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Summary of today\u2019s show: Our usual thursday panel of Scot Landry, Susan Abbott, Gregory Tracy, and Fr. Roger Landry discussed the headlines of the week, including the launch of the Year of Faith both in Rome and in Boston and Fall River; Pope Benedict\u2019s homily for the opening Mass; indulgences for the Year of Faith; the Synod for the New Evangelization; Cardinal Se\xe1n starting to Tweet daily; religious leaders discussing physician-assisted suicide; and Cardinal Se\xe1n\u2019s reflection on the assisted-suicide slippery slope.\nListen to the show:\n\nWatch the show via live video streaming or a recording later: \nToday\u2019s host(s): Scot Landry and Susan Abbott\nToday\u2019s guest(s): Gregory Tracy, managing editor of the Pilot, the newspaper of the Archdiocese of Boston, and Fr. Roger Landry, pastor of St. Bernadette Parish in Fall River\nLinks from today\u2019s show:\n\n\n\nSome of the stories discussed on this show will be available on The Pilot\u2019s and The Anchor\u2019s websites on Friday morning. Please check those sites for the latest links.\n\nToday\u2019s topics: Year of Faith, Tweeting Cardinal Sean, Physician-Assisted Suicide\n1st segment: Scot Landry welcomed everyone to the show and to the Year of Faith. Cardinal Se\xe1n celebrated a Year of Faith opening Mass that was simulcast on WQOM and on BostonCatholicLive.com. Susan and Scot discussed the celebration of the Mass in Rome with the Holy Father and the very crowded Mass in the Pastoral Center with Cardinal Se\xe1n. Scot asked Gregory Tracy about his impressions. He said the homily was very engaging as always. He engages first with humors and anecdotes and then gets to the heart of the matter. After the Mass, they gathered in a conference room where Cardinal Se\xe1n sent out his first tweet for the Year of Faith in front of a group of journalists. Scot noted that the Cardinal had a tough time typing because his own personal computers are set up with Spanish-language keyboards.\n\n\n\nFr. Roger talked about his own preparations and launch of the Year of Faith in his parish. He outlined his plans for his parish over the year. Scot said Cardinal Se\xe1n\u2019s homily and the entire Mass are available online at .\nMoving to Pope Benedict\u2019s homily at the Mass opening the Year of Faith this morning, Scot quoted:\n\nIf today the Church proposes a new Year of Faith and a new evangelization, it is not to honour an anniversary, but because there is more need of it, even more than there was fifty years ago! And the reply to be given to this need is the one desired by the Popes, by the Council Fathers and contained in its documents. Even the initiative to create a Pontifical Council for the promotion of the new evangelization, which I thank for its special effort for the Year of Faith, is to be understood in this context. Recent decades have seen the advance of a spiritual \u201cdesertification\u201d. In the Council\u2019s time it was already possible from a few tragic pages of history to know what a life or a world without God looked like, but now we see it every day around us. This void has spread. But it is in starting from the experience of this desert, from this void, that we can again discover the joy of believing, its vital importance for us, men and women. In the desert we rediscover the value of what is essential for living; thus in today\u2019s world there are innumerable signs, often expressed implicitly or negatively, of the thirst for God, for the ultimate meaning of life. And in the desert people of faith are needed who, with their own lives, point out the way to the Promised Land and keep hope alive. Living faith opens the heart to the grace of God which frees us from pessimism. Today, more than ever, evangelizing means witnessing to the new life, transformed by God, and thus showing the path. The first reading spoke to us of the wisdom of the wayfarer (cf. Sir 34:9-13): the journey is a metaphor for life, and the wise wayfarer is one who has learned the art of living, and can share it with his brethren \u2013 as happens to pilgrims along the Way of Saint James or similar routes which, not by chance, have again become popular in recent years. How come so many people today feel the need to make these journeys? Is it not because they find there, or at least intuit, the meaning of our existence in the world? This, then, is how we can picture the Year of Faith: a pilgrimage in the deserts of today\u2019s world, taking with us only what is necessary: neither staff, nor bag, nor bread, nor money, nor two tunics \u2013 as the Lord said to those he was sending out on mission (cf. Lk 9:3), but the Gospel and the faith of the Church, of which the Council documents are a luminous expression, as is the Catechism of the Catholic Church, published twenty years ago.\n\nScot said the homily is stark about saying that many of the people we meet each day are in the desert, but it is from the starkness of the desert that we can rediscover the faith. Greg said already at the Second Vatican Council, society was making this transition to the secular desert and now 50 years on we are deep into the desert. Susan was reminded of Pope John Paul\u2019s teaching that Christ leads us to the Father through the Holy Father. She also noted he quoted Pope John XXIII: \u201c\u201cWhat above all concerns the Ecumenical Council is this: that the sacred deposit of Christian doctrine be safeguarded and taught more effectively [\u2026] Therefore, the principal purpose of this Council is not the discussion of this or that doctrinal theme.\u201d She said we observe the signs of the times and determine how we authentically and faithfully present the faith. She also noted that he talks about going back to the documents and she always encourages people to read the texts.\nFr. Roger said in this homily the Holy Father is bringing us back to the themes of his pontificate. He says the whole mission of the Church is to lead people out of the desert into friendship with Christ. He said many people haven\u2019t read the documents of the Second Vatican Council and this is an opportunity to go back and re-read them. Fr. Roger noted that this isn\u2019t a year of catechesis, but a year of living by faith.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nScot noted that at the same time as the opening of the Year of Faith is a synod of bishops on the New Evangelization. Cardinal Donald Wuerl says that it\u2019s like a tsunami of secularism has swept across Europe and beyond. He also talked about the cost of poor catechesis.\n\nThe cardinal said a \u201ctsunami of secularism\u201d has washed across the world, leaving in its wake a tendency to deny God\u2019s existence, or to deny that God\u2019s existence is relevant to human thinking and action.\nYet, without God \u201cthe very understanding of what it means to be human is altered,\u201d he said.\nA key task of the new evangelization is to help people see that human dignity and human rights flow from the fact that human beings are created in God\u2019s image, he said.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nSusan said she couldn\u2019t agree more with the Cardinal that the Catechism has immensely improved catechesis. Susan would add the improvement in understanding of hiw we learn through the social sciences.\nScot also noted that the plenary indulgences for the Year of Faith have been given. An indulgence is a remission of the temporal punishment a person is due for sins that have been forgiven. Fr. Roger explained that Purgatory repairs the damage to relationships caused by sin. Indulgences take away that temporal punishment for sin by the merits of Christ. they can be applied to the living or the dead. The indulgences are gained in this circumstance through some specific steps, including making pilgrimages to a local site designated by the bishop, attending parish missions or lectures on Vatican II or the catechism, attending a Mass or Liturgy of the Hours on days designated by the local bishop or renewing baptismal vows where we were baptized; or attending a Mass celebrated by a bishop on the Year of Faith\u2019s last day. The other usual conditions for indulgences apply as well. Scot noted the last day of the Year of Christ will be the Feast of Christ the King on which we have the Cheverus Awards at the Cathedral of the Holy Cross and that could be one of the biggest Masses ever at the cathedral.\n2nd segment: Scot said it was announced today that Cardinal Se\xe1n will be tweeting at least daily until November 6 and encouraging everyone to follow him on Twitter. He\u2019s hoping that people will retweet his messages on the Year of Faith and physician-assisted suicide. The cardinal says the biggest challenge of Question 2 is that not enough people know about it yet. Scot noted that yesterday his follower count was about 5,090 and today it\u2019s up a few hundred more already.\nGreg explained what twitter is and how it works. He said Twitter is very ephemeral and it\u2019s easy to miss one tweet so if the Cardinal writes consistently it will be more easily found.\n\n\n\nScot said we don\u2019t have to be confrontational in talking to people about this issue. There are plenty of low-impact ways of spreading the message. Fr. Roger said the cost of a failure to act is that someone might die and the benefit of acting might be to help people get the help they need instead of poison from their doctor. He noted some anecdotes from people in his parish who have talked to others about it, describing their own experiences with suicide or terminal illness.\nAnother story in the Pilot this week was an invitation to Cardinal Sean from Greek Orthodox Metropolitan Methodius to gather with representatives from different religious groups\u2014from Salvation Army to Islam\u2014 to talk about physician-assisted suicide. Greg was there and said there was a sense that this can\u2019t be described as just a Catholic issue. One of the issues on their minds was how to make it clear to their congregations and others that this isn\u2019t just a Catholic issue, even though the Catholic Church is on the forefront.\n\n\n\nScot said in the Pilot is Cardinal Se\xe1n\u2019s third reflection on assisted suicide:\n\nSlippery slope arguments involve small decisions that lead to undesirable outcomes that never would have been supported at the outset. Often, it is impossible to prove that one small step will have significant negative effects, but common sense allows reasonable people to judge the likelihood that a sequence of events that have happened in one place are likely to happen in another place in a similar way\n\nHe then points out 7 potential problems downstream: It could lead to increased elder abuse; It could lead to adoption of \u201cquality of life\u201d standards; It could lead to lower quality of care; It could undermine doctor/patient relationship; It could lead to a general devaluing of human life; It could lead to an increase of suicide generally; and It could lead, eventually to euthanasia\u2014like it has in the Netherlands.\nScot said people say you can\u2019t prove a slippery slope argument empirically. Susan said arguing the slippery slope can make you seem like an extremist. She noted that in the Netherlands they have mobile euthanasia units now. She also said both the American Medical Association and Massachusetts Medical Society oppose this ballot question.\nScot said there are also good op-ed columns in the Pilot on this topic as well.\nWinding up the show, Scot noted the death of Fr. Lawrence Wetterholm at 88 and the appointment of Fr. Bill Schmidt to pastor of both St. Marym, Wrentham, and St. Martha, Plainville from St. Patrick in Stoneham, one of the biggest parishes in the Archdiocese.