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News Digest

Issue of April 13 – April 26, 2008
The following items are condensed. For the complete articles, please read the print edition of The Catholic New World. To subscribe, call (312) 534-7777.

News Update

Family Ministries builds bridges

Family Ministries is offering free posters in English and Spanish about the importance of marriage to schools and parishes as part of "Family Bridges," an effort sponsored by 24 faith-based organizations and supported by a Healthy Marriages Initiative from the federal government.

To view the posters or order them, visit www.familyministries.org/resources/index.

Family Bridges also offers educational programs for couples ("The Strongest Link"), singles ("How Not to Marry a Jerk or Jerkette"), single parents ("Within My Reach") and youth ("Love U2"). Host sites are asked to provide a meeting place, some advertising and coffee, water and soda. For information, call (312) 751-1002 or visit www.familybridgeschicago. org.

Bishop Lyne honored

Retired Auxiliary Bishop Timothy J. Lyne will be honored at a May 1 dinner at the Westin Chicago River North Hotel, 320 N. Dearborn St., in recognition of his 65 years as an archdiocesan priest, including 25 years as an auxiliary bishop.

The celebration begins at 6 p.m. and will be cohosted by Cardinal George and Father Daniel Mayall, pastor of Holy Name Cathedral Parish. The event's honorary co-chairs are Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley and his wife, Maggie Daley. All proceeds will benefit the restoration and renovation of the Holy Name Cathedral Parish rectory. Dinner tickets can be purchased for $300 by accessing the parish Web site, www.holynamecathedral.org.

Lyne, 89, served as associate pastor of St. Mary Parish in Riverside and St. Edmund Parish in Oak Park before moving to Holy Name Cathedral in 1966. He served as associate pastor there for one year and pastor for 22 years.

In 1983, he was ordained a bishop and he served as episcopal vicar for Vicariate II. In 1998, he became vicar for senior priests in addition to his other duties as a pastor and bishop.

Bishop Lyne continues to serve as vicar for senior priests but he retired from his other ministries in 1995.

News Digest

St. Francis Hospital nears its last days

Employees and patients were mourning the decision to close St. Francis Hospital in Blue Island, while leaders point to the planned closing as a symptom of the problems with health care funding. The decision to close was announced April 2. Five days later, there was word of a possible lastminute reprieve, as Transition Healthcare expressed renewed interest.

Business manager charged with theft

Beverly Houston, the former business manager at Infant Jesus of Prague Parish in Flossmoor, has been charged with felony theft and forgery for writing checks totaling about a quarter million dollars to herself from a parish account. The money allegedly went to feed a gambling habit. Houston, 51, was arrested in late March following an investigation that began last October. Houston, of the 9300 block of South Paxton Avenue in Chicago, remained in Cook County Jail in lieu of $100,000 bail.

Chicago remembers Focolare's founder

Chiara Lubich, the 88-year-old founder of the Focolare movement who died on March 14 in her home outside Rome, will be missed by people 4,800 miles away in Chicago. Alice Sopala of Resurrection Parish on the North Side, a Focolare member for 40 years, said, "Yes, I cried," on hearing the death of the founder. "Yet I believe the [Focolare] ideal is so big that it will go on forever. Chiara has been preparing us for years," Sopala said.

Singers raise voices to God through regional choirs

People who like to sing in the archdiocese now have one more opportunity to do it. Regional choirs around the Chicago area offer opportunities for Catholics to join with like-minded people in song. The archdiocese's Office for Divine Worship came up with the idea after they found a need for music ministers at archdiocesan liturgical events.

Jesus' divine mercy celebrated by many

Eight years ago, Pope John Paul II inaugurated the annual feast of Divine Mercy Sunday to honor devotion to Christ's tender mercy, and each year since then more parishes in the archdiocese mark the day with special services. This particular devotion to Christ's mercy originated with the writings of St. Maria Faustina Kowalska, a Polish nun and visionary who died in 1938 and who John Paul canonized the same day as he declared the feast. "The message of The Divine Mercy is simple," says the Web site thedivinemercy.org run by the Marians of the Immaculate Conception who operate the national Divine Mercy Shrine in Massachusetts. "It is that God loves us - all of us. And, he wants us to recognize that his mercy is greater than our sins, so that we will call upon him with trust, receive his mercy and let it flow through us to others."

School Sisters of Notre Dame 175th anniversary

There really hasn't been any time when women "had it easy." The Victorian era was no exception when Caroline Gerhardinger was growing up in Bavaria. Wars had left her country destitute, with too many widows and orphans, illiterate and hungry. It was an unlikely time to found a religious order, but at a very early age, under a priest's guidance, Gerhardinger responded to the Holy Spirit. She chose Christian education of girls, who would some day become mothers, as the way to renew society. Her budding religious community, the School Sisters of [Our Lady] Notre Dame, numbered three, just 175 years ago. Poverty was one of its hallmarks.

Local patrons are preserving art in the Vatican museums

There is a group of Catholics in Illinois who are preserving some of the church's artistic heritage at the Vatican Museums. They are the Illinois chapter of the Patrons of the Arts in the Vatican Museum.

Steroids pose ethical, moral and health issues

When the use of steroids in professional baseball first came to light in the 1980s, during the Pete Rose gambling scandal, neither federal investigators nor Major League Baseball pursued the issue, said Lester Munon, a lawyer who has covered legal issues and sports for 18 years. But over the past several years, the scandal has grown too big to ignore like the biceps of steroid users, said Munson, who addressed Chicago's First Friday Club April 4.