Some links

- Google's doodle today is about Rachel Carson. She was ... an American marine biologist and conservationist whose book Silent Spring and other writings are credited with advancing the global environmental movement.. I read Silent Spring in college and it had quite an effect on me.

- Beautiful photos of mushrooms

- You can read a summery of what Pope Francis had to say to the press on his plane ride back to Rome here. One comment that caught my attention was about the sex abuse problem ...

At the moment there are three bishops under investigations: one has already been found guilty and we are now considering the penalty to be imposed.

Apparently only those bishops who might have abused (O'Brien, Wesolowski, Contreras) are being investigated. Does this mean then that up to this point, bishops who abuse kids have *not* been investigated?

It seems those bishops who have covered up abuse (Law, Mahony, Finn, et al) will still not be investigated, much less punished, by the Vatican, and that's a hell of a lot of bishops ... Roughly two-thirds of top U.S. Catholic leaders have allowed priests accused of sexual abuse to keep working, a systematic practice that spans decades and continues today, a three-month Dallas Morning News review shows. The study - the first of its kind - looked at the records of the top leaders of the nation’s 178 mainstream Roman Catholic dioceses, including acting administrators in cases where the top job is vacant. from Special Reports: Catholic Bishops and Sex Abuse