Tuesday, November 29, 2005

Preaching in Missouri last weekend

This past weekend, the bishops of the Missouri Catholic Conference decided to ask all of their priests and deacons to direct their homilies toward educating the faithful about Church teaching with regards to stem cell research. This means that, in theory, anyone who attended Mass in Missouri this weekend was presented with a homily on this subject.

A reporter from the Associated Press was at the 10am Mass at St. Peter Church in Jefferson City (where I work) this past Sunday to listen to a homily by Fr. Jamie Smith and interview him after Mass. That information was then turned into an article that has been circulating regionally and nationally for the last few days. A version of that article can be found by clicking here.

I bring this to your attention because, in some news reports, Fr. Jamie's words have been taken out of context, and in other places his words have supposedly implied that the Catholic Church opposes all forms of stem cell research. This is not true. I would refer you to Fr. Jamie's complete homily text which can be found by clicking here.

If you've gotten to this point in the blog, thanks for your concern. Please pass this along to others who might not fully understand this issue and what the Catholic Church has to say about it.

-Shannon

1 comment:

  1. I'm glad he did tie it in with Advent themes, tangentially, by the end. I wish that the message could have gone out some time other than the homily though. Seems to me to be the wrong place and time for politics, and the right place to break open scripture.

    Too bad he's been somewhat mis-quoted... But here we are in the 10-second soundbyte world.

    -Orin

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