{"id":7386,"date":"2004-04-28T09:25:07","date_gmt":"2004-04-28T09:25:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/viamedia\/2004\/04\/staying_away.html"},"modified":"2004-04-28T09:25:07","modified_gmt":"2004-04-28T09:25:07","slug":"staying_away","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2004\/04\/staying_away.html","title":{"rendered":"Staying Away"},"content":{"rendered":"

Who went to a National Catholic Prayer Breakfast and who didn’t<\/a><\/p>\n

The White House spurned one of the largest gatherings of Roman Catholics in Washington this morning, out of concern that the gathering would be too Washington-centric, according to someone familiar with the Bush Administration’s Catholic outreach program.<\/p>\n

Instead of having him drop by the first ever National Catholic Prayer Breakfast on Wednesday morning, the President’s advisers kept him at home. The prayer breakfast, which was to feature a rosary, Mass, and a speech by Avery Cardinal Dulles, sold more than 900 tickets in less than a month.<\/p>\n

The event, including the Mass, was held at the Mayflower Hotel in downtown Washington, a block from St. Matthew’s Cathedral. Washington’s Theodore Cardinal McCarrick, who ten days ago met privately with Sen. John Kerry, would not allow organizers to use the cathedral out of concern that the event would be too “conservative,” according to a source inside the Washington Diocese. <\/p>\n

Sen. Kerry’s presidential campaign had attempted to get Kerry invited, but organizers did not extend an invitation.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Who went to a National Catholic Prayer Breakfast and who didn’t The White House spurned one of the largest gatherings of Roman Catholics in Washington this morning, out of concern that the gathering would be too Washington-centric, according to someone familiar with the Bush Administration’s Catholic outreach program. 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The Catholicism comes from her side. Amy grew up in a number of places - Indiana - Washington, DC - Lubbock Texas - Arlington, Virginia - DeKalb, Illinois - Lawrence, Kansas - and Knoxville, Tennessee, where the family settled in 1973. She attended Knoxville Catholic High School, then the University of Tennessee where she majored in history. She received an MA in Church History from Vanderbilt University, where she wrote a thesis on the changing role of women in 19th century American Protestantism, and the ways Scripture was used to justify those changes. She worked as as a teacher in Catholic high schools and a Parish Director of Religious Education and started writing for the diocesan press - the Florida Catholic - in 1988. Amy has written columns for Our Sunday Visitor and Catholic News Service at times over the past twenty years. Her articles have been published in venues ranging from Our Sunday Visitor to the New York Times to Commonweal. She has written 17 books. 18, if you included the as yet tragically unpublished novel. Amy has five children, ranging in age from 26 to 4 and was married to Michael Dubruiel, who died unexpectedly in February 2009. She lives in Birmingham, Alabama.","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/author\/awelborn"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7386","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/180"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7386"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7386\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7386"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7386"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7386"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}