Deacon Gornick was there to witness one of Oregon’s most notorious prisoners, Gary Haugen, receive the sacrament. Haugen was convicted and sentenced to death in 2007 for murdering a fellow inmate while serving a life sentence for the murder of his ex-girlfriend’s mother. It’s the mantra of many a death penalty supporter: even in prison these guys are so dangerous they need to be killed.
Few things shake a person’s feeling of self-worth and stability as much homelessness. Pope Francis, during Advent last year, spoke about the great difficulties faced by families without a fixed place to live, and compared their situation to that of the Holy Family facing the birth of Jesus in a stable.
“Why Catholic?,” a scriptural and catechetical program for parish small groups presented by Renew International, has experienced increasing popularity since beginning two years ago in the Archdiocese of Anchorage.
In an effort to solidify relationships that have provided the Anchorage Archdiocese with much needed priests and religious, Anchorage Archbishop Roger Schwietz visited South Korea earlier this spring.
CatholicAnchor.org One of two priests on loan to the Archdiocese of Anchorage from the Archdiocese of Cotabato in the Philippines has returned to his native country to establish a new parish there. Father Dadz Esguerra had been in Alaska for three years, spending nearly a year as parochial vicar at St. Francis Xavier Church in…
A bulletin board is like a mini-archaeological dig into a person’s life and values. A good bulletin board — or maybe it’s your refrigerator door, or for those organized types, a scrapbook — should change often. It should be organic and evolving.
So what’s on my bulletin board? Lots of family pictures, of course, from various occasions and years, some of them of little folks long grown. Those never fail to tug at my heartstrings.
CatholicAnchor.org “Why Catholic?,” a scriptural and catechetical program for parish small groups presented by Renew International, has experienced increasing popularity since beginning two years ago in the Archdiocese of Anchorage. The program received a boost in May when Franciscan Sister Maureen Colleary visited for five days, giving mini-retreats in several archdiocesan parishes. Sister Colleary serves…
CatholicAnchor.org In an effort to solidify relationships that have provided the Anchorage Archdiocese with much needed priests and religious, Anchorage Archbishop Roger Schwietz visited South Korea earlier this spring. His travels took him to the Diocese of Cheongju, which has sent priests and religious sisters to serve the Anchorage Korean Catholic Community for many years….
Once every three months, I spend an evening driving with a chaplain to Nebraska’s death row. The chaplain, a woman who is a spiritual director to a death row inmate, organizes the group visit and submits our names.
The issues raised by the group are timely as Pope Francis has taken a keen interest in highlighting the role of women in both the church and society. In creating a new papal commission on sex abuse, he named women as half the membership, a sign that he hopes to create more leadership opportunities for women in the future.