Pope Rebuffs Call for Married Priests in the Amazon while remaining silent on his follower andrew cuomo inflicting his religious beliefs on members of the orthodox church & bettors, infidels , & others at nassau otb. a simple treat his holiness bartholomew & his believers with respect from the Pope eould be a small start.
Shortage of clergy led to a recommendation from bishops to ease rules that have governed the church for centuries
Wednesday, February 12, 2020
Sunday, April 12, 2020
| Track Code | Track Name | Entry | Scratch | 1st Post ET | 1st Post Local | Time Zone | Stakes Race(s) | Stakes Grade | T.V. Indicator |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| SA | SANTA ANITA PARK | 72 | 48 | 3:00 PM | 12:00 PM | PDT | |||
| SUN | SUNLAND PARK | 168 | 24 | 2:30 PM | 12:30 PM | MDT | Mt. Cristo Rey H. | ||
| TAM | TAMPA BAY DOWNS | 72 | 0 | 12:35 PM |
Claude Solnik
Long Island Business News
2150 Smithtown Ave.
Ronkonkoma, NY 11779-7348
Home > LI Confidential > Stop scratching on holidays
Stop scratching on holidays
Published: June 1, 2012
Off Track Betting in New York State has been racing into a crisis called shrinking revenue. Some people have spitballed a solution: Don’t close on holidays.
New York State Racing Law bars racing on Christmas, Easter and Palm Sunday, and the state has ruled OTBs can’t handle action on those days, even though they could easily broadcast races from out of state.
“You should be able to bet whenever you want,” said Jackson Leeds, a Nassau OTB employee who makes an occasional bet. He added some irrefutable logic: “How is the business going to make money if you’re not open to take people’s bets?”
Elias Tsekerides, president of the Federation of Hellenic Societies of Greater New York, said OTB is open on Greek Orthodox Easter and Palm Sunday.
“I don’t want discrimination,” Tsekerides said. “They close for the Catholics, but open for the Greek Orthodox? It’s either open for all or not open.”
OTB officials have said they lose millions by closing on Palm Sunday alone, with tracks such as Gulfstream, Santa Anita, Turf Paradise and Hawthorne running.
One option: OTBs could just stay open and face the consequences. New York City OTB did just that back in 2003. The handle was about $1.5 million – and OTB was fined $5,000.
Pope Francis presided over Mass at the close of a meeting of bishops
for the Amazon region, in St. Peter’s Basilica, Vatican City, Oct. 27.
PHOTO: GIUSEPPE LAMI/EPA/SHUTTERSTOCK
Pope Francis has decided against relaxing rules on celibacy for Roman Catholic priests, declining a proposal from bishops that he allow married men to become priests in Latin America’s Amazon region to tackle a shortage of clergy there, the Vatican said.
The pope, “after praying and reflecting, has decided to respond not by foreseeing changes or further possibilities of exceptions [to priestly celibacy] from those already provided for,” Andrea Tornielli, editorial director of the Vatican’s communications office, said Wednesday.
The decision was a surprise and a setback for progressive bishops who have advocated for married priests to relieve a clergy shortage in various parts of the world. It is likely to cheer conservatives, including retired Pope Benedict XVI, who have warned that breaking the millennium-old tradition of clerical celibacy would undermine the church’s identity.
Pope Francis didn’t mention the question of priestly celibacy in his own response, also published Wednesday, to a set of recommendations from Catholic bishops on the church’s challenges in the Amazon region. The bishops’ most prominent and controversial recommendation was for the ordination of married men as priests.
For conservatives in the U.S. church, a center of opposition to Pope Francis on a number of issues including divorce, the papal document was a welcome reprieve.
“Beautiful,” Bishop Joseph Strickland, of Tyler, Texas, a frequent critic of the pope, wrote on Twitter Wednesday. “Pray for the Holy Father.”
Matthew Schmitz, senior editor of the religious journal “First Things,” said the document on the Amazon should be reassuring for Pope Francis’ critics, though he added that debate over ordaining married men as priests would likely continue.
“Conservatives have been concerned that Francis is going to change doctrine or alter longstanding disciplines in such a way that the church is fundamentally changed,” Mr. Schmitz said. “Now that he has declined at a prominent moment to change church discipline, conservatives should be liberal in their praise for him.”
The pope did address another contentious issue raised by the bishops: the ordination of women as deacons. The pope discouraged hopes that he would allow the practice.
The papal document, “Querida Amazon” (“Beloved Amazon”), is a response to a three-week-long meeting of bishops at the Vatican in October to discuss the Amazon region. Like the meeting, the pope’s response, known as an apostolic exhortation, deals extensively with environmental problems and the plight of indigenous peoples, placing much of the blame for both on rapacious corporations and corrupt politicians.
The October meeting was nevertheless dominated by discussion of the possibility of ordaining local married men as priests, as a special measure to relieve a shortage of clergy in the region. The most remote communities in the sparsely populated Amazon Basin can go many months without a visit from a priest. Only priests can celebrate Mass and hear confessions, essential elements of Catholic life.
Had the pope taken up the bishops’ recommendation, it would have been the first time in almost a thousand years that the Roman Catholic Church routinely ordained married men as priests. The church has ordained as priests, on a case-by-case basis, a small number of married former Protestant ministers who have converted to Catholicism. The relatively small Eastern Catholic Churches, which follow the pope but observe Orthodox practices, have married priests.
Hopes for a change in the Amazon had heartened advocates for married priests in other parts of the world, including Germany, where the question is on the agenda for a two-year series of meetings of Catholic bishops and laity that began last month.
Pope Francis had previously said that “celibacy is a gift for the church,” but that exceptions might be possible in sparsely populated regions such as islands in the Pacific.
In Wednesday’s document, Pope Francis mentions other ways to relieve the priest shortage in the Amazon, including praying for more vocations and encouraging more missionaries to serve in the region. “In some countries of the Amazon Basin, more missionaries go to Europe or the United States than remain to assist their own,” he writes.
Advocates for married priests could take some hope from the lack of an explicit rejection.
“This topic has been discussed for a long time and may continue to be discussed in the future,” the Vatican’s Mr. Tornielli said, because Catholic doctrine about the priesthood doesn’t hold the celibacy requirement as absolute.
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The bishops’ meeting last fall also recommended further study of the question of ordaining women as deacons, or clergy who can celebrate baptisms, marriages and funerals. Pope Francis has said the “door is closed” to ordaining women as priests, but hasn’t ruled out women deacons. Last October, he said that a scholarly panel he had established to study the topic would continue its work.
But in Wednesday’s exhortation, the pope discouraged the idea of women’s ordination, dismissing the suggestion that it would give women a “greater status and participation in the church” and stating that women in the Amazon should be given roles that “do not entail holy orders” but allow them to serve “in a way that reflects their womanhood.”
The papal document therefore deals a double blow to the pope’s progressive supporters. The German bishops, the church’s liberal vanguard, are also considering a proposal for women deacons. On Wednesday, the head of Germany’s top organization of lay Catholics, Thomas Sternberg, lamented the pope’s “lack of courage to pursue real reforms.”
The pope appeared to allude to the most colorful controversy of last October’s Vatican meeting: the presence at several events of wood statues portraying a naked pregnant woman. Some critics denounced the objects as “pagan idols,” and protesters stole several of the statues and threw them into the Tiber river.
“Let us not be quick to describe as superstition or paganism certain religious practices that arise spontaneously from the life of the peoples,” Pope Francis writes in the new exhortation. “It is possible to take up an indigenous symbol in some way, without necessarily considering it as idolatry.”
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