ADDENDA - news on Catholic issues - Brief Article

National Catholic Reporter, July 2, 1999

FR. MICHAEL SCANLAN will continue as president of Franciscan University in Steubenville, Ohio, for the 1999-2000 school year, the nominating and executive committees, of the Franciscan University board of trustees announced June 17. Scanlan announced he would stay on for another year after announcing his retirement in February.

THE LILLY ENDOWMENT INC. has awarded $1.2. million to the Catholic Theological Union in Chicago for its graduate school's Joseph Cardinal Bernardin Center for Theology and Ministry. It is the largest foundation award Catholic Theological Union has ever received.

THE VENICE, FLA., DIOCESE has agreed to pay $500,000 to settle a lawsuit alleging that church officials failed to prevent an altar boy from being molested by a priest and choir director. The diocese acknowledged that the boy, now 22, was molested by Fr. Ed McLoughlin and former choir director Richard Trepinski. The lawsuit claimed that Bishop John Nevins and Fr. Nicholas McLoughlin, pastor of the church, failed to prevent the abuse.

FIVE U.S. AID AGENCIES, including Catholic Relief Services, signed agreements June 14 with the European Community's Humanitarian Office to provide rapid finance to the agencies for emergency assistance. The European Community is one of the largest aid organizations in the world and provides assistance to refugees and displaced people.

THE HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES voted June 17 to permit display of the Ten Commandments in public buildings. The measure, an amendment to the juvenile crime bill, was approved 248-180, even as opponents noted that the U.S. Supreme Court ruled almost two decades ago that posting the Ten Commandments in public buildings illegally breeches the church-state constitutional divide.

MICHAEL D. CONNELLY, president and CEO of Catholic Healthcare Partners in Cincinnati, was installed as chairman of the Catholic Health Association board of trustees for 1999-2000. He succeeds Mercy Sr. Doris Gottemoeller, president of the Sisters of Mercy of the Americas, based in Silver Spring, Md., who became speaker of the St. Louis-based association's membership assembly.

AN 800-NUMBER AND WEB SITE give travelers the ability to find times and locations for Mass around the United States. 1-800-MASS and www.Masstimes.org list weekend Mass times for more than 80 percent of U.S. churches, as well as weekday and holy day times. The Web site provides a map option to view a local street map to find a church's location.

ISRAELI RESEARCHERS have found evidence what the Shroud of Turin, which Catholic tradition claims is the burial cloth in which Jesus was wrapped after his crucifixion, came from Jerusalem. An examination of pollen and other organic material taken from the shroud found samples of vegetation unique to the Judean Hills around the Holy City, professors Avinoam Danin and Uri Baruch of Jerusalem's Hebrew University said.

FORMER POP SINGER and Catholic antiabortion activist Dana Rosemary Scallon was dected to the European Parliament June 14. Scallon, running as an independent, was elected in the Connacht Ulster constituency in Ireland, defeating several candidates from the main political parties in Europe. Scallon said she would move from her current home in Birmingham, Ala., where she hosts a television show on the Eternal Word Television Network.

A POLISH CATHOLIC ACTIVIST who led the campaign to place hundreds of crosses outside the former Nazi death camp at Auschwitz has been freed from jail -- one day after Pope John Paul II left Poland. Kazmierz Switon, 68, was arrested May 27 for placing explosive devices near the crosses in an attempt to prevent their removal prior to the start of the pope's June 5 arrival in his homeland.

FORMER SPICE GIRL and new U.N. goodwill ambassador Geri Halliwell was criticized by the Catholic church in the Philippines for her promotion of contraceptives. On her first tour for the U.N. Population Fund, Halliwell visited the Philippines, a country where 84 percent of the population is Catholic.

ABOUT 45 PERCENT of the Catholic population in the Tokyo archdiocese are foreign nationals, according to a recent survey by the Katorikku Tokyo Kokusai Center. The center published the results of its survey concerning the pastoral care of Catholics in the archdiocese May 30. According to the survey, foreign nationals comprise more than 66,000 out of the some 150,000 Catholics in the archdiocese.

HUNGARY'S CATHOLIC CHURCH has approved a plan that would allow mobile phone companies to place antennae in church towers. A spokesman for the church said it could not pass up the chance to collect $4,150 per year in rent for each antenna, although every parish can opt not to have them installed.