The Bishop of Catholic Social Media offers to help fight ny. religious preference and treat
the other guy's (Bartholomew)
church with respect as taught. by Pope Francis
Claude Solnik
Long Island Business News
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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.
Easy money.
wNo church figure other than the pope has more followers than Robert Barron.
Bishop Robert Barron speaks in Dublin, Aug. 24. PHOTO: JOHN MCELROY/MAXWELL PH/EPA-EFE//EPA/SHUTTERSTOCK
Santa Barbara, Calif.
He might not look it, but Bishop Robert Barron is a social-media superstar. Sporting thick-framed glasses and a folksy Midwestern demeanor, the Catholic auxiliary bishop of Los Angeles resembles the comedian Drew Carey, only trimmer. But the aw-shucks routine isn’t fooling anyone. Beneath it lies a penetrating intellect and clear talent for using popular culture to draw people into—or back to—Catholicism.
With his popular online film reviews, political commentary and plain-English homilies, the 59-year old bishop has struck a nerve. He has 1.6 million Facebookfans and 130,000 Twitter followers. His YouTube videos have been viewed 34 million times, while his channel has some 165,000 subscribers. If there’s a growth stock in the bishop’s portfolio, it’s Instagram, where he’s gained a mere 91,000 fans. Only Pope Francis is more popular with English-speaking Catholics.
The robust online presence comes with pitfalls familiar to anyone who has opened a website’s comment section. “People rarely write to say, ‘Oh my gosh, what a beautiful video and thank you for posting it,’ ” the Chicago native told me earlier this year when I visited his residence here. More typically the comments are contemptuous or profane. “I was at first kind of shocked,” he says, “but now I’m just used to it.”
The responses became nastier this year after new revelations of clerical sex abuse and reports that the Vatican mishandled allegations against Washington Archbishop Theodore McCarrick. Even if commenters express themselves inappropriately, the bishop suggests, the frustration is legitimate. “I wouldn’t for a moment discount the tremendous anger” stirred up by these cases, he says. It’s “an anger that I and the overwhelming majority of priests and bishops share.”
Bishop Barron has called for an investigation into how “someone widely known to be a sex offender managed to rise in the hierarchy and then to remain as a person of considerable influence in the church even after his retirement.” In the Catholic Church, prelates don’t have the authority to investigate each other. Bishop Barron would like to see a lay “review board” comprised of qualified investigators. But, he explained, even that won’t be enough to restore the church’s credibility. The “deeper and more important” reform must be moral: “Everyone in the church ought to embrace the church’s teaching on sexuality and human dignity and then live up to it.”
When Bishop Barron was ordained in 1986 and began a teaching career at Chicago’s Mundelein Seminary, the Catholic media universe was small. “If you wanted to get something out to a wider audience, there was a limited range of options,” he recalls. Publications like Commonweal, America and the National Catholic Reporter were about the sum of it. “All three were very left-leaning”—they still are—“which meant that you had to write in a way that pleased the editors of those journals.” Now, “just on my YouTube page, I’ve got more subscribers than those three combined.”
Bishop Barron’s mentor, Cardinal Francis George, encouraged him to develop his talent for communicating with non-Catholics or those who have strayed. “He took me under his wing,” the bishop says. “I always remember him saying, ‘You can never evangelize a culture you hate.’ ” George, who died in 2015, had a reputation as a social and theological conservative—a tag Bishop Barron avoids. “I always say Cardinal George was not an antiliberal, he was a postliberal—and I would identify myself with that too.”
Like most clergy, Bishop Barron tries to keep his political preferences under wraps: “As a Catholic, as a bishop, I’m not a Democrat or a Republican. I represent the great values of Catholic social teaching, and try to draw the parties as much as I can toward it.” What would a political party that embodied those teachings look like? “It’s the common good, subsidiarity, solidarity, human dignity—those are the great principles. And that would instantiate itself in opposition to abortion, opposition to euthanasia, opposition to [embryonic] stem-cell research, opposition to whatever directly attacks life. But also opposition to capital punishment, opposition to unjust war . . . opposition to marginalization of the poor, opposition to an aggressive attitude toward migrants.”
This policy mix already doesn’t jibe with any contemporary American political party, but I can’t help notice something missing. What type of economic arrangement would this hypothetical Catholic political party support? I note the trend among some Catholics to self-identify as pro-life socialists.
The bishop isn’t having it. “We’re antisocialists,” he says, who support “a vigorous market economy that is disciplined by a very strong moral sensibility. The church clearly affirms the market economy”—that is, “a morally constrained and culturally conditioned market economy.” He adjusts his glasses and flashes a folksy Midwestern smile. “If you can espouse all of those positions, you’d be in the party I’d happily be involved with.”
Mr. Hennessey is the Journal’s deputy editorial features editor.
Appeared in the November 30, 2018, print edition.
Bishop Robert Barron speaks in Dublin, Aug. 24. PHOTO: JOHN MCELROY/MAXWELL PH/EPA-EFE//EPA/SHUTTERSTOCK
Santa Barbara, Calif.
He might not look it, but Bishop Robert Barron is a social-media superstar. Sporting thick-framed glasses and a folksy Midwestern demeanor, the Catholic auxiliary bishop of Los Angeles resembles the comedian Drew Carey, only trimmer. But the aw-shucks routine isn’t fooling anyone. Beneath it lies a penetrating intellect and clear talent for using popular culture to draw people into—or back to—Catholicism.
With his popular online film reviews, political commentary and plain-English homilies, the 59-year old bishop has struck a nerve. He has 1.6 million Facebookfans and 130,000 Twitter followers. His YouTube videos have been viewed 34 million times, while his channel has some 165,000 subscribers. If there’s a growth stock in the bishop’s portfolio, it’s Instagram, where he’s gained a mere 91,000 fans. Only Pope Francis is more popular with English-speaking Catholics.
The robust online presence comes with pitfalls familiar to anyone who has opened a website’s comment section. “People rarely write to say, ‘Oh my gosh, what a beautiful video and thank you for posting it,’ ” the Chicago native told me earlier this year when I visited his residence here. More typically the comments are contemptuous or profane. “I was at first kind of shocked,” he says, “but now I’m just used to it.”
The responses became nastier this year after new revelations of clerical sex abuse and reports that the Vatican mishandled allegations against Washington Archbishop Theodore McCarrick. Even if commenters express themselves inappropriately, the bishop suggests, the frustration is legitimate. “I wouldn’t for a moment discount the tremendous anger” stirred up by these cases, he says. It’s “an anger that I and the overwhelming majority of priests and bishops share.”
Bishop Barron has called for an investigation into how “someone widely known to be a sex offender managed to rise in the hierarchy and then to remain as a person of considerable influence in the church even after his retirement.” In the Catholic Church, prelates don’t have the authority to investigate each other. Bishop Barron would like to see a lay “review board” comprised of qualified investigators. But, he explained, even that won’t be enough to restore the church’s credibility. The “deeper and more important” reform must be moral: “Everyone in the church ought to embrace the church’s teaching on sexuality and human dignity and then live up to it.”
When Bishop Barron was ordained in 1986 and began a teaching career at Chicago’s Mundelein Seminary, the Catholic media universe was small. “If you wanted to get something out to a wider audience, there was a limited range of options,” he recalls. Publications like Commonweal, America and the National Catholic Reporter were about the sum of it. “All three were very left-leaning”—they still are—“which meant that you had to write in a way that pleased the editors of those journals.” Now, “just on my YouTube page, I’ve got more subscribers than those three combined.”
Bishop Barron’s mentor, Cardinal Francis George, encouraged him to develop his talent for communicating with non-Catholics or those who have strayed. “He took me under his wing,” the bishop says. “I always remember him saying, ‘You can never evangelize a culture you hate.’ ” George, who died in 2015, had a reputation as a social and theological conservative—a tag Bishop Barron avoids. “I always say Cardinal George was not an antiliberal, he was a postliberal—and I would identify myself with that too.”
Like most clergy, Bishop Barron tries to keep his political preferences under wraps: “As a Catholic, as a bishop, I’m not a Democrat or a Republican. I represent the great values of Catholic social teaching, and try to draw the parties as much as I can toward it.” What would a political party that embodied those teachings look like? “It’s the common good, subsidiarity, solidarity, human dignity—those are the great principles. And that would instantiate itself in opposition to abortion, opposition to euthanasia, opposition to [embryonic] stem-cell research, opposition to whatever directly attacks life. But also opposition to capital punishment, opposition to unjust war . . . opposition to marginalization of the poor, opposition to an aggressive attitude toward migrants.”
This policy mix already doesn’t jibe with any contemporary American political party, but I can’t help notice something missing. What type of economic arrangement would this hypothetical Catholic political party support? I note the trend among some Catholics to self-identify as pro-life socialists.
The bishop isn’t having it. “We’re antisocialists,” he says, who support “a vigorous market economy that is disciplined by a very strong moral sensibility. The church clearly affirms the market economy”—that is, “a morally constrained and culturally conditioned market economy.” He adjusts his glasses and flashes a folksy Midwestern smile. “If you can espouse all of those positions, you’d be in the party I’d happily be involved with.”
Mr. Hennessey is the Journal’s deputy editorial features editor.
Appeared in the November 30, 2018, print edition.
Live Racing Search Results
Sunday, April 21, 2019
| Track Code | Track Name | Entry | Scratch | 1st Post ET | 1st Post Local | Time Zone | Stakes Race(s) | Stakes Grade | T.V. Indicator |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| GG | GOLDEN GATE FIELDS | 48 | 24 | 3:45 PM | 12:45 PM | PDT | |||
| LS | LONE STAR PARK | 48 | 0 | 3:35 PM | 2:35 PM | CDT | |||
| SA | SANTA ANITA PARK | 72 | 24 | 3:30 PM | 12:30 PM | PDT | |||
| SUN | SUNLAND PARK | 120 | 0 | 2:30 PM | 12:30 PM | MDT |
