2 Articles

1) The Kids Aren’t All Right: New Family Structures and the “No Differences” Claim

The widely circulated claim that parents engaged in same-sex relationships do just as well as other parents at raising children—a claim widely known today as the “no differences” thesis—is not settled science. Two new peer-reviewed studies released this week by the academic journal Social Science Research challenge the claim that there are no differences in outcomes between children raised by parents who have same-sex relationships and those raised by their biological mother and father in intact, stable marriages.

2) One is the loneliest number: meet New York’s only new priest

Being the archdiocese’s sole member of the Class of 2012 is a slightly uncomfortable distinction for Father D’Arcy, 33, a soft-spoken man who prefers to stay out of the spotlight. He is not a native New Yorker, nor even an American citizen. Father D’Arcy comes from a small suburb of Toronto, about 80 miles northwest of Niagara Falls, and transferred to the seminary here three years ago, he said, because he had a special interest in working with Latin American immigrants, and had heard that New York needed such priests.

The number of seminarians has been declining, in New York and nationally, since the 1960s. St. Joseph’s, the New York Archdiocese’s stately limestone seminary in Yonkers, opened in 1896 with room for 180 students. It graduated 25 or 30 men annually through the mid-1970s, but since the mid-1990s, most graduating classes have had fewer than 10 priests. Before this year, the archdiocese’s smallest graduating class was in 1998, with two priests.