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Utah celebrates "Cathedral Week"
CNA reports that Salt Lake City’s Cathedral of the Madeleine is preparing to celebrate its 100th anniversary with an upcoming “Cathedral Week” of Masses, celebrations, lectures and musical performances. Cardinal William J. Levada will be among the many participants in the event.
Franciscan missionaries first visited the land that would become Utah in 1776, according to the Diocese of Salt Lake City. Salt Lake City itself was first settled in 1847 by members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, also known as Mormons, who remain predominant in both the city and the state.
The first permanent Catholic establishment came in 1866 when property was purchased in the city.
A small church on the purchased property served Catholics until the present cathedral was constructed by architects Carl Neuhausen and Bernard Mecklenburg at a different location. The cathedral’s cornerstone was laid on July 2, 1900 and was dedicated to God on August 15, 1909 by James Cardinal Gibbons under the patronage of St. Mary Magdalene.
The cathedral combines a Romanesque exterior with a Gothic interior. Its interior was renovated between 1991 and 1992, with the art, stained glass, and woodwork undergoing restoration.
According to the Salt Lake Tribune, the cathedral’s Madeleine Choir School is one of the few of its kind, with “highly regarded” adult choirs who sing in English and Spanish.
The diocese has declared August 9 to 15, 2009 to be “Cathedral Week.” The week will open on the evening of Sunday August 9 with a Centennial Civic Service in the cathedral, a diocese schedule reports. The service will highlight the cathedral’s role in education, arts and humanities, outreach to the poor and outreach to the growing Hispanic presence.
Bishop of Salt Lake City John C. Wester will preside over the celebration, which will include both the Cathedral Choir and El Coro Hispano de la Catedral.
Speakers will include President Thomas S. Monson of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, University of Utah President Michael K. Young, Salt Lake County Mayor Peter Corroon and Mexican Consul to Utah Ignacio Rios Navarro.
A Cathedral Centennial Lecture will be delivered by Deacon Owen Cummings on the evening of Tuesday August 11.
Wednesday and Thursday evening will feature a Centennial Concert performance of Sir Edward Elgar’s "The Dream of Gerontius." The work is a dramatic setting of the 1865 poem by the English theologian and Catholic convert John Henry Cardinal Newman, whose beatification is still pending.
On Friday of Cathedral Week there will be Vespers for the Solemnity of the Assumption and a children’s procession from the old 1871 cathedral location to the present cathedral.
The former bishop of Salt Lake City, Archbishop of San Francisco George H. Niederauer, will be homilist at the service. Cardinal William Levada, Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, will be in attendance as will other visiting bishops.
That evening Son by Four, a Latin music group from Puerto Rico, will perform a concert at the cathedral to be followed on the plaza by a fiesta with special music and traditional foods.
On Saturday Bishop Wester will celebrate an afternoon Mass for the Solemnity of the Assumption, with Cardinal Levada as homilist. The annual Bishop’s Dinner to benefit the cathedral will be held in the evening.
On Sunday morning, August 16, Bishop Wester will celebrate a Parish Centennial Mass at the cathedral, while a Spanish Centennial Mass will be celebrated in the afternoon by Bishop Emeritus of Sacramento William K. Weigand, who until 1994 was the seventh bishop of Salt Lake City.
Msgr. Joseph Mayo, cathedral pastor, told the Salt Lake Tribune that the cathedral was modeled on ninth century cathedrals of Europe, which had plazas for public events as well as art and architecture for congregants.

What happens when your Project Sponsor wants a slightly different outcome for the project than your Customer, Management Team and other Stakeholders want? The answer is that each party tries to influence the project to get what they want—and this is known as “Project Politics”.
The result is that the team are constantly pushed in different directions, trying to keep everyone happy, but not really doing what they were originally tasked to do which was to deliver a single outcome for the project.
In this scenario, the project team becomes stressed, confused, de-motivated and inefficient. So it’s your job as a Project Manager to ensure this doesn’t happen. Here’s how to prevent it (other than using Project Management Templates).
The most critical but challenging step is to get everyone to agree to the same project scope and objectives. The easiest way to do this is to form a Project Board and include your Sponsor, Customer and other people that may influence the project at some point. The purpose of the board is to control the scope of the project and make sure that specific targets are set and achieved.
By forming a Project Board, you can let them thrash out the politics themselves and come to a consensus. You then have only one party to manage and if they want to divert the project onto other tasks, at least you have their combined approval. If you include all of the “influencers” within the Board, you can task them with giving you a single, consistent vision. That way, there is no confusion as to what must be done to deliver the project and people are not pulled in different directions all of the time. You can also keep the Project Board focused by using Project Templates and a methodology for Project Management Consulting.
Just because you have a board, doesn’t mean there are no politics. It just makes it easier to manage. As a Project Manager, you still need to reduce the politics within the board by building close relationships with each board member. Find out what they need, by when and why. This will help you steer them in the right direction when they meet as a group.
Build close relationships by meeting each board member regularly to find out what they need from the project and why they need it. By listening to their needs, you’re securing their buy-in and you may be able to save heated board meetings by presenting them with solutions instead of problems.
Risk Plan Project Management Template.
The biggest risk to a project is that the goal posts move, causing continuous change to the project scope. This is a breeding ground for project politics, because every stakeholder will have their own wants and needs to be met—and they may not all be consistent with one another.
So you need to manage change carefully by putting in place a formal process for managing it. Your process should involve documenting each Change Request, why it’s needed and the impact to the project in implementing it. The Change Request (project management template) should then be presented to the Project Board for review and approval. You need to make sure that when it’s approved the board also approve the extra time, money and people needed to implement it.
By creating a Project Board and forming close relationships with each board member, you’ll cut through politics to ensure your project success. You can then control changes to the project so that you can achieve success.
Zimbabwe’s ruling Zanu-PF party has called for a recount of the votes from the 29 March presidential election – even though the electoral commission has still, after more than one week, to release the figures! a massive hike in general sales tax. This further inflamed the protests culminating in ‘Red Tuesday’ on 9 December 1997 when over one million joined an anti-government stay-away general strike.
During this period of struggle an increasingly militant working class had forced the Zimbabwe Congress of Trade Unions (ZCTU) to break with Zanu-PF. With this link broken a political vacuum opened up, leading to the formation of a political party, the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC).
The MDC mobilised opposition to defeat Mugabe’s constitutional change referendum in February 2000. However, the MDC leadership executed a rapid turn to the right with Zimbabwean capitalists and white farmers joining and a right-wing US ‘think-tank’ - the Freedom Foundation - donating $1 million. Consequently, the MDC adopted the same neo-liberal policies as Mugabe.
Faced with defeat in the June 2000 general election, Mugabe, after 20 years of faithful service to capitalism and imperialism, suddenly became a champion of the dispossessed. He mobilised war veterans of the liberation struggle to forcibly seize land from white farmers and invoked the Law and Order Maintenance Act, inherited from Ian Smith’s racist Rhodesia regime, to curb the opposition MDC.
The issue of land ownership is of course a real issue. However, the land invasions weren’t part of a peasant uprising or a comprehensive land reform programme, which would entail the nationalisation not only of the big commercial farms but also the commanding heights of the economy.
Some of the best farms seized were handed over to Mugabe’s cronies in the ruling Zanu-PF. The subsistence farmers given land weren’t provided with tools.I love this picture. It always makes me smile. I think it was taken pretty early in my recovery after I learned how to walk and was confident enough to forgo the rollator and use a stroller instead. We were practicing my walking at the mall. Josh is sitting in the stroller bc I need it to be weighed down enough so it won’t flip if I lose my balance and Ezra was too light – see how little he is?
I suppose I’ve been in need of smiles lately but