For those who follow these things, it’s no secret that morale among the Catholic priests of New York is not good.

Many feel isolated, overworked, and unappreciated. I have been repeatedly surprised in recent years by how often priests complain about the state of things (off-the-record, of course, as the vast majority fear being seen as insubordinate).

During the past few days, Cardinal Egan has directed the transfer of dozens of priests. Many are quite unhappy. Some are really unhappy. Morale, let’s say, is not going up.

Now, priests are reassigned every year. It’s part of diocesan life. But I’m told that many priests who did not expect to be moved got the news in a simple phone call from downtown, with no warning and little time to prepare. The priest personnel board had minimal input and did not know what was coming.

“A lot of guys are hurt and this will have a long-term effect,” one priest told me.

Of course, many people will see these moves as another sign that Cardinal Egan’s retirement is imminent—that he’s taking care of business in his final days. Speculation over when his retirement will be announced is close to rampant these days.

But I don’t know. Some people think that the cardinal will be around for a while. Egan may be 76, but Detroit’s Cardinal Maida is still hanging on at 78.

And when it comes to the Catholic Church, does anything ever play out the way it’s expected to? (Well, there was the election of B16…)

When the last head of the Vatican Observatory, Father George Coyne, was removed from the job in 2006, it was said that he was a little too enthusiastic about supporting the theory of evolution.

Now his successor is making news:

VATICAN CITY (AP) _ The Vatican’s chief astronomer says that believing in aliens does not contradict faith in God.

The Rev. Jose Gabriel Funes, the Jesuit director of the Vatican Observatory, says that the vastness of the universe means it is possible there could be other forms of life outside Earth, even intelligent ones.

In an interview published Tuesday by Vatican newspaper L’Osservatore Romano, Funes says that such a notion “doesn’t contradict our faith” because aliens would still be God’s creatures.

The interview was headlined “The extraterrestrial is my brother.” Funes said that ruling out the existence of aliens would be like “putting limits” on God’s creative freedom.

Few have probably heard of the Empire State Stem Cell Board, which was created last year to promote stem-cell research in New York.

Promoting stem-cell research, of course, is not a simple matter, as there is a great disagreement over whether embryonic stem cells are off-limits.

The NY board has an ethics committee to deal with such matters. One of its members, a Catholic priest and bioethicist named Father Thomas Berg, has written a column charging that many government agencies may be biased against stem cell research that does not use embryonic cells.

Berg is executive director of the Westchester Institute for Ethics and the Human Person, a Catholic think tank.

He writes:

Last December, our Ethics Committee unanimously recommended to the Funding Committee a brief six month moratorium on the funding of controversial research projects (such as the creation of new lines of human embryonic stem cells) so that we could have time to make recommendations on the serious ethical issues involved in such research. We were roundly rebuffed, however. Such a moratorium, they argued, “would send the wrong signal to the scientific community in the State.”

As the Barack Obama-Jeremiah Wright story seems to be losing steam…

The venerable investigative magazine Mother Jones is trying to draw attention to John McCain’s “pastor problem.” No, they’re not talking about John Hagee, but another pastor, Rod Parsley.

Parsley (that’s him) is the pastor of a Pentecostal church in Columbus, Ohio, and a pretty prominent televangelist who runs the “Center for Moral Clarity.” McCain has called him a spiritual adviser and campaigned with him in February.

Mother Jones’ focus is Parsley’s comments about Islam. According to MJ:

The spirit of Islam, he maintains, is one of hostility. He asserts that the religion “inspired” the 9/11 attacks. He bemoans the fact that in the years after 9/11, 34,000 Americans “have become Muslim” and that there are “some 1,209 mosques” in America. Islam, he declares, is a “faith that fully intends to conquer the world” through violence. The United States, he insists, “has historically understood herself as a bastion against Islam,” but “history is crashing in upon us.”

Normally, the deaths of at least 22 people who got in the way of tornadoes in Missouri, Oklahoma and Georgia would make for the major news story of the day.

But today is not that day.

Close to 8,000 people were killed by a major earthquake in central China (photo). We all woke up to reports that some 900 children were buried under the rubble of their former school.

And the death toll in Myanmar has hit 32,000, while another 30,000 are missing.

At these times, friends, neighbors, and colleagues ask me about my book. Why do these “acts of God” happen? What answers do religious authorities have?

I generally have little to say (which sometimes surprises people). There are no easy answers. Each religious tradition has its own way of looking at these things. And it’s complicated.

Yes, Buddhists in Myanmar and China will blame karma. Protestants in Missouri may blame Original Sin. Many people around the world, from many faith traditions, will wonder who is being punished for what.

But on a day like today, when children are buried and thousands of people (bodies?) are missing, what explanation can possibly be satisfying?

As one Catholic priest who advises the U.S. Bishops Conference, Father Thomas Weinandy, told me for my book:

What gets preached from the pulpit and by the bishops is “Let’s support these people, take up a collection and do what we can to help them get back on their feet,”—rather than addressing the theological issues that may be raised. Part of the problem is that there is no simply answer. You can’t get up on a pulpit and say this is why this happened, other than to say that God has his purposes and ways and hopefully it will all become clear in heaven. What is there to say other than that we have to know that God loves us, that we have to trust in him, that he’s on our side in the end? Other than that, what can you say?

And we complain about the cost of gas.

Is the American Jewish connection with Israel slowly weakening, particularly among the young?

This has been a common conclusion from academics and pollsters in recent years.

As Israel reaches its 60th birthday, The Washington Post looks at the “evolving” relationship between American Jews and Israel.

“My guess is we’re seeing a tightening of the core, the core being well-committed but the periphery less so,” said Rabbi Aaron Panken, dean of Hebrew Union College, the premiere seminary for Reform Judaism.

Anecdotally, the New York Jewish community remains as steadfast as ever when it comes to emphasizing the American Jewish link to Israel. Support for Israel may be less passionate among young adults, but nothing brings the overall Jewish community together (Orthodox, Conservative, Reform, Reconstructionist, secular) than Israel, particularly when things are not going well.

The picture is from a big rally for Israel at Temple Israel Center of White Plains in 2006, during the war with Hezbollah. About 1,400 people came out with a few days notice.

Rabbi Jamie Korngold, who graduated from Edgemont High School in 1983, is these days known as the…Adventure Rabbi.

Korngold, a Reform rabbi, now lives in Boulder, Colo., where she started the “Synagogue Without Walls” program in 2001. Among other things, she officiates at “wilderness weddings, backcountry b’nai mitzvah” and other life cycle events.

He new book is God in the Wilderness, in which she “uses rabbinic wisdom and witty insights to guide readers through the Bible, showing people of all faiths that, despite the hectic pace of life today, it is vital for us to reclaim these lessons, awaken our inner spirituality, and find meaning, tranquillity, and purpose in our lives.”

Korngold will be in NY next week, promoting her book and helping people find God in the great outdoors. Get the details here.

She’ll do a book reading and signing at Bet Am Shalom in White Plains on May 17 at 1:15 p.m.

She’ll do a “Havdallah Hike,” book reading and signing at Woodlands Community Temple in Greenburgh on May 17 at 5 p.m. Korngold attended Woodlands while growing up.

She’ll lead a hike in Central Park on May 18 at 3 p.m. (Meet at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Fifth Avenue at 82nd Street, and look for the “white Adventure Rabbi banner” north of the steps.)

And she’ll lead a “walk and talk” in Central Park at noon on May 19.

Here are Korngold’s Twenty Commandments of Conscious Consumption:

1. Don’t buy things you don’t need
2. Support businesses and products that have sustainability policies
3. Buy local products and produce, organic and free range foods
4. Install compact fluorescent light bulbs (CFL) and turn off lights when not in use. (If we all replaced one conventional bulb with a CFL, it would lessen pollution as much as removing a million cars from the road.)
5. Buy high efficiency appliances
6. Use eco-friendly cleaning products
7. Lower your heat and lessen your air conditioning
8. Tele-commute whenever possible
9. When it is time to replace you car, buy a fuel efficient vehicle
10. Use wind or solar power for your home and office
11. Drive less: ride your bike & walk more
12. Reduce, reuse, recycle (i.e. encourage the use of hand-me-down clothing, toys, sporting goods and electronics)
13. Install dual 2 flush toilets (different flow amounts based on need)
14. Bring your own reusable, cloth bags to the grocery store
15. Compost
16. Choose products that contain less packaging. (About one-third of the waste in our landfills is from packaging materials!)
17. Vacation near home so you can fly less
18. Don’t use wrapping paper or store bought greeting cards
19. Use less water.
20. Encourage our politicians to create policies that enable us to stop giving oil money to people that hate us and want to kill us.

I returned to St. Joseph’s Seminary in Yonkers the other day, where it was beyond quiet.

I was standing on the fields behind the seminary, where the papal youth rally took place on April 19. It was empty, just grass and dirt. I actually had trouble getting my bearings: Where had the stage been? Where were the incredibly long lines for food? Where were priests listening to confessions?

After turning around a few times, I was finally able to walk over to the hill where the “press pen” was. From 34,700 people (the final count on the total number of people there) to just me.

The grounds are so quiet this week because seminarians are on retreat before tomorrow’s ordination Mass at St. Patrick’s Cathedral. Then seminarians get two weeks off before heading for their summer parish assignments.

But Father Luke Sweeney, head of vocations for the Archdiocese of NY, has been busy.

The hope was that the papal visit would inspire men to listen for a call to the priesthood. The archdiocese desperately needs vocations, as the number of active priests just drops and drops.

Since the papal visit, Sweeney (that’s him) has received dozens of calls and emails from men who say they may be hearing such a call.

I’ll be writing about Sweeney’s experience during the next few days.

By the way, there are rumblings—loud rumblings—of major changes coming with the archdiocese. Much of it has to do with Cardinal Egan’s upcoming (when?) retirement. But lots of church officials may be changing roles. I’m spending a lot of time on the phone these days…

I haven’t seen it, but it sounds like a new book, “The Sistine Secrets,” is aiming to be a Da Vinci Code II.

But the fact that it was co-written by an Orthodox rabbi is not going to go over well with a lot of people.

The book apparently contends that Michelangelo included secret Jewish codes in his painting of the Sistine Chapel—not to mention insults aimed at Pope Julius II.

The Jewish Week reports that art historians have big problems with the conclusions reached by Rabbi Benjamin Blech and his co-author, Roy Doliner, a docent and guide at the Vatican.

ABC News has given the book a lot of play.

Blech is a respected Talmudic scholar at Yeshiva University (I interviewed him for my book about natural disasters). He says that his new book should be seen as a “bridge between Judaism and Christianity.”

We’ll see about that.

Introducing the new non-denominational chapel at the St. Christopher’s residential treatment center in Dobbs Ferry, which serves troubled youngsters…

That’s Robert Maher, executive director of St. Christopher’s, addressing guests at a dedication last week.