Grieving Process

THE CATHOLIC TELEGRAPH, Oct. 13 — As the ranks of religious and priests on college campuses continues to thin, the founding religious communities should recruit and train the Catholic intellectuals “that make a truly Catholic university,” Marianist Father James Heft said in an address at the University of Dayton.

The preparation of lay leadership has been avoided, he said, because “many [religious] are simply grieving” the rapid decline in their own numbers, said Father Heft, Dayton's chancellor.

To truly prepare the laity would “appear as admitting defeat, and even the death of their beloved orders,” said the priest, according to the account of his address in the Telegraph, the newspaper of the Archdiocese of Cincinnati.

Father Heft is also the director of the Institute for Advanced Catholic Studies at the University of Southern California.

‘Double Agent’

CHRONICLE.COM, Oct. 14 — A Syracuse University official criticized Boston College as a “double agent among us” for defecting to the Atlantic Coast Conference (ACC) after participating in strategy sessions with other Big East Conference schools on how to check the ACC's wooing of Big East schools.

“We were working to reconstruct a conference, and we had one of the members that was attending and participating, but working another agenda,” Shaw told the Web site of The Chronicle of Higher Education.

Italian Nuns to Kansas

THE LEAVEN, Oct. 14 — Members of the Apostles of the Interior Life, “the fastest growing community of women religious in Italy,” have joined the Catholic Center at the University of Kansas, reports the newspaper of the Kansas City Archdiocese.

The sisters have been at the Newman Center of the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign since 1999, where 55 students are exploring whether they have a call to a religious vocation.

The discernment process is a key part of the sisters’ apos-tolate, which incorporates spiritual direction and vocational awareness regarding all states of Christian life. The sisters also encourage Eucharistic adoration, the sacrament of reconciliation, and the importance of following a daily pattern of prayer.

Golden Jubilee

SETON HALL UNIVERSITY, Oct. 16 - An Oct. 31 conference on the “Foundations for Jewish-Christian Dialogue” with a keynote address by Baltimore Cardinal William Keeler will initiate Seton Hall's celebration of the 50th anniversary of its Institute of Judaeo-Christian Studies.

The institute was founded on the South Orange, N.J. campus in 1953 by Msgr. John Oesterreicher, an expert in Christian-Jewish relations who participated in the writing of the section on relations with the Jews that forms part of Nostra Aetate, the Second Vatican Council's Declaration on the Church's Relation to Non-Christian Religions.

Social Scientists

FRANCISCAN UNIVERSITY, Oct. 16 — Dr. Warren Carroll, a historian and the founding president of Christendom College, was scheduled to present the annual Christopher Dawson Lecture on “John Paul II: History Maker” at the 11th annual Society of Catholic Social Scientists National Conference at the Steubenville, Ohio, university.

Joe Cullen writes from New York