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All Things Catholic by John L. Allen, Jr.
	Friday, June 6, 2008 - Vol. 7, No. 38

NOTE: John Allen is in Miami Thursday through Sunday to cover the annual conference of the Catholic Theological Society of America. Watch Allen's daily updates on this site for regular reports.

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In a recent NCR cover story I described a phenomenon in Texas I called "Evangelical transfer," meaning ways in which the state's strong Evangelical Protestant ethos shapes the Catholic experience. (See Texas: new Catholic frontier NCR, April 18.) This week, I want to describe another "evangelical" face of Texas Catholicism, this time in the sense of lives lived in radical witness to the values of the Gospel.

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‘She opened the church doors’
On May 12, hundreds of U.S. immigration agents descended on Postville, Iowa, with 700 arrest warrants. Agents closed roads, moved into housing areas and surrounded a meat processing plant. Almost 400 workers were rounded up, put on buses and taken away for deportation. St. Bridget Parish, the Catholic church in Postville, became a command center sheltering and feeding hundreds of people. NCR sent writer and editor Pat Marrin to investigate. Here, Marrin talks with Tom Fox about what he saw and learned in Postville.
Marrin’s story about the immigration raid in Iowa will appear in the June 13 issue of NCR,which will be available at NCRonline.org June 10.

By JOHN L. ALLEN JR.
Miami

Officially, the theme of the major annual gathering of Catholic theologians this week is “generations,” but another sort of transformation took center stage this morning: the demographic revolution in American Catholicism, with Hispanics now representing almost 40 percent of the country’s Catholic population, and Catholics of non-European origin already a clear majority.

By Jonathan D. Rubin, Religion News Service

WASHINGTON — American houses of worship may support a ban on U.S. torture, but they aren't always comfortable with showing it publicly, according to an anti-torture activist group.

The Rev. Richard Killmer is leading a national campaign to get churches, synagogues and mosques to hang banners reading "Torture is a moral issue." He said he found some congregations "were not ready to be publicly visible" on this issue, and one even feared property damage.

By JOHN L. ALLEN JR.
Miami

Until quite recently, statements of support for beleaguered theologians from the Catholic Theological Society of America, the main body for professional Catholic theologians in the United States, were as regular as clockwork. The Vatican or the U.S. bishops would censure somebody, and the CTSA would issue a statement backing that person and criticizing the disciplinary process.