Our Lady Of The Rosary

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• Well, Shawn, first CUPE unionized all the ushers in Windsor, allowing county churches to have a greater edge and lower manpower costs. Then the county churches started bringing in Korean organs while the city churches were forced to use CUPE issue domestic pipe organs that kept breaking down and going out of tune. Finally, it was CUPE's demand for a 15 minute coffee break after the Second Reading and shift premiums at high masses that put the final nail in the coffin. George can fill ya in on the rest...

• i was wondering why they had the area under the steeple with no top on it taped off one day. i thought maybe it fell off, but lightning makes sense. that was a month or so ago, maybe more.

  my website is no more today... took it off due to personal reasons.

• John, I'm curious about something. Who was excluded from the CUPE agreement in Windsor Churches? Couldn't the role the ushers filled be staffed by non-ushers like Priests, nuns, volunteers, temps or anybody else, or did that go against the UNION agreement. Were priests and nuns also unionized in Windsor?

  I thought that low attendance and closings were to due to Charles Sylvestre and the lawsuits against the London Diocese from him and the spiraling insurance premium costs because of it.

• No.... priests, nuns, etc. cannot fill the role performed by ushers even temporarily as it is bargaining unit work under the terms of the collective agreement. One time a priest at Christ the King accepted a donation from a parishioner after mass and the ushers union steward found out and initiated a grievance against the diocese that went all the way to the OLB. Real ugly mess that was.

• Jeeves, how many Catholic churches are being closed in the county? Churches, like retail and manufacturing, follow the people. There are a lot more people moving from Windsor into the county than vice versa. People are moving to the county because taxes are lower and municipal services are better than what they get in Windsor. Unlike the city, Tecumseh and LaSalle are not afraid to contract out municipal services to a private business if the private business can deliver the same service at a lower cost. That's why taxes are lower in the County.

• anyone who thinks ushers are unionized with `mandatory coffee breaks`obviously is not seeing the sarcasm in john`s comments.....

• What's happening in the religious community (of which I am no part) is exactly what's happening in the educational community. The investment in mega-structures on the city's periphery at the expense of established inner-city infrastructure. For some reason, it must be more appealing to be a number in some institutional complex that resembles a fertilizer factory (J. H. Kunstler) as opposed to community-based heritage buildings where everyone knows your name (Norm).

  One of these days, this society will figure out it took a wrong turn somewhere down the line, but regretfully, it may be too late to turn around.

• Brian, what sarcasm? Are ushers unionized or not? I guess if the Catholic schoolboard is unionized, they could influence whether the catholic churches in Windsor can get unionized. Because if CUPE did unionize the Catholic Churches in Windsor, then CUPE is really REALLY pathetic. Servants of God are not meant to use the Catholic Church to get rich. That's why Henry VIII did away with the Catholic Church in England. And, now all the Catholic Churches are being shut down in Windsor.

• /sarcasm OFF

  Jeeves, Henry VIII was excommunicated by the pope. As they say today, the door "slammed on his ass on the way out". He set up the C of E with him in charge so he could make the rules affecting his marriage woes. Nothing to do with "Servants of God". There was nothing altruistic about his actions in that time in history.

  As far as catholic churches closing - it's mostly because there aren't enough priests to go around. Many of the now closed churches were filled on Sundays and had overflowing offertory baskets but couldn't stay open because they had one priest running around saying mass at several parishes. One by one, the diocese has been merging these parishes into "faith communities". At the rate they are going, I can see one centralized superchurch serving the whole city. It's not pretty either, especially in this case such as Andrew's church, which is historically very important to Windsor. Shutting it down is just one step away from going after Assumption or St. Anne's next.

• John, the marriage response for Henry VIII being excommunicated by the Pope is open for debate. A lot of kings were unfaithful. The Churches normally turned a blind eye to this stuff if a King was involved. It's interesting that 60 years prior to Henry VIII's reign, the witch hunts started and were headed by the Church. It extended from Ireland all the way to Germany. If a nobleman was tortured for a confession for witchcraft, guess what happened to his estate?? All of it went to the Catholic Church. For the next 300 years, over 110,000 were accused of witchcraft by the Church and half of them were executed.

  So, you think Henry VIII's marriage was the real reason he formed the Church of England with him being the head of it?? Bullsh-it. Henry VIII wasn't going to stick around and see all his noblemen plundered by the Catholic Church.