Bill Muehlenberg, CultureWatch

There is a Priest on the Sunshine Coast who organized a petition against the Israelis earlier this year but is unable to find the energy nor the time to organize a petition against abortion. In fact he took the trouble of contacting the media over the petition against Israel and had a photograph of himself together with his story in the local newspaper as well as the Courier Mail.

But I plod on with my precious Catholic Faith because these words ring in my ears: “If the world hates you, you know that it hated Me before it hated you. If you were of this world, the world would love its own: but because you are not of the world, but I have chosen you out of the world, therefore the world hates you.”

John FG McMahon

But hey, don’t I already have enough work to do!? Seriously though, thanks for the tip. I copied the list from the website, pasted it into Word, and did a count of paragraphs, and it seems to be around 450 names. So that means only about one tenth have so far come out publically on this. Where are the other 90 per cent?

Thanks again for providing the answer – or the path to the answer! If someone wants to do an actual count of names, here is the link to the list: www.usccb.org/bishops.shtml

Bill Muehlenberg, CultureWatch

Each country has its Conference of Catholic Bishops. So if you check the website for “United States Conference of Catholic Bishops” you will find in the section titled “Bishops” the names of all the Bishops in the USA listed in alphabetical order. But I’ll let you do the counting on this occasion.

John FG McMahon

I called all the church leaders together in the town where I live and presented them with a paper on united evagelistic action. Their response was “go away, we run things around here” after admitting that in the last 12 months all eight churches between them could only muster three conversions.

I did the same with the leaders of the church in the town where the church I attend is and their response was “We are too busy running our churches. We don’t have time for evangelism.”

When the church becomes a social club which is what it is in most cases, it is not the church. It is an invention of man and run by him for his own self gratification. That is why most churches provide entertainment not discipleship.

If anyone is putting his faith in man made institutionalised religion they are going to be disappointed as the church is not organisations and buildings and ritual, it is people full of the Holy Spirit doing exploits for God as they did in the Book of Acts.

In most churches God and the Holy Spirit don’t get a look in. There is a quaint little story about a poor woman that turned up at a church and asked to be baptised and become a member. The pastor wasn’t too keen as she did not fit the image of the church so he told her to go away and think about it. She came back again and repeated her request. Again she was turned away and told to reconsider. She came back again and said that she no longer wanted to join the church. The pastor was relieved and asked her why. She said that whilst she was praying about the situation God said to her not to bother as he had been trying for years to get a look in.

Roger Marks

The number of Bishops has now risen to 52: www.lifesitenews.com/ldn/2009/apr/09042807.html

To give us some perspective on this, does anyone know how many US Catholic Bishops there are in total?

Bill Muehlenberg, CultureWatch