Legion of Angels News Archive

ST. PETERSBURG, Fla. (AP) - The Tampa Bay Rays have been resilient all season, so manager Joe Maddon is not going to start doubting his team now.

A day after Boston closed within percentage points of first place in the AL East with an awesome display of power, the division-leading Rays shut down the Red Sox with superb pitching in a 2-1 victory Tuesday night.

Andy Sonnanstine pitched six strong innings and Tampa Bay’s bullpen sparkled, too, to enable Tampa Bay to rebound from a 13-5 loss in which the Red Sox homered six times and beat All-Star left-hander Scott Kazmir.

“It’s all about starting pitching every night, not just tonight,” Maddon said. “We’ve played well this year because of that and defense.”

Dioner Navarro singled with the bases loaded and one out in the ninth to drive in the winning run for the second time in a week against the defending World Series champions, who have lost seven of eight games at Tropicana Field this season.

The Rays, who have led the division for the past 54 days, moved one game ahead of the Red Sox, who dropped two of three to the Rays at Fenway Park last week.

Dan Wheeler (5-5) struck out the only batter he faced to bail Tampa Bay out of a ninth-inning jam and get the victory.

“We’re finally getting to the point now where we’re starting to believe that we can beat these guys, and that’s very important,” Maddon said. “You’ve got to believe you can beat all the guys in the division if you’re going to win it.”

The Rays loaded the bases on Jason Bartlett’s bloop single, a walk and a hit batsmen. Navarro, whose ninth-inning double off Jonathan Papelbon gave Tampa Bay a 5-4 victory in Boston a week ago Tuesday, ended it against Justin Masterson (6-5) with his hit to center over a drawn-in outfield.

The Rays had tied it 1-all on Carlos Pena’s seventh-inning, opposite-field homer off Josh Beckett.

“It’s amazing how one pitch can change the complexion of the game,” Beckett said.

“I don’t think he hit that ball that good. Ninety-eight percent of the guys in the big leagues will fly out to left field on that. But he’s strong and you can’t leave a pitch up to him like that.”

Beckett and Sonnanstine were outstanding against each another for the second time in six days.

The Boston starter limited the Rays to Pena’s 29th homer and two singles in eight innings, and Sonnanstine held the Red Sox to three hits and an unearned run on Kevin Youkilis’ sacrifice fly.

Both also allowed one run in a game Tampa Bay eventually won 4-2 in 14 innings last Wednesday.

“Sonnanstine was spectacular. That’s two games in a row that I’ve seen him about as good as I can imagine him,” Maddon said.

Beckett retired 13 in a row before Cliff Floyd singled to right with one out in the fifth. He walked Navarro, but got out of the inning when he struck out Eric Hinske and Gabe Gross.

The Red Sox snapped a scoreless tie in the sixth.

Jacoby Ellsbury beat out an infield single and Dustin Pedroia followed with a sharp grounder that Rays third baseman Evan Longoria bobbled and then kicked for an error. David Ortiz grounded to first, moving the runners up, and Youkilis followed with his sacrifice fly.

Akinori Iwamura singled with one out in the sixth for the second hit off Beckett. Pena’s homer in the seventh was his 15th since the All-Star break and only the second Beckett has allowed in his last six starts.

“I was throwing strikes with most of my pitches when I needed to,” Beckett said. “Like I said, it was unfortunate that one pitch changed the game like that.”

Notes

Red Sox 3B Mike Lowell, playing with a sore hip, left the game after singling in the ninth inning. He could hardly run to first base, and his status will be evaluated Wednesday. … Several Rays players, including Longoria and B.J. Upton, have mohawk haircuts, and Rays manager Joe Maddon showed up Tuesday wearing one as well. “It’s a unity kind of thing,” Maddon said, although his barely resembled a mohawk because the sides of his head were not trimmed as low as the others. “I didn’t hold back, I promise,” the manager said, insisting he gave the barber permission to cut it low. … Red Sox LF Jason Bay left the team to be with his wife, who is expecting a baby. He likely will return on Friday, when Boston begins a weekend series at Toronto.

Source — FOX Sports

For decades, the cultural battle over abortion has been about what goes on inside a woman’s womb. But more and more, the focus is shifting to what goes on inside her head.

Activists on both sides are awaiting a comprehensive report reviewing two decades of published research on mental health and abortion, to be presented this week at the American Psychological Association’s annual conference in Boston.

The report comes at a pivotal time as some judges and lawmakers have begun to make decisions in part based on peer-reviewed studies suggesting women who have had abortions are at higher risk of anxiety, depression and substance abuse.

Abortion opponents cite these studies, as well as testimony from women who describe years of psychological turmoil after abortions, to make the case that the state must restrict abortion to protect women’s mental health.

The U.S. Supreme Court cited this reasoning last year in upholding a ban on a late-term procedure known as partial-birth abortion. South Dakota incorporated the same rationale into a new mandate that abortion doctors must tell prospective patients they will be putting themselves at risk for psychological distress and suicide.

The abortion-hurts-women view is also being used to promote a broad abortion ban on South Dakota’s fall ballot. The argument: A woman may think she wants to end a pregnancy, may even feel relief when she does, but she will suffer for it later. So the state has a duty to stop her.

To supporters of legal abortion, this is equivalent to saying the state has a duty to warn women away from giving birth because some might later suffer postpartum depression. They acknowledge some women may regret their decision or feel sad about it, but say there is no proof abortion leads to serious mental illness — or that women would be better off if they were forced to carry unwanted pregnancies.

Both sides agree the mental-health issue has powerful potential to shape public policy for years to come. And both hope to use the American Psychological Association’s report to their advantage.

The organization has long held that abortion has no negative mental-health consequences for most women. Indeed, the psychologists’ group and the separate American Psychiatric Association say it is crucial for women’s mental health that they have access to safe, legal abortions.

About two years ago, the psychological association pulled its fact sheet on mental health and abortion from its Web site for updating. The result is exhaustive but ambiguous, according to reviewers who have seen drafts.

These reviewers cautioned that they haven’t seen the final report. But they said the drafts state that some women may experience higher rates of emotional distress after abortions. Most vulnerable: teens and young women who feel pressured into or ambivalent about their abortions and who lack solid support networks.

The brisk conclusion paragraph on a recent draft, however, focuses on adult women seeking elective abortions in the first trimester of an unwanted pregnancy — which covers the majority of abortions. The takeaway message: They have no greater risk of mental-health problems.

The American Psychological Association wouldn’t comment until the final report is released.

But reviewers on both left and right are troubled by the draft language. Supporters of legal abortions want a more sweeping statement that abortion is safe for mental health. They say the studies that suggest potential harm are riddled with methodological error.

“I would hope it would say that there is no convincing empirical evidence that abortion is a significant cause of psychiatric illness,” said Nada Stotland, president of the American Psychiatric Association, which isn’t affiliated with the psychological association.

From the antiabortion side, there is frustration that the report focuses on women who do well after abortions instead of warning patients and their doctors about those who may need help.

Priscilla Coleman, a researcher at Bowling Green State University in Ohio whose work is often cited approvingly by abortion opponents, said at least 10% to 20% of women suffer serious, prolonged ill effects from abortion. “We’re not doing women any favors by hiding this,” she said.

For all the heated rhetoric on both sides, in the real world of clinics and crisis counselors, a middle ground appears to be emerging.

Supporters of legal abortion are increasingly acknowledging the sorrow that can come with the decision, and independent support groups are promising to help women work through their loss without promoting a political agenda.

But in 35 years of providing abortions, Susan Hill, a clinic director based in Raleigh, N.C., said she has noticed that “women today need less counseling, less psychological care than they did in 1973,” when abortion was legalized but still carried an enormous stigma. Ms. Hill, who runs clinics in five southern states, has tried offering postprocedure counseling sessions — but very few women show up, she said. “They want to get past it and move on with their lives.”

Quantifying any possible mental-health effect of abortion is extremely difficult, though scores of researchers have tried. Many studies share the flaw that they rely on women self-reporting their abortion history, which is notoriously unreliable. There is also the issue of what is an appropriate control group: All women? Women who have given birth? Women who have carried an unwanted pregnancy and given the baby up for adoption?

Another problem: determining cause and effect. A woman who has had an abortion may be depressed, but that doesn’t mean the abortion caused the depression. Perhaps she was in an abusive relationship, or had money trouble, or felt alone and abandoned.

Recent research has tried to control for such variables. A much-cited 2006 study drew on a New Zealand health survey that tracked a group of women for 25 years. The authors controlled for more than a dozen factors — family stability, educational achievement, self-esteem and so on — and still found that young women who had abortions were more likely to suffer mental-health ills than those who carried a pregnancy to term (or those who never got pregnant).

The study has limitations. It covered just 139 young women who self-reported abortions. But the study’s lead author, David Fergusson, supports legal abortion — and said he was “irked” by his own finding — which gives his conclusion some added heft in a world in which both sides use charges of authorial bias to dismiss studies they disagree with.

Mr. Fergusson, a professor at the University of Otago in New Zealand, said he is leaning toward a belief that abortion is associated with negative mental-health outcomes, but he said it is too early to “draw strong conclusions either way.” Plus, he said, even if his hunch is correct, there may be counterbalancing benefits. Aborting an unwanted pregnancy could allow a woman to finish school, get a better job and build more-fulfilling personal relationships.

He hopes the upcoming report will provide some clarity — but with such an incendiary topic, that might be tough. As he put it: “Both sides have been able to reconstruct the same evidence to meet their agendas.”

Source — The Wall Street Journal

Three aspiring Catholic priests will be anointed and prayed over this weekend in an ordination liturgy that will resemble the traditional in most ways but one: The three being ordained are women.

The ordination ceremony Sunday, at a historic Protestant church in the Back Bay, is the first such event to take place in Boston, one of the most Catholic cities in the nation.

The Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Boston, in accord with Vatican teaching, says the participants in the ordination ceremony will be automatically excommunicating themselves.

But the women being ordained say they are acting because they feel called to the priesthood and compelled to resist what they view as a wrong church teaching.

“We’re part of a prophetic tradition of disobeying an unjust law,” said Gabriella Velardi Ward, a 61-year-old Staten Island architect with two children and five grandchildren, who will be ordained along with Gloria Carpeneto of Baltimore and Mary Ann McCarthy Schoettly of Newton, N.J.

Ward said she has wanted to be a priest since age 5, and that she actively considered becoming a nun before deciding that the priesthood was her calling because she wants to be able to celebrate Catholic sacraments.

“Excommunication or not, I will still be a validly ordained priest and still will be able to serve the people of God,” she said.

The women are to be ordained by Dana Reynolds, a California woman who was consecrated as a bishop in Germany in April.

Reynolds and the others are part of an organization called Roman Catholic Womenpriests, which has been holding ordination ceremonies for women since 2002; the organization says there are now 28 women Catholic priests in the United States.

Among those already ordained is Jean Marchant, a former director of healthcare ministry for the Archdiocese of Boston, who with her husband presides over a small congregation that has a weekly Catholic Eucharist in a Protestant church in Weston.

The organization says its ordinations are valid because its first bishops were ordained by Catholic bishops in good standing - bishops whose names have not been released because they would face sanction by the Vatican.

But the Vatican says the ordinations are illegal under church law and yesterday the Archdiocese of Boston sent an e-mail to all priests declaring that women play key roles in the church, but cannot be priests.

“Catholics who attempt to confer a sacred order on a woman, and the women who attempt to receive a sacred order, are by their own actions separating themselves from the church,” the archdiocese said. “As a faith community rooted in the loving ministry of Jesus Christ, we pray for those who have willingly fallen away from the church by participating in such activities.”

The ordination will be Sunday afternoon in Church of the Covenant on Newbury Street in Boston’s Back Bay. The church is affiliated with two Protestant denominations, the Presbyterian Church (USA) and the United Church of Christ.

The interim pastor of Church of the Covenant, the Rev. Jennifer Wegter-McNelly, said the congregation decided to rent its historic space, with Tiffany windows depicting women of the Bible, at a nominal fee to show support.

“It’s our effort to encourage and celebrate with them,” Wegter-McNelly said. “This church’s commitment to women goes back a long time.”

The ceremony has been scheduled to coincide with the first joint conference of four organizations pushing for the admission of married men, as well as of women, to the priesthood. That conference begins today at the Hyatt Harborside.

In St. Louis, a recent Catholic women’s ordination ceremony at a synagogue led to a rift in Catholic-Jewish relations.

The Boston archdiocese declined to comment about the Protestant church’s decision to allow the dissident Catholics to meet there.

The Vatican has repeatedly said that women cannot be priests because Jesus did not have female apostles.

In 1994, in the most definitive recent Vatican statement on the issue, Pope John Paul II issued an apostolic letter in which he wrote, “I declare that the church has no authority whatsoever to confer priestly ordination on women.”

In its own statement, sent to priests by a vicar general, the Rev. Richard M. Erikson, the archdiocese said, “The ordination of men to the priesthood is not merely a matter of practice or discipline within the Catholic Church, but rather, it is part of the unalterable Deposit of Faith handed down by Christ through his apostles.”

But the archdiocese also said it hopes the women involved will seek “reconciliation” with the Catholic Church, and said, “Following our devotion to Mary, the church is committed to, and sustained by the many important contributions of women each and every day.”

Clarification: The main headline on a report in yesterday’s City and Region section may have led to the erroneous impression that three women will be recognized as priests by the Roman Catholic Church after their ordination tomorrow. As the report and a subordinate headline made clear, the women’s status after the ordination is a matter of dispute. Although the organization hosting the ceremony will consider the women to be Catholic priests, the Vatican and the Archdiocese of Boston will regard them as having excommunicated themselves and therefore as being neither Catholic nor priests.

Source — The Boston Globe

BOSTON (AP) - The Boston Red Sox jersey secretly buried under the new Yankee Stadium in a failed curse attempt sold Thursday for $175,100 in a charity auction.

The bid from Kevin Meehan, the owner of Imperialcars.com in Mendon, Mass., was the highest of 282 for the battered No. 34 David Ortiz jersey.

“I actually thought it was going to sell for more money,” said Meehan, who bid only in the final moments of the weeklong eBay auction that ended at 12:30 p.m. “I have three young boys that I take to the games and they would have killed me if I didn’t buy the shirt.”

The Yankees jackhammered the jersey out from under two feet of concrete earlier this month, then donated it to the Jimmy Fund, the Red Sox’s official charity that is affiliated with Boston’s Dana-Farber Cancer Institute.

Mike Andrews, The Jimmy Fund chairman and former Red Sox second baseman, said the charity was “absolutely thrilled.”

“We are grateful for the generous bid, and extend our deep gratitude to the New York Yankees and the Boston Red Sox for coming together again in the fight against cancer,” he said in a statement.

Meehan said he was eager to give to the Jimmy Fund because his father died of cancer and his stepfather has the disease.

“It’s personal,” he said. “It’s a lot deeper than just the shirt.”

Meehan plans to eventually display the jersey from his favorite Red Sox player in one of his car dealerships. He said he has no intention of selling it.

“It was just a win-win all the way around,” said Meehan, who also will receive a new Ortiz jersey, a Yankees T-shirt and two tickets to a Red Sox game where he will be presented with the unusual piece of sports memorabilia.

Construction worker Gino Castignoli, a Red Sox fan from the Bronx, dropped the jersey in wet concrete during construction of the new stadium, hoping to hex the Yankees. The team found the jersey after receiving information from anonymous tipsters.

“As we said, what was intended to be a dastardly act has turned into something very beautiful, and we hope that these funds will play a small part in the fight against pediatric cancer,” the Yankees said in a statement.

Source — Fox Sports