MAPA Convening Board Minutes February 13, 2006

Our local priest's union has posted the minutes of its executive committee's meeting February 13, 2006. Much of the meeting dealt with the then-upcoming meetings of the Alliance's membership and the annual retreat for all the priests in the Archdiocese. In other business

c. Priests’ Rights – Steve Avella has contacted Fr. Pat Legges and Fr. Mike Jamail for advice on how to get a canonical review on our document for protecting your rights as a priest from someone outside of our diocese. The board agreed that he should proceed with Jamail’s recommendation.

This arose from Fr. Paul Hartmann's pointing out problems with their brochure, see my post on their January 9, 2006 meeting. If they now concede he might be pointing out real problems, why don't they just ask him for solutions?

e. Vatican Document on Homosexual Candidates – There is a March 16 focus group meeting on this topic. Brian Mason, Steve Amann, Ken Mich, and perhaps Rick Abert will continue follow-up on this by scheduling an event for priests on processing the negative impact of the Vatican Document rejecting homosexuals from seminaries. ...

When Anne Burke, interim chair of the National Review Board of the USCCB, spoke to the local chapter of Voice of the Faithful September 11, 2004, she said in the Q and A that they had not ruled out homosexuality as a risk factor in the abuse cases. If so, it's hard to see how it can be ignored in seminary admissions if the Church is going to defend itself should such cases arise in the future. I wonder how the MAPA committee will address this aspect of the issue.

Ken [Fr. Ken Mich] will contact Fr. Brian Mason to ask him
to facilitate a focus group at the general meeting on the subject of his article in The Cincture on the theme of: "Are our strategies for dealing with the shortage of priests effective ones?"

Archbishop Dolan's strategy is more priests. MAPA's strategy seems to be reducing the number of laity who show up to fit a declining number of priests.