on human life.

Hundreds of abortion opponents protested on campus Sunday, and the priests said the invitation has opened a "fissure" between Notre Dame and many bishops. More than a dozen bishops have denounced Obama's appearance, including Cardinal Francis George of Chicago, president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops.

Jenkins has said the university does not condone all of Obama's policies, and spokesman Dennis Brown has said Notre Dame does not plan to rescind the invitation.

"We respect the opinions of members of the Holy Cross community and others," Brown said.

Obama would be the ninth U.S. president to receive an honorary degree from Notre Dame and sixth sitting president to address graduates. Other commencement speakers have included Dwight Eisenhower, Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, and George W. Bush.

Cecilia Prinster, president of the Notre Dame Alumni Association, noted in a column also published in the campus newspaper that Obama's policies in areas such as health care reform, economic security and environmental stewardship are in line with Catholic social teaching.

The Pope's worst enemies are Catholics

It's payback time for Pope Benedict XVI's most dedicated enemies, who are not militant secularists, hate-crazed Muslims, diehard Protestants or the liberal media. The people who most dislike the Pope are Catholics, or people who have the nerve to describe themselves as such.

The Pope needs to be protected from Catholics

We learned this morning that "Vatican insiders" consider Benedict XVI "a disaster". It's true. They do think that. He's a disaster for them, and their determination to turn the Catholic Church into a touchy-feely forum in which uncomfortable teachings and traditions are "modernised" to impress non-Catholics. Until the Williamson affair, the media weren't sufficiently interested in attacking Benedict XVI to be useful. But now, after that own goal... YES!!!

Take the furore over condoms. I don't think the Pope should have strayed into the topic of condoms and Aids, but what he said didn't represent a hardening of the Church's line on this subject. Post-Williamson, however, the liberal media have slipped back into anti-papal default mode, which suits certain "Catholics" just fine. Consider this piece by a creep called Robert S McElvaine, Professor of Arts & Letters at Millsaps College. "Impeach the Pope," he screeched in the Washington Post Online.

The Church's opposition to birth control is largely an outgrowth of its all-male composition and those males' attempts to degrade women's physical powers by asserting that women and the intercourse into which they supposedly tempt men are necessary evils ("It is well for a man not to touch a woman," Paul instructed the Christians of Corinth), the only purpose of which is procreation ... Let's start a movement within the Catholic Church to impeach Pope Benedict XVI and remove him from office. While we're at it, let's replace him with a woman.

more...

The Destruction of Notre Dame

By James M. Thunder on 3.23.09 @ 6:08AM

On Friday, March 20, it was announced that President Obama had accepted an invitation by the president of the University of Notre Dame, Father John Jenkins, to give the commencement address on May 19 and receive an honorary degree. What fire could not do, Father Jenkins and his Academic Council may succeed in doing -- destroying a major Catholic institution.

In April 1879, the Main Building of the University was destroyed by fire. It was "the Main Building" because it housed classrooms, student sleeping quarters, kitchen, library, offices. The man who had left France and founded Notre Dame 37 years earlier, in 1842, Father Edward Sorin, was 65 and saw his life's work destroyed. Nonetheless, with fiery determination, he exclaimed: "If it were all gone, I should not give up. Tomorrow, we will build again, and build it bigger." That summer, with help from Chicagoans who had suffered their own fire eight years before, 300 laborers, using mud from the campus lake, made bricks and rebuilt it. It was sufficiently complete for the return of students in September. It is this building that TV viewers see during Notre Dame home football games.

How did Father Jenkins calculate the benefits and the burdens of Notre Dame giving Obama a platform on campus at commencement?     more...

Sign the petition to Fr. Jenkins