Another barrier in the sports world was broken July 20 when Alyssa Nakken coached first base in the late innings of an exhibition game between the San Francisco Giants and the Oakland Athletics, thus becoming the first woman to appear in uniform on the field during a major league baseball game. The Giants won the game, 6-2.
A firm that has filed previous legal complaints against former Cardinal Theodore E. McCarrick and church entities added another complainant July 21 against the laicized prelate, leveling a new accusation that he allegedly abused its new client as a boy at a beach house in Sea Girt, New Jersey, in the early 1980s.
There is an African proverb that says, “As long as a person’s name is called, they never die.” With the spirit of that proverb in mind, John Thorne, pastoral minister at Sacred Heart Parish in Detroit and executive director of the Detroit Catholic Pastoral Alliance, created a memorial in his front yard for Black men and women whose lives have been taken unjustly, complete with crosses bearing their image and name.
Weeks after protesters toppled a statue of Christopher Columbus and threw it into Baltimore’s Inner Harbor, members of the city’s Italian American community are developing a plan to reproduce the marble monument so it can be displayed in a more secure location.
Schools and a Catholic parish in New Jersey expressed pain but also offered prayers following the killing of 20-year-old Daniel Anderl, son of a federal judge, who was a student at The Catholic University of America in Washington.
The beheading of a statue of Christ at a Catholic church in the Miami Archdiocese has saddened the parish community of Good Shepherd Church and prompted Miami Archbishop Thomas G. Wenski to call on law enforcement to investigate the incident as a hate crime.
Prior to the July 17 execution of Dustin Honken, a 52-year-old man from Iowa, Catholic leaders, including the bishops of Iowa, Cardinal Joseph W. Tobin of Newark, New Jersey, and the Benedictine priest who had been Honken’s spiritual adviser for 10 years, pleaded for a lesser sentence or at least a delay.
Prior to the July 17 execution of Dustin Honken, a 52-year-old man from Iowa, Catholic leaders, including the bishops of Iowa, Cardinal Joseph W. Tobin of Newark, New Jersey, and the Benedictine priest who had been Honken’s spiritual adviser for 10 years, pleaded for a lesser sentence or at least a delay.
Jesuit Father Pete Neeley said the announcement is an affirmation of the work he does at the Kino Border Initiative, a Jesuit-run program named for Padre Kino whose mission is to promote immigration policies along the U.S.-Mexico border that affirm the dignity of the human person. The initiative has locations in both sides of the border in Nogales, Arizona and Nogales, Sonora.
The director of food pantries for Catholic Charities in the Diocese of Paterson said the number of people coming for food “is just staggering.” “Throughout the last three months, we have helped more people that any time before in our 80-year history,” Carlos Roldan said in a statement July 13.
