Shocked and dismayed, SF mayor decides not to attend Levada’s elevation:

Newsom suggested the Vatican should move beyond "stale and questionable documents."

"This is just corroding and divisive," Newsom told the Sentinel.

"If the church is going to evolve in recognition that it can expand its reach, then it should expand its capacity of understanding and not limit it to some real stale doctrines… I think never had a good context, and now really are questionable."

"This is hardly the first time I’ve disagreed.

"I always respectfully disagree and it doesn’t demean the message of the church which is to me fundamental and profound – the morality that is teached in the church and that is the reason I continue to be a proud Catholic but I just thought the timing wasn’t right.

Dom has been following the situation with Boston Catholic Charities and adoption closely, and new blogger The Old Eremite looks at the big picture:

The Church is already vulnerable on a number of fronts (as an employer, as the proprietor of healthcare facilities, as an educator, and as a provider of religious "services" — especially of the sacraments of Baptism, Eucharist, Penance, and Matrimony) to demands by the state that it comply with legally enshrined norms of secularist morality, and it will probably be made more so by laws likely to be enacted in the next few years. We have already seen such laws introduced in various state legislatures across the country, and we should not let their defeat lead us to suppose that we have seen the last of them or that those who sponsored them are going to accept defeat.

Another issue, under the same category of "First Amendment? Who cares?" has been emerging in Connecticut, with the struggle over hospitals, rape victims, and the morning-after pill

Cosmos-Liturgy-Sex has a lengthy post on the Boston situation as well. Well worth a read.