Held in Denver late last month, the aim was to brainstorm and swap ideas about improving parish life, the Catholic News Agency reported.

The newly-founded Amazing Parish movement seeks to provide a one-stop shop for resources to pastors and parish leaders so they can create a thriving parish life.

The conference featured Catholic speakers and workshops on topics such as parish leadership teams, formation programmes and evangelisation.

Many of the speakers were Catholics serving in leadership roles for big companies, who are adapting tricks of the trade of company leadership to practical ideas for parish leadership.

"The Church is larger than maybe any company that these kind of guys work with, so we have to be strategic," said Amazing Parish staff member Chris Stefanick.

"We have to have the best practices and good team building skills and so I think what we're given is really unique here and it's been received really well."

Mr Stefanick is also a social media evangelist at reallifecatholic.com and helped host the conference, which filled to its 500-person capacity before it was even officially advertised.

"Both that and how it's been received, it just confirms that it's meeting a very huge need in the Church," he said.

For Mr Stefanick, the biggest hope he had for the parishes who attended was that they come away with clarity of both vision and practice.

He called for reduced complexity and a focus on what parishes can do well with what they have.

Everyone at the conference received a binder with guiding questions and planning sheets for each of the seven foundational parts needed to create an amazing parish.

These are made up for three foundational traits: a reliance on prayer, a real leadership team, and a clear vision, as well as four other traits, which are the Sunday experience, compelling formation, small group discipleship and missionary zeal.

During the conference, parish representatives were encouraged to focus on those things that made their parishes unique and how they could work with those characteristics.

Tim Weiske, a parishioner at St Clements in Chicago, said he thought a good goal to focus on for their parish was forming their large young adult population.

Sources

• Catholic News Agency
• Amazing Parish
• National Catholic Register
• Image: Catholic News Agency

At Queen of Peace Catholic Church in Aurora, Denver, where nearly 1,500 people gathered to remember parishioner A.J. Boik, who was among the 12 people killed in the Batman massacre, Father Mauricio Bermudez said "We live in a culture that promotes violence." He asked, "What kind of people are we becoming?"

"This is our opportunity to change things, to do something different," said Bermudez.

Father James Martin, says responding to the Aurora Batman massacre by calling on God for help and comfort is not enough: "Simply praying, 'God, never let this happen again' is insufficient for the person who believes that God gave us the intelligence to bring about lasting change," he said.

Martin's opinion piece created an avalanche of comment on Facebook and Twitter. Within hours of posting his opinion he had to shut down comments on his Facebook page and cut off trading tweets on the topic.

Martin says just praying is not enough. He thinks gun control is as much a pro-life issue as is abortion, euthanasia or the death penalty "and programs that provide the poor with the same access to basic human needs as the wealthy."

There is a "consistent ethic of life" that views all these issues as linked, because they are," he says.

Martin believes that pro-life religious people need to consider how it might be made more difficult for people to procure weapons that are not designed for sport or hunting or self-defense. "If one protests against abortion clinics because they facilitate the taking of human life, why not protest against largely unregulated suppliers of firearms because they facilitate the taking of human life as well?"

In Rome on Sunday, Pope Benedict expressed dismay and sadness at the shooting.

"I was deeply shocked by the senseless violence which took place in Aurora, Denver," he said in his regular Sunday Angelus address.

Source

• America Magazine
• Toronto Sun
• USA Today
• USA Today
• TVNZ
• Los Angeles Times
• Image: Los Angeles Times