As a new school year begins for teenagers across Alaska, so do tales of new jobs, family vacations and summer adventures. Amidst all the chatter, a small number of students will be recollecting their recent pilgrimage halfway across the world with millions of other young Catholics.
Catholic young people are falling away from the faith at a staggering rate as families and relatives struggle with how best to respond. Catholics United for the Faith in Anchorage invites the public to an evening with Father Michael Shields.
Alaskan parents won a hard fought battle to gain control over what is taught to their children when it comes to sex education.
Religious education methods from 50 or 60 years ago simply aren’t working now. Millennials don’t accept church doctrine and authority just because it’s what they’re supposed to do. They need more. They need reasons to believe and causes to believe in. Unfortunately many parishes fail to offer either.
The former presider’s chair (cathedra) at Our Lady of Guadalupe Co-Cathedral in Anchorage now sits in the church’s narthex as a shrine to Saint Pope John Paul II who once used the chair during his historic 1981 visit to Anchorage.
It was 1991 when Saint Pope John Paul II laid hands on Father Kermit Syren’s head and ordained him into the priesthood.
When Middle-Eastern Christians are beheaded for their faith, when men, women and children are killed in the streets of France, when ancient holy sites are reduced to rubble — something deep in the human heart cries for revenge.
When viewed as a whole, the church in Alaska seems at times wonderfully human, at other times, mysteriously divine — the heroic efforts and serendipitous fortunes of Providence Hospital after the Good Friday Earthquake seem good examples of both.
Many Catholic parents, like Owens, home-school in order to cultivate the Catholic faith in their children. They believe children need time in the nurturing environment of home to develop the virtues necessary to become good citizens and most importantly, to reach heaven.
Spencer drew from the blessings she found in being adopted as she mad the choice for her unborn child to have two stable parents and a future she could not have provided as an unwed teen.