VOLUME 1, ISSUE 22  •  MAY 30, 2015

Table of Contents

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VATICAN NEWS

Pope’s visit to Vatican departments a ‘beautiful experience,’ official says

Want to empower women? Support mothers, politician argues

Pope Francis’ Bosnian visit to steer clear of Medjugorje

Pope: Oscar Romero was a martyr who fought violence with love

Respect creation – this is a must for every single Christian, Pope Francis says

Thousands of people are trapped in the ocean right now – here is Pope Francis’ response

What does Pope Francis miss most? Walking in the streets, eating pizza at restaurants

Think you’re important because you have money? Think again, Pope says

As synod council meets, ‘shadow council’ pushes acceptance of gay unions

Love requires work – not just attraction or feelings, Pope tells couples

‘Mother of Mercy’ beatification in Kenya draws tens of thousands

For the Vatican bank, a new direction means profitability

Vatican rolls out first-ever guidebook for Arab pilgrims

What does the world need? Mercy and love, Pope tells Christians

Annual report shows Vatican financial watchdog to be on track

WORLD NEWS

This little boy still can’t talk or move – but his mother has never been happier

History versus caricature: Three facts that show us the real Romero

Vote to legalize gay marriage poses uncertain future for Ireland

Syrian Catholic archdiocese asks prayers for kidnapped priest

A drastic threat looms for an already ravaged Nepal – the rain season

Oscar Romero, a ‘father of the poor,’ beatified in El Salvador

Insides that didn’t decompose – and other stunning facts about Oscar Romero

Relics of Saints John XXIII, John Paul II light fires of faith in Thailand

Why no one wants to talk about China’s female suicide problem

A ‘reality check’ for Ireland’s Church – gay marriage vote both challenge and invitation

‘Little’ friars credit vocation boom to Pope’s name

Understanding the fierce devotion behind the Black Nazarene

Not a burden, but a grace: The indissolubility of marriage

Is ‘Charlie Charlie’ a harmless game? Exorcist says absolutely not

Another Christian youth is accused over blasphemy law in Pakistan

For Boko Haram victims – and their babies – Catholics pledge full support

As conflict rages on, Ukrainian troops make a pilgrimage for peace

In Pakistan, dozens face murder charges for lynching of Christian couple

U.S. NEWS

Rabbi: Vatican II’s interreligious document was ‘life-saving’

Denver’s Archbishop Aquila restores sacraments to original order

D.C. Cardinal: Christ didn’t change his words, and neither should the Church

Bishop Conley asks for prayers as Nebraska legislators vote on death penalty

Documentary follows JPII’s footprints across the Western Hemisphere

What does four decades as a priest look like? One bishop shares his story

Obama’s immigration order stalls. For 5 million immigrants, now what?

Rick Santorum, Catholic and Republican, to run for U.S. president

Jail time over eagle feathers? One Native American’s religious freedom fight

Does an Illinois bill threaten doctors’ conscience rights? Depends on whom you ask

FEATURES

‘Tomorrowland’ carefully crafted and highly entertaining

Thoughts on a Smaller, More Vibrant Catholic Church in America

Stay with Us

The wisdom of St. Francis de Sales for a troubled world

‘Aloha’ is filled with heart and humor

SCRIPTURE READINGS

Sunday • May 31, 2015

Monday • June 1, 2015

Tuesday • June 2, 2015

Wednesday • June 3, 2015

Thursday • June 4, 2015

Friday • June 5, 2015

Saturday • June 6, 2015

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Volume 1, Issue 22 • May 30, 2015

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VATICAN NEWS

Pope’s visit to Vatican departments a ‘beautiful experience,’ official says

by Elise Harris (CNA/EWTN News) • May 22, 2015

(CNA/YouTube)

Vatican City — On Friday Pope Francis began making stops at different departments of the Roman Curia – the first in a series of visits. Today’s rounds included four different offices.

A Vatican official from one of the departments the Pope stopped in to during his May 22 round of visits told CNA afterward that the pontiff gave them “general reflections about what our work entails.”

Francis also responded to some requests for clarification on matters of canon law, the official said. “It was a beautiful experience.”

The official, who preferred not to be named, said that he only found out the Pope was coming a few days ago.

In order, the departments Pope Francis visited today were the Pontifical Committee for Historical Sciences and the Pontifical Congregations for Catholic Education, Clergy and Institutes of Consecrated Life. All of the offices are in the same building.

The Roman Curia – which serves as the Vatican’s governing body – is broken up into different departments. It is composed of nine congregations, 11 pontifical councils, three tribunals, the Secretariat of State and three offices dedicated to organizing different areas of the Holy See – including the secretariat for the economy.

Many of the departments have their offices in Vatican-owned buildings on Via della Conciliazione – the broad street that leads to St. Peter’s Square – and Pius XII Square.

Each Vatican congregation is headed by a cardinal prefect, while presidents of the pontifical councils can be chaired by either a cardinal or archbishop, but never anyone below that rank.

Under the cardinals and archbishops of the dicasteries fall the ordinary of the dicastery, the secretary, a group of consulters, the undersecretary, the congress and finally the heads of specific offices and their officials.

Such visits to Curial dicasteries are not unusual for a Pope to do. During his pontificate, St. John Paul II visited the departments, and Benedict XVI also visited some, although not all.

The official who spoke with CNA recalled how Pope Francis told them that he has wanted to visit the various dicasteries since the beginning of his pontificate, and made a resolution to do it this year.

After gathering in their department’s large conference room, the office members met with Pope Francis. The Pope stayed roughly and hour and a half before moving on.

“He gave us his reflections on his pastoral guidance what our work would entail, and then there were a couple of questions,” the official noted.

Although their encounter wasn’t really an “open session” due to the large number of people present, he said that it could have been that way in other, smaller departments.

Once he had spoken to the department as a whole, Pope Francis greeted each member individually. In his conversation with the Pope, the Vatican official said that he welcomed the pontiff to the department, and offered some “kind words” to him.

Before coming into the conference room, the Pope and his delegation met in the lobby and stopped by the department’s chapel to pray in front of the Blessed Sacrament.

Offices previously visited by Pope Francis include that of the Synod of Bishops and the Secretariat of State. It is believed that Pope Francis will go to the Congregation for Bishops and the Pontifical Council for Legislative Texts June 1.

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VATICAN NEWS

Want to empower women? Support mothers, politician argues

by Elise Harris (CNA/EWTN News) • May 22, 2015

(Tatiana Vdb via Flickr CC BY 2.0)

Vatican City — Ahead of a conference discussing the presence of women in the 2015 development agenda, organizers said goals fall short of addressing issues such as attacks on motherhood and surrogacy.

“Today we live, at least in western society, in an abortive society. It doesn’t welcome life. If a second child comes they ask you ‘but do you want it?’ So maternity is not welcomed … today whoever has more children is penalized,” Olimpia Tarzia told CNA May 21.

She said that to marginalize motherhood in such a way is “the greatest damage a society can do to itself, because it doesn’t invest in the future.”

Tarzia is an Italian politician and president of the World Women’s Alliance for Life and Family. The organization is partnering with the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace in in organizing a May 22-24 conference at the Vatican discussing women in the post-2015 development agenda.

The conference is titled “Women and the post-2015 Development Agenda: the Challenges of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). More than 100 delegates from across the globe will take part in the discussions.

On the table for discussion are various issues related to women, including modernity, the so-called gender theory, surrogate motherhood, education, interreligious dialogue, both old and new forms of slavery, poverty, violence and “femicide.”

In her speech for the May 21 presentation of the conference, Tarzia made specific reference to the fifth SDG, which is to “Achieve gender equality and empower all women and girls.”

“How can you think of ‘empowering women’ without making some reference to the social protection of maternity, the harmonization between work and family time, to the right to be free to welcome life?” she asked.

And “how can you achieve true equality without taking into account that most women are often simultaneously working, mothers and, due to the elongation of age, also daughters, and at any latitude, the duties of care are mostly entrusted to her?” she continued.

Tarzia also referred to the very first SDG, which commits to “end poverty in all its forms.” This goal, she said, is inseparable from “the brutal practice of a new heinous slavery, the uterus for rent, better known as surrogate motherhood.”

Surrogacy not only takes advantage of situations of poverty, but also reduces women to “a mere incubator and tramples on them” as well as the children they carry, she said.

The current of a society indoctrinated by individualism, moral relativism and a utilitarian logic tied exclusively to profit have all contributed to “commercializing even the human being.”

If the eradication of poverty is ever to be expedited, then a strong fight must be made against “the uterus for rent, of maternal surrogacy. Because it’s a new form of slavery,” she observed.

In her comments to CNA, Tarzia said that the topic of surrogacy is an issue of women’s equality since “there is no doubt” it is linked to both civil unions and artificial fertilization. These, she said, are all issues which “manipulate life.”

She revealed that another goal of the conference is to counteract gender theory, which she said “destroys the family founded on a man and a woman, and so doing also destroys society.”

Cardinal Peter Turkson, president of the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, was also present at the May 21 presentation of the conference.

In response to journalists’ questions, he explained that the basis of gender theory comes from the belief that rather than having an inherent nature, a person’s sexuality is determined by society.

Under this theory the concept of male and female are “untied from the nature of the person. So sexuality and gender don’t have anything to do the body,” he said.

“The body can come with all of its signs, but this, according to them, is not an indication of the gender of a person,” the cardinal continued, saying that a person is considered either male or female not because their bodies are, but “because society has programmed them like this … this is why it’s called ‘theory.’”

Tarzia also stressed the importance of re-exploring the “new feminism” called for by St. John Paul II in his 1995 encyclical “Evangelium Vitae” in handling women’s issues.

She noted how her organization, founded in 2007, was formed with the goal of defending women and life, which the encyclical “prophetically” called for.

To fight for an end to the problematic phenomena surrounding women and society that will be addressed, Tarzia said, is an answer to St. John Paul II’s call.

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VATICAN NEWS

Pope Francis’ Bosnian visit to steer clear of Medjugorje

by Andrea Gagliarducci (CNA/EWTN News) • May 22, 2015

A statue of Our Lady in Medjugorje, Bosnia and Herzegovina. (Gnuckx via Flickr CC BY 2.0)

Vatican City — Pope Francis’ one-day trip to Bosnia and Herzegovina this June will not include a visit to Medjugorje, the location of controversial alleged Marian apparitions, according to a coordinator of the visit.

Monsignor Ivo Tomasevic, communications officer for the papal trip, confirmed to CNA May 22 that the Pope is only going to Sarajevo on June 6, and not the southern town near the Croatian border where six people claim to have seen apparitions of the Virgin Mary.

Msgr. Tomasevic could not confirm whether any visionaries would be at the papal Mass, but he said any delegation from Medjugorje would be treated like any other parish delegation.

He stressed that Medjugorje is “one of the parishes of the Diocese of Mostar-Duvno, and its faithful will take part in the celebration like faithful of the other parishes of the area, with an equal number of places assigned.”

Enzo Manes, the editor of the Magazine “Medjugorje, the presence of Mary,” told CNA May 21 that he has been informed that “some of the visionaries will take part in the Mass.”

He predicted a “strong” presence from Medjugorje.

The alleged apparitions originally began June 24, 1981, when six children in Medjugorje began to experience phenomena which they have claimed to be apparitions of the Blessed Virgin Mary.

According to these six “seers,” the apparitions contained a message of peace for the world, a call to conversion, prayer and fasting, as well as certain secrets surrounding events to be fulfilled in the future.

These apparitions are said to have continued almost daily since their first occurrence, with three of the original six children – who are now young adults – continuing to receive apparitions every afternoon because not all of the “secrets” intended for them have been revealed.

Since their beginning, the alleged apparitions have been a source of both controversy and conversion, with many flocking to the city for pilgrimage and prayer, and some claiming to have experienced miracles at the site, while many others claim the visions are non-credible.

In April 1991, the bishops of the former Yugoslavia determined that “on the basis of the research that has been done, it is not possible to state that there were apparitions or supernatural revelations.”

On the basis of those findings the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith directed in October 2013 that clerics and the faithful “are not permitted to participate in meetings, conferences or public celebrations during which the credibility of such ‘apparitions’ would be taken for granted.”

In January 2014, a Vatican commission completed an investigation into the supposed apparitions’ doctrinal and disciplinary aspects, and was to have submitted its findings to the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith.

A source within the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith told CNA May 19 that “the conclusions have not been discussed yet at the congregation, neither in a special meeting nor in a regular meeting.”

Once the congregation analyzes the commission’s conclusions and finalizes a document on the phenomena, the Bishop of Rome will be able to make a final decision.

Speculations about the possible conclusions of the commission led some local residents to think that the Pope might visit the shrine during his one-day trip to Bosnia and Herzegovina.

However, Cardinal Vinko Puljic of Sarajevo, a member of the commission which investigated the apparition, completely dismissed this possibility.

Cardinal Puljic told a May 13 press conference in Sarajevo that the Pope’s visit to Sarajevo “has nothing to do with Medjugorje” and its alleged apparitions.

Regarding the investigating commission, Cardinal Puljic stressed: “I cannot speak about it, as I was part of it and I am bound to secrecy.”

According to CNA’s source in the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith, the Vatican’s caution around the supposed apparitions is also due to “the exceptional nature of the apparitions.”

“It was never the case in history that the Virgin Mary appeared so continuously and so constantly over the years,” he said, noting that “the tradition of Marian apparitions show that they are limited to a given period in the life of any visionary.”

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VATICAN NEWS

Pope: Oscar Romero was a martyr who fought violence with love

by Elise Harris (CNA/EWTN News) • May 23, 2015

Archbishop Oscar Romero with young people in El Salvador in this undated file photo. (Arzobispado de San Salvador/Oficina de la Causa de Canonizacion)

Vatican City — On the day of Oscar Romero’s beatification in San Salvador, Pope Francis sent a letter to the current archbishop, praising the martyr for his courageous service to the poor amid widespread national violence.

“On this day of celebration for the Salvadoran nation, and also for the beautiful Latin American countries, we give thanks to God because he granted a martyr bishop the ability to see and hear the suffering of his people,” the Pope said in his May 23 letter.

Romero, he said, “built peace with the power of love, (and) bore witness to the faith with his life given to the extreme.”

Addressed to Archbishop José Luis Escobar Alas, the letter was sent by the Pope to the diocese of San Salvador in honor of the May 23 beatification of its former archbishop, Oacute;scar Arnulfo Romero Galdámez.

Archbishop Romero oversaw the diocese of San Salvador from 1977 until March 24, 1980, when he was shot while saying Mass.

He headed the Church in San Salvador during a time of heavy unrest, when El Salvador was on the brink of civil war. He was an outspoken critic of human rights abuses perpetrated by the repressive Salvadoran government, and spoke out on behalf of the poor and the victims of the government.

Both Pope Francis and Benedict XVI hold Archbishop Romero in high regard. The bishop’s cause for beatification was opened in 1993, and Feb. 3 of this year Francis officially approved of his martyrdom, opening the door for his beatification.

In his letter, Pope Francis referred to Romero as “a zealous bishop who, by loving God and serving his brethren, became an image of Christ the Good Shepherd.”

At a time when peaceful coexistence in El Salvador was unstable, Romero emerged as a shepherd who “knew how to lead, defend and protect his flock,” the Pope said, noting how the bishop’s entire ministry was marked “by a special attention to the poorest and most marginalized.”

The Lord, he said, never abandons his people in the midst of difficulty and oppression, but rather hears their cries and immediately comes to their aid to so they can be set free.

Archbishop Romero’s voice continues to ring out even today as a reminder that the Church is truly the family of God “in which there can be no division,” Francis said.

Those who have Romero as a friend and who invoke him as an intercessor and protector find in him “strength and courage to build the Kingdom of God, and to commit to a more equitable and dignified social order,” the Pope continued.

He said that the archbishop’s beatification is a ripe time for “true and proper national reconciliation” in El Salvador, which, despite having made political peace, still suffers due to poverty and violence.

Pope Francis said that he participates in the beatification with his hopes, and joins in prayer “so that the seed of martyrdom flourishes and becomes entrenched by the true paths of the sons and daughters of this nation, which proudly bears the name of the Divine Savior of the world.”

Please find below CNA’s full English translation of the Pope’s letter:

Mons. José Luis Escobar Alas, Archbishop of San Salvador, President of the Episcopal Conference of El Salvador

Dear brother,

The beatification of Mons. Oacute;scar Arnulfo Romero Galdámez, who was pastor of this dear archdiocese, is a reason for great joy for Salvadorans and for all those who enjoy the example of the best sons of the Church. Mons. Romero, who built peace with the power of love, bore witness to the faith with his life given to the extreme.

The Lord never abandons his people in difficulties, and he always shows diligence in their needs. He sees the oppression, hears the painful cries of his children, and comes to their aid to free them from oppression and bring them to a new land, fertile and spacious, “flowing with milk and honey (Ex 3:7-8).” Just as he chose Moses to lead his people in his name, he continues to raise pastors after his own heart, who feed his flock with knowledge and prudence.

In this beautiful Central American country, bathed by the Pacific Ocean, the Lord granted to his Church a zealous bishop who, by loving God and serving his brethren, became an image of Christ the Good Shepherd. In times of difficult coexistence, Mons. Romero knew how to lead, defend and protect his flock, remaining faithful to the Gospel and in communion with the entire Church. His ministry was distinguished by a special attention to the poorest and most marginalized. And in the moment of his death, while celebrating the Holy Sacrifice of Love and Reconciliation, he received the grace of fully identifying with the One who have his life for his sheep.

On this day of celebration for the Salvadoran nation, and also for the beautiful Latin American countries, we give thanks to God because he granted a martyr bishop the ability to see and hear the suffering of his people, and was molding his heart so that, in his name, he will guide and enlighten, to make his work a full exercise of Christian Charity.

The voice of the new Blessed continues to resonate today to remind us that the Church, a gathering of brothers around their Lord, is the family of God in which there can be no division. Faith in Jesus Christ, when it is well understood and is assumed until its final consequences, generates communities who are builders of peace and solidarity. It is to this that the Church in El Salvador, in America and in the entire world is called to today: to be rich in mercy, to become a leaven of reconciliation for society.

Mons. Romero invites us to wisdom and reflection, to respect for life and harmony.

It’s necessary to renounce “the violence of the sword, of hatred,” and to live “the violence of love, which left Christ nailed to a cross, which makes each person overcome their egoism and ensures that no such cruel inequalities are among us.” He knew how to see and experience in his own flesh “the egoism that lurks in those who do not want to give up themselves in order to reach others.” And, with the heart of a father, he cared for “the most poor,” asking the powerful to convert their “weapons into scythes for work.”

Those who have Mons. Romero as a friend in the faith, who invoke him as protector and intercessor, who admire his image, finds in him strength and courage to build the Kingdom of God, and to commit to a more equitable and dignified social order.

It is a favorable moment for a true and proper national reconciliation in front of the challenges that currently faced today. The Pope participates with his hopes, he joins his prayers so that the seed of martyrdom flourishes and becomes entrenched by the true paths of the sons and daughters of this nation, which proudly bears the name of the Divine Savior of the world.

Dear brother, I ask you, please, to pray and do pray for me, while at the same time I impart my apostolic blessing to all those who are united in different ways in the celebration of the new Blessed.

Fraternally,

Francisco

Vatican, 23 May 2015

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VATICAN NEWS

Respect creation – this is a must for every single Christian, Pope Francis says

by Ann Schneible (CNA/EWTN News) • May 24, 2015

Pope Francis at Saint Peter’s Basilica on the feast of Pentecost, May 24, 2015. (Bohumil Petrik/CNA)

Vatican City — Pope Francis used Sunday’s feast of Pentecost – the descent of the Holy Spirit – as an occasion to remind Christians of their duty to care for and respect the earth.

“The Holy Spirit whom Christ sent from the Father, and the Creator Spirit who gives life to all things, are one and the same,” the Pope said.

“Respect for creation, then, is a requirement of our faith: the ‘garden’ in which we live is not entrusted to us to be exploited, but rather to be cultivated and tended with respect.”

Pope Francis, dressed in red vestments traditional for the solemnity of Pentecost, made these remarks during Mass in Saint Peter’s Basilica.

Reflecting on Adam, who himself was “formed from the earth,” the pontiff explained, this respect for the earth is only possible when man is renewed by the Holy Spirit, and “reformed by the Father on the model of Christ, the new Adam.”

In this way, “we will indeed be able to experience the freedom of the sons and daughters, in harmony with all creation.”

These remarks about man’s responsibility to care for the earth comes ahead of the Pope’s upcoming encyclical on environmental degradation and the global effects of climate change on the poor.

Expected to be published in mid-late June, the document has already been written and is currently being translated.

Reflecting on the day’s readings for the feast of Pentecost, Pope Francis cited the second letter Saint Paul to the Galatians, comparing those who allow the Holy Spirit into their lives with those who close themselves off to the Spirit through selfishness, “rigid legalism,” neglecting Jesus’ teachings, and so on.

“Closing oneself off from the Holy Spirit means not only a lack of freedom; it is a sin,” he said.

On the other hand, the Pope explained, the world is in need of those who are open to the Spirit.

“The world needs the courage, hope, faith and perseverance of Christ’s followers,” as well as the fruits of the Holy Spirit, as cited in the day’s readings: “love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control” (Gal 5:22).

Pope Francis turned his reflection to the account of the descent of the Holy Spirit on the Apostles and Mary from the day’s first reading.

Receiving this outpouring of the Holy Spirit which filled “their minds and hearts,” the pontiff said, the Apostles “received a new strength so great that they were able to proclaim Christ’s Resurrection in different languages.”

The Pope also how Mary, “the first disciple and the Mother of the nascent Church,” who was present at Pentecost,, “accompanied the joyful young Bride, the Church of Jesus.”

With the coming of the Holy Spirit, the Apostles came to understand all that Jesus had said and done, especially with regard to the “scandal” of his death and resurrection.

“To the Apostles, who could not bear the scandal of their Master’s sufferings, the Spirit would give a new understanding of the truth and beauty of that saving event.”

The Pope explained that the Apostles had hidden themselves away in the Upper Room following Christ’s death out of fear.

“Now they would no longer be ashamed to be Christ’s disciples; they would no longer tremble before the courts of men,” he said.

“Filled with the Holy Spirit,” the Holy Father continued, the Apostles “would now understand ‘all the truth’: that the death of Jesus was not his defeat, but rather the ultimate expression of God’s love, a love that, in the Resurrection, conquers death and exalts Jesus as the Living One, the Lord, the Redeemer of mankind, of history and of the world.”

Pope Francis concluded his homily by reminding the faithful of the responsibilities which come from having received the Holy Spirit.

“The gift of the Holy Spirit has been bestowed upon the Church and upon each one of us, so that we may live lives of genuine faith and active charity, that we may sow the seeds of reconciliation and peace,” he said. “

Strengthened by the Spirit and his many gifts, may we be able uncompromisingly to battle against sin and corruption, devoting ourselves with patient perseverance to the works of justice and peace.”

Shortly after the conclusion of Mass in the Basilica, Pope Francis led the crowds in Saint Peter’s Square in reciting the Regina Caeli address for the last time for the Easter Season.

In his pre-Regina Caeli address, he recalled the Church’s birth during Pentecost as universal, with a “precise identity” that is nonetheless “open to everyone,” and “which embraces the entire world, without excluding anyone.”

By infusing the disciples with the Holy Spirit, the Pope said, a “new season” of “witness and fraternity” was opened.

“As on that day of Pentecost, the Holy Spirit is continuously poured out on the Church and on each one of us even today, in order that we might leave behind our mediocrity,” and that which keeps us enclosed, “and communicate the Lord’s mercy to the whole world.”

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VATICAN NEWS

Thousands of people are trapped in the ocean right now – here is Pope Francis’ response

by Ann Schneible (CNA/EWTN News) • May 25, 2015

Francis prays with journalists on the papal flight en route to South Korea on Aug. 14, 2014. (Alan Holdren/CNA)

Vatican City — Pope Francis has strongly called on the international community to help the scores of migrants who are currently trapped after attempting to cross the Bay of Bengal and the Andaman Sea.

While around three thousand migrants have managed to make their way to Indonesia, Malaysia, or Thailand, thousands more are believed to be stranded in the middle of the ocean.

“I continue to follow with great concern and suffering in my heart the stories of numerous refugees in the Bay of Bengal and the Andaman Sea,” the Pope said during his May 24 Regina Caeli address.

The migrants who remain stranded at sea were being transported by human traffickers. They were then abandoned on the boats by their smugglers amid crackdowns by Thailand’s government.

According to the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), some 2,000 people are stranded in boats in the Bay of Bengal, and another 1,500 in the Andaman Sea.

In a May 21 statement by the U.N. Special Rapporteurs on migrants, Indonesia and Malaysia have said they would take in 7000 migrants and asylum seekers stranded on the sea.

About half of the migrants are reportedly from Bangladesh. The rest are Rohingya Muslims escaping persecution in Burma.

“I express my appreciation for the efforts made by those countries who have expressed their willingness to welcome these persons who are confronting grave sufferings and dangers,” Pope Francis said.

The Pope then urged the international community to offer their humanitarian aid.

The pontiff’s remarks come amid reports of mass graves found in Malaysia, on the border with Thailand, believed to contain the bodies of smuggled migrants.

According to the United Nations more than 120,000 Rohingyas have fled Burma in the past three years.

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VATICAN NEWS

What does Pope Francis miss most? Walking in the streets, eating pizza at restaurants

by Andrea Gagliarducci and Ann Schneible (CNA/EWTN News) • May 25, 2015

Pope Francis laughing outside of St. Peter’s Basilica during the general audience on April 1, 2015. (Bohumil Petrik/CNA)

Vatican City — In a recent interview with an Argentine newspaper, Pope Francis said he misses the “tranquillity of walking in the streets” and that he’s always been “callejero” – a man of the city.

The interview was published May 24, and is the result of a 45 minute meeting between the pontiff and a journalist and photographer from “La voz del Pueblo.” They spoke in the Vatican’s Saint Martha residence where the Pope lives and celebrates daily Mass.

Pope Francis said that since being elected Pope, he misses being able to “go out in the streets,” or even “going to a pizzeria to eat a good pizza.” When the journalist told him that he can always order a delivery pizza, he responded: “it is not the same thing.”

“I have always been a ‘callejero.’ When I was cardinal, I loved walking the streets, and taking buses and the underground,” he said.

Pope Francis added that he is “delighted by the city. I am a citizen in my soul.”

The Holy Father also explained his need to stay in touch with people. “I enjoy the general audiences, both from a spiritual and from a human point of view. I get along well with people, I am in tune with people, it is just like my life is enveloped by people,” the Pope said.

He noted that “from a psychological point of view, I cannot live without people, I am not useful as monk.” The Pope said that this is the reason why he chose to live in the Saint Martha residence.

“There are 210 rooms. We are 40 living there and working for the Holy See, while the rest of people are guests, bishops, priests, lay people who pass and are accommodated here, and I like this a lot. Coming here, eating in the refectory where everybody eats, celebrating Mass there, where four days a week there are people from the outside, from the parish priests. I like it a lot,” he said.

Pope Francis also revealed details surrounding his day-to-day life.

“I sleep so profoundly” – he said – “that as soon as I get in bed, I fall asleep. I sleep six hours a day. Normally, I stay in bed from 9 p.m., and read until almost 10 p.m.. As soon as one of my eyes waters, I turn off the light and I sleep until 4 a.m., when I wake up by myself, thanks to my biological clock.”

During the afternoons, Pope Francis takes a siesta that last from 40 minutes to one hour. “When I don’t take the siesta, I suffer,” he said.

Pope Francis also said that he never dreamed of being a Pope, and that he had planned to return to Argentina from the 2013 conclave to live as a simple priest and confessor.

He recalled how during the conclave, as Cardinal Jorge Bergoglio, he had been named as a possible “kingmaker” – someone who uses his influence behind the scenes – but not as a Pope. Because of this, “none of my pictures were published in newspapers,” he said.

According to one cardinal who took part in the 2005 conclave which elected Pope Benedict XVI, Cardinal Bergoglio had received the second most votes after Joseph Ratzinger.

Pope Francis told the journalist that “this is chatter,” but certainly “at that time I was among the papabili,” – even if “inside (the conclave) it was clear that (the next Pope) had to be Benedict, and he got almost the unanimity of vote.”

Pope Francis also said that he had no candidate in mind for 2013 conclave. There were possibilities, he said, but “not a strong candidate.”

Additionally, he already booked a ticket to leave on Saturday night in order to be in Buenos Aires for the Palm Sunday, the Mass for which he had already written the homily.

But at the moment of the election, the Pope said that he felt “a great peace.” As they were counting the votes, “I was praying my rosary.”

Pope Francis then recalled: “On my side, there was Cardinal Hummes, a friend of mine, who told me in a previous poll not to worry, because ‘this is how the Holy Spirit works.’”

Asked if he understands the extent of his impact on people, Pope Francis said that he doesn’t know why exactly.

“I try to be concrete in the audiences, in things I speak about,” the Pope said. He used the example of the time he spoke “about the case of the separated parents who use children as hostages – it is something very sad – and made the children victims.”

The pontiff also spoke about the importance of mourning, a theme he underscored during his trip to Philippines in January 2015. He said that he mourns when “he sees human dramatic situations,” like that of the Rohingya population, which he mentioned during his Regina Caeli address last Sunday.

“I am very moved by these kind of dramatic situations,” the Pope said.

He said he is also touched by circumstances involving “sick children,” especially those who are affected by “rare infirmities.”

The Pope said he also mourns when he goes to prisons. He’s spent two out of three Holy Thursdays in a prison since his pontificate, and recalled that he has visited prisons in other towns throughout Italy.

“When I am having meals with inmates, I think that I could be there,” Pope Francis said. “No one of us can be sure that he will never commit a crime,” he added. “I feel pain for the inmates, and thank God that I am not there (in prison).”

He went on, however: “sometimes I feel that this gratitude is of convenience, as the inmates did not have the opportunities I had.”

Pope Francis said he doesn’t cry in public, but admits that there have been occasions where “I was about to cry and stopped right in time.” One of these instances, he said, occurred when he “was speaking about persecuted Christians.”

The pontiff also added that he’s not afraid of anything. He is “in God’s hands” with regard to any possible attempts against his life. He simply prays that, if it has to be, God will give him grace not to feel physical pain.

Pope Francis said he says this prayer because he is a “coward” when it comes to pain. “I can manage the moral pain, but I can’t manage the physical pain.”

Pope Francis also said that he feels the pressures of daily life like any person who governs. And he admitted that the intensity of his duties is weighing on him. “I am pushing forward an intense rhythm of work,” as if it were the last year of school, he said.

Pope Francis also addressed problems surrounding the media’s coverage of him, which he says “takes a word and uses it out of context.”

The Pope said he reads only one newspaper – the Italian “La Repubblica” – but even then only for about 10 minutes. He also has not watched television in twenty-five years owing to “a promise I made to the Virgin of Carmel on the night of July 15, 1990.”

A supporter of the soccer team San Lorenzo, he does not watch the football matches, and he keeps himself updated on a weekly basis by a Swiss Guard.

Speaking about his home country, he called Argentina “a country of many possibilities and many lost opportunities,” citing Cardinal Antonio Quarracino, his predecessor as archbishop of Buenos Aires.

The Pope, however, said he doesn’t follow the political situation of his country, and that he stopped receiving politicians because of reports “that some of them used this (the audience) and my picture.”

When asked if he likes being referred to as the “poor Pope,” he joked that he agrees with that title if ‘poor’ is accompanied by another word: “for example: the poor guy, the Pope.” Then he underscored that “poverty is the center of the Gospel, Jesus came to preach to poor, if you take poverty out of the Gospel, you cannot understand anything.”

The Pope admitted that eradicating global poverty might be aiming for a sort of Utopia, but – he added – a “Utopia that makes us keep going.”

“There are three things that each of us must have in life: memory, ability to understand the present, and a utopia for the future.” These three things must be combined together, because “if I cut my roots and lose my memories, the same happens to me as happens to a plant: I die; if I just live the present day without foreseeing the future, the same thing happens to me as happens to any bad manager who is unable to make plans.”

According to Pope Francis, the worst evils in the world are poverty, corruption and human trafficking. He said that he always asks people to pray for him because he “needs it. It is an internal need.”

Pope Francis concluded the interview by saying that he simply wants to be remembered as a good guy.

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VATICAN NEWS

Think you’re important because you have money? Think again, Pope says

by Elise Harris (CNA/EWTN News) • May 26, 2015

Francis celebrates Mass with new cardinals on Feb. 15, 2015. (Lauren Cater/CNA)

Vatican City — In his homily Tuesday Pope Francis cautioned against the “counter-witness” of those who seek to follow both Jesus and worldly temptations, saying that to follow Christ means denying oneself and serving others.

“There are three things, three steps that take us away from Jesus: wealth, vanity and pride,” the Pope told attendees of his May 26 Mass in the Vatican’s Saint Martha guesthouse.

Riches, he said, are dangerous “because they immediately make you vain and you think you are important. And when you think you are important, you build your head up and then you lose it.”

Francis took his cue from the day’s Mark Chapter 10 Gospel reading in which Peter asks Jesus what the disciples will get in return for following him. The scene takes place right after Jesus had told the rich young man to sell all of his possessions and give them to the poor.

Instead of talking about wealth, the Lord gives an unexpected answer when he says that the disciples will gain the Kingdom of Heaven, but only “with persecution, with the cross.”

“When a Christian is attached to (worldly) things, he gives the bad impression of a Christian who wants to have two things: (both) heaven and earth,” the Pope said, explaining that that the daily cross of denying ourselves is the remedy.

From a human perspective following Jesus “is not a good deal” because it means serving others, he said. If the Lord gives you the opportunity to be first you have to act like the one in last place, and the same goes for wealth, he continued.

Pope Francis also indicated the Gospel passage in Matthew when the mother of James and John asks Jesus to secure a place for her sons at his side.

By essentially telling Jesus to “make this one prime minister for me, (and) this one, the minister of the economy,” the disciples’ mother took the worldly path in following Jesus, the Pope noted.

When a person wants to be “with both Jesus and with the world, with both poverty and with riches … this is a half-way Christianity that desires material gain. It is the spirit of worldliness,” he warned.

To follow the Lord freely, he said, “is the answer to the gratuitousness of love and salvation that Jesus gives us.”

Francis observed how the frequently the attitude of worldliness prevails in the Church itself, saying that “it’s sad” to see Christians – laypersons, priests and bishops included – who strive after both heavenly and worldly things.

“(It) is a counter-witness and furthers people from Jesus,” he said, and encouraged attendees to ask the Lord to teach them the “science of service,” which provides a lesson in humility and in placing ourselves last so as to serve our brothers and sisters in the Church.

The Pope closed his homily by telling those present to continue the Mass with both Peter’s question and Jesus’ answer in mind.

“The recompense that (Jesus) will give us is resemblance to Him. This will be our ‘recompense;’ to be like Jesus!”

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VATICAN NEWS

As synod council meets, ‘shadow council’ pushes acceptance of gay unions

by Catholic News Agency’s Vatican Observer, Andrea Gagliarducci (CNA/EWTN News) • May 26, 2015

(Glasseyes View via Flickr CC BY-SA 2.0)

Rome, Italy — While the Synod of Bishops’ ordinary council gathered to discuss the upcoming Synod on the Family this week, a private group of bishops and experts convened behind closed doors in Rome to consider the most controversial issues at the synod, particularly support of gay unions and Communion for the divorced and remarried.

Pope Francis chaired the May 25-26 meeting of the Ordinary Council of the Synod of Bishops, which is preparing for this October’s synod on “the vocation and mission of the family in the Church and in contemporary world.”

The council, meeting at the Vatican, examined the synod’s instrumentum laboris, or working document, which was produced by last year’s Synod of Bishops, and integrated it with the responses to questions which were sent to dioceses worldwide.

“An extensive and detailed study of the text has generated proposals and contributions for its integration and improvement,” the Vatican Information Service noted, adding that the working document’s final text will be prepared and translated by the Secretariat General within the next few weeks.

The council also considered modifications to the synod’s modus operandi.

The Synod of Bishops’ secretary general, Cardinal Lorenzo Baldisseri – who was appointed in September 2013 – had changed the synod’s working rules.

Prior to Cardinal Baldisseri’s leadership, the synod had provided summaries in many languages of each scheduled intervention from the synod fathers.

That system was suppressed under Cardinal Baldisseri, replaced with a brief summary presented daily by Holy See press officer Fr. Federico Lombardi.

In the face of criticism that this change negatively affected the synod’s transparency, Cardinal Baldisseri claimed that “information is provided by a verbal summary” and is transparent, and that synod fathers were “not forbidden to speak to the press,” though they were prohibited from publishing their interventions, as any synod text “is property of the synod.”

On the other hand, the impossibility of seeing the extent of the discussion within the synod paved the way for media speculation.

This autumn’s synod may re-present the same dynamic, given that while the Synod of Bishops’ ordinary council was meeting, a “shadow council” held a closed-door meeting regarding the most contentious issues of the Synod on the Family, which include approval of gay unions and Communion for the divorced and remarried.

The May 25 discussion was held in a conference center of the Jesuit-run Pontifical Gregorian University – though the meeting itself was not managed by the university. Bishops and theologians spoke before a select audience of 50, according to French daily Le Figaro.

The conference was called the “Mutual Convention of the French, German and Swiss Bishops Conferences concerning the issues of the pastoral care of marriage and family at the eve of the Synod of Bishops.”

The meeting was not in fact for all the bishops of the interested countries, but only for some of them – while others were not even informed of the meeting.

Among the speakers at the meeting were Bishop Jean-Marie Lovey of Sion; Bishop Jean-Luc Brunin of Le Havre; the theologian Eva Maria Faber; Anne-Marie Pelletier, who won the 2014 Ratzinger Prize for Theology; Fr. François Xavier Amherdt, professor of pastoral theology at the University of Freiburg; Eberhard Schockenhoff, professor of moral theology in Freiburg; and the theologian Alain Thomasset.

The final remarks were given by Cardinal Reinhard Marx of Munich and Freising.

One person who took part in the discussion stressed to CNA May 26 that “the tune was that of a pastoral opening on issues such as communion for the divorced and remarried, and the pastoral care of homosexuals.”

One of the speakers, who asked to be kept anonymous, refused to comment on the purpose of the conference and the tone of the discussion, as “it is unfortunately forbidden to us by the organizers to give any interview or explanation about yesterday’s conference.”

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VATICAN NEWS

Love requires work – not just attraction or feelings, Pope tells couples

by Elise Harris (CNA/EWTN News) • May 27, 2015

A newly married couple snaps a selfie with Pope Francis at the Wednesday general audience in Paul VI Hall, Feb. 4, 2015. (Daniel Ibáñez/CNA)

Vatican City — In his weekly general audience, Pope Francis said the process of engagement is essential for any couple on their way to marriage since it not only allows love to mature, but helps future spouses deepen in knowledge of one another.

“Marriage, as a vocation from God, is not just a relationship based on attraction and feelings, of a moment, of something short. It requires a journey,” the Pope told pilgrims present in St. Peter’s Square for his May 27 general audience.

The journey of marriage “establishes a very strong and lasting partnership, which makes two lives one, a true miracle of human freedom and the grace of God,” he said, adding that such a partnership “is not improvised overnight.”

An “express marriage” doesn’t exist, he said, explaining that “we have to work for love. We have to journey in the relationship of love between a man and a woman until it learns (and) until it grows.”

Stages along this journey “should not be burned,” the Pope said, warning against the consumerist “throwaway” culture prevalent in society that wants “everything and immediately.”

When seen through this lens, love is turned into an object of consumption, and is unable to form a solid foundation for such a “vital” commitment as marriage.

Francis’ focus on engagement is part of his ongoing catechesis on the family, which he began last fall as part of the lead-up to the World Day of Families in September, as well as October’s Synod of Bishops on the Family.

In his address, the Pope said that the process of engagement is a call for couples to lay the foundations for a “project of common love” that should be assumed by both parties with “full awareness” of what they are committing to.

The word “engagement” itself points to a process of entrustment and commitment, he said, explaining that it is a unique time for couples to get to know each other more deeply while preparing for the “beautiful yet demanding enterprise of marriage.”

Pope Francis said that it is necessary for couples to have this time to get to know one another “so that the responsible decision for something so big – something which can’t be bought or sold – matures.”

“Love itself demands this preparation, which makes possible a free, generous and sober decision to enter into a life-long covenant of love,” he said.

The Church in her wisdom has always placed a heavy emphasis on preserving the distinction between engagement and marriage, Francis noted. This distinction protects “the depth of the sacrament.”

He said that marriage preparation courses are a concrete example of the Church’s concern for the preparation of spouses.

Marriage preparation is a gift, the Pope said, lamenting that frequently couples go through the courses “a little reluctantly,” saying “these priests make us do these courses. Why? We already know … ‘“

However, Francis observed how many times couples who finish the courses are grateful for everything they have learned.

“Today more than ever it’s necessary to revalue engagement as an initiation to the surprise of the spiritual gifts with which God blesses and enriches the family,” he said.

Couples are challenged during this time to reflect together on their love and their future, as well as the important role that faith and prayer will play in their coming life together, the Pope continued. He called on Christian married couples to help accompany young engaged couples on this path.

Francis concluded by encouraging attendees to pray for all young people on their way to marriage, that they may “prepare for the wedding day not in a worldly or banal way, but with the wisdom, hope and joy born of their faith in Christ.”

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VATICAN NEWS

‘Mother of Mercy’ beatification in Kenya draws tens of thousands

by Ann Schneible (CNA/EWTN News) • May 27, 2015

Sister Irene Stefani, Nyeri, Kenya. (Kenya Yote)

Vatican City — Massive crowds attended Saturday’s beatification of early twentieth-century Italian missionary, Sister Irene Stefani, who was known as “mother of mercy” to the Kenyan people she cared for.

Pope Francis remembered the new blessed during his Regina Caeli address on Sunday in Rome, recalling how the member of the Consolata Missionaries had served the Kenyan people “with joy, mercy, and tender compassion.”

Speaking also about Archbishop Oscar Romero, who was also beatified Saturday in San Salvador, the Pope said: “The heroic example of these Blesseds sustain in each one of us the lively desire to give witness to the Gospel with courage and self-sacrifice.”

Sr. Irene Stefani (1891-1930) was beatified May 23 at the Dedan Kimathi University in Nyeri, Kenya in a ceremony attended by as many as 100,000 people, according to the country’s Daily Nation newspaper.

It was the first time a beatification has been held in Kenya. The process is the final step in the cause for sainthood before a person can be canonized. One of the requirements is the presence of at least one miracle officially attributed to the person the person.

The Daily Nation reports that the miracle attributed to Sr. Stefani occurred in 1989 during Mozambique’s civil war. According to the report, 270 people had become trapped in the parish church of Nipepe amid the conflict. After praying for her intercession, the contents of a small Holy Water font was miraculously increased, providing enough drinking water for four days until help could arrive.

Born 1891, Sr. Stefani joined the Consolata Missionaries in 1911. She arrived in Kenya January 1915, where she served as a nurse. From the people she cared for, she received the nickname “Nyaatha” – which translates as “mother of mercy.” She died at the age of 39 after contracting a disease from one of her patients.

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VATICAN NEWS

For the Vatican bank, a new direction means profitability

by Andrea Gagliarducci (CNA/EWTN News) • May 28, 2015

The Institute for Religious Works, known informally as the ‘Vatican bank.’ (CNA)

Vatican City — The Vatican Bank’s net profits in 2014 jumped to $75.5 million from only $3.2 million the previous year, reflecting a change in its financial management and investments.

The Institute for Religious Works (IOR), known informally as the ‘Vatican bank’, released its third annual report on May 25. The report registered a massive increase in net profits.

This increase may be attributed both to a sharp rise in the bank’s net trading income and to a decline of its extraordinary operating expenses, like the costs of hiring external consultants to monitor and screen the IOR accounts.

The increase in net profit is also a result of the financial policy now underway that is aimed at generating more profits. According to the IOR, there will be “a shift by the IOR’s clients away from term deposits and toward asset management solutions, confirming a long-term trend.”

Jean-Baptiste de Franssu, president of the IOR’s Board of Superintendents, said that “the main focus is fundamentally improving our overall client service standards and further professionalizing our asset management services.”

The IOR “has mostly worked with term deposits, which generate a low, but safe, profit,” an inside source who has observed the works of the IOR told CNA May 25.

The source said that since 2008, “the need to generate more revenues has caused a shift in the Institute’s investment plan, following a path that the Vatican economic reform accelerated.”

The IOR assets under management have grown from $2.5 billion to $3.5 billion, while client deposits have decreased from about $3.5 billion to under $2.3 billion. Combined with assets under custody, the Vatican Bank was overseeing $6.5 billion in assets at the close of 2014.

In July 2014 Cardinal George Pell, prefect of the Secretariat for the Economy, announced a major reform of the Vatican economy. He said that the reform needs to be effective and able “to generate revenues.” According to the goals of this reform, the management of Vatican assets are to be transferred to a new body, the Vatican Asset Management, which has yet to be established.

In the meantime, the IOR has carried forward its commitment to reform. De Franssu stressed that “the long-term, strategic plan of the Institute revolves around two key objectives: putting the interests of the clients first by offering appropriate and improved services and by (lessening the risk) of the activities of the Institute.”

De Franssu added that “all this is done within the strong regulatory framework now in place in the Vatican and in close cooperation with the Authority for Financial Information, the Holy See regulator.”

The 2014 profit will allow the bank to turn over almost $60 million to the Holy See for charitable purposes at the discretion of the Pope, pending the approval of the IOR cardinals’ commission.

In 2013, despite its small profit, the Vatican Bank turned over to the Holy See almost $59 million, drawing from its reserves.

The Vatican bank says it has progressed in screening its accounts. According to its report, the IOR ended relationships with more than 3,100 of almost 20,000 clients since May 2013. Most of these were dormant accounts. In 550 of these cases, client relationships were ended because the IOR did not find an acceptable client profile.

According to the IOR statement, Pope Francis asked the Vatican bank “to continue to serve with prudence and to provide specialized financial services to the Catholic Church worldwide, thereby assisting him in his mission as universal pastor.

“To that extent the IOR’s management had been tasked to finalize a plan for the future of the Institute accordingly, which has subsequently been developed in 2014,” the IOR said.

The IOR has also worked to adhere to Vatican regulatory standards including those of the Authority for Financial Information, the Vatican financial watchdog, whose regulation on supervision of Vatican entities carrying out professional financial activities took force on Jan. 13, 2015.

These regulatory efforts are an outcome of a years-long commitment. In July 2012 the Council of Europe’s anti-money-laundering committee Moneyval found the Vatican “compliant” or “largely compliant” on nine of its 16 key areas for combating terrorist financing and money laundering.

The Moneyval report indicated that the Vatican bank’s security standards surpass those required by Vatican law and that Vatican legislation on secrecy is compliant with international standards. The report also praised the high level of Vatican engagement in international cooperation.

“The Holy See has come a long way in a very short period of time,” the Moneyval report said, adding that “many of the building blocks” of rules to counter money laundering and terrorism financing are now formally in place.

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VATICAN NEWS

Vatican rolls out first-ever guidebook for Arab pilgrims

by Elise Harris (CNA/EWTN News) • May 28, 2015

Cover art for the Arabic Vatican Guide. (Vatican Publishing House)

Vatican City — In a move intended to reach out to Arab pilgrims who make their way to the Eternal City, the Vatican has for the first time published a guidebook entirely in the Arabic language.

At the May 20 presentation of the book, Cardinal Leonardo Sandri said that “We cannot forget the sufferings and the challenges which Christians and more generally the populations of the Middle East are facing.”

He expressed his confidence that the new book will “help to keep hope alive” for Arab pilgrims who come to Rome, particularly during the upcoming Jubilee for Mercy declared by Pope Francis in March.

The cardinal, prefect of the Congregation for Eastern Churches, was present alongside the book’s author Edmond Farhat, who is the current archbishop of Byblos, Lebanon.

Held at the Patristic Augustinian Institute in Rome, the event also gathered Lebanon’s Ambassador to the Holy See, Georges El-Khoury; Egypt’s Ambassador to the Holy See, Wafaa Bassim and professor of Oriental Rights Onorato Bucci, who teaches at the Pontifical Lateran University and the University of Molise.

Titled “The Vatican, its meaning and its monuments,” the guidebook was released by the Vatican Publishing House, which is directed by Fr. Giuseppe Costa. Fr. Costa gave the welcoming address for the event.

Designed to serve as a guide for the thousands of Arab tourists who visit Vatican City, the book elaborates on the art and monuments within St. Peter’s Basilica and the Vatican Museums.

In addition to giving background on areas of the Vatican ranging from the gardens to the catacombs, a historical context of the city-state is also provided, as well as descriptions of the Vatican’s various departments and offices, in order to explain its history and significance through the ages to the public.

Apart from heading the diocese of Bylos, Archbishop Farhat has also served as the Vatican’s nuncio to Austria, Turkmenistan, Slovenia, Turkey and Macedonia. His diplomatic service also took him to Libya, Tunisia and Algeria.

Cardinal Sandri said that given the archbishop’s ethnic and diplomatic background, his book is “ready to grasp a challenge of the ecclesial world and contemporary society” at a time when Christian life in Arab countries is threatened.

He noted that the Vatican’s attention to the Arab world has increased in recent years. He pointed out how after Benedict XVI greeted Arab pilgrims in his first general audience after returning from Lebanon in 2012, there has been a summary of the catechesis in the Arabic language every week since.

Other initiatives include the launching of the Pope’s twitter account, @Pontifex, in Arabic as well as the establishment of the Vatican’s Arabic website, which celebrated one year of inauguration May 24.

The cardinal said that the new guidebook is both “beautiful and important” since it is written by someone who knows “the contradictions of today’s world (and) never tires of publicly declaring the persecution and the martyrdom of so many of our brothers.”

“Even today the Lord has to be born with the fall of the gods, with the pain and martyrdom of witnesses against the (false) divinities of today” which include “anonymous capital which enslaves men (and) violence perpetuated in the name of God,” he said, quoting Benedict XVI’s speech on the first day of the October 2010 Synod for the Middle East.

However, Cardinal Sandri stressed that it is the faith of simple people which constitutes the true foundation, wisdom and strength of the Church.

The new book, which has been “written with faith,” will serve as a great support for the faith of the simple ones who come to the heart of the Church, he said.

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VATICAN NEWS

What does the world need? Mercy and love, Pope tells Christians

by CNA/EWTN News • May 29, 2015

Pope Francis greets pilgrims in St. Peter’s Square during the Wednesday general audience on May 28, 2014. (Daniel Ibáñez/CNA)

Vatican City — The Catholic Church shouldn’t be afraid of the great changes of the modern world, Pope Francis has said. Rather, the Church should embrace this “happy challenge” with a renewed language of love and mercy.

For Pope Francis, what people expect from the Church today is that “she knows how to walk with them, offering the company of the witness of faith, which shows solidarity to all, in particular those who are most alone and marginalized.”

The Pope on May 29 recognized the many men, women and children living “on the existential peripheries generated by a consumer society” who are waiting for the closeness and solidarity of the Church.

The Gospel, which every Christian is called to proclaim, is “the announcement of God’s love which, in Jesus Christ, calls us to participate in his life,” Pope Francis said.

In this light, the New Evangelization means “to be aware of the merciful love of the Father in order to also become instruments of salvation for our brothers.”

The pontiff’s words came in an audience with members of the Pontifical Council for Promoting the New Evangelization at the close of its plenary assembly. The council, headed by Archbishop Rino Fisichella, is organizing the Jubilee for Mercy. The jubilee is a holy year Pope Francis has declared to emphasize conversion, reconciliation and forgiveness of sins.

The Jubilee for Mercy will begin on Dec. 8, the Feast of the Immaculate Conception. It will end on Nov. 20, 2016, the Feast of Christ the King.

Pope Francis told the pontifical council members that their work on the jubilee year can make the Church’s message of mercy more apparent.

The awareness of God’s merciful love has been given to each Christian in baptism and constantly seeks to grow and become fruitful, the Pope added.

“The gift of mercy is the announcement that the Church is called to transmit in her work of evangelization in this time of great changes.”

The great changes of the modern world are a “happy challenge” and an opportunity for the Church to better understand the signs of the times in order to bring Jesus Christ to the people of today, he said.

The Pope said that although the mission of the Church is always the same, the language that announces the Gospel needs to be renewed “with pastoral wisdom.”

This renewal is essential so that Christians’ contemporaries can understand the Gospel and so that Catholic tradition “can speak to today’s cultures of the world and help them to open themselves to the everlasting fruitfulness of Christ’s message.”

The Church shouldn’t be afraid to face modern challenges. By taking on these challenges, she is able to provide concrete answers illuminated by the light of the Gospel.

The Pope said that Christian maturity comes above all through catechesis, in which they experience God’s mercy. This experience is not something abstract. Rather, it is a concrete moment in which we “understand our weakness and the strength that comes from above.”

As a step in the process of evangelization, catechesis needs to go beyond just the “scholastic sphere,” so that it can truly educate believers, including children, and lead them to an encounter with Christ, who is “alive and active” in his Church.

Pope Francis assured the pontifical council members of his closeness and support in their “truly urgent responsibility.” He entrusted them to the intercession of the Blessed Virgin Mary.

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VATICAN NEWS

Annual report shows Vatican financial watchdog to be on track

by Andrea Gagliarducci (CNA/EWTN News) • May 29, 2015

St. Peter’s Basilica in Vatican City, Jan. 25, 2015. (Bohumil Petrik/CNA)

Vatican City — The third annual report of the Financial Intelligence Authority shows that the Vatican’s anti-money laundering legal system has been consolidated, journalists were told on Friday.

The May 29 report regards the 2014 annual report, and the AIF noted that the year “saw a continuous strengthening of the legal and institutional framework of the Holy See and Vatican City State to regulate supervised entities.”

René Bruelhart, president of the authority, highlighted that “with the introduction of Regulation No.1, we have completed the prudential supervisory framework of the Holy See and Vatican City State.”

The AIF also concluded its first ordinary on-site inspection of the Institute for Religious Works, informally known as the ‘Vatican bank,’ and – though the inspection did not find any fundamental shortcomings – the authority provided an action plan for the full and systematic adjustment of existing procedures to the required standards in accordance with Law No. XVIII.

Coming into effect of October 2013, Law XVIII is a comprehensive text that outlines the design and functions of the Vatican financial system. The law was the last step in the path of implementation of the first Vatican anti-money laundering law, which was amended and then substantially rewritten with Law XVIII.

According to Tommaso Di Ruzza, director of the AIF, “the first on site inspection of the IOR is an important consequence and a concrete sign of the effectiveness of the AML/CFT (anti-money laundering / counter financing of terrorism) system adopted by the Holy See and by Vatican City State.”

The new framework marks the third phase of Vatican financial reform. Initially, there was an assumption of responsibility made under Benedict XVI, who issued the first Vatican anti-money laundering law. Then there was a season of adjustments and improvements, the law was amended and the Vatican strengthened its international cooperation. This is the season when the system settles down, and starts working in effect.

As a result, the Vatican now complies with international standards because of the effectiveness of its domestic system.

The reporting system data is a proof of the consolidation of the vigilance system. In 2012, the AIF had received six suspicious transactions reports; in 2013, it received 202; and in 2014, 147.

“Such development is a consequence both of the full implementation of the legal framework and of the substantial improvement in the operational performance of the supervised entitites with the regard to the prevention of the financial crime,” the AIF release reads.

It is necessary to clarify that a transactions report does not necessarily mean a crime, and that the AIF does not charge anyone over crimes. “As we receive a suspected transactions report, we analyze it, and, if we find something that may be considered a crime, we forward it to the Vatican prosecutor,” Di Ruzza explained.

From that point on, the issue is handled by prosecutors, and not the AIF, he emphasized.

In 2014, seven reports were passed on to the Vatican promoter of justice for further investigation by judicial authorities.

The AIF also strengthened bilateral cooperation between itself and its foreign counterparts, which passed from four in 2012 to 81 in 2013, to 113 in 2014.

International cooperation was also strengthened through the signing of memoranda of understanding with the Financial Intelligence Units of country such as Australia, France, and the UK, and also with regulators of Germany, Luxembourg, and the United States.

In additional Vatican financial news, Pope Francis signed on May 28 a motu proprio, Il Fondo Pensioni, revising the statute of the Vatican Pension Fund.

The motu proprio changed the statues of the pension fund, but does not affect the regulations governing the pensions themselves. The president of the Fund’s board of directors will now be directly appointed by the Pope, on the advisement of the Council for the Economy; previously, the president of the Administration of the Patrimony of the Apostolic See assumed the post automatically.

The revisions follow from the establishment of the Council and the Secretariat for the Economy.

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This little boy still can’t talk or move – but his mother has never been happier

by CNA/EWTN News • May 22, 2015

Constance Saavedra with her son, who she fondly calls “Nachito,” who has a serious congenital muscular disease that prevents him from breathing on his own. (CNA)

Santiago, Chile — Constanza Saavedra spends 24 hours a day devoted to her son Ignacio, or “Nachito” as she affectionately calls him. He’s only seven years-old and suffers from a serious congenital muscular condition that prevents him from breathing on his own. He depends on a respirator to survive.

When he was born on August 17, 2008 in Santiago, Chile, the midwives advised the family not to get emotionally attached to him because he would probably die within a few hours. Surprisingly, it didn’t happen.

Ignacio’s health is so delicate that his mother hardly ever leaves the house for fear of infecting him with some kind of virus or bacteria. She is with him all the time.

Moreover, the cost of his care has become so high that this family has had to sell the little they had to survive and have had to move in with their parents. She and her husband Gonzalo Opazo have now dedicated their lives to care for their only child.

For many, it’s a devastating story – but for Saavedra, her son is the best thing that ever happened in her life and is the reason for her joy.

“I am humbled to say I’m happy. I feel completely fulfilled. For me it’s an honor that such a marvelous child should be my son,” she said in an interview with ACI Prensa.

Due to his condition, Ignacio can’t move most of his muscles and has to communicate through simple sounds. Consequently, he has daily physical therapy sessions to work on his motor skills and breathing as well as two days with a speech therapist.

He spends most of his time in bed. His pastimes are reading and watching television, but without a doubt his favorite is playing with his mother.

“For sure it’s a very serious muscular condition, and true, he cannot breathe without a respirator that breathes for him, but anybody who knows him realizes how immensely happy he is,” she said.

“He is very intelligent, knows how to read, and communicates extremely well. We spend the whole day playing, learning, singing, reading, doing entertaining things … and he knows that his little head has no limits,” Saavedra said of her son.

This mother is also a family doctor, but she could not continue practicing her profession at any medical facility after “Nachito” was born. However, as she says, this has been “the most important and beautiful medical challenge that I have been able to experience. In no way do I feel frustrated. I’ve learned a lot and I also have been able to help others.”

Saavedra said that as a family “we have everything that matters to us. We’re not lacking anything important. We enjoy our days and we want to continue this adventure with our son.”

“For me it was never an option to abort Nachito. If I had known just how much I would be losing, it would have been the biggest mistake in the world,” she said.

Saavedra noted, however, that many women in her country lack the support to make the same decision for their children.

“There’s a problem … and we can’t cover it up,” she said. “Without support there are mothers and families nowadays that are shouldering a large percentage of the expense of having a child with a chronic illness. It happened to me and it’s happening to a lot of other mothers a lot worse than for me.”

“You can’t put a price on the life of a child. And a family shouldn’t have to be out on the street because they put the well being and health of their child ahead of everything else,” she added.

“So the government has to take the responsibility to guarantee all possible available support for these women, their children and their families.”

Saavedra also runs the Facebook page “Testimonies for Life” that gathers together real life stories of mothers that have gone through an at-risk pregnancy such as she did, women who have decided to go forward with courage and resolve.

“Every human life inherently has dignity,” she reflected. “Because what defines dignity? Health? If that’s the way it is then a high percentage of society would have lives without dignity.”

“All the old people, all the people dependent on others, the little children, sick people, poor people. So who defines what dignity is? Another thing is quality of life. For me quality of life doesn’t consist in what you can or can’t do,” Saavedra said.

“Rather, it’s about how much you enjoy your life, and how much you look forward to wake up the next day and go on living, and my son clearly enjoys his life.”

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History versus caricature: Three facts that show us the real Romero

by David Ramos (CNA/EWTN News) • May 22, 2015

A pilgim carries a banner of Oscar Romero in San Salvador on May 22, 2015. (The Oscar Arnulfo Romero beatification committee via Flickr)

San Salvador, El Salvador — The beloved Archbishop Oscar Arnulfo Romero was beatified El Salvador this weekend amid both celebration and what one critic calls skewed media reporting on the martyr’s life.

San Salvador’s Federico Hernandez Aguilar, an expert on the history of the new blessed, debunked what he views as common misconceptions surrounding Romero – voicing his hope that the truth about the archbishop would emerge.

Hernandez, former minister of culture and current executive director of the El Salvador’s Chamber of Commerce, spoke to CNA about the diocesan priest who became archbishop of San Salvador in the period prior to the civil war.

Beginning in 1980 and lasting 12 years, the war pitted leftist groups assembled in the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front (FMLN) against the Armed Forces of El Salvador, connected to an extreme right-wing government.

Amid the conflict, Archbishop Romero was brutally assassinated on March 24, 1980 while celebrating Mass. In February of this year, Pope Francis recognized the death of the Salvadoran prelate as having been for hatred of the faith – martyrdom – and approved his beatification.

According to Hernandez, when he began to study the biographical documents of Romero, he realized that he “didn’t have portrait, but a caricature” of the archbishop.

“And I believe that this is what has happened to Salvadorans over the last 35 years.”

“After his assassination in 1980, he began to be very manipulated, above all by the more radical left of the country, and this also weighed in against his image for many Salvadorans,” he said.

“We are children of a civil war that polarized the country and still remains very polarized,” he added, listing out both factual errors and little-known details about the late archbishop.

1. Romero wasn’t Marxist – he was convinced of the Gospel.

Hernandez says he’s studied the diary of Archbishop Romero – along with pastoral letters and eight volumes of homilies – in which he says you can find “an integral dimension of the person, the things that he really said.”

“Archbishop Romero embodied an evangelical calling, embodied this call that Jesus made to us to care for the poor, to watch over others, not to lock ourselves inside our own navels.”

Unfortunately, he said, “there are people who thing that he only criticized the violence of the army, which of course he criticizes, and very strongly, but he also criticized the violence that at that time the guerrillas began.”

Archbishop Romero, he added, was also “very emphatic, first in saying that he was not in favor of Marxism, but also that the radicalized violence from Marxist ideas didn’t lead to anything good.”

The blessed was also a man of profound prayer and “faithful to the Catholic Church until the last day.” Romero “consulted everything with the Magesterium” with a special obedience to the Pope, “whom he recognized as Christ on earth.”

2. Romero had a deep love for Saint Josemaria Escriva and Opus Dei.

Hernandez also highlighted Romero’s deep affection for the Personal Prelature of Opus Dei.

“There is a relationship, throughout the entire life of Archbishop Romero, of love for the Work (Opus Dei),” he noted, and recalled “a meeting that he had with the founder of Opus Dei, St. Josemaria Escriva, in Rome.”

“On one occasion, when he was already an archbishop, an order was received in Rome by St. Josemaria for the people of (Opus Dei) to treat him well, so that he could rest and be calm, because they saw him nervous, they saw him tense because of what was happening in El Salvador.”

In 1975, after the death of the Opus Dei founder, “one of the first bishops in the world who sent letters to the Pope asking for his beatification was precisely Archbishop Romero,” Hernandez said.

“Later, who was his successor in charge of Opus Dei, Mons. Alvaro del Portillo, now a Blessed too proclaimed by Pope Francis, they (Romero and Portillo) had a very affectionate correspondence.”

3. Romero never said: “If they kill me, I will rise again in the Salvadoran people.”

Hernandez also emphasized that Archbishop Romero never pronounced one of the most popular phrases that is attributed to him.

He pointed to Roberto Morozzo della Roca, an Italian researcher, who conducted a detailed investigation on the life of Archbishop Romero which was included inside of the process of beatification. In it, Hernandez said, it’s clear “that the phrase is apocryphal.”

“Morozzo della Roca make a very thorough investigation and discovered that a Guatemalan journalist published an interview that was allegedly given by phone between him and Mons. Romero, but published it just days after his murder. Archbishop Romero could not defend himself against it.”

Morozzo della Roca also found “that the journalist already had a history of having lied in other interviews” and even years before attributed to himself “a very similar phrase to that which years later he attributed to Archbishop Romero.”

On the contrary, “if one reads the spiritual notes of Archbishop Romero days, weeks before his assassination, one does not discover this messianism in Archbishop Romero.”

“Archbishop Romero himself was afraid to die, he realized that his death was going to be violent also, and he had a natural fear,” Hernandez said, stressing that “it’s clear that a phrase so messianic was not able to be said a few days before his death.”

Archbishop Romero, he reiterated, “was very misrepresented. He himself … said, ‘don’t distort my words, please record the things that I said and how I said them.’”

If “those who manipulated Archbishop Romero stop manipulating him – realizing that they destroy his message and and become murderers of his message, as others were to his person – this is going to help the country to finally reconcile,” he said.

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Vote to legalize gay marriage poses uncertain future for Ireland

by Ann Schneible (CNA/EWTN News) • May 22, 2015

(La Marga via Flickr CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)

Rome, Italy — As Ireland goes to the polls to vote on whether to legalize same-sex marriage, one Church official warns that the new law could bring yet-unforeseen consequences for future generations.

“The importance of the vote today cannot be underestimated,” said Msgr. John Kennedy, an official of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, in a May 22 email to CNA.

If passed, the Dublin-native said the referendum “would signal a significant alteration in how marriage is understood, appreciated at a societal level and taught to future generations.”

More than 3.2 million people throughout the Republic of Ireland are eligible to vote in Friday’s national referendum on whether the constitution should be changed to allow same-sex couples to legally marry.

While 18 countries have already legalized same-sex marriage, Ireland would become the first to adopt the law through popular vote, so long as the referendum passes.

“If passed it would mark a sea-change that would, I imagine, be irreversible and have significant consequences,” Msgr. Kennedy said. “Not all of these consequences might be appreciated in the present moment but will have to be confronted in the future.”

He observed that while political parties and public figures have vocalized support for the “Yes” campaign for same-sex marriage, many others, particularly private individuals, “have preferred to remain silent on how they might cast their vote.”

Coming from a country with a long history of fidelity to the Catholic Church, shaken only in recent decades by scandals among the clergy and religious, the May 22 referendum is significant.

The proposed amendment to the constitution to allow for same-sex marriage was introduced in January by the Fine Gael-Labour Government. The proposal must be voted on in a referendum before it can become law.

Friday’s referendum comes 22 years after Ireland decriminalized homosexual acts. In 2010, the country enacted the Civil Partnership and Certain Rights and Obligations of Cohabitants Act, which allowed same-sex couples to enter into civil unions.

Despite the consequences such a law could have on future generations, Msgr. Kennedy is confident that the Church’s message will withstand the challenges.

“The Church lives within the structures of society,” he said, “and will continue to show respect for the individual choices persons might make.”

Regardless of the outcome of the referendum, he continued: “The noble and beautiful teaching on sacramental union of a man and woman as taught by Christ the Lord and as designed by God at creation, will remain at the heart of the message that it brings to the world.”

“While society continues to change, the beauty and permanence of Christ’s teachings will perhaps shine all the more brightly.”

Polls throughout the Republic of Ireland were opened from 7am to 10pm local time on May 22. The results will be announced on Saturday.

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Syrian Catholic archdiocese asks prayers for kidnapped priest

by CNA/EWTN News • May 22, 2015

Fr. Jacques Mourad (R), in Deir Mar Mousa with Fr. Paolo Dall’Oglio (L) in an undated photo; Fr. Mourad was abducted this week, and Fr. Dall’Oglio in July 2013. (www.terrasanta.net)

Homs, Syria — The Syrian Catholic Archdiocese of Homs confirmed on Friday that a priest in the diocese has been kidnapped, and has asked for prayers for the priest’s safe release.

According to Fides, the Homs archdiocese “asked all the faithful to invoke the Lord in prayer so that Father Jacques is released and can return to his life of prayer, to serve his brothers and all Syrians.”

Father Jacques Mourad was reportedly kidnapped at gunpoint from the Monastery of Mar Elian just outside of Al Quaryatayn, some 60 miles southeast of Homs. The exact date of the kidnapping is unclear, with reports ranging from May 18 to May 21.

Reports suggest militants may have also kidnapped Deacon Boutros Hanna in this week’s assault. The Homs archdiocese has yet to confirm these reports.

“We do not yet have any news, we know only that he was taken by four men, certainly belonging to a jihadist group,” Fr. Nawras Sammour of Jesuit Refugee Service told Aid to the Church in Need.

Local sources told Fides that Salafists in the area may be responsible for the kidnapping. The Sunni Islamists may have been motivated by the recent success of al-Nusra Front and the Islamic State – Al Quaryatayn is only 75 miles from Palmyra, which was seized by the Islamic State on Thursday.

Fr. Kamil Semaan, of the Syrian Catholic Patriarchate, told AFP that Fr. Mourad had refused to leave Mar Elian, even as the Islamic State threatened nearby Palmyra, saying: “As the priest and pastor, I will never leave this place so long as there are people here, unless they hunt me down.”

Fr. Mourad is prior of the Mar Elian monastery. He was also pastor of a parish in Al Qaryatayn, where he served as an active mediator between the Syrian army and rebel forces, according to Fides. The monastery also provided refuge to hundreds of Syrians displaced from Al Qarytayn, and partnered with Muslim donors to provide for their needs.

Fr. Mourad’s monastery is a branch of the Monastery of Saint Moses the Abyssinian, which also lost a priest to militants, in July 2013.

Fr. Mourad’s kidnapping is the latest in a series of attacks on Christian religious since the start of the Syrian civil war. In 2013, militants kidnapped a group of Greek Orthodox nuns, Fr. Paolo Dall’Oglio, S.J., and the Greek and Syriac Orthodox bishops of Aleppo. The nuns were eventually returned to their convent unharmed, but Fr. Dall’Oglio and the bishops remain missing.

In 2014, Dutch priest Fr. Frans van der Lugt, S.J., was murdered in Homs. The priest served in Syria for more than four decades. He was involved in interreligious dialogue and had built as spirituality center that housed children with mental disabilities.

In February, the Islamic State kidnapped at least ninety Christians from villages in northeast Syria. Syriac Patriarch of Antioch Ignatius Joseph III Younan responded to news of the kidnappings with a plea for prayer.

“Let us pray for those innocent people,” Patriach Younan told CNA in February. “It’s a very … ordinary thing to have those people with such hatred toward non-Muslims that they don’t respect any human life.”

The Syrian civil war began in March 2011 with demonstrations against al-Assad. The war has claimed the lives of more than 220,000 people, and forced 3.9 million to become refugees. Another 8 million Syrians are believed to have been internally displaced by the violence.

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A drastic threat looms for an already ravaged Nepal – the rain season

by Elise Harris (CNA/EWTN News) • May 23, 2015

Monsoon lightning. (Matt Frahm via Flickr CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)

Rome, Italy — With 3-4 months of heavy rain at their doorstep, Nepal citizens who have been without shelter for nearly a month due to several massive earthquakes are desperate to find some sort of sturdy housing.

“The greatest need right now is shelter, because within a month, the monsoon rains will start … that is going to change the situation totally,” director of Caritas Nepal, Father Pius Perumana, said.

“All these hills which are shaken, when the rain starts coming there are going to be a lot more landslides. Even in normal conditions we have massive landslides every monsoon, and with the entire hilly region shaken, it is going to be terrible,” he said.

Fr. Perumana was in Rome for the charity organization’s annual international general assembly May 12-17. He spoke with CNA the day after his country was hit by their third massive earthquake in less than two weeks.

On April 25, a quake that measured 7.9 on the Richter scale ripped through Nepal’s capital, Kathmandu, killing more than 8,000 people.

“We saw right in front of our eyes, the houses shaking and crumbling, people crying for help and running in all directions … I myself felt helpless, I didn’t really know what to do,” Fr. Perumana said.

In addition to the many aftershocks that came, the priest said the situation was complicated even further when the next day another earthquake measuring 6.9 hit the country. When the third, 7.4 quake shook the country again May 12, it only brought “more destruction,” he said.

As the frightening scene unfolded the day the first earthquake hit, Fr. Perumana said that he and the other Caritas workers tried to make it to their office and gather the staff in order to “start some sort of help.”

“We were all lost because our own staff, many of them lost their own houses,” he said, explaining that with electricity and phone lines down they weren’t able to do much the first night apart from hand out sheets to the people they found gathered around their office and the city’s cathedral.

The priest said that, according to the experts, the pattern of the first two quakes was unusual, since the first struck from north to south, while the second went east to west.

The earthquakes, he noted, “literally shook Kathmandu Valley, and Kathmandu was shifted to the south by 10 feet – that is more than 3 meters.”

“It also raised the Kathmandu Valley by nearly 1 meter. The whole Kathmandu Valley came up and they also say Everest lost some inches of its height, so it literally shook the entire Nepal.”

Roughly 8 million people have been affected by the quakes, and more than 400,000 houses have been destroyed. Numerous schools have also fallen, and 14 districts in Nepal reported that more than 80 percent of their houses were gone.

In addition to the high number of deaths, close to 25,000 people have been injured. With many roads gone due to landsides, the logistics of making it to remote areas have been perplexed, and the situation is further complicated by the fact that Nepal only has 1 small airport handling all of the materials that come in, Fr. Perumana said.

“The main problems we are facing are problems of shelter, medicine, food, wash materials,” as well as reaching the far out villages.

Fr. Perumana said that since day-one several other Caritas branches have come to their assistance, including Caritas Asia, Australia, Belgium and India, who were gathered for a farmers conference when the first quake struck.

Since then they have organized a coordination committee, and appointed Caritas Australia as the facilitator for other Caritas branches coming from all over the globe. While Caritas Nepal is playing the leading role, “we are organizing the help together,” the priest said.

However, he expressed his concern that the situation would quickly spiral down without finding more shelter, food and medicine for those who have been left without a home.

“These three have to go together, because as I said, they are great needs right now.”

Nepal is one of the poorest countries in Asia, and has an estimated population of 27 to 28 million.

The epicenter of the first earthquake was 80 km northwest of the country’s capital, Kathmandu, where the force of the quake toppled a 100-year-old temple, split roads, and destroyed houses and buildings.

Tremors could be felt as far away as New Dehli in India, and aftershocks continued to shake the area for hours after the initial quake. It was the second-worst earthquake in Nepal since 1934, when an 8.0 magnitude earthquake all but destroyed the cities of Kathmandu, Bhaktapur and Patan.

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Oscar Romero, a ‘father of the poor,’ beatified in El Salvador

by David Ramos (CNA/EWTN News) • May 23, 2015

A procession in San Salvador for the beatification Mass of Oscar Romero. (The Oscar Arnulfo Romero Beatification Committee via Flickr)

San Salvador, El Salvador — Archbishop Oscar Romero was beatified in El Salvador this morning, with Pope Francis declaring from the Vatican that the martyr’s feast will be celebrated on March 24 each year – the day “in which he was born into heaven.”

Cardinal Angelo Amato, prefect of the Congregation for the Causes of Saints, presided over Blessed Oscar Romero’s May 23 beatification Mass in the capital city of San Salvador.

In his homily the cardinal said that “the figure of Romero is still alive and giving comfort to the marginalized of the earth.”

“His option for the poor was not ideological, but evangelical. His charity extended to the persecutors.”

Archbishop Romero was killed due to hatred of the faith on March 24, 1980, in the midst of the birth of a civil war between leftist guerrillas and the dictatorial government of the right. At the beginning of this year Pope Francis approved of his martyrdom and that the ceremony of his beatification be held.

The Mass began at 10:00 a.m. local time in front of a multitude of near 300,000 people, who filled the streets surrounding the Salvador Plaza of the Mundo de San Salvador.

At the beginning of the ceremony, the current archbishop of San Salvador, Archbishop Jose Luis Escobar Alas, read a message asking Pope Francis “to deign to enroll in the number of the blesseds this venerable servant of God Oacute;scar Arnulfo Romero Galdámez.”

The postulator Archbishop Romero’s cause, Mons. Vicenzo Paglia, then read a brief biography of the now Blessed.

In a letter read first in Latin and then in Spanish, Pope Francis said that “to fulfill the hope of many faithful Christians” and by virtue of his apostolic authority he authorized that hereafter Archbishop Romero “is called Blessed and his feast is celebrated the day of March 24, on the day that he was born into heaven.”

The Holy Father described the now Blessed Salvadoran as “Bishop and martyr, pastor according to the heart of Christ, evangelizer and father of the poor, heroic witness of the Kingdom of God.”

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Insides that didn’t decompose – and other stunning facts about Oscar Romero

by David Ramos and Elise Harris (CNA/EWTN News) • May 23, 2015

Archbishop Oscar Romero. (Javier Hidalgo via Flickr CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)

San Salvador, El Salvador — In his role as Vicar General, Monsignor Ricardo Urioste was one of the closest collaborators of Oscar Romero, the archbishop of San Salvador who was martyred for the faith in 1980 and beatified just this weekend.

And this monsignor has some stories to tell.

Among the most fascinating involve details surrounding the day Romero was killed, what the late archbishop really thought about the controversial and problematic Liberation Theology, and the fact that the martyr’s insides hadn’t decomposed when they were exhumed three years after his death.

Archbishop Romero was brutally killed while celebrating Mass on March 24, 1980 – a time when El Salvador was on the brink of civil war. In February Pope Francis officially recognized his death as having been for hatred of the faith and gave the green light for his beatification.

Msgr. Urioste, who currently heads up the Archbishop Romero Foundation, said that during the time the martyr lived, whenever “he preached, spoke, was a pastor, they accused him of being communist, Marxist, a politician, and a thousand things.”

However, he noted how after 12 years of extensive study on the life and writings of the archbishop, the Vatican never found anything that supported these claims.

In an interview with CNA, Msgr. revealed some the of the lesser known facts surrounding the new blessed, as well as his continuing legacy on the Church and the world at large.

What happened on the day Archbishop Romero died

Msgr. Urioste can easily recall the day that Archbishop Romero was killed, saying that it was “an ordinary day of work” for him.

In the morning the archbishop had a meeting with a group of priests, and then they ate lunch together. After the meeting he went to confession with his usual confessor, which was a priest named Fr. Segundo Ascue.

Once he confessed, Archbishop Romero went to celebrate a 6 p.m. Mass in San Salvador’s hospital of Divine Providence, which was staffed by nuns. The Mass, Mons. Urioste recalled, had been widely publicized throughout the diocese.

While he was celebrating Mass in the hospital’s chapel, the archbishop was shot in the chest from outside.

Msgr. Urioste said that after getting a phone call informing him of what happened, “I immediately went to the hospital, and he was already taken to the polyclinic. A television set arrived, they interviewed me, and after I went to the hospital where he was.”

He recalled how as the sisters were going to embalm Archbishop Romero’s body, he told them “please be careful not to drop his insides anywhere, but that they pick them up and bury them, and they did, burying them in front of the little apartment he had in the hospital where he lived.”

Three years later, on the occasion St. John Paul II’s visit to the country, the nuns of the hospital “made a monument to the Virgin in the same place where we had buried (Romero’s) insides.”

“When they were digging they ran into the box and the plastic bag where they had placed the insides, and the blood was still liquid and the insides didn’t have any bad smell,” he revealed.

“I don’t want to say that it was a miracle, it’s possible that it’s a natural phenomenon, but the truth is that this happened, and we told the archbishop at the time (Arturo Rivera y Damas), look monsignor, this has happened and he said ‘be quiet, don’t tell anyone because they are going to say that they are our inventions,’” he said.

However, “Pope John Paul II was given a small canister with Archbishop Romero’s blood,” he noted.

Msgr. Urioste recalled that when John Paul II arrived to San Salvador, the first thing he did “was go to the cathedral without telling anyone. The cathedral was closed, they had to go and look for someone to open it so that the Pope could enter and kneel before the tomb of Archbishop Romero.”

John Paul II asked during his visit that no one manipulate the memory of Archbishop Romero, Msgr. Urioste recalled, and lamented how “they politicized him.”

“The left had politicized him, putting him as their banner. And the right politicized him, saying things that are untrue about the bishop, that are purely false, they denigrated him.”

One of the things that the Church in El Salvador wants, Msgr. Urioste said, is that “the figure of the archbishop, known now a little more than he was before, is a cause for reflection, a motive for peace, a motive for forgiveness, a motive for reconciliation with one another, and that we all have more patience to renew ourselves and follow the paths that Archbishop Romero proposed to us.”

“I think that (Romero’s) figure is going to contribute a lot to a better meeting and reconciliation in El Salvador,” he said.

What Archbishop Romero really thought about Liberation Theology

Despite the many accusations leveled against the archbishop of San Salvador, his Vicar General said that Romero “never had a Marxist thought or Marxist ideology in his mind.”

“If there had been, the Vatican, which has studied so much, would not have beatified him, if they had found that he had Marxist interests.”

The real backbone of his closeness to the poor, he said, was the Gospel and the teaching of the Church.

“He was a servant of the Gospel, he never read anything from Liberation Theology, but he read the Bible.”

Msgr. Urioste noted that the archbishop’s library, “had all these books from the early Fathers of the Church, from the current Magisterium of the Church, but (he) never even opened any of the books from Liberation Theology, or Gustavo Gutiérrez, or of anyone else.”

“He read the Bible and there he encountered a Jesus in love with the poor and in this way started walking toward him,” he said.

What set Archbishop Romero apart

One of the most distinguishing characteristics of Archbishop Romero was “his great sense of work. He was an extremely hardworking man and devoted to his work day and night – until midnight and until dawn,” Msgr. Urioste said.

He recalled how the archbishop would begin to prepare his Sunday homilies the day before, and would always include three reflections on the Eucharist. When Romero preached, he made frequent reference to the Fathers of the Church, based his comments on Church teaching and related his thoughts to the country’s current reality.

“A homily that doesn’t have this relation with what is happening sounds the same here as in Ireland, in Paris, as anywhere,” the priest said.

He recalled how in Romero’s time the government was “a ferocious military dictatorship, which had ‘national security’ as it’s theme.”

Everyone who either sided with the poor or expressed concern for them “was accused of being communist, they were sent to be killed without thinking more. There were 70 thousand deaths like this in the country at that time,” Msgr. Urioste noted.

“The social economic reality was of a lot of poverty, of a great lack of unemployment, of low wages.”

Ultimately, Archbishop Romero’s beatification, the monsignor said, is “a triumph of the truth.”

It is a triumph, he said, of the truth of “who Archbishop Romero really was, what he did, how he did it, from the Word of God, from the Magisterium of the Church, in defense of the poor, who were the favored ones of Jesus Christ and who were were also the favored ones of Archbishop Romero.”

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Relics of Saints John XXIII, John Paul II light fires of faith in Thailand

by Antonio Anup Gonsalves (CNA/EWTN News) • May 24, 2015

Students venerate the relics of St John XXIII and St John Paul II in Sriracha, Thailand, May 2015. (Antonio Anup Gonsalves/CNA)

Chanthaburi, Thailand — Scores of Catholic faithful are taking part in the Thailand tour of the sacred relics of St. John XXIII and St. John Paul II.

“The visit of the relic is a blessing of God for us in our dioceses as the saints are visiting us and they light the fire of faith and hope,” Bishop Silvio Siripong Charatsri of the Chanthaburi told CNA May 18.

The reliquaries of St. John XXIII and St. John Paul II have been brought to various dioceses’ parishes for over a year, with stops scheduled in ten Thai dioceses.

The reliquaries’ latest stop is the Sacred Heart Church Chapel in the Chanthaburi diocese. The reliquary tour makes the relics available for exposition and veneration.

Bishop Silvio said Thailand’s Catholics are “very happy to welcome the saints, for we are part of the universal Church, and the popes, who lived with us, are now in heaven to intercede for us and empower our people with their exemplary teachings of faith and life.”

Father Francis Xavier Manokprechawut, the parish priest, presided over a thanksgiving Mass with a congregation of over 600 faithful, including over 20 priests, religious, and seminarians. The Mass concelebrants included Bishop Silvio and Bishop emeritus Lawrence Thienchai Samanchit of Chanthaburi.

The May 18 Mass also marked the birthday of St. John Paul II.

Bishop Silvio discussed Catholics’ close connection to the two canonized popes.

He said St. John XXIII “gave a new dimension to church renewal” by calling the Second Vatican Council, and that St. John Paul II, during his long pontificate, “led the vision of the Church” and held “extensive apostolic visits.”

Bishop Siripong noted the eagerness of the Thai people, who participated with devotion in the liturgy to venerate and ask the intercession of the popular saints.

“Only a few people have the opportunity to visit Rome and see the Vatican and the Popes, so the relics of the Popes visiting their parishes is like the Pope himself who is coming to visit them,” he said.

“They can touch them … it’s the Bishop of Rome, the Vicar of Christ, the leader of the Church who is coming to meet and bless his people.”

The silver- and gold-plated reliquary of Saint John XXIII contains a small piece of his skin. The relic of St. John Paul II is a vial of his blood, set in a similar reliquary. Pope Francis canonized the two Popes on April 27, 2014.

Thai Catholics also have a special regard for St. John XXIII and St. John Paul II because of their meetings with the reigning monarch, Bhumibol Adulyadej, and the rest of the royal family. The royals’ photographs adorn the walls of most houses and institutions as a sign of the people’s great respect and admiration.

St. John XXIII received Thailand’s king and queen at the Vatican on October 1, 1960. St. John Paul II met the king on May 10, 1984 during his apostolic visit to Thailand.

In May 2014, Archbishop emeritus of Bangkok, Cardinal Michael Michai Kitboonchu and bishops of the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of Thailand attended a special audience granted by the king. The bishops brought the two relics of Saint John XXIII and Saint John Paul II to the monarchs, in order to pray for the good health of the royal couple.

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Why no one wants to talk about China’s female suicide problem

by Elise Harris and Kate Veik (CNA/EWTN News) • May 24, 2015

(XI via Flickr CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)

Rome, Italy — Zhang Xihuan doesn’t know what was going through her mind when she swallowed a mouthful of the pesticide stored behind the staircase in her home in rural Shandong province.

Maybe she was thinking of her neighbors who had ostracized her when she was diagnosed with hepatitis B. Or perhaps she was thinking of the hours spent scraping a living by collecting coal that had fallen on the road en route to nearby mines.

Regardless, when Xihuan brought the bottle of Yang Hua Le Guo pesticide to her lips in May 2009, she was doing what countless Chinese women had done before her and would do after: taking their own lives rather than face the harsh reality of their society. The only difference was that Xihuan would live to tell her story to the World Health Organization.

China accounts for 26 percent of suicides worldwide, according to WHO estimates. Suicide is the fifth leading cause of death in the country and the suicide rate in women is 25 percent higher than in men. Young rural women are most at risk and their poison of choice – or convenience – is pesticide.

So why are hundreds of Chinese women taking their own lives every day?

Women’s rights activist Reggie Littlejohn told CNA that in addition to domestic violence and discrimination, women in China are traumatized by the Chinese Communist Party’s brutal enforcement of its one-child policy. Since its inception 35 years ago, China’s one-child policy has killed between 360 and 400 million people.

Littlejohn, who is the founder and president of the organization Women’s Rights Without Frontiers, believes the Chinese Communist Party is using its one-child policy as a means of social control “masquerading as population control.”

“I would absolutely say that (the CCP) are maintaining their grip on power through shedding the blood of innocent women and children,” Littlejohn said.

She warned the policy is also subtly breaking down relationships and trust in Chinese society through its system of paid informants who expose illegally pregnant neighbors and family members. And, Littlejohn warned, the infrastructure of China’s Family Planning Police stamps out any form of dissent in the country.

Littlejohn called on the international community to speak out against China’s one-child policy, particularly in light of the 35th anniversary of the policy’s inception. She said any international effort against the policy would bring hope to persecuted women in China.

To see that the international community “is standing by their rights” would give women a lot of hope “since clearly the people within China are not doing so,” Littlejohn said. “It would give (women) a hope and something to hold onto, that maybe these atrocities will end.”

This year also marks the 20th anniversary of a conference in Beijing hosted by the United Nations Commission on the Status of Women. Conference participants outlined twelve priorities for the advancement of women’s rights in China; including forced abortion.

However, Littlejohn told CNA that since the 1995 conference “Beijing has completely ignored the issue of women’s rights” and has made “no progress whatsoever toward women’s rights.”

“In the last 20 years (China has) done hundreds of millions of abortions, most of them forced, hundreds of millions of sterilizations, most of them forced, hundreds of millions of contraceptive coils inserted into women, many of them forced,” she said.

“It’s very important for the United Nations, the U.S. congress and the entire international community to grab hold of this and hold a mirror up to them and say this is what you promised in Beijing (in 1995), and this is what you’ve done, which is nothing.”

Littlejohn specifically called for an increase in the “political will” to act on a 2013 agreement of the U.N. women’s commission asking governments and NGOs to condemn “state-sponsored, coercive population control,” including forced abortion, forced sterilization and forced contraception.

Although European Parliament has also passed a resolution condemning forced abortion in China, Littlejohn said to have a commitment on paper isn’t enough, and that governmental bodies need to take a greater stand in putting pressure on China to end the one-child policy.

She also called on the international community to cut funding for the United Nations Population Fund, which she said has been working “hand-in-hand” with the CCP since the policy’s inception.

The UNFPA “has been entirely opaque in terms of their activities in China. They argue that they don’t do forced abortions. What are they doing to counter it? If you’re not actively fighting against an atrocity, but are in a very secretive way somehow supporting a structure that forcibly aborts women, you are complicit with those forced abortions,” she said.

“So I think we can put a lot of pressure on the UNFPA either to pull out of China or to be transparent about their activities in China and demonstrate that they are actively and effectively advocating against coercive population control, because if they are advocating against it, it’s completely ineffective.”

Littlejohn’s organization Women’s Rights Without Frontiers combats gendercide, sex slavery, and forced abortions and sterilizations in China. Littlejohn spoke with CNA in Rome, where she met with Vatican officials to discuss her April 30 congressional hearing on China’s one-child policy. She is also presenting this weekend at the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace’s two-day conference on women and the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

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A ‘reality check’ for Ireland’s Church – gay marriage vote both challenge and invitation

by Ann Schneible (CNA/EWTN News) • May 25, 2015

(La Marga via Flickr CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)

Rome, Italy — The Christian message can’t be shaken by a national vote, but Ireland’s decision to legalize same-sex marriage is forcing Catholic leaders to rethink how they have been keeping the faith alive among the nation’s young people.

“This vote has certainly changed the landscape in which the Church ministers in Ireland and the outcome offers it new and brave challenges,” said Dublin native Monsignor John Kennedy, speaking after Friday’s referendum to allow same-sex couples in Ireland to marry.

Msgr. Kennedy, an official of the Vatican’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, told CNA in a May 25 email interview that he believed the pro same-sex marriage – or “Yes” – campaign was successful because of the sizable number of young voters who are in favor of the legislation.

“For Catholics it raises serious questions about the depth of faith and conscience formation, and the link between the practice of the faith and its relevance in and to society as a whole,” he said.

The monsignor’s observations about the influence of young voters are echoed in an interview given by Dublin’s archbishop Diarmuid Martin following the news that the referendum had passed.

“The Church needs a reality check right across the board, to look at the things we are doing well and look at the areas where we need to say, have we drifted away completely from young people?” the archbishop told RTE.

“Most of these young people who voted yes are products of our Catholic school system for 12 years,” Archbishop Martin said. “I’m saying there’s a big challenge there to see how we get across the message of the Church.”

The results of Friday’s vote was 62 percent in favor of same-sex marriage, and 38 percent opposed.

While 18 other countries have already legalized same-sex marriage, Ireland is the first to adopt the law through popular vote.

Msgr. Kennedy said that while he did not think the “Yes” campaign was unstoppable, he was not surprised that the referendum passed in the end.

“I believe that many had made up their minds quite a long time ago,” he said.

The popular vote to allow same-sex marriage is significant in Ireland on account of its long history of fidelity to the Catholic Church, shaken only in recent decades by scandals among the clergy and religious.

Nonetheless, Msgr. Kennedy said the new legislation should not be cause for discouragement, but for a stronger commitment to disseminating the Christian message.

“Instead of perhaps feeling downcast by the decision, or wondering about the role of the Church in the world today, I believe that Catholics must now pause, focus, pray and advance with even greater energy,” he said.

He added that Catholics should be “conscious that what they have received in the Lord’s teaching, in its entirety and not just on marriage, is not something that can be altered by a national vote, by a certain percentage of those in favor of a change.”

Around 60 percent of the 3.2 million eligible voters throughout the Republic of Ireland took part in the referendum.

The new law comes 22 years after Ireland decriminalized homosexual acts.

In 2010, the country enacted the Civil Partnership and Certain Rights and Obligations of Cohabitants Act, allowing same-sex couples to enter into civil unions.

“The late Saint John Paul II once said that every generation is a continent to be conquered for Christ,” Msgr. Kennedy said. “I had some difficulty understanding the radical tone of his statement but now I appreciate what he meant.”

One of the main players in the “No” campaign opposing the constitutional amendment was the Iona Institute, a Catholic advocacy group based in Ireland which promotes the role of religion and family in society.

In a press release following Saturday’s announcement that the referendum had gone through, the Iona Institute director David Quinn said the campaign “was always going to be an uphill battle.”

Quinn expressed concern that the hundreds of thousands of voters who opposed the referendum were not represented by Ireland’s political parties, which all supported the “Yes” campaign.

He concludes: “Going forward, we will continue to affirm the importance of the biological ties and of motherhood and fatherhood. We hope the Government will address the concerns voters on the No side have about the implications for freedom of religion and freedom of conscience.”

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‘Little’ friars credit vocation boom to Pope’s name

by Elise Harris (CNA/EWTN News) • May 26, 2015

Franciscan friars. (tintinjust via Flickr CC BY-NC 2.0)

Rome, Italy — Gathered in Rome for their general chapter meeting, members of the Order of Friars Minor – better known as Franciscans – said that while vocations in general have been down in recent years, numbers have begun to rise again after Pope Francis’ election.

Polish Friar Fr. Filemon Janka spoke with CNA after the order’s May 26 audience with Pope Francis, saying that his papal name selection “is significant for all Franciscan friars.”

In his province of Posen, the effects of having a Pope named Francis have been particularly strong among the youth, he said, adding that the Franciscans “have new vocations because of that.”

“It is also the reason that young people love our spirituality, and when the Pope chose the name Francis it was an important issue for these young people, so thanks be to God for new vocations.”

The friar said that his small province has nine new novices this year, a significant number considering the size of the province.

To have nine new vocations “is a good sign for the future for our order in Poland,” Fr. Janka said, noting that it’s been 10-15 years since his province has had so many new novices. In 2012, the year before Francis’ election, he said they only had two or three, and in the years before that maybe five at the most.

“I think it is a sign of Pope Francis choosing this name and young people love him so much,” the friar said. “All people in Poland love Pope Francis.”

Founded by St. Francis of Assisi in the early 1200s, the Order of Friars Minor are a religious order committed to living a life of poverty, and can easily be identified by their long, brown, hooded habits often paired with a beard and leather sandals.

Due to their name, originally “Ordo Fratrum Minorum” in Latin, the friars were frequently called “fraticelli,” meaning “Little Brothers,” by their founder.

The order is currently gathered in Rome for their general chapter meeting, which will conclude June 7.

In his May 26 audience with the friars, Pope Francis emphasized the importance of “minorita,” or “smallness” for a Franciscan, saying the call to be “minor” means “to be and to feel small before God, completely entrusting oneself to his infinite mercy.”

Mercy is something incomprehensible for those who do not see themselves as small, needy sinners before God, the Pope said, adding that “the more aware we are of this, the closer we are to salvation; the more convinced we are of being sinners, the more we are able to be saved.”

Pope Francis explained that this “smallness” also means going outside of oneself and letting go of personal plans and opinions.

A friar, he said, must be able to go beyond habits and securities, so that he can bear true witness to the poor, needy and marginalized.

Pope Francis also spoke of the importance of fraternity for the friars, noting that in the time of the early Church, people “were amazed” to see how united the Christians were in love, service, benevolence and reciprocal help.

The Franciscan spiritual family “is called to express this concrete fraternity,” the Pope continued, through a recovery of mutual trust “in interpersonal relationships, so that the world may see and believe, acknowledging that the love of Christ heals wounds.”

The Pope warned against losing oneself amid disputes and gossip, saying that instead the friars must always seek to foster peaceful dialogue with gentleness, meekness and humility.

He also encouraged them to be content with what is given to them, which he said “requires a strong commitment to transparency, ethics, solidarity of goods, in the style of sobriety and dispossession.”

“If instead you are attached to goods and to worldly richness, and your security there, it will be precisely the Lord who strips this worldly spirit off in order to preserve the precious heritage of ‘smallness’ and poverty to which he has called you through St. Francis,” the Pope continued.

“You have inherited an authority among God’s people with ‘smallness,’ with fraternity, meekness, humility, poverty. Please, conserve it! Don’t lose it!”

The Holy Father concluded by telling the Franciscans that their spirituality is important and needed in the world. He said that while society views it as acceptable to sneer at priests in general, Franciscans have gained “authority” due to their commitments to ‘smallness’ and helping the poor.

Francis closed by entrusting the order to the protection and intercession of the Virgin Mary, and asked that they pray for him.

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Understanding the fierce devotion behind the Black Nazarene

by Antonio Anup Gonsalves (CNA/EWTN News) • May 27, 2015

(Arlan Javillo via Flickr CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)

Manila, Philippines — For over four centuries, a historical and iconic miraculous statue of Jesus Christ carrying his Cross has become an emblem of passion, struggle and faith for Filipino Catholics.

The life-size statue of Jesus is enshrined in the famous minor basilica popularly known as the Quiapo Church, located in the Archdiocese of Manila. The statue has survived the blazing fires that destroyed the church twice, two earthquakes, the floods of numerous typhoons and bombings during World War II.

The church which hosts the statue never sleeps. It welcomes devotees early in the morning till late evening. During the day, it holds continuous Masses and healing services. During the night, the church shelters poor homeless people. In the early morning the church is cleaned and again reaches out to the pilgrims and devotees.

Every year on Jan. 9, the annual feast day, millions of devotees gather to celebrate the Feast of the Black Nazarene. They take part in the spectacular religious procession known locally as the “Traslacion,” during which devotees carry a replica of the statue across Manila.

Pope Innocent X specially recognized the Philippines’ strong devotion to the Black Nazarene of Manila in 1650.

Msgr. Jose Clemente Ignacio, the rector of the Minor Basilica of the Black Nazarene, said that some people wait in line for seven hours without complaint, simply to touch the image.

“They say Filipinos are resilient, but where is this resiliency coming from? It’s the practice of our faith,” he told CNA May 24.

Msgr. Ignacio spoke more about the Black Nazarene and its related devotions. The text of the interview is below, edited for clarity and brevity.

CNA: Could you describe Quiapo Church for us?

Msgr Ignacio: The church is one of the most popular churches in the country as it is home to the miraculous Black Nazarene, a much venerated statue of Jesus Christ which many people believe has miraculous attributes.

St. John Paul II recognized the church as the Minor Basilica of the Black Nazarene because of its role in strengthening a deep popular devotion to Jesus Christ and because of its cultural contribution to the religiosity of the Filipino people.

CNA: What is the historical background of the Black Nazarene statue of Quiapo?

Msgr. Ignacio: A first group of Augustinian Recollect missionaries landed in Manila in 1606 from Mexico. They brought with them a dark image of Jesus Christ kneeling on one knee and carrying a large wooden cross. The image was first enshrined in St. John the Baptist Church at Luneta in 1606 and after two years was moved to a bigger church nearby. Over a century and a half later, in 1767, the image was transferred to Quiapo Church whose patron is also St. John the Baptist.

In 2006 we celebrated the 400th anniversary of the arrival of the image of Black Nazarene in Manila.

CNA: Explain to us the devotion to the Black Nazarene at Quiapo.

Msgr. Ignacio: In the words of Archbishop of Manila, Cardinal Luis Antonio Tagle, “To understand the devotee you have to be a devotee. Only a devotee could best understand a devotee.”

People have sensed the spiritual wealth in Quiapo Church and there is a huge attendance for Mass every day and especially on Friday.

However, it’s the feast day that gathers together millions of devotees who walk in the procession, called the “Traslacion” of the Black Nazarene. Here in Quiapo Church you can witness many stories of the faith of the people, those who are patiently lining up for seven hours without any complaints. They just want to pray and touch the image of Black Nazarene. There are huge queues for confessions.

They say Filipinos are resilient, but where is this resiliency coming from? It’s the practice of our faith.

CNA: Tell us more about the procession called “Traslacion” of the Black Nazarene.

Msgr. Ignacio: “Traslacion” means the transfer of the Image of Black Nazarene. In a way it is imitating the Calvary experience: the sacrifice and suffering that our Lord endured for our salvation like when Jesus was walking barefoot, carrying the cross to Mount Calvary.

The devotees also want to give back to God by participating in the suffering of our Lord and entering into the Paschal mystery of Christ.

It is also commemorating the transfer of the image from Lunetta to Quiapo, when we first received the statue in 1868. Since then, because of the many answered prayers, people have been celebrating the feast on January 9.

The barefoot procession of an almost 4.3-mile journey starts from the Quirino Grandstand at Luneta and snakes its way towards the narrow streets. Passing through the city’s winding roads, after 19 hours of spiritual euphoria, the procession eventually reaches Quiapo at the Basilica Minore de Nazareno. The devotees flood by to touch the image and throw cloths to touch the image, before receiving the cloths back.

Our culture is a culture of touch and, significantly, in a way we want to touch heaven.

CNA: How do you explain this popular devotion and its importance to bring people to faith?

Msgr. Ignacio: Maybe in the past in the Western world the contemplatives’ experience of undergoing retreats in monasteries, retreat houses etc. was a contemplative way of entering into the mystery of Christ.

But there was also another, lay-focused way of having retreats by making pilgrimages. St. Francis of Assisi, St. Anthony, St Ignatius of Loyola — they also undertook pilgrimages which involved suffering and bodily penance in the process of entering into the Paschal mystery of Christ.

The devotion in Quiapo is somewhat similar to a pilgrimage experience and every year they come and somehow something changes in the people.

Popular religiosity is not being encouraged because there are elements that need purification … but we cannot dismiss this, because through popular piety our faith has been introduced in our home and in our families. We have been introduced to the prayers, the Rosary, the statues of the saints, the Way of the Cross.

Somehow it has a value and I guess the people here know that there is a very deep gold mine of the spiritual fruits that they can experience in Quiapo Church.

Somehow some theologians have not fully grasped this wealth that is these popular religious devotions. The Second Vatican Council encourages them and does not dismiss them. Pope Francis is asking us to support and strengthen, understand and find meaning in popular piety.

CNA: Has the devotion increased, and what is the impact of this devotion in living the Christian life in the community?

Msgr. Ignacio: The devotion has definitely increased. On weekdays there are about 10 Masses celebrated, there are also healing services. We expected only a 10 to 15 percent increase (in attendance) this year. But we were astonished that there was a 30 percent increase and lot of dioceses are asking for crucifixes from Quiapo Church.

Last year (attendance) was estimated at 4 million and this years they say it is 5 million in the procession alone. But this does not include the crowd in the evening and it also does not include the crowd that goes into the Quiapo Church every hour. The local estimates say this is around 12 million.

Somehow the devotion is growing. You can see the effect of the devotion is to bring out more compassion. Even in just the “Translacion” experience (volunteers) are helping out with the medical team, water, food, so there is lot of compassion.

CNA: How is Quiapo Church helping disaster victims and fostering devotion elsewhere in the Philippines?

People are giving. Even when disaster strikes there is a second collection. But where the disaster impact is big we help in rehabilitation measures.

In Bohol (a province ravaged by Typhoon Haiyan in 2014) we have finished 72 houses and given them to different families. We joined relief programs in other dioceses and granted scholarships and ran a livelihood program through our Black Nazarene Foundation, which is the distribution arm of the Quiapo Parish.

We are giving one crucifix to every church so that devotees are nourished in their devotion to the Black Nazarene. Our pilgrim image too keeps visiting parishes and dioceses.

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Not a burden, but a grace: The indissolubility of marriage

by Marta Jimenez (CNA/EWTN News) • May 27, 2015

(Fabio Sola Penna via Flickr CC BY 2.0)

Rome, Italy — The sacrament of marriage, characterized as it is by indissolubility, is good news for the people of today, according to a Spanish priest who specializes in family and marriage issues.

“The family is in crisis: divorce, models of the family contrary to the Gospel, abandoned children, abortion … it’s true there are problems, but before anything else the family is good news and the indissolubility of marriage is not a burden, but a grace that comes from the Christian Gospel,” Father Jose Granados, DCJM, told CNA.

“Christ places marriage at the center of the Gospel,” he continued. “The Church has good news when speaking of marriage and the family, and that’s becoming more important in the secularized society in which we live.”

Fr. Granados is a member of the Disciples of the Hearts of Jesus and Mary, a religious order founded in Spain. He is vice president of the Pontifical John Paul II Institute for Studies on Marriage and Family, and has authored several books, including, with Carl Anderson, Called to Love: Approaching John Paul II’s Theology of the Body.

His latest work, Una sola carne en un solo espiritu (One Body in One Spirit), discusses the theology of marriage as being at the service of society and the Church, and is meant to show the beauty of God’s plan for marriage and the family. Fr. Granados explained that it focuses on indissolubility and on marriage as a gift of the Holy Spirit.

Referring to the upcoming Synod on the Family being held at the Vatican Oct. 4-25, he said: “the big challenge doesn’t come from society, but God presents the Church with a challenge, giving her the gift of family.”

“God presents the Church with a challenge because he has given her the gift of family, and asks her to cultivate it, promote it, and make it grow. From this point of view the difficulties can be placed in perspective,” he said.

“For example, the issue of divorced persons – you can look with great compassion on the suffering of so many people. And at the same time you can understand that when the Church proclaims the Gospel and the indissolubility of marriage, she doesn’t do it as a theory but as a concrete gift. This is how you can best serve people.”

Marriage is “a very special sacrament that has the power to change society,” Fr. Granados reflected, because “through the indissoluble love between man and woman, the basic unit of society is established for the good of children.”

Despite the difficulties of living out this indissoluble love, this task is made easier because in the sacrament “Christ gives his own love to the couple, so they can love one another as he loves the Church,” Fr. Granados said.

The priest also referred to the issue of admitting the divorced and remarried to Communion, noting that the Church seeks to heal the person’s heart: “in the end, indissoluble marriage is a call to us from God. The great mercy of the Church is that this call can accompany them in their lives so they can respond to it,” he emphasized.

He added that one must understand that God’s mercy “not only wants to look upon us with compassion, but also to heal our wounds and help us on our journey.”

“This makes it possible for the Church to see that giving Communion to the divorced and remarried is not a solution, and that other solutions can be opened: finding other ways to accompany the divorced and remarried so they can meet the requirements for the worthy reception of the Eucharist.”

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Is ‘Charlie Charlie’ a harmless game? Exorcist says absolutely not

by CNA/EWTN News • May 27, 2015

(Maggie Lawson/CNA)

Lima, Peru — A game that purports to invoke a Mexican demon – known as “Charlie, Charlie” and considered to be a simplified version of the Ouija board – has gone viral on social media among young people, prompting one exorcist to warn of its dangers.

The game, which has gained significant traction online in recent days, involves a pair of pencils or pens, a sheet of paper, and the invocation of a spirit named “Charlie.”

Scores of short video clips, posted mostly by teens, show players shrieking and running out of view when the pencil apparently moves on its own and points to a “yes” or a “no” after they say a phrase inviting the demon.

Spanish exorcist Jose Antonio Fortea told ACI Prensa that the so-called #CharlieCharlieChallenge involves the very real, occult practice of “calling on spirits.”

In an interview May 27, he warned that “some spirits who are at the root of that practice will harass some of those who play the game.” Even though the priest thinks that players “won’t be possessed” necessarily, the spirit that has been invoked “will stay around for a while.”

Fr. Fortea also warned that playing the game “will result in other spirits beginning to enter into even more frequent communication.”

“And so then the person really can suffer much worse consequences from the demons,” he said.

Catholic experts have noted that occult activity and the resulting need for exorcisms has reached a critical level worldwide.

The International Association of Exorcists (AIE) met for their 12th annual conference in Rome last October. According to AIE spokesperson Dr. Valter Cascioli, an increasing number of bishops and cardinals asked to participate in the conference due to an increase in demonic activity.

“It’s becoming a pastoral emergency,” Cascioli told CNA. “At the moment the number of disturbances of extraordinary demonic activity is on the rise.”

The rise in demonic activity can be attributed to a decreasing faith among individuals, coupled with an increase in curiosity and participation in occult activity such as Ouija boards and seances, Cascioli said.

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Another Christian youth is accused over blasphemy law in Pakistan

by CNA/EWTN News • May 28, 2015

(Matthew Lee High via Flickr CC BY-NC 2.0)

Lahore, Pakistan — Tension and fear have gripped the Christian community in Lahore, Pakistan’s second largest city, after a Muslim mob attacked the community on Sunday when a young Christian man was accused of blasphemy.

The city’s archbishop, Sebastian Shaw, has credited local authorities with containing the mob and diverting the worst of the possible violence.

On May 24, Humayun Faisal Masih was burning newspapers in Sanda, a Christian district in Lahore’s northwest. Muslim onlookers accused him of blasphemy, alleging that some of the pages contained verses of the Quran.

Masih, who is mentally ill, was detained by police, and in the evening a mob gathered, wishing to lynch him. He was kept safe by police, and the angry mob went about attacking Christian homes and places of worship, including St. Joseph Catholic Church.

Doors, windows, and electric meters were broken, and goods were looted, according to Legal Evangelical Association Development, a Pakistani minority rights group. The crowd blocked traffic, setting tires on fire and throwing stones at Christian homes.

A local Christian told CNA May 27 that “some angry Muslims, some armed with guns, ransacked churches and attacked Christian residences and houses pelting stones … which is a horrific and gruesome scene of violence against the innocent women, children, and elderly.”

He lamented the role that “ignorance, illiteracy, religious fanaticism, and greed” play in such eruptions of mob violence in Pakistan.

Local Christians were warned of impending violence by police, and many fled the area before the attack began.

Police were forced to use teargas on the mob, as several officers were attacked and injured.

The local source told CNA that “the situation today has come under control and over 150 Muslim people have been charged for violence, and Humayun Masih is also taken into police custody. The town is coming back to normalcy, but the fear and mental trauma will linger for years.”

Archbishop Shaw was appreciative of the authorities’ efforts to contain the violence.

“ I immediately requested help from some Muslim leaders and local politicians,” he told international Catholic charity Aid to the Church in Need. “Thanks to their intervention, the police succeeded in dispersing the crowd by midnight. It is the first time the government has succeeded in acting in time to save both the people and their homes.”

He credited the effectiveness of the police response to his close contacts with officials since two Lahore churches were attacked in March, saying, “Since then I have maintained close relations with politicians and representatives of the local Muslim community. It was their support that has enabled us to avert the worst.”

Archbishop Shaw lamented the impact that accusation of blasphemy have on the community at large: “When a Muslim is accused of blasphemy, it is just that individual who pays the consequences. But if a Christian is accused, the entire Christian community is held responsible.”

Pakistan’s state religion is Islam, and around 97 percent of the population is Muslim. The nation has adopted blasphemy laws which impose strict punishment – typically the death penalty – on those who desecrate the Quran or who defame or insult Muhammad. Mental illnesses such as Masih’s also do not constitute a mitigating factor under the blasphemy laws.

Dr. Shahid Mobeen, a professor of Islamic history and thought at the Pontifical Lateran University, told Aid to the Church in Need that the blasphemy law also “takes no account of the intention on the part of the accused. In order to be convicted it is sufficient to drop a copy of the Quran or accidentally tread on a page of a newspaper on which are printed verses of the Quran … and yet only five percent of Pakistanis even understand Arabic – consequently 95 percent of the population could easily commit blasphemy without even realizing it.”

Moreover, Pakistan’s literacy rate is estimated to be around 60 percent – meaning 40 percent of Pakistanis could burn a newspaper which they cannot know contains Quranic verses.

The blasphemy laws are said to be often used to settle scores or to persecute minorities: while non-Muslims constitute only three percent of the Pakistani population, 14 percent of blasphemy cases have been levied against them.

In November 2014, a Christian couple, Shahzad and Shama Masih, were burned alive by a mob after they were accused of desecrating the Quran. Shama was burning some of her recently deceased father-in-law’s things, and her employer noticed, and alleged that some of the burnt pages were from the Quran.

The month prior, the Lahore High Court rejected the appeal of Asia Bibi, a Christian woman, who has been sentenced to death under the blasphemy laws. According to the Centre for Legal Aid Assistance and Settlement, some 25 mullahs were present at the court “to apply pressure and push for the sentence … to be upheld.”

In May 2014, a lawyer defending a professor accused of blasphemy was shot dead in Multan.

In 2012, a teenaged Christian girl, Rimsha Masih, who has Down syndrome, was arrested under the blasphemy laws, and released on bail. She and her family had to be relocated because of threats against them.

And in 2011, two politicians – Salmaan Taseer, a Muslim, and Shahbaz Bhatti, a Catholic – were assassinated for opposing the blasphemy laws.

The Lahore Archdiocesan National Peace and Justice Commission and other human rights advocacy groups have condemned the recent violence in Lahore, and hope peace will prevail in the region.

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WORLD NEWS

For Boko Haram victims – and their babies – Catholics pledge full support

by CNA/EWTN News • May 28, 2015

(Brian Smith via Flickr CC BY 2.0)

Abuja, Nigeria — Many escapees of the terrorist group Boko Haram include women and girls who are pregnant as a result of rape, and Nigeria’s Catholics have been swift to show solidarity and support for the victims.

“To the women who are victims of the criminal actions by the Boko Haramists, we extend special concern and empathy,” the country’s bishops said in a May 25 letter. “We appeal to them to keep faith in God Almighty who has given them the uncommon strength to face the trials and travails.”

“The trauma of sexual assault and rape is enormous, and the Catholic Church in Nigeria in cooperation with all people of goodwill is ever prepared to provide every measure of support to accelerate the healing, rehabilitation and resettlement of the victims so that they can swiftly be reintegrated into the society.”

The bishops noted that the Catholic Caritas Foundation of Nigeria and diocesan structures are helping support the pregnant women and girls, as are government agencies, civil society groups and faith-based organizations.

As of early May, Nigeria’s military had rescued more than 600 women and girls from a Boko Haram stronghold in the Sambisa Forest, the Associated Press reports. Many of them have become residents of displacement camps.

The United Nations Population Fund said May 6 that over 200 women and girls in displacement camps in Nigeria’s Borno State are pregnant, though the agency did not know how many of them are former abductees.

Nigeria’s Catholic bishops voiced their prayers for the pregnant women and urged them “to take solace and draw encouragement from the comfort that God has a purpose in their motherhood role for the innocent babies they now carry in their wombs.” They encouraged the women to “show maternal love for the Nigerian children they now bear.”

The bishops advocated the establishment of crisis pregnancy centers to help these pregnant women and other Nigerians.

“The children rescued from terror and abortion would be presented for adoption to the many generous Nigerians willing to accept abandoned, rejected or motherless and fatherless babies into their families,” they said.

The bishops lamented that some individuals and groups are proposing “mass abortions” for the pregnant women, saying this would mean “repaying violence with even more vicious violence.”

They rejected the suggestion that “killing the babies conceived through rape by the terrorist is the most humane action to take.” The babies are “innocent of the crimes” against their mothers and it is wrong to punish them for their fathers’ sins and offenses.

“How can we accept to visit capital punishment (death sentence by abortion) on young Nigerians simply because their fathers were misguided religious and ideological bigots? God forbid!” the bishops said.

Bishop Anselm Umoren, an auxiliary of the Diocese of Abuja who chairs the Nigerian bishops’ Health Committee, authored the May 25 statement on behalf of the Catholic Bishops Conference of Nigeria.

Since Boko Haram began its insurgency in 2009, over 15,000 people have been killed and 1.5 million people have fled their homes. Since 2014, the group has kidnapped more than 2,000 women and girls, including a notorious raid on a secondary school in Chibok that abducted 276 girls. Of these girls, 219 remain unaccounted for.

Some Boko Haram captives are forcibly converted to the group’s strict version of Islam.

The effects of Boko Haram on the Catholic population have been evaluated in a situation report on the northeastern Nigerian Diocese of Maiduguri, where more than 5,000 Catholics there have been killed and another 100,000 displaced. Another 350 churches have been destroyed. About 7,000 Catholic women have been widowed and 10,000 children have been orphaned, according to Aid to the Church in Need’s account of the report.

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WORLD NEWS

As conflict rages on, Ukrainian troops make a pilgrimage for peace

by Elise Harris (CNA/EWTN News) • May 29, 2015

Prayer candle at a Military Chaplaincy in the Ukraine. (Aid to the Church in Need)

Lourdes, France — Members of the Ukrainian army recently traveled to Lourdes, France for an international military pilgrimage aimed at promoting peace – something the whole country is said to be praying for.

To come to the shrine with soldiers actively fighting in conflict zones “is very important to us because like this we feel very supported by the whole world,” Father Ivan Yavorskyy told CNA May 16.

“We also want to show the world that we have a war in the Ukraine in this moment. We are here to pray for peace in Ukraine.”

A military chaplain for the Ukrainian Greek-Catholic Church, Fr. Yavorskyy accompanied 17 Ukrainian soldiers on the annual International Military Pilgrimage to Lourdes, which was established in 1946 in order to pray for global peace, healing and reconciliation after World War II.

The pilgrimage, which each year gathers military personnel from 35 nations in Lourdes in May, took place May 12-18. Thousands of international soldiers were present representing the military branches of their respective countries.

Originally from Kiev, Fr. Yavorskyy was joined by 17 active members of the Ukrainian army, a Greek-Catholic bishop and one other military chaplain.

Most of those who came have been involved in the military operations currently taking place in eastern Ukraine, he said, adding that “many of them were blessed” by their time at renowned Marian shrine.

Conflict erupted in Ukraine last year in February when the country’s former president was ousted following months of violent protest, and a new government appointed. In March, Ukraine’s eastern peninsula of Crimea was annexed by Russia and pro-Russian separatist rebels have since taken control of eastern portions of Ukraine, around Donetsk and Luhansk.

It is estimated that nearly 6,000 people have died in the conflict in eastern Ukraine. Rebels have been supported by both Russian arms and troops, according to both Ukraine and Western nations.

The ongoing crisis in Ukraine was among the topics covered by Pope Francis and German Chancellor Angela Merkel in their Feb. 21 meeting at the Vatican.

Merkel helped to negotiate the latest cease-fire agreement between Ukrainian government forces and Pro-Russian separatists, hoping to ease the conflict that many have said has resulted in a humanitarian crisis.

The ceasefire officially began at midnight Feb. 15, and called for all sides to pull back heavy weapons. It was also expected that a de-militarized zone be created between the Ukrainian government and separatist forces, who will both pull back to new positions.

All prisoners were to be released, and foreign weapons and troops withdrawn. Constitutional reform was expected to enable decentralization in the eastern portions of Ukraine by 2016.

However, despite the agreement of a ceasefire and the slight fall in violence since it was reached, shelling in the eastern region of the country has continued, and the number of casualties has continued to rise.

Although many citizens from the towns and villages nearest the fighting have fled, Fr. Yavorskyy said the Church continues to support all those who are affected by the conflict.

“The Church is still in the zone of the conflict, and they support people there. They did not leave the territory but they are there to support people and to give help,” he said.

In his role as a military chaplain the most important thing he can do “is to be near to the soldiers, to support them all the time, to be behind them in the conflict territory and to give every support that we can give.”

Fr. Yavorskyy said that all 20 people who came on the pilgrimage are joined by their entire country in praying for a peaceful resolution to the conflict.

“It was a goal to come here and to be near to the Virgin to pray for Ukraine and to have peace faster in Ukraine.”

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WORLD NEWS

In Pakistan, dozens face murder charges for lynching of Christian couple

by CNA/EWTN News • May 29, 2015

The site where a young Christian couple were lynched at a brick factory in Pakistan’s Punjab province in November 2014. (Legal Evangelical Association Development)

Lahore, Pakistan — In Pakistan’s Punjab province, 106 people have been charged with the November 2014 murder of a Christian couple, who were attacked by a lynch mob and burned alive after being accused of blasphemy.

Pakistan’s anti-terrorism court charged that three Muslim clerics were involved in persistent provocative speech against the couple, while local media reported the clerics stirred up over 400 people against Shahzad Masih and his wife Shama, who was pregnant with the couple’s fourth child.

The Christian couple were killed and their bodies burned by a mob after they were accused of desecrating the Quran. The couple lived in Kot Radha Kishan, a city located nearly 40 miles southwest of Lahore.

Another 32 alleged participants in the lynching are still at large, BBC News reports.

A peaceful joint Christian-Muslim protest was held in Lahore to protest the crime. Local Christian and Muslim leaders also met with the governor of Punjab about the case.

Before the married couple were killed on Nov. 4, angry villagers reportedly told them to convert to Islam to make amends for their alleged crime.

The couple worked at a brick kiln, and it has been reported that the kiln owner noticed Shama burning some belongings of her recently-deceased father-in-law, and charged that some pages she burnt were from the Quran – he then detained them. They owed him money, and he refused to release them without being paid.

It was then announced from local mosques that the couple had desecrated the Quran, and a mob forced their way into the room where the Masihs were held, and beat them with bricks and shovels. Reports vary as to whether or not the couple’s bodies were thrown into the kiln before or after their deaths.

Pakistan’s state religion is Islam, and around 97 percent of the population is Muslim. The nation has adopted blasphemy laws which impose strict punishment on those who desecrate the Quran or who defame or insult Muhammad.

The blasphemy laws are said to be often used to settle scores or to persecute religious minorities; while non-Muslims constitute only 3 percent of the Pakistani population, 14 percent of blasphemy cases have been levied against them.

Many of those accused of blasphemy are murdered, and advocates of changing the law are also targeted by violence.

In 2011 the Punjab governor Salmaan Taseer, a Muslim critic of the blasphemy laws, was assassinated. Shahbaz Bhatti, a Catholic and the only Christian in Pakistan’s cabinet, was also assassinated the same year by militant supporters of the blasphemy laws.

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U.S. NEWS

Rabbi: Vatican II’s interreligious document was ‘life-saving’

by Matt Hadro (CNA/EWTN News) • May 22, 2015

(Grey World via Flickr CC BY 2.0)

Washington, D.C. — A 50-year-old declaration of the Second Vatican Council established a new era in Christian-Jewish relations and enabled members of both religions to unite against present-day secularism, Cardinal Timothy Dolan of New York reflected on Wednesday.

Nostra aetate, the council’s declaration on the relation of the Church to non-Christian religions, acknowledged what is true and holy in other religions, particularly Judaism, and began a period of dialogue with them.

The declaration “has borne much fruit,” remarked Cardinal Dolan May 20, at a conference celebrating the 50th anniversary of the document held at the Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C.

The declaration enabled dialogue between Christian and Jewish leaders, which spurred St. John Paul II to lead a joint response to atheism and secularism.

The shortest of Vatican II’s documents, Nostra aetate was widely approved by the Council’s fathers (2,221 to 88), though it met with sharp opposition from some Catholic circles for its perceived indifferentism.

Despite this, it marked a turning point in the Church’s relationships with other religions, and Jewish leaders are still marveling 50 years later at the positive effects it has produced.

It was “nothing short of a life-saving document,” Rabbi Noram Morans, director of interreligious relations for the American Jewish Committee, told the conference in response to Cardinal Dolan’s address. Prior to the declaration there existed a centuries-old tension between Catholics and Jews, marked by harrassment and violence of Jews for alleged deicide and scorn for them not recogizing Jesus as the Messiah.

The welcoming tone of Nostra aetate was well received by the Jewish community, as they were now seen as the “elder brothers” to the Christians, remarked Morans.

The document was only the first step toward improving Catholic-Jewish relations, noted both Cardinal Dolan and Morans. Leaders of both religions had to put it into practice and they did exactly that. The U.S. bishops conference played a “singular role” in strengthening the relationship after Vatican II, Morans said.

The relationship has “never been stronger,” remarked Cardinal Dolan, adding it “has been remarkably successful” in the United States.

It carries an immense importance with it today as Christians and Jews unite to discuss the most pressing problems for both religions. Chief among these problems is secularism, especially among the youth, Cardinal Dolan insisted.

The “most obvious imperative,” he said, is “to reclaim the primacy of God in a world that prefers not to take him seriously, to ignore him, or even to deny him,” Cardinal Dolan said. St. John Paul II put this fight against secularism at the core of the Church’s post-Vatican II relationship with the Jews because he saw secularism as the chief enemy of the Church, and the Jews among her greatest allies, the cardinal added.

Both devout Jews and Christians acknowledge they world they live in is “simply irreligious,” Cardinal Dolan said, quoting Bl. John Henry Newman.

What hasn’t helped is the many Christians who ignore talk of sin and redemption, he said, which columnist David Brooks has pointed out in his recent work. Churches preach that everyone is “okay” without acknowledging the need for a savior and redeemer, so attendees begin to look at other ecclesial communities, particularly evangelial megachurches, that preach the need for repentance and salvation.

If people only attended church to make friends, they would have an easier time doing it at a coffee shop or a bowling alley, Cardinal Dolan added.

Both Catholics and Jews can preach the “Biblical reality that popular soothing spiritually would rather have us forget, namely sin and redemption,” Cardinal Dolan said.

“They must proclaim ‘I am flawed’,” he continued. “That is our forte. That’s the Jewish and Christian vocabulary. That’s what the prophets and the saints proclaimed.”

Other problems that both religons face are an abandonment of faith by young members once they become adults or teenagers. Cardinal Dolan related how one rabbi told him that a boy’s bar mitzvah would be the last time he would attend synogogue until his son’s bar mitzvah. “We Catholics have that, it’s called the Sacrament of Confirmation,” he recalled jokingly.

The problem is real and serious, he added. “We can hardly ignore their challenge,” he said of the youth leaving the religion of their childhood. “It’s alarm clock time for both of us.”

Another problem that unites the two religions is the international persecution of both Christians and Jews, Morans noted. Christians are the victims of ethnic cleansing by Islamist terrorists in the Middle East and North Africa, and anti-Semitism is making an ugly resurgence in Europe.

These threats demand “mutual admiration and support,” he added.

The two religions have found much common ground, particularly through “mutual theological study” and a new candor between leaders over controversies that have arisen since the document. Arguments that previously tore the two faiths apart now strengthen the relations like arguments between members of a family, Cardinal Dolan remarked.

Tensions do exist. Among them, from the Jewish perspective, are the Vatican’s official recognition of the state of Palestine, and the role of Venerable Pius XII in the Second World War, Morans suggested.

However, “we have come a long way in 50 years,” he admitted, and there is “too much at stake” for these tensions to divide Christians and Jews.

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U.S. NEWS

Denver’s Archbishop Aquila restores sacraments to original order

by CNA/EWTN News • May 23, 2015

(Lauren Cater/CNA)

Denver, CO — In an unprecedented change for an archdiocese, Archbishop Samuel J. Aquila of Denver announced that the Sacraments of Initiation – Baptism, Confirmation and First Communion – will be restored to their original order.

“In an increasingly secular world, the reality is this: the souls of our children are the battleground. As the shepherd of the Archdiocese of Denver, I must do everything I can to help those who form children win that battle,” he explained in his pastoral letter “Saints Among Us” released May 23.

“The world needs saints. Even as our society becomes more distant from faith and more forgetful of God, it still hungers for joyful witnesses who have been transformed by Christ,” he explained. “At the same time, new generations of Catholics need grace to sustain them in a non-Christian environment.”

In response to those needs, Archbishop Aquila said he’s chosen to restore the sacraments to the original order.

While the majority of dioceses and archdioceses have children baptized in infancy, receive the First Communion in first or second grade and Confirmation sometime in middle or high school, the original order placed Confirmation and First Communion in the same ceremony.

“This will make available every sacramental grace the Church has to offer to children who have reached the age of reason,” he explained.

When he made the change in his then-Diocese of Fargo in 2002, he said he was convinced by the “theological and pastoral reasons” that it was the right decision, but the feedback from parents after it was implemented further confirmed the change.

In his pastoral letter, Archbishop Aquila detailed a five year plan that will help parishes in Northern Colorado implement the changes by 2020.

It is his hope that after the change, Confirmation will no longer be the “sacrament of farewell” and Pope Francis regretfully called it, but rather “a profound encounter with each person of the Holy Trinity.”

As a result of the change, youth groups will need to adapt from sacramental preparation to “building community, fostering deeper relationships with each person of the Holy Trinity, and preparing them to be witnesses to the poor, those in need, and those who do not know Jesus Christ.”

This model, which is based on Jesus’ preparation of the Twelve Apostles, is already present in many parishes of the Archdiocese and is “bearing great fruits.”

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U.S. NEWS

D.C. Cardinal: Christ didn’t change his words, and neither should the Church

by Matt Hadro (CNA/EWTN News) • May 27, 2015

(Sarah Buckley via Flickr CC BY 2.0)

Washington, D.C. — It is not discrimination for a Catholic to publicly profess his faith, Cardinal Donald Wuerl of Washington insisted Sunday in a pastoral letter on “Being Catholic Today.”

“It has become increasingly acceptable,” he stated, “to disparage as bigoted and mean-spirited anyone who seeks to uphold fundamental truths about the human person that have been recognized throughout history.”

Church teaching is rooted in an “authentic humanism,” he added, and “it is neither discrimination nor an undue imposition on the freedom of others to promote that belief and live by it.”

The letter, published May 24, outlined various challenges facing Catholics in the U.S. who want to practice their faith publicly. The faith must be lived in action because the “missionary activity of the Church is essential to her identity,” he said. This is practiced through Catholic ministries to the poor, immigrants, and children.

These ministries must never be severed from the teachings of Christ, he added. “The Church is not a business, a club, or a special-interest group. Her origins are found in the will and actions of Christ.”

Yet threats loom to the practice of the faith because some wish to impose a secular morality on everyone, including Catholics, he explained. This would include a forced “tolerance” for acts such as abortion or sexual activity that contradicts Church teaching.

As a primary example of this threat, the cardinal cited two Washington, D.C. laws. One, the Reproductive Health Non-Discrimination Amendment Act, mandates that employers, including religious and pro-life organizations, are not free to hire and retain only those employees who do not publicly contradict their mission.

The other law, the Human Rights Amendment Act, forces religious schools to “endorse, fund, or provide other assistance for the promotion of sexual conduct contrary to their faith and moral beliefs,” he stated.

In both cases, Catholic institutions that live their faith by serving the poor are being forced to violate Church teaching. The Washington archdiocese led an effort to oppose the laws, which were passed the city council and signed by the mayor in January.

An effort to disapprove of the laws passed the House but not the Senate, ultimately failing to stop the laws from going into full effect. Catholic and pro-life organizations in the city now might fight the laws in court if a discrimination lawsuit is brought against them.

Cardinal Wuerl listed other threats to religious liberty, such as demands that Catholic teachers be able to contradict Church teaching in their words and actions.

This battle is being waged in San Francisco by opponents of Archbishop Salvatore Cordileone’s move to clarify Church teaching in employee handbooks for diocesan teachers. This included statements of Church teaching on sexual ethics and assisted reproductive technology.

A campaign against the Archbishop’s action was launched, including a public letter from Bay Area Catholics to Pope Francis to remove Archbishop Cordileone.

“Some now wrongly claim it is discrimination for the Church to insist that those who teach in Catholic schools present Catholic teaching in word and in witness,” Cardinal Wuerl stated.

“As Catholics, who we are cannot be separated from how we live. Jesus taught us to feed the hungry, shelter the homeless, and care for the sick and those in need, and the Catholic Church’s history of educating and serving the poor is long and wellknown.”

Catholics can show love to everyone, without approving of sin, he explained.

“We can embrace someone who has had an abortion. But we cannot proclaim that the killing of a child in the womb is good. For someone to insist that we do so under the guise of avoiding ‘discrimination’ is unjust.”

Rather than an objective judgement of an action, “discrimination” is actually something very different, and something the Church has abhorred through the ages.

“In an age when the prevailing society treated some people like property, the first Christians saw slaves and nobles as brothers and sisters in Christ,” Cardinal Wuerl wrote. In modern times, Catholics helped the civil rights movement obtain equal rights for Americans of all races, he added.

“Prejudice and discrimination are wrong because they divide the human family, violate fundamental human dignity and are contrary to the truth and charity to which we are all called,” he continued.

Yet although the Church embraces all sinners, it cannot approve of sin, he added. “Jesus did not change his message just because some who heard it felt it was a ‘hard saying’.”

“No one should be surprised that the Church continues to be faithful to Jesus’ Gospel – his teaching,” he added. “After all, it is his message, his Church. We are not free to change either.”

The Church is not imposing its will on everyone, he added, but rather seeks the freedom for Catholics to practice their faith publicly.

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U.S. NEWS

Bishop Conley asks for prayers as Nebraska legislators vote on death penalty

by Carl Bunderson (CNA/EWTN News) • May 27, 2015

Bishop James Conley of Lincoln gives Confirmation to a prisoner during a Mass said at the Nebraska State Penitentiary, March 31, 2015. (Southern Nebraska Register)

Lincoln, NE — Updated at 4:04 p.m. Nebraska’s Catholic bishops commended the state legislature on the vote, adding: “We recognize many men and women of good will on both sides of this debate. May all Nebraskans continue working together for peace, justice, safety, and the common good. We encourage all people to pray for our civic leaders, for police officers and first responders, for the victims of violent crimes and their families, and for the incarcerated. May the peace of Jesus Christ reign in our hearts, our communities, and in our state.”

Updated at 3:36 p.m. The Nebraska Legislature overrode the governor’s veto by a 30 to 19 vote earlier this afternoon, abolishing the death penalty in the state.

As the Nebraska Legislature considers overriding the state governor’s veto of a bill that would repeal the death penalty, the Bishop of Lincoln has requested a prayerful response to the situation.

“The Church teaches that the death penalty is permissible in certain circumstances, especially when it is required for public safety. We do not believe that the death penalty is necessary in Nebraska, and we hope it will be repealed here,” Bishop Conley told CNA May 27.

“We’ll be praying that the Legislature overturns the veto, and we hope that others will do the same.”

The bishop continued, saying, “We also have real compassion for the victims of violent crimes, and for their families. We pray especially for them. But we do not believe that the death penalty brings healing. Jesus Christ brings comfort to those who mourn, and hope to those who grieve. Above all, we need to work together to proclaim Christ to every single human heart.”

On May 26, Governor Pete Ricketts (R) vetoed the bill, which would replace capital punishment with life in prison without parole.

“Nebraska’s Catholic bishops disagree with Governor Ricketts’ decision. We remain convinced that the death penalty does not deter crime, nor does it make Nebraska safer or promote the common good in our state,” the state’s three bishops stated.

“We encourage Catholics to contact their state legislators, encouraging them to vote to override the Governor’s veto.”

The bill was passed 32-15 by Nebraska’s unicameral legislature May 20. Thirty votes are needed to override Ricketts’ veto.

The legislature is scheduled to begin debate on the override vote today at 1:30 p.m. Central.

“We got 32 votes to end the death penalty and if they follow their conscience, we should have no trouble with an override,” Senator Ernie Chambers, sponsor of the bill, told the Los Angeles Times.

Senator Jerry Johnson of Wahoo voted in favor of the bill throughout three rounds of voting, but said Tuesday he would support the veto after being pressured by pro-death penalty constituents, according to the Omaha World-Herald.

Chambers told the New York Times: “I expect those people who voted for the bill three times, during the three stages of debate, I would expect them to do the same thing. But you never know. We’ll just see how it turns out.”

Senators John Murante of Gretna and Robert Hilkemann of Omaha “said they remain undecided on how they will vote on the override,” the Omaha World-Herald reported.

Nebraska legislators opposed to the death penalty have voiced various objections, including religious reasons, the cost to taxpayers of executions and legal appeals, and whether government can be trusted to administer the death penalty.

Nebraska’s bishops have collectively made the judgement that the state’s circumstances do not require the death penalty to protect public safety; their support for the bill, they have said, “reflects the teaching of our faith and our prudential judgment that the death penalty cannot be justified in Nebraska at this time.”

After vetoing the bill, Ricketts called the issue “a matter of public safety” and said a vote “to repeal the death penalty … sends the message to criminals that Nebraska will be soft on crime.”

The last U.S. state to end the death penalty was Connecticut, doing so in 2013. Capital punishment is barred in 18 states, as well as the District of Columbia.

Nebraska last executed a prisoner in 1997, and there are currently 10 men on death row in the state.

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U.S. NEWS

Documentary follows JPII’s footprints across the Western Hemisphere

by CNA/EWTN News • May 27, 2015

Pope John Paul II visits the United Nations. (Milton Grant/United Nations)

New Haven, CN — During his time as Pope, Saint John Paul II visited the American continent 22 times, traveling everywhere from Boston to Bolivia in an effort to unite the Western Hemisphere in faith.

The Polish Pope’s American endeavors are now being featured in a new documentary with rare footage of his trips to North and South America, highlighting how his presence played a weighty role in shaping their modern day history.

The film was produced by the Knights of Columbus.

“John Paul II brought a great renewal of confidence, excitement and joy to Christian life that was manifested in such events as the canonization of St. Juan Diego in Mexico City and the World Youth Days in Buenos Aires, Denver and Toronto,” stated Supreme Knight Carl Anderson in a press release.

“He also issued a renewed call for human dignity, the gospel of life, respect for indigenous people, and a commitment to the poor throughout Latin America and North America,” Anderson continued.

In light of John Paul II’s impact on North and South America, EWTN Global Catholic Network partnered with various PBS stations to bring the life of John Paul II to television screens across the U.S.

The documentary, “John Paul II in America: Uniting a Continent,” debuted on PBS April 3, to honor the 10-year anniversary of the Pope’s death. EWTN and CatholicTV of Boston aired the show later in April across the United States.

Honing in on John Paul II’s imprint on the American continents, the documentary travels from Argentina to Alaska, following the late Holy Father’s steps around the Western Hemisphere. The footage exemplifies how the beloved Pope touched a whole generation of Catholics, drawing monumental crowds in America and gaining admiration from the youth.

The documentary also probes into the phenomenon of the “JPII generation” and how John Paul II, asking the intercession of Our Lady of Guadalupe, inspired the entire world with his dedication to the gospel of life.

The Pope’s relationship with both North and South America are analyzed throughout the film by Catholic thinkers such as George Weigel and former Vatican spokesman Joaquin Navarro-Valls. Cardinal Sean P. O’Malley of Boston and Supreme Knight Carl A. Anderson are also featured in the documentary.

Cuban-American actor and director Andy Garcia narrates throughout the film.

For more information about the film, including broadcast times and the DVD release, visit kofc.org/jpiifilm.

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What does four decades as a priest look like? One bishop shares his story

by Hillary Mast (CNA/EWTN News) • May 28, 2015

Bishop David Kagan on May 20 at the Cathedral of the Holy Spirit, Bismarck. (Deacon Joe Krupinsky)

Bismarck, N.D. — On his 40th anniversary as a priest, Bishop David Kagan of Bismarck says he has a deeper understanding of his own vocation than when he was first ordained.

“My vocation is who I am and it is not just what I do at times. I think I understand much better now that I am a priest forever,” he told CNA in a recent interview. “This is a tremendous grace which gives me much consolation every day, but it is the daily challenge to me to be who I have been called to be in every way.”

His comments came after priests from the Diocese of Bismarck gathered along with loved ones on May 20 to mark jubilee anniversaries ranging from 10 to 60 years with Mass at the Cathedral of the Holy Spirit.

For Bishop Kagan, the strongest memory in 40 years of priesthood remains his ordination day in 1975, which came with an “exhortation to become what I celebrate at the altar of God.”

“I don’t think I am there yet, but by God’s mercy and grace I keep trying,” he added.

He says the best part of being a priest “has always been celebrating our Church’s liturgies, especially the liturgies of the Most Holy Eucharist and Reconciliation.”

Having served as Bishop of Bismarck since 2011, he said his favorite part of that role is two-fold: ordaining priests and administering the Sacrament of Confirmation.

“These give me such great hope and my own faith is always renewed at these times.”

In the time since his ordination, he’s seen many changes in the Church but “perhaps the most dramatic” was the introduction of face-to-face confession and the wide availability of the Code of Canon Law and the Catechism to the laity. Even now, he says he is “seeing and experiencing the good fruits of these changes.”

For the young men preparing for the priesthood in the seminaries, Bishop Kagan advised them not to “second guess God’s choice of you” but to “(h)umbly accept it and enter completely into priestly formation.”

“It does not end with Ordination, your priestly formation goes with you into the priesthood. Enjoy it now and keep it fresh and vital as it will stand you in good stead as a priest,” he said.

Fr. John Paul Gardner, a priest celebrating his 10th anniversary in the diocese, had similar advice for seminarians.

Echoing Bishop Kagan, Fr. Gardner encouraged them to “spend every single day praying for the grace necessary to fulfill the call of Christ” and to ask the Blessed Mother for her help.

“If we hesitate in that, (that’s where) the devil is lurking,” he warned, “and that’s where scandal’s going to occur, so it’s really essential to say ‘yes’ to Jesus wholeheartedly.”

Born nine months after John Paul II’s election and ordained just two months after the pope’s death, Fr. Gardner said the saint has always been “one of my heroes.” The strongest memory he has as a priest is being in St. Peter’s Square when his namesake was declared a saint April 27, 2014.

“Ever since I was a little kid I wanted to be like him,” Fr. Gardner said, “so just to be there when there were so many people – that was a pretty big highlight of my life.”

One thing Fr. Gardner has learned in his time as a priest is just how indispensable the family is in the life of the Church. The committed love of a husband and wife and their children is “so essential,” he reflected.

“If there’s no family, it’s so difficult, I would say maybe impossible in my experience, for the Church to exist,” he said. “Families are the Church.”

Fr. Gardner said his parents’ example in raising their nine children helped him discover his vocation to the priesthood.

“I had a mom and a dad who worked through all their difficulties with prayer, with a sense of humor. All of us kids in some way – in some deep way – benefitted from that,” he said.

Like Bishop Kagan, Fr. Gardner said “by far” his favorite part of being a priest is the privilege of celebrating the Holy Mass.

“Raising the host and chalice to the Heavenly Father, offering him our Lord Jesus in union with the Holy Spirit – there’s no doubt that’s what I live and breathe for.”

The other priests celebrating special anniversaries in the diocese were Monsignor Gerald Walsh (60 years); Fr. Stephen Kranz (60 years); Fr. John Pfiefer (50 years); Fr. George Pruys (40 years); Fr. John Gurthie (25 years); Fr. Johnson Kuriappilly (25 years); Fr. Boniface Muggli (25 years); Fr. Manuel Silva Cely (10 years); and Fr. Paul Eberle (10 years).

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Obama’s immigration order stalls. For 5 million immigrants, now what?

by Matt Hadro (CNA/EWTN News) • May 28, 2015

(Peter Kirkeskov Rasmussen via Flickr CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)

Washington, D.C. — As the Obama administration’s massive immigration order met a roadblock in federal court, Catholic immigration advocates are unhappy but are helping undocumented immigrants any way they can.

“Obviously, we’re extremely disappointed,” Jeanne Atkinson of the Catholic Legal Immigration Network told CNA in response.

CLINIC was founded by the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, and serves dioceses throughout the country in a legal capacity on immigration. It advocates for policies like legal status for undocumented immigrants and family reunification.

“Every day” that the program’s implementation is delayed “makes a difference” for parents, children, and siblings of lawful residents, she added, “many of who have been here for many, many years.”

On May 26, the U.S. Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals refused to stay an injunction against President Obama’s massive executive action from November, the Deferred Action for Parents of Americans program. It would have delayed deportation for up to five million undocumented immigrants in the U.S.

An expansion of the president’s previous executive action on immigration, the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, DAPA would have law enforcement effectively delay by three years the deportation of undocumented immigrants who met certain conditions.

Among the primary conditions for DAPA eligibility were parents who entered the U.S. illegally but had children who were born in the U.S. who were also citizens or lawful permanent residents. In addition, the parents had to have resided in the U.S. for at least five years, passed a criminal background check, and agreed to pay taxes.

Twenty-six states had asked the courts for injunctive relief against having to roll out the program. In February, a district court judge in Brownsville, Tex. granted the state an injunction from implementing DAPA, ruling that the state made a sufficient case that the administration may have violated the Administrative Procedure Act.

The Obama administration then asked the U.S. Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals for a stay on the injunction, but were denied.

Although the federal court decision was a blow to the president’s immigration policy, the impact might only be temporary felt with the merits of the case still to be decided.

The administration’s official memorandum had established priorities for deportation of the undocumented, the highest including felons, terror suspects or terrorists, “criminal street gang” members, and those apprehended at the border or at ports.

The next highest priority for deportation were the undocumented convicted of three or more misdemeanors or a “significant misdemeanor” like selling drugs, driving under the influence, sexual assault, or burglary. The memorandum made it clear that the lower priority undocumented not be sought after for deportation while higher priority cases existed.

Although unhappy with the delay of the program, CLINIC is still working to help educate undocumented immigrants that the program was only a partial fix and there may be other means for them to “protect yourself from being taken advantage of.”

“We’re trying to make sure what the immigrant community understands what this means,” Atkinson said.

Although legal precedent for the president’s executive action probably exists, immigration reform ultimately must be bipartisan and not a unilateral action, argued Alfonso Aguilar, head of the Latino Partnership at the American Principles Project.

The president took a “risk” with the program because “nothing like this has ever been done before,” Aguilar said. Because it has been challenged “effectively” in federal court and opposed by so many states, the executive action has made passing comprehensive immigration reform harder than before.

“I understand the frustration,” he said of President Obama’s criticism of the inaction of Congress on the issue, but “I think he could have waited,” Aguilar said. He thinks political capital does exist for Congress to pass immigration bills, but Republicans want it done “piecemeal” and not through a massive comprehensive bill.

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Rick Santorum, Catholic and Republican, to run for U.S. president

by CNA/EWTN News • May 28, 2015

Rick Santorum. (Gage Skidmore via Flickr CC BY-SA 2.0)

Pittsburgh, PA — Second-time presidential candidate Rick Santorum announced his campaign for the U.S. presidency on Wednesday, standing behind his goals to shrink the government, heal the middle class, and focus on social issues, while honing in on his image as a “blue collar conservative.”

“I am proud to stand here among you and for you, the American workers who have sacrificed so much, to announce that I am running for president of the United States,” Santorum stated May 27 in his home state of Pennsylvania.

Santorum will try to appeal to Catholic voters in the 2016 race, although he is among two other Republican contenders with a Catholic affiliation - Jeb Bush, a convert from Episcopalianism, and Marco Rubio.

Santorum’s 2012 campaign for president bolstered his transparency on faith, revealing his belief that God and the importance of religion are pivotal in American democracy. The former U.S. Senator has made it clear over the years that he is devoted to his faith, and that the Church has helped shape some of his political stances.

“I am proud of being Catholic. I’m proud of the teachings of the Church,” Santorum told CNA in 2011, upholding the belief that faith and reason go hand in hand.

“When the reason is right and the faith is true, they end up in the same place,” Santorum continued.

The New York Times called Santorum the “boldest candidate in the race” because of his stance opposing abortion and same-sex marriage, making him stand apart from what could be a dozen republican runners.

During his two terms as a U.S. Senator, Santorum worked resolutely to ban partial-birth abortion and continues to oppose the practice. He also told CNA that the “faith teaches very clearly that life is life at the moment of conception.”

Santorum also defended religious-based organizations and helped them receive more assistance during his time as a senator in the 1996 welfare overhaul. He has also spoken out against homosexual acts and supports marriage between one man and one woman, publicly supporting the Defense of Marriage Act of 1996.

Although Santorum admitted on NBC earlier in the year that he had spoken rashly about some sensitive issues during his 2012 campaign, but he is still resolved to speak openly about the importance of family and traditional values.

The former senator, age 57, joins an already crowded race, but his history of winning 11 states against Mitt Romney in the 2012 Republican primaries could prove helpful in the continuously brimming bids.

Although recent polls place him 10th among his fellow Republicans, Santorum will work to make his way towards the early debates in August, pushing his themes of restoring traditional American values and defence against the country’s enemies.

Santorum spoke boldly this week about the impending threat of radical Islam, saying he has been dubbed as an enemy by the Islamic State in one of their English-language magazines. Nevertheless, Santorum believes America should be wary of the brewing storm that extremist Islam may pose.

Other candidates for the Republican nomination include former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee, Texas senator Ted Cruz, and Ben Carson, a retired surgeon.

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Jail time over eagle feathers? One Native American’s religious freedom fight

by Matt Hadro (CNA/EWTN News) • May 29, 2015

Bald eagle feathers. (Leo Reynolds via Flickr CC BY-NA-SA 2.0)

Washington, D.C. — A Native American tribe leader has been threatened with time in prison for his religious use of eagle feathers, and his case is currently before federal court.

“This is a particularly egregious case where the federal government sent an undercover agent into a core religious ceremony, confiscated religious property, and criminally prosecuted people simply for practicing their religion,” stated Luke Goodrich, deputy general counsel for the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, representing the leader Pastor Soto.

Pastor Soto is a religious leader in Texas’ Liban Apache tribe, recognized as a Native American tribe at the state level but not the federal level. He uses eagle feathers in religious rituals, but eagles are protected by federal law and the religious group is not recognized at the federal level.

Undercover federal agents invaded his ceremony in 2006, confiscated the feathers, and threatened him with up to 15 years in prison and a $250,000 fine.

The operation was “violating the circle which we consider sacred,” Pastor Soto said in a video circulated by the Becket Fund. “I think if I remember anything of that day was the children running around, and some were crying and some were trying to hide.”

“It was violating everything we were as native people,” he said.

Eagles are protected by federal law and thus their feathers generally cannot be used or sold. However, many Native Americans give religious and cultural significance to eagles and “federally recognized” tribes can apply for a permit to use feathers that are stored in the National Eagle Repository for religious purposes.

Official Native American tribes can apply to use as many feathers as they want, Goodrich said. The burden to become officially recognized is a “byzantine application process” where a tribe must prove that it has sustained its communal and cultural identity throughout the years.

This is hard to do when the U.S. government had quelled various native practices in the past through “forced assimilation,” Goodrich explained.

“Nobody doubts that this is a real tribe,” he added. The Liban Apaches have made treaties in the past with Mexico and the Republic of Texas, he said.

Pastor Soto recently won his case at the Fifth Circuit Court level and got the feathers back. The Department of Justice wants the case dismissed, but Becket Fund says it isn’t over as once Pastor Soto dies the feathers will go back to the federal government instead of staying within his family and the tribe.

They want the religious exception for use of eagle feathers to apply not just to officially-recognized Native American tribes.

On Wednesday, a federal district court judge ruled against both parties. No one in the tribe but Pastor Soto can use the feathers, but the case is still open regarding the wildlife law’s application to Native American tribes.

The Becket Fund will file an injunction for summary judgment in the case, where the judge could rule in their favor without a trial by the end of 2015. If this movement is refused then the case will move to a trial in 2016.

The case is very important for religious liberty of all Americans, not just Native Americans, the Becket Fund argued. If the federal government can raid a religious ceremony and confiscate materials considered sacred by the aggrieved party, what can’t it do, asked Goodrich.

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Does an Illinois bill threaten doctors’ conscience rights? Depends on whom you ask

by Matt Hadro (CNA/EWTN News) • May 29, 2015

(Alex Proimos via Flickr CC BY-NC 2.0)

Springfield, IL — An Illinois bill that some say threatens the conscience rights of medical providers is currently under consideration in the state’s general assembly.

Catholics and pro-lifers are divided among themselves over the implications of SB 1564 for the conscience rights of medical providers.

While the state’s Catholic Conference is neutral on the bill, the Christian legal group Alliance Defending Freedom states that it “would force medical facilities and physicians who conscientiously object to involvement in abortions (and other procedures) to refer for, make arrangements for someone else to perform, or arrange referral information that lists willing providers, for abortions.”

The Health Care Right of Conscience Act would affect all medical providers in the state, including Catholic hospitals and pro-life pregnancy centers. Originally, it was invoked in court to uphold the rights of pharmacists not to sell birth control to which they morally object.

However, a recent push by the state’s ACLU to “reform” the bill resulted in an amended version staunchly opposed by the state’s Catholic Conference. That version clearly mandated that all medical providers who, out of conscience, will not perform services – such as abortion and sterilization – must refer patients to other providers of that service.

This “could constitute a direct material cooperation with the objected to service,” the conference stated at the time.

Then, in an April 16 statement, the conference claimed to have reached a compromise with lawmakers: that the law does not require medical providers to refer for abortions, but instead maintains the status quo for medical providers – they could give a list of providers in the area where “maybe” one could provide what the patient was looking for.

According to the National Catholic Register, while neither pro-life groups nor the Illinois bishops’ conference “likes the bill … the Catholic Conference of Illinois has declared its neutrality as a consequence of negotiations that brought about changes it believes are acceptable but that pro-life groups say are insufficient.”

Catholic ethicists and hospital lawyers participated in the compromise, the conference said, shortly before the bill passed the state senate.

The National Catholic Register reported that a spokesman for the Illinois Catholic Conference “explained that they would rather see no changes to the existing law but had to make the best of the political reality” in the state.

“What we did is negotiate the bill to a point where our ethicists and lawyers said, ‘This is acceptable … [and] reflects what is in Catholic health care now,” the spokesman said.

However, heads of the Catholic Medical Association Illinois Guilds are not convinced that the bill establishes sufficient conscience protections for physicians. In a May 10 statement they expressed grave concern that the bill “violates the sacred life-affirming calling of medical practitioners by forcing them to provide information to aid killing.”

According to their statement, language in the bill still mandates that providers give information of places they are reasonably sure provides the service to which they object in conscience.

The bill passed the Illinois state senate but has not yet passed the general assembly, which could vote on it soon.

Lawmakers are hesitant to support a bill that opponents say takes away their right to choose a pro-life physician, said Matthew Bowman, senior counsel at Alliance Defending Freedom. The legal group plans to fight the bill if it is signed into law.

“This is an attack on women’s choice,” Bowman told CNA, because women will no longer be able to have a pro-life doctor in the state who objects in good conscience to having to refer for abortions.

In a fact sheet on the bill, the ACLU says that providers must give “either a referral or transfer, or written information about where the patient may be able to get the treatment they need.”

Both Americans United for Life and Robert George, a professor of jurisprudence at Princeton, have voiced objection to the bill.

So why are some pro-lifers opposing the bill, while others find it acceptable, though not ideal? Is the devil in the details?

The National Catholic Bioethics Center has spoken about the issue, though not specifically referring to the bill itself.

A moral distinction must be made between a “referral” and a “transfer of care,” they explained. When a provider refers a patient to another provider for a morally-objectionable service, that is “formal cooperation” with evil, even if the provider does not intend for the patient to receive the service.

“The objector implicitly wills the requestor’s accomplishment of the evil act,” the center explained of formal cooperation with an evil act.

The center gave two examples of formal cooperation: a hospital physician giving a patient a list of gynecologists who prescribe contraceptives, and a Catholic hospital informing a patient of other places “that it knows or believes will perform abortions.”

However, there is a morally licit avenue for Catholic hospitals and physicians threatened by laws like SB 1564, they added.

The provider must make every attempt to dissuade the patient from an evil practice like abortion or sterilization. However, if the patient insists on the action, they are still “an independent moral agent” with free will.

So in such a case the provider can provide them a “transfer of care” to another provider that the patient wants, “without stating where the patient might go to receive the immoral procedure or otherwise directing the patient to it.”

The provider can, in good conscience, even provide a list of medical providers in the area, without specifying whether or not they offer the morally-objectionable practice the patient wants – but the list must include providers who do not offer that practice.

The Illinois Catholic Conference believes the bill satisfies moral concerns, as their director of government relations explained to the National Catholic Register. Now providers must only do “what they’ve always done.”

That procedure, under the most recent version of the bill, is to “counsel against the objectionable service, tell the patient what the problems are with it, but if the patient continues to insist on it, to say, ‘Look, we don’t do that here; here is a list of medical providers: Maybe one of them can help you.’”

For pro-life groups who still insist on fighting the bill, they may face a court date if it becomes law.

Regarding their legal recourse, Illinois does have a law similar to the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, Bowman acknowledged, which could be invoked to protect pro-life doctors. Under such a law, the government in infringing upon a person’s religious freedom would have to establish a compelling interest that would justify the substantial burden upon one’s religious practice.

Recently Illinois pharmacists won a years-long case in the state appeals court after they refused to provide customers with contraceptives. Then-Governor Rod Blagojevich had issued a mandate in 2005 that pharmacies fill prescriptions for emergency contraceptives “without delay.”

The pharmacists fought the mandate in court, invoking their First Amendment rights, their rights under the state’s Religious Freedom Restoration Act, and the Health Care Right of Conscience Act.

The ACLU later launched an initiative to “reform” the Right of Conscience Act, stating that “everyone in Illinois has the right to receive health care and information that is not restricted by the religious beliefs of others.”

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‘Tomorrowland’ carefully crafted and highly entertaining

by Carl Kozlowski • May 22, 2015

There has never been a movie studio that has utterly dominated the family marketplace more strongly than Disney right now. Bearing control over not only its own illustrious lineage of famous characters and films, but also of other mega-popular entertainment brands including Pixar, Marvel, “Star Wars” and the Muppets, it seems there is no way the famed conglomerate can do wrong.

That theory is put to the test this weekend with the new movie “Tomorrowland,” produced by Disney and based on the idea of the Tomorrowland section of the Disney theme parks. When this project was announced a couple years back, it seemed like the height of product-placement cynicism – but unlike the morons responsible for utter dreck like 2012’s film “Battleship,” the execs at Disney were smart enough to know the stakes were high and that maintaining their credibility mattered.

As a result, some of the most creative minds in the business were assigned the task of creating an actual story that was entertaining and had something to say, rather than 90 minutes of rides coming to life. Brad Bird, the visionary director behind “The Iron Giant,” “The Incredibles” and the last “Mission: Impossible” movie, was put in the director’s chair, while Damon Lindelof of the beloved TV series “Lost” was hired to write the screenplay with him.

Add in George Clooney in a rare turn starring in a blockbuster and a family film (as opposed to prestige pictures for adults), and you’ve got one impressive pedigree. And the results are impressive as well, with the creative team’s efforts resulting in a movie that plays nearly at the same level as the first “Back to the Future.”

Much like the plot of that timeless classic from 1985, “Tomorrowland” is rooted in the adventurous and often funny friendship between a teenager and an eccentric inventor, with the 21st century twist being that the main hero is a girl named Casey (winningly played by Britt Robertson) this time. But the action starts back at the 1964 World’s Fair, where a young boy inventor named Frank (Thomas Robinson) presents his jet-pack invention to the head of a young inventor’s contest (Hugh Laurie), only to be rejected when he admits its flying capabilities aren’t fully functional.

Dejected, Frank is ready to abandon his dreams when a mysterious girl named Athena (Raffey Cassidy) – who was lurking near the contest head – discreetly hands him a pin with the letter T on it and tells him to follow her ride-car into the Fair’s version of the “It’s a Small World” ride. Busting through the crowded line, Frank leaps into a car and sees a laser hit his new pin – causing the “Small World” ride to stop and drop him down a mysterious chute into the futuristic world of Tomorrowland.

Frank is elated to spend years there inventing things while developing unrequited feelings for Athena, and it is from that point that the story leaps into the present day and follows the adventures of the aforementioned girl Casey. She’s the daughter of a NASA engineer (Tim McGraw) who’s about to lose his job when three rocket launch platforms at Cape Canaveral are permanently taken down, and she gets arrested when she tries to disable the equipment involved in the dismantling.

As she’s bailed out from jail, Casey is handed a pin with the letter “T” on it, and finds that when she touches it, she can see quick glimpses of a brighter, flashier, seemingly futuristic world. Her dad thinks she’s crazy or on drugs, but she soon sneaks away in the dead of night to track down a Houston kitsch store whose Internet ad features the only image of the pin to be found anywhere on the Web.

Casey’s quest for the truth behind the pin surprisingly leads her into contact with Athena as well, despite the fact that Athena is still a girl who hasn’t seemed to age a bit in the past 50 years. And while those two find themselves chased by and battling all manner of androids and robots, the key to their understanding everything comes from finding the now-reclusive adult Frank (Clooney) and roping him into their quest against his will.

What’s at stake is the entire fate of Earth and mankind as we know it, and that fact is not just a fun way of raising the stakes to the ultimate level. It’s also a smart means for Lindelof and Bird to gently educate kids about the myriad problems faced by the world today from nuclear proliferation to climate change, and encourage them through the heroic and unflappably optimistic Casey to believe that it’s never too late to set the world back on the right course.

Yes, this plot sounds convoluted, but the zippy pace and zesty performances keep it lively and memorable throughout. Besides, it’ refreshing to find a summer blockbuster whose plot keeps viewers constantly surprised and on their toes, and which finds a way to respect the intelligence of audience members of all ages.

There is no foul language other than a few “Hells” and one “Oh my God!”, and no sex or nudity of course. While the movie is rated PG, it is packed with a surprising amount of action that Bird manages to tone and pace just right to avoid being too gruesome for little ones – but parents of younger kids age 8 and under should be aware there are a few scary moments and that realistic-looking androids have their fake heads shot off or torn off at a few points in the movie.

While some might argue that any mention of environmental problems and climate change is politically correct messaging, I am a conservative and felt that it steered clear of heavy-handed politicizing. Casey is held up as an example of a girl who cares about the world around her and has the optimism to try, and Pope Francis himself has recently said not caring about the world in the form of our carbon footprint is a sin.

Carefully crafted yet wildly entertaining, “Tomorrowland” is one movie that will make viewers of all ages happy to be watching it right now.

Carl Kozlowski has been a professional film critic and essayist for the past five years at Pasadena Weekly, in addition to the Christian movie site Movieguide.org, the conservative pop culture site Breitbart.coms Big Hollywood, the Christian pop culture magazine Relevant and New City newspaper in Chicago. He also writes in-depth celebrity interviews for Esquire.com and The Progressive. He is owner of the podcasting site radiotitans.com, which was named one of the Frontier Fifty in 2013 as one of the 50 best talk-radio outlets in the nation by talkers.com and will be relaunching it in January 2014 after a five-month sabbatical. He lives in Los Angeles.

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Thoughts on a Smaller, More Vibrant Catholic Church in America

by Father Thomas Berg • May 25, 2015

Catholics, as a segment of U.S. population, shrank by 3.1 percent from 2007 to 2014, and are now outnumbered as a portion of American population by the “nones”, the religiously unaffiliated. That was the headline-grabbing revelation two weeks ago from the Pew Research Center. That trend fits within the overall decline in affiliation with Christian denominations, notwithstanding population growth in the U.S. in the same time period.

So there it was in black in white: approximately 51 million adult Catholics in the United States as of 2014 versus approximately 56 million religiously “unaffiliated” adults.

That should come as no surprise to any Catholic who is attentive to the current situation of the Church in North America. What the study did not point out, but we know from experience to be the case, is that only approximately 12 percent of those 51 million Catholics attend mass regularly on Sundays. The Catholic Church in America is, and has been for decades now, constituted by practicing Catholics, kind-of-practicing Catholics, and non-practicing Catholics — a situation in many ways not unlike previous centuries, yet which emerges from new and complex causes, and has resulted in a Church of profound internal tensions.

Those tensions have all too painfully come to bear on the religious experience of most present day Catholics. Yet our manner of articulating those tensions within the Church is often far too simplistic, contrasting as we often do conservatives with liberals, the remnant with the fallen-away.

Although open to similar over-simplifications, the terms ‘committed Catholic’ and ‘cultural Catholic’ are sometimes contrasted, but arguably with good reason. Committed Catholics are those who, in varying forms, manifest a robust religious practice, an active pursuit of a spiritual life, a deepening of their understanding of Catholic dogma, and an intentional embrace of the fullness of Catholic teaching — including her moral teaching on hot-button issues such as contraception and homosexuality — giving the free allegiance of mind and will to the Church’s authentic magisterium.

‘Cultural Catholics’ by contrast are those who in varying degrees have negligible Catholic practice, or while retaining elements of practice (such as occasional Church attendance) find themselves disagreeing (whether they understand why or not) with certain Church teachings. And of course it is no secret that culturally Catholic politicians and academics especially, while insisting on their Catholic identity, will openly dissent from the Church’s received teaching (even to the extreme of explaining their dissent as a ‘service’ to the Church).

The truth is, the baptized express their Catholicism across a broad spectrum of practice, or lack thereof, of embrace of Church teaching, or rejection thereof.

So, yes, the tensions are real.

A historically shallow view of the Church’s history, we might add, faults the Second Vatican Council for those tensions. But if we are attentive to history, we see that this has generally been the Church’s situation throughout her two millennia of existence, and that the Holy Spirit has not yet ceased to be present and active in the lives of all of his faithful — the committed and fallen-away alike.

Yet, cultural Catholics are the ones who are exiting. And that’s disturbing, and it invites reflection. What ought a committed Catholic’s attitude be toward this situation? And what will our Church look like in the America of the future? For what it’s worth, I offer a few thoughts on both questions, beginning with the latter.

As we watch the exodus of 6.5 American Catholics from the Church for every one person received into the Church (according to the Pew study), it is very reasonable to assume that robust Catholicism will, in the future, be found more commonly in smaller, more concentrated communities characterized by intense, faithful religious practice.

Why so?

It’s not just that there will likely be fewer Catholics.

Rather, it’s a question of how cultural changes — readily reflected in the Pew study — will impact Catholic practice and identity.

No matter who happens to occupy the White House or have control of Congress in the coming decades, committed Catholics in the United States will feel more and more, not just as ‘strangers in a strange land’ but as aliens in an openly hostile environment, in a secular culture that wishes to render Catholicism insipid, innocuous, and largely indistinguishable from itself.

While large percentages of cultural Catholics will continue to be assimilated (to not say digested) by that secular culture, to the eventual loss of their religious practice and Christian faith altogether, it makes all the sense in the world to expect that committed Catholics will find themselves bolstered more and more by tightknit communities of Catholic belief and practice. If truth be told, this dynamic has already been going on for years.

And, yes, of course I am thinking here of Pope Benedict’s (then Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger’s) 1997 interview with Peter Seewald in Salt of the Earth. In that interview, Benedict mused on the future of the Church in these terms:

Perhaps the time has come to say farewell to the idea of traditionally Catholic cultures. Maybe we are facing a new and different kind of epoch in the Church’s history, where Christianity will again be characterized more by the mustard seed, where it will exist in small, insignificant groups that nonetheless live an intensive struggle against evil and bring the good into the world – that let God in.

That vision was echoed in a 2003 interview he gave to EWTN’s Raymond Arroyo. In that interview, then Cardinal Ratzinger took a question about the future of the Church and was asked to give his own interpretation of what had become by then a major theme of Pope St. John Paul’s pontificate: “the new springtime of evangelization.” His reply echoed the response to Seewald: “The essential things in history [of the Church],” observed Benedict, “begin always with smaller, convinced communities … communities with the élan of the faith.”

In our present circumstances, we can be quite sure this is a vision of what we will look like as a Church: convinced communities where the faith is lived robustly and dynamically; communities composed of relatively smaller numbers of Catholics living their faith on their sleeves; communities full of joy and irradiating the faith; communities — it goes without saying — that live in communion with the institutional Church and in docility to the local bishop as well; communities, not of messiah complexes and misguided reform, but of fidelity. Idyllic? Perfect? Hardly. There will be plenty of problems and tensions therein as well. Yet, how resist the hopeful thought that they should act as creative minorities engaged in a long, twilight struggle to avoid becoming the next European-style spiritual wasteland of empty cathedrals and emasculated Catholicism?

To be sure, Pope Benedict was not thinking here so much of a return to the catacombs, as of communities — arguably, on the whole, parish communities — in which Catholics live in a state of intense — or more precisely, intentional — discipleship. These communities will be places, by God’s grace, in which Catholics who have been given the grace of a personal and life-altering encounter with the risen Lord will guide other Catholics to a similar encounter.

So, if we are looking for ways to stop the hemorrhaging of Catholics from the Church, our decades-old approach of reluctantly accepting lukewarm Catholic practice as “normal” is going to get us nowhere — we now have empirical proof of that. As Catholic evangelist, and author of Forming Intentional Disciples, Sherry Weddell observed, reacting to the Pew study, “cultural Catholicism is dead as a retention strategy.”

Fortunately, there are plenty of parishes across the U.S. headed by pastors who understand this. They get it. They are pastors who understand that their congregations need to receive in their Sunday homilies, not psychobabble, but kerygma; not fluff, but the great story of salvation; not empty niceties, but the irresistible beauty of Jesus Christ. And these priests employ new, out-of-the-box approaches to parish evangelization, religious education, youth ministry and marriage preparation. They know that the primary task before them is to invite their flocks to a living encounter with Jesus, and to a life of discipleship. (And by the way — our seminarians get it as well).

Some might want to suggest that small, robust networks of vibrant Catholicism are by far preferable to large populations of lukewarm, innocuous Catholics. Smaller is better, it is suggested, and perhaps this should be adopted as a strategy. As for the lukewarm who are nearing the exit doors, well, good riddance.

Of course, such an attitude is nothing short of diabolical. Nor would it seem that Pope Benedict was thinking of ‘small and robust’ as a strategy so much as the upshot of unavoidable historical circumstances.

So, as we find ourselves, nonetheless, living our faith lives more and more from within these potent Catholic nuclei, let’s forego the bunker mentality, and the remnant mindset. Our attitude must remain that proposed by Pope Francis, the attitude of those fully caught up in the drama of the Church as field-hospital, reaching out to the spiritually marginalized, to cultural Catholics, to the religiously “unaffiliated,” to the extremities of a Church troubled by deep internal tensions and profoundly in need of the experience of Jesus Christ.

Father Thomas Berg is a priest of the Archdiocese of New York and Professor of Moral Theology at St. Joseph’s Seminary (Dunwoodie). More of Fr. Berg’s publications are available at www.fatherberg.com.

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Stay with Us

by Sr. Joan L. Roccasalvo, C.S.J. • May 27, 2015

The songs of Irving Berlin have woven their way into the fabric of American life. They’re a national treasure. Occasionally, the lyrics can raise our minds heavenward. Take for example, the song, “I’ll be loving you, always.”

In St. Matthew’s gospel for Trinity Sunday, Jesus speaks his final words to the disciples: “I am with you always, yes, to the end of time.” In other words, ‘I’ll stay with you always … ‘I’ll be loving you, always, for I-AM-LOVE.’

The Plan of Salvation

With the feast of Pentecost, the Easter season has officially come to a close. Pentecost leads directly to the feast of the Most Holy Trinity, the central mystery of Christendom. From now until next Advent season, the Church settles in to Ordinary Time, the extended time when the Church basks in the love of the Blessed Trinity, Father, Son, and Spirit. The plan of salvation acts dynamically and continues in creation, in current events, in the mission of the Church, and in every individual.

The Indwelling of the Most Holy Trinity

The feast of the Most Holy Trinity is mystery so wide, expansive, and boundless to ponder, for it is the gift of God’s very own Self to the world. God’s grace encourages me in moments of distress. It prompts me to develop my gifts and root out my particular faults. Whatever I have received is placed at the service of others. My vocation is to love God into the world, one day at a time. Nothing less will do.

Jesus assured his disciples: “If any man and woman love me, they will keep my word, and my father will love them, and we will come to them and make our home with him.” This awareness makes the sacrament of the present moment all the more vital. Exhorting the catechumens in Constantinople, St. Gregory the Theologian (4th c) tells them: “I give the Most Holy Trinity to you as the companion and patron of your whole life.”

St. Paul’s Favorite Metaphor

The Christian vocation is lived out not in isolation but with one another, the Body of Christ. St. Paul’s use of the body-metaphor comes into play most vividly in his letters to the Corinthians:

• ”Do you not know that you are God’s temple and that God’s spirit lives in you?”

• ”The temple of God is sacred, and you are that temple. You belong to Christ, and Christ belongs to you.”

• ”Get rid of all the old yeast and make yourselves into a completely new batch of bread.”

• ”You are not your own property; you have been bought and paid for. That is why you should use your body for the glory of God” (1 Cor 3; 5; 6ff).

“Do you love me more than these?”

At the close of St. John’s gospel, Jesus turns to Peter with an edgy question: “Peter, do you love me more than these?” “Yes, Lord, you know that I love you,” he answers. Jesus repeats the question, and Peter answers. Didn’t Jesus hear him the first time? But a third time? The Master’s gentle jab, or is it teasing — whatever it is upsets Peter, and rightfully so. He grasps the point. His threefold denial has been seared in his memory. He will weep over that betrayal all his life.

“Do you love me more than these?” This question to every Christian does not lose its edge. Peter is Everyman — Augustine, Francis of Assisi, Ignatius of Loyola, Francis Xavier, Teresa of Avila, Edith Stein, Dietrich Bonhoffer, Oscar Romero, the martyred missionary women in El Salvador, the martyrs in Syria, Nigeria, Nagasaki. Then there are the hidden and nameless: the homebound and suffering praying for special intentions of the Church, our wounded veterans and those suffering in hospitals, the dedicated teacher, physician, nurse, and other caregivers, the politician and government official, the spouse and mother keeping the family together and praying that it stays together. The question pricks; it needles. It will never lose its edge. It’s always before us.

The words of Jeremiah anticipate those of Jesus: “I have loved you with an everlasting love” (Jer 31:3), and the lyrics of Mr. Berlin echo Jeremiah’s:

“I’ll be loving you, always,

Not for just an hour,

Not for just a day,

Not for just a year,

But always.”

In Sunday’s gospel, Jesus clinches it all: “I am with you always, yes, to the end of time.”

Sr. Joan L. Roccasalvo, a member of the Congregation of St. Joseph, Brentwood, NY, holds degrees in philosophy (Ph.L), musicology (Ph.D.), theology (M.A.), and liturgical studies (Ph.D). She has taught at all levels of Catholic education and writes with a particular focus on a theology of beauty and the sacred arts. Her e-mail address is jroccasalvo@optonline.net.

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The wisdom of St. Francis de Sales for a troubled world

by Alice von Hildebrand • May 28, 2015

If anyone came to me with the following request: what is the book on spiritual life that you would recommend not only for beginners, but also for people who have already taken their first steps? Without a moment’s hesitation, I would say; Saint Francis of Sales’ Introduction to the Devout Life, a book published in the XVII century which, I believe, never was out of print. There is a profound reason for it: not only is it classical, (above time and fashion), but it has a value for people of the most varied backgrounds. It is like bread: it will never be outdated.

This great saint’s message is couched in such gracious terms that he combines depth of thought, and gentle charm.

One typical temptation of beginners in spiritual life, is to feed their soul on mystical literature, such as the Dark Night of the Soul of St. John of the Cross. Its very title attracts a large number of beginners convinced that they know by personal experience what this great saint and mystic is referring to. Being spiritually immature, they easily fall prey to an exaltation that favors dangerous illusions. St. Francis of Sales’ book combines profound spiritual wisdom, with what I shall term “holy sobriety”. Such spiritual food prevents one from falling into the very many illusions which are traps set by the devil to make many people endorse spiritual fallacies and leave the safe road of humility.

All I intend to do in this brief essay is to meditate on one chapter in Book 3, which, in my personal life, I have found to be a gold mine of insights.

It refers to our attitude toward the faults and sins of others — a topic of crucial importance because all of us have to deal with it, and very few are aware of the only valid Christian response. Any sin calls for tears because first and foremost, it is an offense of God. Had men not sinned, Christ would not have been crucified. This should be our primary concern.

Moreover, every sin harms the sinner, and may, when grave, endanger his eternal welfare. This is another reason to “grieve”, for sorrow is the response God expects us to give. But many of us might be tempted to exclaim: “Such a deed is so abominable that never, absolutely never, would it have tempted me”. The ABCs of humility reminds us that we are capable of the most horrible crimes were it not for the fact that God’s grace has protected us either in not allowing the Devil to tempt us, or in giving us the grace to defeat his diabolical attack.

Peter was sincere when, at the Last Supper he declared himself ready to give his life for Christ. Alas, he lacked humility and soon afterwards, scared by the remark of a maid, he denied that he knew Him. There are sins that some of us have not committed: let us humbly thank God for having given us the grace we needed.

What is the Christian attitude toward the sins of others? We should make a crucial difference between the sin and the sinner. Sin is always detestable for the reasons mentioned above. St Benedict writes in his Holy Rule that the Abbot should “oderit vitia, diligat fratres …” (Chapter 64). In his dealing with his sons, he should always remember that the sinner is God’s child – badly stained by sin, but redeemable as long as he lives. If he responded to God’s grace which is never refused, and repented, there will be greater joy in heaven than for someone who is not (or rather does not seem) in need of mercy.

Sin cannot be rehabilitated. This is made clear by St. Paul in his Epistle to the Romans: murderers, adulterers, thieves, blasphemers cannot enter the Kingdom of God. No one should be accused of being ”homophobic” for condemning the practice of any form of sexual perversion.

Years ago I had the privilege of meeting Jerome Lejeune - the famous French doctor - a most ardent defender of life. It was at a conference organized by Human Life International in Miami. My niece, Marie Peeters, had been his assistant for some thirteen years, and a friendly contact was soon established. In the course of the conversation, he referred to young parents who had brought him their little girl, aged six, who looked like a child of two. His great concern was to comfort them and to help the child. He had a noble, attractive French face, and then suddenly, his expression changed to one of anger, edging on rage: “If you only knew how I hate disease“. This perfectly expresses the attitude called for toward sinners; the ardor of our love for them should be proportionate to our hatred of their sin - their worst enemy.

Sin by its very nature is hateful and should be condemned. This admits of no exception. But, alas, this rightful indignation is now given a distorted interpretation as expressing a “lack of compassion”. It is cleverly hijacked by the devil who sets a trap into which many fall. Today, we are repeatedly told that it is the duty of Christians to look for what is positive and good in homosexual relationships. Yet it should be called the cancer attacking a bond which in some case could have developed into a noble male friendship. It is a tragic derailment. Not to condemn sin is a grave lack of charity.

Alas, more than once in the course of my long life, I have come across some people who “feel called” to be God’s detectives. They are convinced that it is their mission to unearth sins of others, and are triumphant when their suspicions are proven to be valid. “Did I not tell you that so and so was an adulterer. I ‘knew’ it; it is a domain in which I am infallible”.

How profoundly charitable is the advice of St. Francis of Sales to prohibit our “advertising” the sins of others, adding spicy details, and enjoying discussing them publicly, instead of earnestly seeking excuses that may shed a milder light not on the sin but on the sinner. Moreover, if someone tells us confidentially about his or her moral aberrations, it would indeed be a very grave sin to share this information with others. It is a serious sin called defamation differing from slander which spreads lies, and also fully deserves to be severely censured. In fact both are cousin sins: in one case we spread lies; in the other we spread sad facts which most people need not, should not know. Both are serious offenses against charity.

The sins and faults of others should never be a topic of conversation; alas, some people major in it: it is entertaining, it is a superb topic for cynics who enjoy proclaiming that between virtue and vice, there is only a very minor difference. As a French cynic remarked: conversion easily languishes when the guests run out of things to criticize.

How many of us need beat their breast in this domain? How deeply meaningful that St. Teresa of Avila writes in her biography that “the absent” were safe when she was present at a conversation.

Granted that “charity” toward sin can never be justified, one’s attitude toward sinners should be radically different. Sin is the arch enemy of the sinner; let me repeat: the practice of homosexuality is the cancer menacing some potentially very beautiful friendships between either two men or two women. Let us recall the beautiful words of St. Augustine bound by a deep affection with Nebridius and the moving words he uses referring to his friend’s death.

The Bishop of Hippo gave us a golden key that we should always carry with us; Interficere errorem; diligere errantem. (kill the error; love the erring person). How many great sinners became great saints. Let us recall Mary Magdalena who had been possessed by seven demons, and when converted, followed Christ to Golgotha. She was the one who first received the glorious news of Christ’s resurrection.

Detestable as the sinner’s sin might be, we should hope that his intentions were not as bad as they might appear to be. We should refrain from judging him, even though we should mercilessly condemn the sin. St. Augustine is, in fact, formulating the arch Christian principle taught us by the Savior who did not condemn the adulterous woman, but condemned adultery He told her: “sin no more”.

Alas, the history of the world teaches two sad facts; how often have sinners been brutally rejected because of their sin (let us recall the Scarlet Letter), or, and this is rampant today, sins are “not that bad” they might have some positive sides; in fact the practice of sodomy expresses the deep love the two men have for each other.

Our “Brave New World” is definitely sympathetic to “amorality – a child of relativism – this “new Gospel” which is finally authentic “good news”, has liberated us from the horror of Pharisaism. “Fortunately” modern man freed to the taboo of the Dark ages, has “finally” understood the authentic Christian message which is “compassion”. Any radical condemnation of sin is now viewed as a very grave lack of “love for the sinner, redolent of the harshness of the Dark ages”. The Inquisition, Anathema, the Crusades: all rotten fruits of a so- called orthodoxy. Why should adultery be condemned? There are so many reasons that seem to justify it. Moreover, as a French cynic remarked, to limit one’s “love” (meaning sex) to one single people is to deprive others of their right to pursue happiness. Why should people object to gay marriage? Circumstance Ethics has eloquently shown that it all depends upon time, place and circumstances which vary from person to person and from epoch to epoch.

Advertisements such as “sinfully attractive” are gaining currency. Sin is in fact “lovable”. What is to be thrown into the deepest pits of hell (if there is one) is pharisaic behavior. Puritanism is the sin par excellence, and is responsible for many grave psychological problems.

This is the framework in which we shall address a baffling question: the disappointment we should experience when people that we look up to, love and admire, do or say things which conflict with their previous views. Unfortunately these cases are not infrequent and are troubling. How can one and the same person make contributions of great depth and value, and all of a sudden, communicate gravely misleading messages.

As I said, it does happen. In the framework of this brief article, I shall limit myself to very few. But it might be valuable to dedicate a whole book to this topic. No one can deny that Origen was a great and noble thinker whose message has been enriching and beautiful. Yet, he has been accused of erring in making statements which seem to indicate that he believed in universal salvation: that is, at the end of time, Christ will victoriously guarantee the salvation of all men. This is being echoed today in several noble and famous Catholic thinkers. Jacques Maritain wrote an article published posthumously in which he suggests that, once again, at the end of time, all men, all devils will be freed from hell, thanks to the love and merits of Christ. One by one, they will be drawn out of this place of hatred and despair, and be accepted in Limbo – the place where unbaptized children are now to be found. Lucifer will be the last one to be pulled out … but the physical fire of hell will continue to burn forever, even though hell will now be empty. Any economist would object to the amazing waste of fuel!

Be it remarked that Maritain – a most faithful son of the Church – does not say that it will be so, but only that He who can change bread into his body at the words of consecration, could also by means of a miracle change the will of those who are condemned by their own sins. (Idees Eschatologiques, p. 26. Published dans Approches sans entraves). Hans Urs von Balthasar has been similarly interpreted by some in his book: Dare We Hope That All Men Will Be Saved? In this context, two things should be mentioned: there is a fundamental difference by making suggestions which can be seriously questioned for not being in conformity with the traditional teaching of the Church, and making a claim that a position is true, even though in disagreement with the Magisterium. This applies to the two thinkers I have just mentioned. They would definitely submit to the Church’s judgment. One of the many great blessings of Catholicism is that it has a magisterium - blessed by infallibility.

Another great mind to whom we are very indebted is Tertullian. Alas, he too at the end of his life was accused to falling into Montanism.

No human mind, great and noble as it is infallible. Humility is the greatest protection against error. Great thinkers should, like St. Augustine, write a retractions.

Worth mentioning is a remarkable spiritual writer, Karl Adam who, in 1924 wrote a book: The Spirit of Catholicism which was immediately praised as a Catholic classic. I believe it never was out of print. But to Dietrich von Hildebrand’s profound grief he was told that, shortly after Hitler came to power in l933, Karl Adam referring to the traditional claim of the Church that grace does not destroy nature, but presupposes it (Gratia supponit naturam), he is supposed to have added the word: NATURAM GERMANICAM. Such aberrations call for tears. How is it possible that such a noble and orthodox thinker can all of sudden, after the ascension of a criminal to the Chancellorship of Germany, seem to endorse his anti- Christian racism? I do not have an answer to that question, but it should be a concern for all “intellectuals”, who, possibly because of their reputation and the accolade they keep receiving, suddenly forget that humility is the golden key indispensable when addressing supernatural question or any “sensitive” question for that matter. Whereas this most unfortunate formulation should grieve us and be rejected, this does not allow us to forget the beauty of the message he has transmitted us in his previous work.

A similar case of the one of Otto von Habsburg, the eldest son of the last the saintly Emperor of Austria. Some ten years again he told a friend of mine who visited him in Rome, that recently he was in Barcelona and upon entering a Church, possibly the Cathedral, he saw “to his great satisfaction” that there were three pictures over the altar: one of the Cross, the second the Star of David, and the third, the Crescent. “This is a hopeful sign for the future” Otto said. Alas, ecumenism easily degenerates into what my husband called “ecumenitis” that is a distorted desire to create a harmony of all religions by viewing each one of them as a segment of the truth: in fact, “we need them all to have the fullness of truth”. This is to sacrifice the word of Christ, “I am the truth” on the altar of wishy- washy relativism.

If such aberrations can take place with good and noble thinkers, what should be said about detestable philosophies and psychologies which have pervaded our colleges and universities? Because of their “brilliance’ or because they were “new” or because they appeal to our fallen nature, have gained currency and formed the mentality of millions of young people, responsible for the confusion dominating the world today. Let us think of the brilliant Nietzsche or of the eloquent Marx, or the clever Darwin, of the seducing Freud … followed by a whole army of disciples. One of the many stupidities one hears in Universities is that ideas can do no harm (except the true ones). Actions alone can be dangerous. But such claim has no basis in history; there is no revolution that had not been preceded by vicious philosophies. Let me just mention Communism, and Nazism that have done a tremendous amount of harm by cleverly injecting poison into schools and universities. The intellectual confusion prevailing today is the fruit of their “evil efficiency”. Anyone wishing to destroy a society only need aim at destroying the family and education. Once this is done, these evil doers can “rest”.

In such cases, let us once again, quote St. Francis of Sales He writes: “Of the enemies of God and His Church we must speak openly, since in charity we are bound to give the alarm whenever the wolf is found among the sheep”. (Chapter XXIX) Silence would be interpreted as an endorsement of such heretical statements. Once again, St. Francis of Sales give us the only Catholic response: open condemnation.

Ecumenism, in the sense of a loving search for any truth found in other religions, while deploring those that are not perceived, is certainly to be welcome. Moreover it should be welcome as an opportunity to correct the totally false conceptions that other religions have of Catholicism, such as that Catholics adore the Holy Virgin, or that any statement of the pope is Ex cathedra, or that Catholicism denigrates the “intimate sphere” because it places celibacy above it. In fact, it is only consecrated virginity that is highly praised. Never has the Church showed a particular regard for bachelors and old maids.

Unfortunately, how easily does it degenerate into what DvH called “ecumenitis”, that is a systematic “dethronement of truth”, a victory of dictatorial relativism, that arrogantly declares that there is no objective truth, and that everyone is entitled to his own religious views, but none can claim to be “the truth”.

Bishop Fulton Sheen (whose life and writing are being examined for a possible canonization) has also, while Bishop of Rochester, made decisions which are troubling. I need not add my praise to the one of innumerable people who have known him, admired him, benefited from his talks and books, who looked up to him as a remarkable thinker and a very holy man, who never missed for one single day a full hour of adoration in front of the Blessed Sacrament.

But while Bishop of Rochester, he made two decisions which, should be deplored. One of them is that he gave his placet not only to introduce sex education in all Catholic schools in his diocese, but moreover, I was told, endorsed the choice of a Sex Education Program known to be one of the most “daring” offered at the time. Dietrich von Hildebrand was the first (possibly not the only first) to vociferously raise his voice again these innovations. One key reason being was that there was very little “education” and detailed “information” totally inappropriate for grammar school children. The reasons which he expounded in articles and a small booklet (with Dr. William Marra) called Sex Education: The Basic Issues (The Wanderer Press) are that the mysterious and intimate sphere of “sex” should never be an object of public discussion. The intimate parts of our body are “our secret” and should never be publicly unveiled. In God’s marvelous plan, this “unveiling” is only to be shared and unveiled in the Holy Sacrament of Matrimony when, with God’s permission the Spouse gives to her husband a key to this mysterious domain, trusting that he will approach it with trembling reverence and as an expression of spousal love. For sex is not and cannot be understood apart from the love between husband and wife.

Moreover, and this is also crucial, “sex information” (e.g. detailed biological information of the marriage act, abortion, sexual aberrations) should not be communicated to young, immature innocent children, not yet concerned about these questions. The key thought of Dietrich von Hildebrand is that sex education begins in the cradle, by teaching the key virtue of reverence which he calls “the mother of all virtues”. This reverence should dictate our attitude primarily toward God, what is Sacred, parents, tradition, what is true, good and beautiful. Information should not be given to young children not yet ready to face these serious and grave questions. It will come at the time of puberty, which differs from child to child. If a child has been trained to be reverent, he will receive these facts in trembling reverence, and will grasp both the beauty of God’s plan by making homo male and female, but also - and this is often denied today - that when abused this sphere open the door to moral filth incomparably worse than the horror of alcoholism, and drug abuse. It is precisely because this sphere is mysterious and deep that its abuse is so gravely staining the soul. All this reflects the information Rhoda Lorand, professor of education at Long Island University. She studied the sex education program endorsed by Bishop Sheen and eloquently shows how harmful sex information is when dished to small and immature children. Not because this sphere is “dirty” as many people have unfortunately claimed, but because to be properly understood a certain degree of maturity is required that children in grammar school do not have. Moreover, DvH objected to a public discussion of things which, by their very nature, and intimate and personal.

It is also to be regretted that Bishop Sheen gave the works of Teilhard de Chardin to his seminarians. The latter was definitely making the headlines at the time, and it was tempting to be “open minded” and up to date, but it is worth listening to Etienne Gilson’s warning that what he offers us is a “theology fiction” based on his unbaptized scientific enthusiasm.

It is alarming and most regrettable to see how people are attracted by novelty and blinding brilliance or by philosophies which justify their lifestyle.

Close to this death, when my beloved husband solemnly confided his literary bequest to me, he uttered the following words which gave me great joy: If you ever find in my works a single sentence which is not in full harmony with the teaching of the Church, do not hesitate: burn it.

This is the attitude that all Catholic thinkers who deserve this noble title, should adopt.

Alice von Hildebrand is a lecturer and an author whose works include The Privilege of Being a Woman (2002) and The Soul of a Lion: The Life of Dietrich von Hildebrand (2000), a biography of her late husband. She was made a Dame Grand Cross of the Equestrian Order of St. Gregory by Pope Francis in 2013.

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‘Aloha’ is filled with heart and humor

by Carl Kozlowski • May 29, 2015

There was a time when it was enough for a filmmaker to make a great movie, and nothing else mattered. There were writers and directors whose name on a poster signified that viewers were in for a treat, whether they were seeing a movie by Preston Sturges or John Ford, Alfred Hitchcock or Frank Capra, Steven Spielberg or Martin Scorsese.

For just over a decade, Cameron Crowe was among those greats, with classics like “Say Anything,” “Jerry Maguire” and his tour de force, “Almost Famous,” all coming between 1989 and 2000. But then he fell from grace, and fell hard, with a disastrous 2005 movie called “Elizabethtown,” a highly personal tribute to his then-recently deceased father that was such a bomb it derailed both his own career and the careers of its stars, Kirsten Dunst and Orlando Bloom.

Fast forward to this weekend, when Crowe’s new movie “Aloha” hits theatres with a cast that’s almost too good to be true. Bradley Cooper, fresh off the $500 million worldwide smash “American Sniper,” is the head of an ensemble that includes Rachel McAdams, Emma Stone, Bill Murray, Alec Baldwin, Danny McBride and John Krasinski of “The Office” – and yet, the movie has garnered near-poisonous advance word of mouth, largely because industry insiders are criticizing its marketing campaign.

The good news for viewers is, this is a great movie, filled with all the hallmarks that make Crowe one of our most vital filmmakers: vibrant performances, memorable dialogue and situations that truly wrap viewers into moral dilemmas that are comic and heartbreaking all at once. The bad news for Sony, which has to market it, is that this is a movie that can’t be defined and dumbed-down in a sentence, like “Hot Pursuit” and “Mad Max,” “Pitch Perfect 2” and the upcoming “Spy,” and the resulting billboards and posters are more confusing than enlightening about its plot.

“Aloha” follows Cooper as Brian Gilcrest, a former military contractor who was gravely injured in Afghanistan while conducting a business mission for an eccentric billionaire named Carson Welch (Bill Murray). Forced to abandon his lifelong dreams of being an astronaut by a combination of his injuries and the government cutbacks that de-funded NASA, he’s flying back to his boyhood home of Hawaii with an unusual assignment from both the military and Welch: to convince the leader of a native Hawaiian resistance group to give his literal and figurative blessing to a new bridge between two US bases.

While he’s there for the five days of his mission, Gilcrest finds himself torn between two women – a very serious ex-girlfriend named Tracy from 13 years ago (McAdams) and a pilot named Alison Ng (Stone), who has volunteered to be his military escort throughout his stay. At first, Alison seems overbearing and annoying, while the now-married Tracy has the forbidden allure of an exotic past lover. And as he navigates his way between the two women, Gilcrest is also having to wrestle with his conscience as he learns what his prayer-seeking mission is really about.

Since this is a Cameron Crowe movie, all of this is more unique and involving than a basic plot description could ever convey. This is the writer who coined all-time catch phrases like “Show me the money!” and “You complete me” in “Jerry Maguire,” brought us the iconic image of John Cusack holding a boombox over his head to express undying love in “Say Anything,” and refashioned Elton John’s “Tiny Dancer” into an anthem of youthful rock n’roll freedom in “Almost Famous.”

On top of it all, “Aloha” is one of the most moral movies to come out of the Hollywood mainstream in a long time. It’s rated PG13 but I honestly couldn’t see why, by the usual standards of the rating. There are no F words, literally a couple of milder swear words, no violence, no onscreen sex (two unmarried characters are shown lying in bed together talking after implied sex, however), and everyone winds up doing the right thing. It won’t appeal to young kids, and likely not teenagers, but for adults, it’s a rare film that respects both your intelligence and your conscience.

“Aloha” may be hard to describe in a sentence or two, or those sentences may not grab a prospective filmgoer’s attention as an easily defined genre piece. But it is filled with heart and humor, breathtaking moments of romance and heartbreaking moments of choices between right and wrong that are universally relatable and eminently lovable.

In other words, it’s not prefabricated garbage from the Hollywood assembly line, but rather a film that is memorable enough to stand the test of time. It’s the kind of movie that people will look back on someday and wish they’d given a chance to the first time around in theaters. Here’s your chance, don’t blow it.

Carl Kozlowski has been a professional film critic and essayist for the past five years at Pasadena Weekly, in addition to the Christian movie site Movieguide.org, the conservative pop culture site Breitbart.coms Big Hollywood, the Christian pop culture magazine Relevant and New City newspaper in Chicago. He also writes in-depth celebrity interviews for Esquire.com and The Progressive. He is owner of the podcasting site radiotitans.com, which was named one of the Frontier Fifty in 2013 as one of the 50 best talk-radio outlets in the nation by talkers.com and will be relaunching it in January 2014 after a five-month sabbatical. He lives in Los Angeles.

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SUNDAY • MAY 31, 2015

The Solemnity of the Most Holy Trinity

First Reading (Dt 4:32-34, 39-40; NRSVCE)

Moses said to the people, “For ask now about former ages, long before your own, ever since the day that God created human beings on the earth; ask from one end of heaven to the other: has anything so great as this ever happened or has its like ever been heard of? Has any people ever heard the voice of a god speaking out of a fire, as you have heard, and lived? Or has any god ever attempted to go and take a nation for himself from the midst of another nation, by trials, by signs and wonders, by war, by a mighty hand and an outstretched arm, and by terrifying displays of power, as the Lord your God did for you in Egypt before your very eyes? So acknowledge today and take to heart that the Lord is God in heaven above and on the earth beneath; there is no other. Keep his statutes and his commandments, which I am commanding you today for your own well-being and that of your descendants after you, so that you may long remain in the land that the Lord your God is giving you for all time.”

Second Reading (Rom 8:14-17; NRSVCE)

For all who are led by the Spirit of God are children of God. For you did not receive a spirit of slavery to fall back into fear, but you have received a spirit of adoption. When we cry, “Abba! Father!” it is that very Spirit bearing witness with our spirit that we are children of God, and if children, then heirs, heirs of God and joint heirs with Christ — if, in fact, we suffer with him so that we may also be glorified with him.

Gospel Reading (Mt 28:16-20; NRSVCE)

Now the eleven disciples went to Galilee, to the mountain to which Jesus had directed them. When they saw him, they worshiped him; but some doubted. And Jesus came and said to them, “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything that I have commanded you. And remember, I am with you always, to the end of the age.”

MONDAY • JUNE 1, 2015

Memorial of Saint Justin

First Reading (Tb 1:3; 2:1b-8; NRSVCE)

I, Tobit, walked in the ways of truth and righteousness all the days of my life. I performed many acts of charity for my kindred and my people who had gone with me in exile to Nineveh in the land of the Assyrians.

At our festival of Pentecost, which is the sacred festival of weeks, a good dinner was prepared for me and I reclined to eat. When the table was set for me and an abundance of food placed before me, I said to my son Tobias, “Go, my child, and bring whatever poor person you may find of our people among the exiles in Nineveh, who is wholeheartedly mindful of God, and he shall eat together with me. I will wait for you, until you come back.” So Tobias went to look for some poor person of our people. When he had returned he said, “Father!” And I replied, “Here I am, my child.” Then he went on to say, “Look, father, one of our own people has been murdered and thrown into the market place, and now he lies there strangled.” Then I sprang up, left the dinner before even tasting it, and removed the body from the square and laid it in one of the rooms until sunset when I might bury it. When I returned, I washed myself and ate my food in sorrow. Then I remembered the prophecy of Amos, how he said against Bethel,

“Your festivals shall be turned into mourning,

and all your songs into lamentation.”

And I wept.

When the sun had set, I went and dug a grave and buried him. And my neighbors laughed and said, “Is he still not afraid? He has already been hunted down to be put to death for doing this, and he ran away; yet here he is again burying the dead!”

Gospel Reading (Mk 12:1-12; NRSVCE)

Then Jesus began to speak to them in parables. “A man planted a vineyard, put a fence around it, dug a pit for the wine press, and built a watchtower; then he leased it to tenants and went to another country. When the season came, he sent a slave to the tenants to collect from them his share of the produce of the vineyard. But they seized him, and beat him, and sent him away empty-handed. And again he sent another slave to them; this one they beat over the head and insulted. Then he sent another, and that one they killed. And so it was with many others; some they beat, and others they killed. He had still one other, a beloved son. Finally he sent him to them, saying, ‘They will respect my son.’ But those tenants said to one another, ‘This is the heir; come, let us kill him, and the inheritance will be ours.’ So they seized him, killed him, and threw him out of the vineyard. What then will the owner of the vineyard do? He will come and destroy the tenants and give the vineyard to others. Have you not read this scripture:

‘The stone that the builders rejected

has become the cornerstone;

this was the Lord’s doing,

and it is amazing in our eyes’?”

When they realized that he had told this parable against them, they wanted to arrest him, but they feared the crowd. So they left him and went away.

TUESDAY • JUNE 2, 2015

Tuesday of the Ninth Week in Ordinary Time

First Reading (Tb 2:9-14; NRSVCE)

That same night I washed myself and went into my courtyard and slept by the wall of the courtyard; and my face was uncovered because of the heat. I did not know that there were sparrows on the wall; their fresh droppings fell into my eyes and produced white films. I went to physicians to be healed, but the more they treated me with ointments the more my vision was obscured by the white films, until I became completely blind. For four years I remained unable to see. All my kindred were sorry for me, and Ahikar took care of me for two years before he went to Elymais.

At that time, also, my wife Anna earned money at women’s work. She used to send what she made to the owners and they would pay wages to her. One day, the seventh of Dystrus, when she cut off a piece she had woven and sent it to the owners, they paid her full wages and also gave her a young goat for a meal. When she returned to me, the goat began to bleat. So I called her and said, “Where did you get this goat? It is surely not stolen, is it? Return it to the owners; for we have no right to eat anything stolen.” But she said to me, “It was given to me as a gift in addition to my wages.” But I did not believe her, and told her to return it to the owners. I became flushed with anger against her over this. Then she replied to me, “Where are your acts of charity? Where are your righteous deeds? These things are known about you!”

Gospel Reading (Mk 12:13-17; NRSVCE)

Then they sent to him some Pharisees and some Herodians to trap Jesus in what he said. And they came and said to him, “Teacher, we know that you are sincere, and show deference to no one; for you do not regard people with partiality, but teach the way of God in accordance with truth. Is it lawful to pay taxes to the emperor, or not? Should we pay them, or should we not?” But knowing their hypocrisy, he said to them, “Why are you putting me to the test? Bring me a denarius and let me see it.” And they brought one. Then he said to them, “Whose head is this, and whose title?” They answered, “The emperor’s.” Jesus said to them, “Give to the emperor the things that are the emperor’s, and to God the things that are God’s.” And they were utterly amazed at him.

WEDNESDAY • JUNE 3, 2015

Memorial of Saint Charles Lwanga and Companions

First Reading (Tb 3:1-11, 16-17a; NRSVCE)

Then with much grief and anguish of heart I wept, and with groaning began to pray:

“You are righteous, O Lord,

and all your deeds are just;

all your ways are mercy and truth;

you judge the world.

And now, O Lord, remember me

and look favorably upon me.

Do not punish me for my sins

and for my unwitting offenses

and those that my ancestors committed before you.

They sinned against you,

and disobeyed your commandments.

So you gave us over to plunder, exile, and death,

to become the talk, the byword, and an object of reproach

among all the nations among whom you have dispersed us.

And now your many judgments are true

in exacting penalty from me for my sins.

For we have not kept your commandments

and have not walked in accordance with truth before you.

So now deal with me as you will;

command my spirit to be taken from me,

so that I may be released from the face of the earth and become dust.

For it is better for me to die than to live,

because I have had to listen to undeserved insults,

and great is the sorrow within me.

Command, O Lord, that I be released from this distress;

release me to go to the eternal home,

and do not, O Lord, turn your face away from me.

For it is better for me to die

than to see so much distress in my life

and to listen to insults.”

On the same day, at Ecbatana in Media, it also happened that Sarah, the daughter of Raguel, was reproached by one of her father’s maids. For she had been married to seven husbands, and the wicked demon Asmodeus had killed each of them before they had been with her as is customary for wives. So the maid said to her, “You are the one who kills your husbands! See, you have already been married to seven husbands and have not borne the name of a single one of them. Why do you beat us? Because your husbands are dead? Go with them! May we never see a son or daughter of yours!”

On that day she was grieved in spirit and wept. When she had gone up to her father’s upper room, she intended to hang herself. But she thought it over and said, “Never shall they reproach my father, saying to him, ‘You had only one beloved daughter but she hanged herself because of her distress.’ And I shall bring my father in his old age down in sorrow to Hades. It is better for me not to hang myself, but to pray the Lord that I may die and not listen to these reproaches anymore.” At that same time, with hands outstretched toward the window, she prayed and said,

“Blessed are you, merciful God!

Blessed is your name forever;

let all your works praise you forever.”

At that very moment, the prayers of both of them were heard in the glorious presence of God. So Raphael was sent to heal both of them: Tobit, by removing the white films from his eyes, so that he might see God’s light with his eyes; and Sarah, daughter of Raguel, by giving her in marriage to Tobias son of Tobit, and by setting her free from the wicked demon Asmodeus.

Gospel Reading (Mk 12:18-27; NRSVCE)

Some Sadducees, who say there is no resurrection, came to Jesus and asked him a question, saying, “Teacher, Moses wrote for us that if a man’s brother dies, leaving a wife but no child, the man shall marry the widow and raise up children for his brother. There were seven brothers; the first married and, when he died, left no children; and the second married the widow and died, leaving no children; and the third likewise; none of the seven left children. Last of all the woman herself died. In the resurrection whose wife will she be? For the seven had married her.”

Jesus said to them, “Is not this the reason you are wrong, that you know neither the scriptures nor the power of God? For when they rise from the dead, they neither marry nor are given in marriage, but are like angels in heaven. And as for the dead being raised, have you not read in the book of Moses, in the story about the bush, how God said to him, ‘I am the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob’? He is God not of the dead, but of the living; you are quite wrong.”

THURSDAY • JUNE 4, 2015

Thursday of the Ninth Week in Ordinary Time

First Reading (Tb 6:10-11; 7:1bcde, 9-17; 8:4-9a; NRSVCE)

When they entered Media and already were approaching Ecbatana, Raphael said to the young man, “Brother Tobias.” “Here I am,” he answered. Then Raphael said to him, “We must stay this night in the home of Raguel. He is your relative, and he has a daughter named Sarah.

So he took him to Raguel’s house, where they found him sitting beside the courtyard door. They greeted him first, and he replied, “Joyous greetings, brothers; welcome and good health!” Then he brought them into his house.

Then Raguel slaughtered a ram from the flock and received them very warmly.

When they had bathed and washed themselves and had reclined to dine, Tobias said to Raphael, “Brother Azariah, ask Raguel to give me my kinswoman Sarah.” But Raguel overheard it and said to the lad, “Eat and drink, and be merry tonight. For no one except you, brother, has the right to marry my daughter Sarah. Likewise I am not at liberty to give her to any other man than yourself, because you are my nearest relative. But let me explain to you the true situation more fully, my child. I have given her to seven men of our kinsmen, and all died on the night when they went in to her. But now, my child, eat and drink, and the Lord will act on behalf of you both.” But Tobias said, “I will neither eat nor drink anything until you settle the things that pertain to me.” So Raguel said, “I will do so. She is given to you in accordance with the decree in the book of Moses, and it has been decreed from heaven that she be given to you. Take your kinswoman; from now on you are her brother and she is your sister. She is given to you from today and forever. May the Lord of heaven, my child, guide and prosper you both this night and grant you mercy and peace.” Then Raguel summoned his daughter Sarah. When she came to him he took her by the hand and gave her to Tobias, saying, “Take her to be your wife in accordance with the law and decree written in the book of Moses. Take her and bring her safely to your father. And may the God of heaven prosper your journey with his peace.” Then he called her mother and told her to bring writing material; and he wrote out a copy of a marriage contract, to the effect that he gave her to him as wife according to the decree of the law of Moses. Then they began to eat and drink.

Raguel called his wife Edna and said to her, “Sister, get the other room ready, and take her there.” So she went and made the bed in the room as he had told her, and brought Sarah there. She wept for her daughter. Then, wiping away the tears, she said to her, “Take courage, my daughter; the Lord of heaven grant you joy in place of your sorrow. Take courage, my daughter.” Then she went out.

When the parents had gone out and shut the door of the room, Tobias got out of bed and said to Sarah, “Sister, get up, and let us pray and implore our Lord that he grant us mercy and safety.” So she got up, and they began to pray and implore that they might be kept safe. Tobias began by saying,

“Blessed are you, O God of our ancestors,

and blessed is your name in all generations forever.

Let the heavens and the whole creation bless you forever.

You made Adam, and for him you made his wife Eve

as a helper and support.

From the two of them the human race has sprung.

You said, ‘It is not good that the man should be alone;

let us make a helper for him like himself.’

I now am taking this kinswoman of mine,

not because of lust,

but with sincerity.

Grant that she and I may find mercy

and that we may grow old together.”

And they both said, “Amen, Amen.” Then they went to sleep for the night.

Gospel Reading (Mk 12:28-34; NRSVCE)

One of the scribes came near and heard them disputing with one another, and seeing that Jesus answered them well, he asked him, “Which commandment is the first of all?” Jesus answered, “The first is, ‘Hear, O Israel: the Lord our God, the Lord is one; you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind, and with all your strength.’ The second is this, ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ There is no other commandment greater than these.” Then the scribe said to him, “You are right, Teacher; you have truly said that ‘he is one, and besides him there is no other’; and ‘to love him with all the heart, and with all the understanding, and with all the strength,’ and ‘to love one’s neighbor as oneself,’ — this is much more important than all whole burnt offerings and sacrifices.” When Jesus saw that he answered wisely, he said to him, “You are not far from the kingdom of God.” After that no one dared to ask him any question.

FRIDAY • JUNE 5, 2015

Memorial of Saint Boniface

First Reading (Tb 11:5-17; NRSVCE)

Meanwhile Anna sat looking intently down the road by which her son would come. When she caught sight of him coming, she said to his father, “Look, your son is coming, and the man who went with him!”

Raphael said to Tobias, before he had approached his father, “I know that his eyes will be opened. Smear the gall of the fish on his eyes; the medicine will make the white films shrink and peel off from his eyes, and your father will regain his sight and see the light.”

Then Anna ran up to her son and threw her arms around him, saying, “Now that I have seen you, my child, I am ready to die.” And she wept. Then Tobit got up and came stumbling out through the courtyard door. Tobias went up to him, with the gall of the fish in his hand, and holding him firmly, he blew into his eyes, saying, “Take courage, father.” With this he applied the medicine on his eyes, and it made them smart. Next, with both his hands he peeled off the white films from the corners of his eyes. Then Tobit saw his son and threw his arms around him, and he wept and said to him, “I see you, my son, the light of my eyes!” Then he said,

“Blessed be God,

and blessed be his great name,

and blessed be all his holy angels.

May his holy name be blessed

throughout all the ages.

Though he afflicted me,

he has had mercy upon me.

Now I see my son Tobias!”

So Tobit went in rejoicing and praising God at the top of his voice. Tobias reported to his father that his journey had been successful, that he had brought the money, that he had married Raguel’s daughter Sarah, and that she was, indeed, on her way there, very near to the gate of Nineveh.

Then Tobit, rejoicing and praising God, went out to meet his daughter-in-law at the gate of Nineveh. When the people of Nineveh saw him coming, walking along in full vigor and with no one leading him, they were amazed. Before them all, Tobit acknowledged that God had been merciful to him and had restored his sight. When Tobit met Sarah the wife of his son Tobias, he blessed her saying, “Come in, my daughter, and welcome. Blessed be your God who has brought you to us, my daughter. Blessed be your father and your mother, blessed be my son Tobias, and blessed be you, my daughter. Come in now to your home, and welcome, with blessing and joy. Come in, my daughter.” So on that day there was rejoicing among all the Jews who were in Nineveh.

Gospel Reading (Mk 12:35-37; NRSVCE)

While Jesus was teaching in the temple, he said, “How can the scribes say that the Messiah is the son of David? David himself, by the Holy Spirit, declared,

The Lord said to my Lord,

‘Sit at my right hand,

until I put your enemies under your feet.’

David himself calls him Lord; so how can he be his son?” And the large crowd was listening to him with delight.

SATURDAY • JUNE 6, 2015

Saturday of the Ninth Week in Ordinary Time

First Reading (Tb 12:1, 5-15, 20; NRSVCE)

When the wedding celebration was ended, Tobit called his son Tobias and said to him, “My child, see to paying the wages of the man who went with you, and give him a bonus as well.” So Tobias called him and said, “Take for your wages half of all that you brought back, and farewell.”

Then Raphael called the two of them privately and said to them, “Bless God and acknowledge him in the presence of all the living for the good things he has done for you. Bless and sing praise to his name. With fitting honor declare to all people the deeds of God. Do not be slow to acknowledge him. It is good to conceal the secret of a king, but to acknowledge and reveal the works of God, and with fitting honor to acknowledge him. Do good and evil will not overtake you. Prayer with fasting is good, but better than both is almsgiving with righteousness. A little with righteousness is better than wealth with wrongdoing. It is better to give alms than to lay up gold. For almsgiving saves from death and purges away every sin. Those who give alms will enjoy a full life, but those who commit sin and do wrong are their own worst enemies.

“I will now declare the whole truth to you and will conceal nothing from you. Already I have declared it to you when I said, ‘It is good to conceal the secret of a king, but to reveal with due honor the works of God.’ So now when you and Sarah prayed, it was I who brought and read the record of your prayer before the glory of the Lord, and likewise whenever you would bury the dead. And that time when you did not hesitate to get up and leave your dinner to go and bury the dead, I was sent to you to test you. And at the same time God sent me to heal you and Sarah your daughter-in-law. I am Raphael, one of the seven angels who stand ready and enter before the glory of the Lord.

“So now get up from the ground, and acknowledge God. See, I am ascending to him who sent me. Write down all these things that have happened to you.”

Gospel Reading (Mk 12:38-44; NRSVCE)

As Jesus taught, he said, “Beware of the scribes, who like to walk around in long robes, and to be greeted with respect in the marketplaces, and to have the best seats in the synagogues and places of honor at banquets! They devour widows’ houses and for the sake of appearance say long prayers. They will receive the greater condemnation.”

He sat down opposite the treasury, and watched the crowd putting money into the treasury. Many rich people put in large sums. A poor widow came and put in two small copper coins, which are worth a penny. Then he called his disciples and said to them, “Truly I tell you, this poor widow has put in more than all those who are contributing to the treasury. For all of them have contributed out of their abundance; but she out of her poverty has put in everything she had, all she had to live on.”