VOLUME 1, ISSUE 32  •  AUGUST 8, 2015

Table of Contents

Copyright Notice

VATICAN NEWS

A childhood friendship that shaped JPII’s love for the Jewish community

Pope: In Confession we encounter God’s immense mercy

Will Pope Francis visit Kenya in November?

Pope Francis’ advice to altar servers: Let Christ draw near to you

Pope: Divorce and remarriage contradicts the sacrament, but Church always reaches out

To welcome refugees is a witness of the resurrection, Pope says

Pope Francis: Beware the ‘false peace’ that comes from the devil

Archbishop Cupich will attend synod, Vatican source says

WORLD NEWS

New Armenian Catholic patriarch pulled from retirement to take the reins

Enrique Shaw: the Argentine businessman whom Francis may soon beatify

After 57 years, Kiwi priests’ ministry in Antarctica ends

How one skeptical scientist came to believe the Shroud of Turin

Meet Saint Nektarios – a philosopher, poet and miracle worker

This 100-year-old priest still has a very important task: Fighting Satan

Chilean women: Abortion does not solve problem of sexual violence, discrimination

Greece in crisis – and what Catholics are doing to help

China consecrates first new bishop in three years

U.S. NEWS

Nuns, guns, and the Wild West – the extraordinary tale of Sr. Blandina

Why the effort to make gay marriage sacramental won’t work

Half of church fires in the last 20 years were set on purpose

Judge rules L.A. convent sale invalid

Effort to defund Planned Parenthood falls short of Senate vote

Undercover reports on fetal body parts trade face legal hurdles

Is Planned Parenthood altering abortion procedures to obtain intact body parts?

State pride, Knights of Columbus style

Mothers lash back at forced vaccines, ‘inhumane’ conditions in detention centers

‘Immigrant bashing’ is nothing new to America, Bishop Farrell laments

Think the human person is nothing special? Think again, says archbishop

If you won’t help our people stay, help them leave – Catholic bishops from the Middle East

How Junipero Serra fought the death penalty for a California native

How to respond to Planned Parenthood? Prayer and fasting, say Colorado bishops

Tough lessons to learn from Hiroshima and Nagasaki: Just war, nuclear disarmament

For Archbishop Cupich, Planned Parenthood videos should urge us to fight all social ills

Why the Boy Scouts’ new policy led a Catholic bishop to cut ties

Pope to Knights: Thank you for your steadfast witness to truth of marriage

And you shall be like gods – The fierce warning of ‘Ex Machina’

When the Senate won’t defund Planned Parenthood, states will

FEATURES

Why You Need Spiritual Food

Beauty Rising from the Ashes

Some items that have caught my attention recently

SCRIPTURE READINGS

Sunday • August 9, 2015

Monday • August 10, 2015

Tuesday • August 11, 2015

Wednesday • August 12, 2015

Thursday • August 13, 2015

Friday • August 14, 2015

Saturday • August 15, 2015

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Volume 1, Issue 32 • August 8, 2015

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VATICAN NEWS

A childhood friendship that shaped JPII’s love for the Jewish community

by CNA’s Vatican Observer Andrea Gagliarducci (CNA/EWTN News) • August 2, 2015

The exhibit A Blessing to One Another in the Vatican’s Charlemagne Wing. (Andrea Gagliarducci, courtesy of the Vatican exhibition A Blessing to One Another)

Vatican City — Saint John Paul II’s historic embrace of former chief rabbi of Rome Elio Toaff welcomes visitors to a new Vatican exhibition on the late Pope’s compelling relationship with the Jewish people.

The moment is reminiscent of an earlier, childhood friendship that likely laid the foundation for many of the symbolic acts that John Paul II would make toward Jews as Pope.

Entitled “A Blessing to One Another,” the exhibit begins with John Paul II and Toaff’s embrace, which took place when the saintly Bishop of Rome became the first Pope to ever enter a synagogue April 13, 1986.

It then traces back through the history of St. John Paul II’s friendship with the Jewish people, with particular emphasis on his childhood friend Jerzy Kluger.

Located at the Braccio di Carlo Magno – the left-side corridor of Saint Peter’s Basilica – the exhibit was originally installed in 18 different locations in the United States, where it attracted more than 1 million visitors. It will be open in Rome until Sept. 17, 2015.

It was installed in the Vatican in honor of the 50th anniversary of the promulgation of the Second Vatican Council document Nostra Aetate, issued Oct. 28, 1965.

A declaration on the interaction of the Catholic Church with non-Christian religions, Nostra Aetate marked a new era in Catholic-Jewish relations.

Jewish-Christian relations had developed significantly under Bl. Paul VI, who was the first Pope to go on pilgrimage to the Holy Land, however St. John Paul II gave a definitive impetus to this new era.

Coming from the small Polish town of Wadowice, which had a strong Jewish community, John Paul II from a young age had become very close friends with Jerzy Kluger, who was Jewish.

The two lost contact with one another during the Second World War, but reconnected again in Rome, where Kluger had moved and where the then-Bishop Karol Wojtyla was taking part in the Second Vatican Council.

The story of this friendship is traced throughout the entire exhibition, with one part dedicated entirely to Kluger.

Although he passed away in 2011, Kugler recounted the story of his friendship with the late Pope in a video interview, during which he specifically recalled his first meeting John Paul right after he was elected Pope.

One of the first meetings a new elected Pope holds is with the community of his home country, and St. John Paul II held a meeting with Poles in Rome.

“I was obviously called to take part in the meeting, and I was called to greet the Pope. The meeting was warm, and Italian newspaper headlined: ‘The Pope greets his Jewish friend first,’” Kruger said.

This first encounter set the tone of St. John Paul II’s relationship with the Jewish community, which culminated when he became the first Pope to a visit a synagogue in 1986.

“We see the pictures of the event, of the embrace between John Paul II and Rabbi Elio Toaff, and it seems to us something normal. But it was not normal, it was epic,” the current Chief Rabbi of Rome, Riccardo Di Segni, said at the July 28 presentation the exhibition.

“It was the moment when the dialogue among theologians had turned into facts,” he said.

The multisensory exhibit is divided into four sections, called “chapters.” The first covers from 1920 to 1938, the years of Karol Wojtyla’s childhood in Wadowice. The second chapter is dedicated to 1939 until 1945, the time of World War II.

It was during those years Karol Wojtyla matured is vocation, but also witnessed the suffering of the Jewish people. A section of this chapter in the exhibit shows one of the prisoner suits used in Auschwitz.

The third Chapter is wider, and goes from 1946 to 1978, which are the years of Karol Wojtyla’s priesthood and his time as bishop until he was elected Pope. His papacy is explored in the fourth chapter.

A banner is also hung indicating a list of papal-firsts in St. John Paul II’s relationship with the Jews.

In 1979 he was the first Pope to go to Auschwitz and pay homage to the Jewish people who died in the extermination camps; in 1986 he became the first Pope to enter a Synagogue; he was the first Pope to acknowledge the State of Israel in 1993 and was the first Pope who publicly recalled “The Shoah,” or Holocaust, at the Vatican in 1994.

The banner also highlights how John Paul II was also the first Pope to host and honor a long-term Jewish friend in a Pontifical residence.

James Buchanan, a professor at Xavier University of Cincinnati, Ohio and curator of the exhibition, explained at the exhibit’s launch that its message, as well as that of John Paul II, “is that the responsibility of dialogue with the other falls upon each of us. More importantly it falls upon each of us each us to pass this message on through our children.”

One of the central ideas of the exhibit, he said, “is that what we teach our children, how we raise them, with whom we raise them, and how we teach them to deal with others is of critical importance to their future.”

However, St. John Paul II’s friendship with Kugler is the real leit motiv of the exhibition.

William Madges of St. Joseph University of Philadelphia and also a curator of the exhibit, explained that the friendship between the two was emphasized “because we believe that this special relationship, together with the Holy Father’s family upbringing, created in him a profound respect for the Jewish community that remained with him his entire life.”

The 10th anniversary of the St. John Paul II’s death is also marked in the exhibit. The idea for the exhibition was conceived before the pontiff’s death, and was presented to him as an honor for his 85th birthday.

However, St. John Paul II was never able to see how the exhibition turned out, as he died shortly before the installation was completed.

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VATICAN NEWS

Pope: In Confession we encounter God’s immense mercy

by Ann Schneible (CNA/EWTN News) • August 2, 2015

Pope Francis delivers an Angelus address in St. Peter’s Square, June 15, 2015. (L’Osservatore Romano)

Vatican City — Delivering his weekly Angelus address in St. Peter’s Square on Sunday, Pope Francis said that while everyone feels shame before going to Confession, this grace helps us to be open to God’s forgiveness.

“There are people who are afraid of approaching Confession, forgetting that there, we do not encounter severe judgment, but the immensely merciful Father,” the Roman Pontiff said Aug. 2, speaking to the crowds who had braved the hot Roman sun.

“It is true that when we go to Confession, we feel a little shameful. This happens to all, to all of us, but we must remember that even this shame is a grace which prepares us for the embrace of the Father, who always forgives and always forgives everyone.”

Speaking after leading the recitation of the Angelus prayer, the Pope noted that today is, in the Franciscan tradition, the feast of Our Lady of the Angels of Porziuncola and its associated indulgence; he used the occasion to remind the faithful of the importance of Confession.

The feast marks the dedication of the Porziuncola or “little portion,” a small parish church which is one of those St. Francis of Assisi rebuilt in obedience to Christ’s command to “rebuild my church.”

“It is a powerful reminder to bring ourselves closer to the Lord in the Sacrament of Mercy, and to receive Communion,” Pope Francis said.

Before leading the faithful in the Angelus, Pope Francis spoke on the day’s Gospel according to St. John, centering his reflection on the importance of finding lasting sustenance in Christ as the “Bread of Life.”

The Roman Pontiff recounted the Gospel passage, which takes place shortly after Christ multiplied the loaves and fishes to feed the multitudes, who then continued to follow him.

Those who followed Christ after having received “material bread,” he said, “did not understand that this bread, broken for many, for many, was an expression of the love of Jesus himself. They gave more value to that bread than to the giver.”

In order to get past this “spiritual blindness,” he continued, Christ calls the people to discover and understand the one who gives the bread.

“God is the gift, and also the giver.”

It is “from this bread, this act” that the people are able to discover God, who gives the bread, Pope Francis said.

Christ invites us to be open to another perspective, not solely based on concerns about food, clothing, success, or career, the Roman Pontiff added. Rather: “Jesus speaks of another food; he speaks of a food that is not corruptible, and which is good to seek and receive.”

The Pope cited the Gospel reading, in which Christ exhorts us not to “labor for the food which perishes, but for the food which endures to eternal life.”

In other words, the Roman Pontiff said: “Seek salvation, the encounter with God.”

Pope Francis said Christ’s words are to help us understand that while we all experience the need to satiate our physical hunger, the “hunger for life” and eternity are more important, and cannot be fulfilled with ordinary food.

Christ’s words do not take away our concerns when it comes to our “daily bread,” the Pope said, but they invite us to consider how our lives are directed toward eternity.

“Jesus reminds us that the true meaning of our earthly existence is that human history, with its sufferings and joys, must be seen on the horizon of eternity, that is, in the horizon of the definitive encounter with him.”

“And this encounter illumines all the days of our life,” the Roman Pontiff said.

Making reference to the Eucharist, Pope Francis added, Christ says he is the Bread of Life, the “greatest gift which satiates the soul and the body.”

Not only does this Bread of Life give us meaning in hope amid life’s often “tortuous” journey, but in the task of announcing the Gospel to our brothers and sisters so that their “spiritual and material hunger” may be satisfied.

Pope Francis concluded his address by asking Mary for help in following her son, the True Bread which “does not corrupt, and endures for eternal life.”

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VATICAN NEWS

Will Pope Francis visit Kenya in November?

by CNA/EWTN News • August 4, 2015

Pope Francis at the General Audience address in St. Peter’s Square, March 11, 2015. (Bohumil Petrik/CNA)

Vatican City — Uganda, Central African Republic … and Kenya? There are no details yet for Pope Francis’ trip to Africa this November, but Kenyan media have announced that a Vatican delegation is expected next week to prepare for the Pope’s arrival.

Initially, according to the website of the Prefecture of the Papal Household, Pope Francis was expected to travel to Africa Nov. 27-29, visiting Uganda and Central African Republic. Later the idea of Kenya was added: it borders Uganda’s east, and locals are already betting on a three-day papal visit to their nation. The supposition is supported by the fact that the prefecture’s website now lists the Africa trip as lasting Nov. 25-30.

The Daily Nation, a Nairobi-based paper, maintains that the precise size and dates of next week’s delegation from the Vatican remain unknown. But the paper writes that the delegation will be welcomed by Cardinal John Njue of Nairobi and Archbishop Charles Balvo, apostolic nuncio to Kenya and South Sudan.

Archbishop Peter Kairo of Nyeri has said the delegation will oversee preparations for the Pope’s arrival, and discuss security issues with the relevant government bodies.

According to the archbishop, the Pope’s visit in Kenya should last three days – he said that “We are expecting him to arrive here on November 25 whereby he will be welcomed in the country by President Uhuru Kenyatta.”

He added that three committees are being formed at the moment, composed of archbishops and other Church figures who have previously helped in coordinating large events, such as the beatification of Sister Irene Sefani.

Fr. Peter Githinji of the Nyeri archdiocese, who coordinated that beatification, hopes Pope Francis will declare as martyrs the 75 faithful who were killed for their faith during the Mau Mau Uprising during the 1950s.

Such a celebration tie in with Pope Francis’ visit to Uganda, where he is expected to canonize that nation’s martyrs.

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VATICAN NEWS

Pope Francis’ advice to altar servers: Let Christ draw near to you

by Elise Harris (CNA/EWTN News) • August 4, 2015

Pope Francis at the General Audience address in St. Peter’s Square, May 13, 2015. (Daniel Ibanez/CNA)

Vatican City — In his first public audience in a month, Pope Francis told thousands of young altar servers on Tuesday that they should be open to Christ, who isn’t someone far off, but is close to us in the Eucharist and the other sacraments.

“You do not encounter Jesus placed on an inaccessibly high throne, but in the bread and wine of the Eucharist. His word does not shake the doorposts, but rather caresses the strings of the heart,” the Pope said Aug. 4 in St. Peter’s Square.

“If we do not resist him, Jesus will touch our lips with the flame of his merciful love, as he did to the prophet Isaiah. This will make us worthy to receive him and to bring him to our brothers and sisters.”

To be close to Christ and to get to know him in the Eucharist enables one to be open to others, to journey together, and to set and accomplish demanding goals, Francis observed.

“It is a source of real joy to recognize that we are small and weak, all the while knowing that, with Jesus’ help, we can be strengthened and take up the challenge of life’s great journey in his company.”

After taking a break from public audiences in July, Pope Francis prayed Vespers with the 12,000 altar servers gathered in Rome for their annual pilgrimage to the Eternal City. This year’s pilgrimage theme is “Here I am, send me,” spoken by Isaiah in response to God’s call.

Lasting Aug. 3-6, conference attendees hail from Germany, Austria, France, Portugal, Switzerland, Hungary, Serbia, and Italy.

The pilgrimage was led by Bishop Ladislav Nemet of Zrenjanin, who is president of the International Union of Altar Servers.

The Pope’s homily for the event centered on the day’s reading from the Book of Isaiah, in which the glory of God was revealed to the prophet in a vision. However, in the vision it was also revealed that although the Lord had made himself known to Isaiah, he still remained distant.

Isaiah was surprised to discover that it was God who had made the first move toward him, and not the other way around, the Pope said, adding that “God is the one drawing close.”

Francis noted how Isaiah realized that his own imperfections didn’t impede the Lord from acting in his life, and that it was God’s goodness alone that enabled him to take up his mission as a prophet, after being transformed into a new person able to respond to God’s call.

“You are more fortunate today than the prophet Isaiah” because of the sacraments, particularly the Eucharist, he said. In them, we experience “the intimate closeness of Jesus, the sweetness and power of his presence.”

Like Isaiah, we are also invited to be open, and “not remain closed in on ourselves, protecting our faith in an underground bunker to which we flee in difficult moments,” the Pope explained.

Instead, we are called to share the joy of knowing we are chosen by God and saved by his mercy.

“How beautiful it is to realize that faith brings us out of ourselves, out of our isolation,” he said, explaining that it is due to the joy of being friends with Christ that faith is able to draws us toward others, “making us natural missionaries!”

Pope Francis concluded his homily by telling the servers that the closer they are to the altar, the more they will remember to pray and be nourished by the Word and Body of the Lord.

Being close to the altar will also help them to go out and meet others, sharing with them the joy and enthusiasm they have received in their encounter with Christ.

Francis thanked the youth for serving at the Lord’s altar and for “making of this service a real school of learning the faith, and charity toward your neighbor. Thank you also for having begun to respond to the Lord, like the prophet Isaiah, ‘Here I am. Send me.’”

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VATICAN NEWS

Pope: Divorce and remarriage contradicts the sacrament, but Church always reaches out

by Ann Schneible (CNA/EWTN News) • August 5, 2015

Pope Francis at the General Audience address in St. Peter’s Square, May 20, 2015. (Daniel Ibanez/CNA)

Vatican City — Echoing his predecessors on the need to care for divorced and remarried persons, Pope Francis said Christians should help these persons integrate into the community rather than treating them as though they are excommunicated.

“The Church well knows that such a situation contradicts the Christian Sacrament,” the Pope said in his Aug. 5 General Audience at St. Peter’s Square. Nonetheless, he added, the Church should always approach such situations with a “mother’s heart; a heart which, animated by the Holy Spirit, seeks always the good and the salvation of the person.”

“It is important that they experience the Church as a mother attentive to all, always disposed to listen in encounters.”

The community is to welcome persons who have divorced and entered into new unions, the Pope said, that “they may live and develop their adherence to Christ and the Church with prayer, listening to God’s word, frequenting the liturgy, the Christian education of their children, charity, service to the poor, and a commitment to justice and peace.”

Pope Francis made these remarks in his first General Audience since his summer break, picking up where he left off in his ongoing series of catecheses about the family.

Since last autumn, the Roman Pontiff has been centering his Wednesday catecheses on the theme of family as part of the lead-up to the World Day of Families in September, and the Synod on the Family in October.

In stressing the complexity of the pastoral care of those who have entered unions without having received an annulment of their marriage, Pope Francis turned to his immediate predecessors, St. John Paul II and Benedict XVI, both of whom had addressed this problem.

Pope Francis went on to stress how in recent decades, under the guidance of his predecessors, the Church has come to an increased awareness of the need for “fraternal and attentive welcome, in love and in truth” of those who have entered a new union following the failure of their marriage.

For instance, the Pope cited Benedict XVI who, in a question and answer period during the 2012 World Meeting of Families, acknowledged there were no “simple solutions.”

He also cited St. John Paul II’s 1981 apostolic exhortation on the family, Familiaris consortio, calling on pastors to “exercise careful discernment of situations” (84) in caring for couples who have attempted to remarry without having obtained an annulment – giving the example of the difference between someone who caused the separation, and who suffered it.

One of the areas of particular concern, the Pope said, pertains to the children affected by such complex family situations, for they are who suffer the most.

“If we then look at these unions with the eyes of the small children,” the Pope said, “we see the even more urgency for developing, within our communities, a real welcoming of persons who live in these situations.”

“How can we entrust these parents to do everything to educate their children in the Christian life, to give them the example of convicted and practiced faith, if we keep them at a distance from the life of the community, as if they were excommunicated?”

“These persons are by no means excommunicated,” the Roman Pontiff stressed, “and they should absolutely not be treated as such: They are always part of the Church.”

Excommunication is a medicinal penalty, and an excommunicated person cannot have a ministerial participation in worship; celebrate or receive the sacraments; or exercise ecclesiastical offices, ministries, or functions.

The divorced who have remarried cannot, however, be admitted to Eucharistic Communion because “their state and condition of life objectively contradict that union of love between Christ and the Church which is signified and effected by the Eucharist,” St. John Paul II taught in Familiaris consortio.

Pope Francis said that in caring for people who are divorced and remarried, Christians should take their example from the Good Shepherd, an image which, he said, summarizes Christ’s mission to “give his life for his sheep.”

“This attitude is also a model for the Church, who welcomes her sons as a mother who givers her life for them.”

The Pope stressed that “all Christians are called to imitate the Good Shepherd.”

“Christian families can collaborate with him in taking care of wounded families, accompanying in the community’s life of faith. Each must his part to assume the attitude of the Good Shepherd, who knows every one of his sheep, and excludes no one from his infinite love!”

This year’s Synod on the Family, to be held Oct. 4-25, will be the second and larger of two such gatherings to take place in the course of a year. Like its 2014 precursor, the focus of the 2015 Synod of Bishops will be the family, this time with the theme: “The vocation and mission of the family in the Church and the modern world.”

The 2014 meeting became the subject of widespread media attention, largely owing to proposals by a small number of prelates to rethink the Church’s practice regarding the admission to Holy Communion for divorced persons who have remarried without having had their marriage recognized as null.

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VATICAN NEWS

To welcome refugees is a witness of the resurrection, Pope says

by Elise Harris (CNA/EWTN News) • August 6, 2015

A young child at the Sharia Refugee Camp in Dohuk, Iraq. (Daniel Ibanez/CNA)

Vatican City — On the first anniversary of the arrival of Iraqi refugees in Jordan, Pope Francis sent a letter thanking the country for welcoming thousands forced to flee their homes, and urged the international community not to remain indifferent.

“Many times I have wanted to give voice to the atrocious, inhumane and inexplicable persecution of those who in many parts of the world – and especially among Christians – are victims of fanaticism and intolerance, often under the eyes and silence of all,” the Pope said in his Aug. 6 letter.

“They are the martyrs of today, humiliated and discriminated against because of their fidelity to the Gospel.”

Addressed to the Latin Patriarch of Jerusalem S.B. Fouwad Toual, and the Patriarchal Vicar for Jordan S.E. Maroun Lahham, the letter was sent on the occasion of the first anniversary of the arrival of Iraqi refugees in Jordan Aug. 8, 2014.

With ISIS forces beginning a major offensive in June 2014, more than 2.5 million refugees – many of them Christian – fled from Mosul and the Nineveh Plan, either to neighboring countries or to Erbil and other cities in the Kurdish area.

In honor of the anniversary the president of the Italian bishops’ conference, Bishop Nunzio Galantino, will travel to Jordan Aug. 6-7, where he will participate in various meetings and events. Among them will be several visits refugee centers, the Vatican announced Aug. 6.

Pope Francis took bishop’s trip as an occasion to renew is appeal for solidarity and for a Church “that doesn’t forget or abandon her children, exiled for their faith.”

The Pope voiced his gratitude to Jordan and the many other countries for refusing to look the other way when refugees began to arrive.

“You announce the resurrection of Christ with the sharing of their pain and the fraternal help which provides aid to the hundreds of thousands of refugees; with your stooping down into their suffering, which risks suffocating hope; with your fraternal service, which also risks many dark moments of existence,” he told them.

On the other hand, Francis stressed that “public opinion” can always be more attentive and quick to participate in helping to end the global persecution of Christians and other religious minorities.

He renewed his frequently repeated appeal for the international community “not remain mute and inactive in front of such unacceptable crimes.”

Such crimes, he said, evoke an alarming concern for the most essential human rights and impede the richness of peaceful cohabitation among peoples, cultures and different faith practices.

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VATICAN NEWS

Pope Francis: Beware the ‘false peace’ that comes from the devil

by Elise Harris (CNA/EWTN News) • August 7, 2015

Pope Francis greets pilgrims in St. Peters Square before the Wed. general audience on April 16, 2014. (Daniel Ibanez/CNA)

Vatican City — Pope Francis on Friday told a group of youth that the greatest challenge in his vocation so far has been finding true peace, and encouraged them to learn how to discern between this peace and the one offered by the devil.

“I would say finding peace in the Lord. That peace that only Jesus can give, in work and chores” the Pope said Aug. 7. in response to the question, posed by one of the youth he met with in audience that day.

“The key is finding that peace which means that the Lord is with you and helps you,” he said.

Francis then stressed the importance of knowing how to tell the difference between peace from God, and the false peace offered by the devil.

True peace, he said, always comes from Jesus, and is sometimes “wrapped” in the cross, while the other, false peace that only makes you “kind of happy” comes from the devil.

“We have to ask for this grace to distinguish, to know true peace,” the Pope said, explaining that while on the outside we might think everything is ok and that we’re doing good, “way down inside is the devil.”

“The devil always destroys. He tells you this is the way and then leaves you alone,” he continued, adding that the devil is “a poor payer; he always rips you off.”

A sign of this peace, Francis said, is joy, because true joy is something that only Jesus can give.

The challenge for both them and himself “is to find the peace of Jesus, also in difficult moments, to find Jesus’ peace and to recognize that peace which has make-up on it,” the Pope said.

He made his comments during an audience with more than 1500 members of the International Eucharistic Youth Movement. They are meeting in Rome from Aug. 4-10 in honor of the 100th anniversary of their founding in 1915. The theme for the gathering is “Joy be with you.”

Six of the youth present, from Italy, Indonesia, Argentina, Brazil, Taiwan, and France got to meet the Pope personally and ask him questions on things that affect their daily life.

Among the topics discussed were tensions and conflicts within families and society, the discernment between true and false peace, signs of hope in the world and deepening one’s relationship with Jesus in the Eucharist.

In his response to the question on conflict, Pope Francis noted how there are many conflicts present in the world, and said that we should neither be afraid of them nor seek them out. Some conflicts, he said, can be good and help us to understand differences.

One problem with the world’s current conflicts is that “one culture doesn’t tolerate another,” he said, and pointed to the Rohingya as an example.

Rohingya people are an Indo-Aryan ethnic group largely from the Rakhine state of Burma, in west Myanmar. Since clashes began in 2012 between the state’s Buddhist community and the long-oppressed Rohingya Muslim minority, more than 100,000 Rohingya’s have fled Myanmar by sea, according to the U.N.

In order to escape forced segregation from the rest of the population inside rural ghettos, many of the Rohingya – who are not recognized by the government as a legitimate ethnic group or as citizens or Myanmar – have made the perilous journey at sea in hopes of evading persecution.

In May Pope Francis spoke out after a number of Rohingya people – estimated to be in the thousands – were stranded at sea in boats with dwindling supplies while Southeastern nations such as Thailand, Indonesia and Malaysia refused to take them in.

This, he told the youth, “is called killing. It’s true. If I have a conflict with you and I kill you, its war.”

Conflict is normal when so many different cultures exist in one country, the Pope observed, but emphasized that there must be mutual respect in order for these conflicts to be resolved.

He said that dialogue is the best resolution to the great social problems of today, and pointed to the persecution of Christians in the Middle East as an example of when one culture doesn’t respect the identity or faith of another.

Yesterday Pope Francis wrote a letter to the Latin Patriarch of Jerusalem S.B. Fouwad Toual for the Aug. 8 anniversary of the first arrival of Iraqi refugees in Jordan.

In his letter, the Pope thanked Jordan for welcoming the refugees, saying their actions bear witness to Christ’s resurrection.

He also noted how these refugees are “victims of fanaticism and intolerance, often under the eyes and silence of all,” and called on the international community to step up their efforts in putting an end to the persecution of Christians and other religious minorities.

In his speech to the youth, Francis said that even if you disagree with another culture’s practice, “Respect. Look for the good in it. Respect. In this way, conflicts are resolved with respect for the identity of others. Conflicts are resolved with dialogue.”

Another question posed to the Pope was if he sees true signs of joy in amid the problems of the 21st century.

Pope Francis responded by saying that the signs are there, and that one of them is seeing so many youth gathered together who believe that Jesus is truly in the Eucharist.

He also pointed to the family, noting that right now there are many strong tensions between generations.

Often when we speak of generations, parents and children come to mind, but grandparents are frequently left out, Francis observed.

“Grandparents are the great forgotten of this time,” he said, and encouraged the youth to speak to their grandparents, who are sources of wisdom due to the memory they have of life, tensions, conflicts and faith.

“Always when you meet your grandparents you find a surprise. They are patient, they know how to listen … don’t forget grandparents, understand?”

The last question the Pope answered, posed by a youth named Maradona, was what he would say to young people so that they might discover the depth of the Eucharist.

Francis immediately turned to the Last Supper, where Jesus gave us his body and blood for our salvation.

“The memory of Jesus … is there. The memory of the gesture of Jesus who then went to the Mount of Olives to start his Passion,” which is a personal act of love for each individual, he said.

The Pope stressed that Mass is not a ritual or a ceremony like what we see in the military or cultural celebration. Instead, going to Mass means going to Calvary with Jesus, where he gave his life for us, the Pope said.

In order to deepen in the mystery of the Eucharist, Francis suggested remembering St. Paul’s invitation to “remember Jesus Christ. When they are there at the table, he is giving his life for me. And so you deepen in the mystery.”

Pope Francis concluded by saying that although “we are at war” and there are so many conflicts, there are also many good and beautiful things, such as the hidden everyday saints among the people of God.

“God is present and there are so many reasons to be joyful. Take courage and go forward!” he finished.

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VATICAN NEWS

Archbishop Cupich will attend synod, Vatican source says

by CNA/EWTN News • August 7, 2015

Archbishop Blase Cupich at installation Mass at Holy Name Cathedral in Chicago on Nov. 17, 2014. (Joshua Lott/Getty Images)

Vatican City — Originally selected as an alternate synod delegate, Archbishop Blase Cupich of Chicago will in fact be an attendee at the Vatican gathering on the family this fall, a Vatican source told CNA.

The source also said that another American bishop will likely be chosen to attend as well, bringing the total U.S. delegation of bishops up to six.

The Synod on the Family, which will be held at the Vatican in October, will bring together bishops from around the world to discuss a wide variety of matters related to marriage and family across the globe.

Last fall, the U.S. bishops selected delegates to represent them at the upcoming synod.

They chose Archbishop Joseph Kurtz of Louisville and Cardinal Daniel DiNardo of Galveston-Houston, the president and vice-president respectively of the U.S. bishops’ conference, as well as Archbishop Charles Chaput of Philadelphia, who is hosting the 2015 World Meeting of Families and Archbishop Jose Gomez of Los Angeles, the highest-ranking Hispanic bishop in the country, who leads the nation’s largest diocese.

Archbishop Cupich was originally selected as an alternate, along with Archbishop Salvatore Cordileone of San Francisco, who heads the U.S. bishops’ defense and promotion of marriage subcommittee.

Delegates must be approved by the Vatican. In addition to those elected by their fellow bishops, candidates can be proposed for the Pope’s approval by the Office of the Synod of Bishops, led by Cardinal Lorenzo Baldisseri.

With the official announcement of Archbishop Cupich’s appointment, the slate of lay delegates is also expected. At last year’s synod, a number of married couples from around the world were invited as auditors.

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WORLD NEWS

New Armenian Catholic patriarch pulled from retirement to take the reins

by Elise Harris (CNA/EWTN News) • August 1, 2015

Gregory Peter XX Ghabroyan, Armenian Patriarch of Cilicia. (Armenian Catholic Eparchy of Our Lady of Nareg in the U.S.A. and Canada)

Beirut, Lebanon — In a rare move, the Armenian Catholic Church has pulled their new patriarch from out of retirement to take on the role as their new head. Church leaders cited his energy and authority as necessary when dealing with current issues, particularly those in the Middle East.

Gregory Peter XX Ghabroyan was elected Patriarch of Cilicia of the Armenians July 24. He succeeds former patriarch Nerses Pierre XIX Tarmouni, who died June 25.

The patriarch is head of the Armenian Catholic Church, an Eastern Catholic Church in full communion with the Pope. The Church uses the Armenian rite, and is estimated to have 1 million followers.

“The patriarch was born in 1934, which makes him 80 years old, and in November he will be 81. However, you have to know this person to be able to understand why he was elected,” Fr. Thomas Garabedian told CNA July 28.

“When he talks he talks with authority. He has the charisma to have people listen to him and to appreciate what he’s saying to them. He’s a person that when he talks to you, he convinces you.”

Fr. Garabedian, chancellor for the Armenian Eparchy of Our Lady of Nareg in Glendale, praised the new patriarch for his organization, discipline, spiritual devoutness, and energy, despite his advanced age.

“At 80 years old … the physical vigor he has is of someone who is in his 50s or 60s,” Fr. Garabedian said.

“He wakes up early and goes to bed a little late, so his whole day is filled with work. It’s really somebody who is very well disciplined and authoritative who we needed at this one juncture of our life in the Armenian Catholic Church.”

Born in Aleppo, Patriarch Ghabroyan had been retired for two years prior to his election last week. He had been ordained a priest of the Institute of Patriarchal Clergy of Bzommar in 1959, at the age of 24. In 1977 he was ordained a bishop and appointed the Armenian Apostolic Exarch of France.

He stepped down as the Armenian Eparch of France in 2013, however his election as patriarch now pulls him out of retirement.

Patriarch Ghabroyan will be installed at the Armenian monastery of Bzommar in Lebanon, the official seat of his patriarchate. However, due to practical reasons and the fact that most of the 12,000 Lebanese members of the Church live in Beirut, 20 miles away, the patriarch will likely spend the majority his time there, Fr. Garabedian explained.

In attendance at the ceremony, which will take place Aug. 9, will be the Vatican’s ambassador to Lebanon, Archbishop Gabriele Caccia.

The decision to elect someone as patriarch who has already gone into retirement is “very uncommon,” Fr. Garabedian noted, though he added that discussions ahead of the synod that elected him gave clues as to what the bishops were looking for.

Fr. Garabedian explained that in the Armenian Catholic Church, the synod convenes each time the bishops meet to discuss and make decisions on current issues, and a general synod is typically held once a year.

All but two of the 15 members of the Armenian synod of bishops were present in Lebanon to elect the patriarch. Under the Code of Canon Law of the Eastern Churches, the bishops are given 15 days once the synod begins to select a new patriarch, who must be elected by a two thirds vote.

Should the synod fail to elect a new patriarch within the 15 days, the matter is then turned over to the Holy See, who selects a person to fill the role.

Patriarch Ghabroyan is “definitely the man for the job,” Fr. Garabedian said, noting that he has the skills needed to meet the current challenges the Armenian Catholic Church faces.

The first of these challenges, he said, is the crisis in the Middle East.

“The Middle East today is not the Middle East of 10 or 20 or 30 years ago … there is a sense of loss in the Middle East as far as the Christian community is concerned. People in these countries don’t know what tomorrow will bring. Bombs, killings, ISIS, all these situations.”

He also pointed to the high number of refugees pouring out of Syria due to its civil war, which he called “the most dramatic situation of any country today on earth.”

With roughly 2 million of those refugees now in Lebanon, “you need a patriarch who is first of all able to lead his faithful in this very dire situation,” as well as to manage the internal life of the Church, the priest said.

Current internal issues the Armenian Catholic Church faces are how to distribute a diminishing number of clergy, how to regain those who have left the Church, as well as managing relations with Armenia.

In Armenia, 93 percent of the population belongs to the Armenian Apostolic Church – an Oriental Orthodox Church from which the Armenian Catholic Church was formed in the 18th century.

“We have a very large Armenian Catholic community in Armenia – how do you cooperate with the Armenian [Apostolic] Church without making them feel that you are there to proselytize, when in reality you are there only to take care of the spiritual needs of your faithful?”

These are all topics Fr. Garabedian said the new patriarch will be able to handle with his diplomatic skills, his ability to fund raise, and his devout spiritual life.

“He’s a great administrator, so I think with his administration and his diplomacy and also with his spiritual life, I think those could be three things he could use to make things happen.”

Pope Francis sent a letter July 25 congratulating Patriarch Ghabroyan on his election, and granting him full ecclesial communion with Rome.

He noted how the patriarch’s election comes at a time when the Armenian Catholic Church is facing new difficulties and challenges, particularly in the Middle East.

However, with the light of faith in the Risen Christ, “our outlook on the world is full of hope and mercy, for we are certain that the Cross of Jesus is the tree that gives life,” the Pope said.

“I am sure that Your Beatitude, in communion with the venerable Synod Fathers, with the help of the Holy Spirit and with evangelical wisdom, will know how to be the ‘Pater et Caput,” (Father and Head), the Good Shepherd to that part of the People of God entrusted to you.”

Francis called on the intercession of the Armenian martyrs and St. Gregory of Narek, whom he recently declared a Doctor of the Church, to intercede for the patriarch, and entrusted his new ministry to the protection of Mary, the Mother of God.

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WORLD NEWS

Enrique Shaw: the Argentine businessman whom Francis may soon beatify

by Abel Camasca (CNA/EWTN News) • August 3, 2015

Enrique Shaw, c. 1957. (CNA)

Buenos Aires, Argentina — Pope Francis’ desire to see the late Argentine businessman Enrique Shaw raised to the altars could be close to fruition, according to the postulator of Shaw’s cause for beatification.

Juan Navarro Floria told CNA the diocesan phase of the cause has been completed.

“This process began when Pope Francis was the Archbishop of Buenos Aires, and in that capacity he was the one who asked Rome to open the process,” he related.

The diocesan process was closed in 2013 under Archbishop Mario Poli, and everything was passed on to the Congregation for the Causes of Saints, which this year declared the juridical validity of that phase of the process.

In an interview conducted in March with the Mexican TV station Televisa, Pope Francis said, “I’ve known rich people and I’m moving forward with the cause for beatification over there [in Argentina] of a rich Argentine businessman. Enrique Shaw was rich, yet saintly. A person can have money. God gives it to him so he can administer it well. And this man administered it well. Not with paternalism, but by fostering the [personal] growth of people who needed help.”

Shaw’s cause for beatification is now following its course in Rome, with the postulator Silvia Correale. Correale is working with the rapporteur to draft a positio, which in addition to the testimonies of witnesses, includes the main aspects of Shaw’s life, virtues, and writings.

Shaw was born in 1921, and joined the navy while still young. He started his business after the Second World War, and founded in 1952 the Christian Association of Business Executives. He also was among the founders of the Catholic University of Argentina and the Christian Familiar Movement, and served as president of the Argentine Catholic Action.

In 1955, he was a victim of the anti-Catholic waves that took place in the first phase of Juan Peron’s administration. According to Navarro Floria, the postulator of the cause of beatification, even after his arrest he proved altruistic, giving other inmates the mattresses his family brought to him, as well as food.

Shaw established a pension fund and a health care system to provide the 3,400 industry’s workers medical service, financial support in case of illness, and loans for important life events such as marriage, birth, and death.

In 1961, the industry led by Shaw was sold to an American trust fund which decided to fire 1,200 people. Shaw was already suffering an advanced cancer that was to lead to his death the following year, but he strongly opposed the layoffs and proposed a recovery plan that was to retain all the workers.

Sara Shaw, one of Enrique’s daughters, told CNA that what she remembers most about her father was “how he enjoyed coming home. He would come in whistling. We kids would come running, and the whole atmosphere changed because it was like a party when he came home from work … he really enjoyed his family.”

“He would have problems but he never unloaded them on us, not in the way he looked or what he said. Certainly he would talk with my mother, but we kids always saw him looking happy,” she added.

Sara added that several people have commented to her that many times her father did not accept dinner invitations from friends. He used to say he had a very important prior commitment. “And it seems the most important commitment was to come home in the evening to have dinner with his children,” she emphasized.

One of the family’s devotional practices was praying the Rosary. “He taught each one of us how to lead a decade, taking turns, and he used to tell us to mention our petitions out loud … and we used to walk to church on Sundays to get to Mass early.”

“After Communion he gave us all a hug and had us pray the Anima Christi … that was very beautiful and a many people remember how he had us recite this prayer in thanksgiving after Communion.”

Commenting on the Christian life their father led in the business world, Shaw’s daughter recalled that he had a lot of contact with his co-workers, including those from his navy years. “They remembered him very well. What struck them was that even though he was so quiet, he stood out by the way he acted, and by his faith.”

Fernán de Elizalde, himself a businessman and member of the Christian Association of Business Executives, is also vice postulator of Shaw’s cause for beatification.

He told CNA he is “convinced Shaw was a man of outstanding holiness. We’ll probably have in the future the first businessman saint in the world.”

“I’m a businessman like he was, and I wanted to take on this role of vice postulator to the extent that I could, to prove that this man had organized a business really in keeping with the social teaching of the Church … and it took me about two years to establish that, but once I discovered it in depth, by visiting many of the businesses where he worked, where he was a stockholder, where he was the director or a board member, I found a wonder of a person.”

de Elizalde recalled a moving anecdote about Shaw that reflects the affection he had for his workers, and vice versa. “During his last days he received a blood transfusion donated by the workers from his main factory. People at that hospital were wondering who had been admitted there because they couldn’t believe there were so many workers standing at the door, getting in line to donate blood – all the more so for an employer. They thought he must be a union member, but they never thought he was their employer.”

“One of Enrique’s last words as he was dying, was that he was happy that at this moment the blood of his workers was coursing through his veins.”

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WORLD NEWS

After 57 years, Kiwi priests’ ministry in Antarctica ends

by CNA/EWTN News • August 4, 2015

Chapel of the Snows, McMurdo Station, Antarctica. (Alan Light via Flickr CC BY 2.0)

Christchurch, New Zealand — New Zealand’s Diocese of Christchurch has operated an Antarctic Ministry at McMurdo Station, the largest community in Antarctica, since November 1957. But a declining numbers of churchgoers has brought the program to an end.

“There is a gradual decrease in religiosity, there is also a decrease in the number of people working at McMurdo Station and the South Pole and budget cuts so all of these factors have led to the decision that only one chaplain is necessary,” Fr. Dan Doyle, who coordinates the diocese’s Antarctic ministry, told Radio New Zealand July 26.

McMurdo Station is a US research center on Ross Island, which has some 1,000 residents during summers and is operated by the National Science Foundation.

Peter West, a National Science Foundation spokesman, told the BBC, “There are Catholic chaplains available through the US military, so it’s not as if practising Catholics will not be able to avail themselves of services and a Catholic priest. But this particular programme we cannot accommodate any longer.”

The first New Zealander priest to serve at McMurdo was Fr. Ronald O’Gorman, who assisted a US Navy chaplain in 1957. Since then, the diocese has managed to assist in providing priests for the station’s summer, from October to February.

The priests serving at McMurdo have been based at the interreligious Chapel of the Snows.

When McMurdo station was being built, there was not originally a plan to build a church. However, while working on other buildings, volunteers collected extra lumber and supplies to build the chapel, and its construction was completed even before the rest of the base was finished.

The original Chapel of the Snows burned down in 1978, and was replaced with a new temporary chapel. The current chapel was dedicated in 1989.

Fr. Doyle explained that at its heyday, McMurdo Station would be home to 2,000 people during the summer. He also added that improved communications technology has helped residents to feel less isolated while working in Antarctica.

McMurdo Station will continue to be served by chaplains for the US military, and other Catholic chapels remain elsewhere in Antarctica. Argentina has several chapels at its bases, including one dedicated to Our Lady of Lujan at Marambio Base.

There are also several Eastern Orthodox chapels located in Antarctica.

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WORLD NEWS

How one skeptical scientist came to believe the Shroud of Turin

by Ann Schneible (CNA/EWTN News) • August 4, 2015

The Shroud of Turin featuring positive (left) and negative (right) digital filters. (Dianelos Georgoudis via Wikimedia Commons)

Rome, Italy — The Shroud of Turin has different meanings for many people: some see it as an object of veneration, others a forgery, still others a medieval curiosity. For one Jewish scientist, however, the evidence has led him to see it as a meeting point between science and faith.

“The Shroud challenges (many people’s core beliefs) because there’s a strong implication that there is something beyond the basic science going on here,” Barrie Schwortz, one of the leading scientific experts on the Shroud of Turin, in an CNA.

Admitting that he did not know whether there was something beyond science at play, he added: “That’s not what convinced me: it was the science that convinced me.”

The Shroud of Turin is among the most well-known relics believed to be connected with Christ’s Passion. Venerated for centuries by Christians as the burial shroud of Jesus, it has been subject to intense scientific study to ascertain its authenticity, and the origins of the image.

The image on the 14 feet long, three-and-a-half feet wide cloth is stained with the postmortem image of a man – front and back – who has been brutally tortured and crucified.

Schwortz, now a retired technical photographer and frequent lecturer on the shroud, was a member of the 1978 Shroud of Turin Research Project which brought prestigious scientists together to examine the ancient artifact.

As a non-practicing Jew at the time, he was hesitant to be part of the team and skeptical as to the shroud’s authenticity – presuming it was nothing more than an elaborate painting. Nonetheless, he was intrigued by the scientific questions raised by the image.

Despite his reservations, Schwortz recounts being persuaded to remain on the project by a fellow scientist on the team – a NASA imaging specialist, and a Catholic – who jokingly told him: “You don’t think God wouldn’t want one of his chosen people on our team?”

And Schwortz soon encountered one of the great mysteries of the image that still entrances its examiners to this day.

He explained that a specific instrument used for the project was designed for evaluating x-rays, which allowed the lights and darks of an image to be vertically stretched into space, based on the lights and darks proportionately.

For a normal photograph, the result would be a distorted image: with the shroud, however, the natural, 3-D relief of a human form came through. This means “there’s a correlation between image density – lights and darks on the image – and cloth to body distance.”

“The only way that can happen is by some interaction between cloth and body,” he said. “It can’t be projected. It’s not a photograph – photographs don’t have that kind of information, artworks don’t.”

This evidence led him to believe that the image on the shroud was produced in a way that exceeds the capacities even of modern technology.

“There’s no way a medieval forger would have had the knowledge to create something like this, and to do so with a method that we can’t figure out today – the most image-oriented era of human history.”

“Think about it: in your pocket, you have a camera, and a computer, connected to each other in one little device,” he said.

“The shroud has become one of the most studied artifacts in human history itself, and modern science doesn’t have an explanation for how those chemical and physical properties can be made.”

While the image on the Shroud of Turin was the most convincing evidence for him, he said it was only a fraction of all the scientific data which points to it being real.

“Really, it’s an accumulation of thousands of little tiny bits of evidence that, when put together, are overwhelming in favor of its authenticity.”

Despite the evidence, many skeptics question the evidence without having seen the facts. For this reason, Schwortz launched the website www.shroud.com, which serves as a resource for the scientific data on the Shroud.

Nonetheless, he said, there are many who still question the evidence, many believing it is nothing more than an elaborate medieval painting.

“I think the reason skeptics deny the science is, if they accept any of that, their core beliefs have been dramatically challenged, and they would have to go back and reconfigure who they are and what they believe in,” he said. “It’s much easier to reject it out of hand, and not worry about it. That way they don’t have to confront their own beliefs.”

“I think some people would rather ignore it than be challenged.”

Schwortz emphasized that the science points to the Shroud being the burial cloth belonging to a man, buried according to the Jewish tradition after having been crucified in a way consistent with the Gospel. However, he said it is not proof of the resurrection – and this is where faith comes in.

“It’s a pre-resurrection image, because if it were a post-resurrection image, it would be a living man – not a dead man,” he said, adding that science is unable to test for the sort of images that would be produced by a human body rising from the dead.

“The Shroud is a test of faith, not a test of science. There comes a point with the Shroud where the science stops, and people have to decide for themselves.”

“The answer to faith isn’t going to be a piece of cloth. But, perhaps, the answer to faith is in the eyes and hearts of those who look upon it.”

When it comes to testifying to this meeting point between faith and science, Schwortz is in a unique position: he has never converted to Christianity, but remains a practicing Jew. And this, he says, makes his witness as a scientist all the more credible.

“I think I serve God better this way, in my involvement in the Shroud, by being the last person in the world people would expect to be lecturing on what is, effectively, the ultimate Christian relic.”

“I think God in his infinite wisdom knew better than I did, and he put me there for a reason.”

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WORLD NEWS

Meet Saint Nektarios – a philosopher, poet and miracle worker

by Elise Harris (CNA/EWTN News) • August 5, 2015

Images in Holy Trinity Monastery, founded by St. Nektarios in Aegina, Greece. (Elise Harris/CNA)

Athens, Greece — Buried in a hilltop monastery on a small Greek island, Saint Nektarios – one of the most widely known and venerated Greek Orthodox saints – draws thousands of pilgrims each year, and is known for his writings and miracles.

The Greek Orthodox Church is part of the larger body of Eastern Orthodox Churches, who share a common doctrine and form of worship with each other.

Although the majority of Greek Orthodox live in Greece and in the southern Balkans, they are also present in Cyprus, Anatolia, southern Caucasus and Turkey, where their patriarch and head – Bartholomew I – lives.

Agios Nektarios of Aegina was born Oct. 1, 1846, in Asia Minor, now a part Turkey, into a simple but pious Christian home and given the name Anastasios.

Although family funds were limited, Nektarios completed elementary school in his hometown before leaving for Constantinople (now Istanbul) at the age of 14, where he worked as a shop assistant.

He regularly attended the Orthodox Church’s Sunday Divine Liturgy, and was an avid reader of scripture, as well as the writings of the Orthodox Elders of the Church.

In 1866, at the age of 20, Nektarios went to the island of Chios, where he was appointed a teacher. After seven years he entered the local monastery. Three years later he was made a monk, taking the name Lazarus.

After a just one year he was ordained a deacon and given the name Nektarios. Having completed his studies thanks to the help of a wealthy benefactor, the deacon moved to Alexandria, where he served under the guidance of the then-Patriarch of Alexandria, Sophronios.

With the patriarch’s urging, Nektarios went on to complete his theological studies, graduating in 1885 from the School of Theology in Athens. He was ordained a priest in 1886.

After quickly becoming known for his dedication to the Church, his prolific writings and teachings and his energy and zeal, Fr. Nektarios was soon ordained bishop, overseeing the Orthodox diocese of Pentapolis in Egypt.

As a bishop Nektarios became highly admired for his virtue and purity, and was greatly loved by his flock.

However, after his popularity evoked envy in higher officials, the beloved bishop was removed from office in 1890 without an explanation or trial procedure.

Nektarios then returned to Greece to where he served as a monk and preacher, continuing to write his now-famous books.

In 1904 he founded a monastery for women on the small island of Aegina, one of the Saronic Islands of Greece located roughly 17 miles from Athens.

Named the Holy Trinity Convent, the monastery flourished and was the place where Nektarios withdrew after retiring from his teaching position at the Rizarios Ecclesiastical School in 1908, at the age of 62.

He lived the rest of his days at the monastery, serving as a confessor and spiritual guide for the nuns and also priests who would come from distant cities. Known for his holiness and piety, the bishop would receive many visits from people asking for healing.

In September 1920 he was taken to the local hospital by one of the nuns in the convent, despite his protest, due to the great pain he was experiencing linked to a long-standing illness.

Placed in the same ward as the poor, Nektarios remained among them for two months before passing away the evening of Nov. 8.

The first miracle attributed to the saint came soon after his death when a nurse came to prepare his body for its transfer to Aegina for burial.

When the nurse removed the sweater Nektarios had been wearing, she placed it on the bed next to his, which was occupied by a paralytic. As soon as the sweater touched the bed the paralytic immediately regained his strength and stood up, giving glory to God.

He was officially recognized as a saint by the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople in 1961, and his feast day is celebrated Nov. 9 in the Greek Orthodox Church.

Each year on that day services are held at the monastery and a special procession takes place in the morning, during which the saint’s remains are carried through the streets of Aegina.

Pilgrims who come to pray at Nektarios’ tomb follow the Orthodox custom of making a threefold sign of the cross and kiss icons with the saint’s image. In another Orthodox practice visitors often lay their head on the saint’s stone tomb, wet from the humidity, while offering prayers that are usually answered.

Since Pope Francis’ election in March 2013, he has met Greek Orthodox Patriarch Bartholomew I on several occasions, with the aim of strengthening ecumenical ties between the Catholic and Orthodox churches.

In addition to signing two join-declarations last year, the two experienced a shared moment of prayer in Jerusalem’s Church of the Holy Sepulcher during the Roman Pontiff’s trip to the Holy Land in May 2014.

They reunited a month later at the Vatican for a June 8, 2014, invocation for peace between Israel and Palestine.

Francis and the patriarch also shared an emotional embrace during the Pope’s visit to Turkey in November 2014, which was a trip made largely upon the patriarch’s invitation to participate in the celebration of the feast of St. Andrew.

Since then Francis has spoken on several occasions about the steps that need to be done in continuing to strengthen relations between the churches, and has mentioned that finding a common date for the celebration of Easter is a priority that could happen in the near future.

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WORLD NEWS

This 100-year-old priest still has a very important task: Fighting Satan

by Blanca Ruiz (CNA/EWTN News) • August 5, 2015

Father Francisco Acevedo. (Diocese of Malaga)

Madrid, Spain — On August 1, the oldest priest in the Diocese of Malaga, Spain turned 100 years old. After a century of life, Father Francisco Acevedo says he still has important work to do.

“St. Peter says: ‘Be sober and keep watch, because the devil as a roaring lion walks about, seeking whom he may devour,” said Fr. Acevedo in an interview published by the Bishop of Malaga.

“I still have to resist the devil, but it’s not easy. The devil does not want there to be holy priests, and it’s dangerous to not take this seriously,” he said when asked about his ongoing task.

Now living in residence at St. Patrick’s parish, the priest says he has led a normal life and does not have any “tricks” to such a long life.

Having spent most of the last century as a priest, Fr. Acevedo offered some advice to seminarians and young priests: “Seek God alone.”

He also stressed the importance of prayer, saying that it “is everything” to him and is “a permanent guard.”

Fr. Acevedo tried to be faithful in prayer, and highlighted Mary’s faithfulness in always praying for her children.

Those who see prayer time as taking away from other activities “do not know what it means to be Christian,” he continued. “They might have heard something about him, but they do not know Jesus. If they knew him, they would seek.”

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WORLD NEWS

Chilean women: Abortion does not solve problem of sexual violence, discrimination

by CNA/EWTN News • August 5, 2015

Screenshot from #MiDecisión (MyDecision) video. (YouTube)

Santiago, Chile — Women in a new video released in Chile said that mothers facing difficult pregnancies need compassion and care from society, not abortion.

“I became pregnant after I was sexually assaulted by a stranger, and it was a traumatic experience,” said Magaly Rios.

“I also had a miscarriage, and it was very distressing. So I can imagine the pain these women subject themselves to when they decide to have an abortion. The suffering is for the rest of your life. Your whole life you think about this child who died.”

Rios was one of the women who shared her testimony in a new video #MiDecisión (MyDecision), which highlights the stories of women who have faced crisis pregnancies in Chile.

#MiDecisión was launched amid legislative debate on a bill that would legalize abortion in the country in cases of rape, incest or fetal deformity.

In the video, women decry violations from sexual violence to workplace discrimination. However, they also reject abortion as a solution to these problems.

“I don’t want to be a rape victim, or lose my job because I’m pregnant,” one woman said.

However, she continued, “I can’t kill a child for those reasons, or for any other. Because it’s my child, and he’s in my womb, I’m first of all the one to take care of him, protect him and respect him, and defend his right to life even if he’s so ill that he won’t live after he’s born. No law can change that.”

At the end of the video, women hold signs that say: “No to sexual violence, discrimination, abuse of women, injustice, lies, and abortion. Both lives have value.”

Myriam Trullenque, a professor who participated in the video, explained, “I’m Catholic and defending life is defending what I believe in. It’s not up to us to take away the life of baby because God made us out of love and so we also need to receive with love the unborn children.”

“We have to create real networks of support for women who are in this dilemma, so Chile can be a place where everyone can live, no matter what situation they’re in,” she said.

The #MiDecisión video, which has surpassed 26,000 views on Facebook, was created by a group of lay people who are promoting the initiative @ValePorDosChile (Both have value).

The initiative seeks to promote care for both mother and child in crisis pregnancy situations, rejecting the proposed law that would legalize abortion as a “solution” for such situations.

“We believe it’s necessary to take a look at integrating the values of freedom, dignity and respect for the mother as well as for the child. In that way, we’re trying to create a sense of responsibility in society to take care of the problems that thousands of women are going through and who see abortion as the only solution to their problems,” the Vale por Dos webpage explains.

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WORLD NEWS

Greece in crisis – and what Catholics are doing to help

by Elise Harris (CNA/EWTN News) • August 6, 2015

(aesthetics of crisis via Flickr CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)

Athens, Greece — As Greece’s financial and political situation reaches a fever pitch in complexity, Caritas has stepped up and is offering help to the growing number of poor and migrants inhabiting the country.

“Here everything is blocked, everything is difficult. There isn’t work, there isn’t anything. Also Greeks are looking for work, everyone is. It’s a very, very difficult situation,” Father Andrea Voutsinos told CNA Aug. 5.

Fr. Voutsinos is the director of Caritas Greece, which is part of the regional Caritas Europe branch and the wider, all-encompassing Caritas Internationalis.

In a July 5 referendum Greek citizens voted heavily against Europe’s latest bailout offer after the country failed to repay their creditors large amounts of their more than $300 billion debt. The vote raised concerns that the country could suffer a worse economic disaster and lose its place in the eurozone.

Greece has been in financial crisis for years. Economically the weakest nation in the eurozone, it was hit hard during the 2008 global financial crisis. Beginning in 2010, it began receiving financial bailouts, on the condition that it adopt austerity measures such as pension cuts, tax hikes and public sector layoffs.

These austerity measures were a primary motivation in the negative referendum vote, which has left Greece with an increasingly uncertain future.

Unemployment in Greece is currently 25 percent, and individuals are unable to withdraw more than $70 a day from ATMs.

Amid the country’s ongoing dilemma, including a rising number of needy families and a growing number of refugees flooding in from the Middle East, Caritas Greece has been expanding their initiatives to assist more people.

The organization recently launched a new program called “Estia,” aimed at reaching out to families who have nothing, Fr. Voutsinos explained.

In addition to helping families with basic food needs, Caritas also offers assistance in paying for bills and medical insurance, since in Greece you can’t be admitted to the hospital unless you pay, the priest said.

“If they don’t have any work, they can’t bring anything home to live on. We are sending help daily,” he noted, including funds for electric, gas and water bills.

Caritas Greece also runs a large daily soup kitchen, this year feeding nearly 300 extra mouths, including several who are elderly.

However, the country’s growing number of poor is “only half the concern,” Fr. Voutsinos said, explaining that there is also an increasing worry over what to do with the number of refugees who enter into Greece’s southeastern islands from Turkey, making their way to Athens and beyond.

More than 90,000 refugees have entered Greece from the so far this year, most of them from the Middle East, the priest said, and he expects to see even more of an increase before the end of the year. Among those who come are many from Syria, Pakistan and Afghanistan.

“Every day more arrive from Turkey because it’s so close,” he said. With nowhere to go the refugees often make their way to Athens and sleep on the streets or in parks.

“There is great poverty, because the people don’t have the possibility to buy what’s necessary to eat.” So Caritas tries to help feed them, he said.

In addition to their other initiatives, the charitable organization also has a special project for Syrians who come to Greece, helping them in integrate as well as offering meals through their soup kitchen, assisted by the Missionaries of Charity.

The refugees who come “are looking for a better world,” the priest said, “but when they enter it’s not a better world.”

Despite the various projects Caritas is involved in, Catholics in Greece are a minority, making it difficult to raise the necessary funds in order to meet the country’s rising needs.

With the dominating religion being the Greek Orthodox practice, only 200-300,000 Catholics live in the country, “but by now also the Greek Catholics have lost work. They also ask us for help, but we don’t always have the money because we also have to sustain the parishes,” Fr. Voutsinos said.

As a result, the Caritas branches of Europe, Italy, Latin America and North America have all donated to the Greek branch in order to ensure they have enough funds to continue assisting their needy community.

Pope Francis recently offered his solidarity with Greece ahead of the country’s July referendum, calling for prayer and an attention to human dignity when entering into political debate.

“The news from Greece regarding the economic and social situation of the country is worrying,” Vatican press director Fr. Federico Lombardi said in a July 1 statement on behalf of Pope Francis. The Pope, he said, “invites all the faithful to unite in prayer for the good of the beloved Greek people.”

Fr. Voutsinos said that the Pope’s words were a consolation for them, but that difficulty remains, and “everyone is a little afraid for the future.”

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WORLD NEWS

China consecrates first new bishop in three years

by CNA/EWTN News • August 7, 2015

Chinese pilgrims gathered in St. Peter’s Square for the General Audience, April 22, 2015. (Bohumil Petrik/CNA)

Weihui, China — In mainland China’s first episcopal consecration since 2012, a priest was consecrated a bishop in the cathedral of Anyang on Tuesday. His appointment was agreed upon by both the Vatican and the Chinese government.

Fr. Joseph Zhang Yinlin, 44, was consecrated coadjutor bishop of the Diocese of Weihui (Anyang) on Aug. 4 by Bishop Thomas Zhang Huaixin of Weihui, who is 90. According to UCANews, assisting bishops were Joseph Shen Bin of Haimen, Joseph Yang Yongqiang of Zhoucun, and Wang Renlei of Xuzhou. Each of the bishops present are recognized by the Vatican.

According to the official website of the Henan Catholic Church, the ordination Mass was concelebrated by 75 priests and attended by an estimated 1,400 people. A source who attended the Mass told UCANews that the cathedral was under heavy security, with hundreds of police and firemen guarding it.

According to AsiaNews, Bishop Zhang “told the congregation that he was very touched, thanked God for choosing him, a simple and weak servant. He also thanked the ordinary Bishop Zhang for nurturing, guiding him patiently for years, and now presiding at his ordination.”

The episcopal consecration is the first since Pope Francis was elected Bishop of Rome, and the first since Vatican-China talks resumed in June 2014.

The last bishop consecrated in the People’s Republic of China was Thaddeus Ma Daqin, in July 2012. Bishop Ma had been part of the Chinese Patriotic Catholic Association – the government-sanctioned Church – but after his consecration as auxiliary bishop of Shanghai he announced he would leave the association, and he was confined by the government.

The ceremony comes weeks after Beijing beginning to recognize seminary studies, allowing seminarians to continued their education in a state university should they leave.

However, in Zhejiang province churches have been ordered to stop displaying crosses, and a number of churches have been demolished. Seven Christians have also been detained in the province.

The Church in China is often described as divided between an ‘official’ Church (the Patriotic Association), linked to the government, and an ‘underground’ Church, persecuted and whose episcopal appointments are frequently not acknowledged by Chinese authorities.

But a source in the Congregation for the Evangelization of Peoples told CNA July 27 that “for years, priests of Chinese communities and faithful have been working to overcome the divide between ‘clandestine’ and official Church … the more the ‘Cultural Revolution’ gets farther in time, the fewer the differences between patriotic and underground Church are.”

Bishop Zhang was born in 1971 in Henan province, and has served as vicar general of the Weihui diocese.

He was elected as a bishop candidate April 29, after having been approved by the Vatican. The vote was held by the government-sanctioned bishops’ conference, and was heavily controlled by the authorities.

The day prior, the Zhumadian diocese – also located in Henan province – had also elected a bishop candidate, Fr. Cosos Ji Chengyi. The date of his episcopal consecration has not been announced.

The cathedral of the Diocese of Weihui was moved to Anyang (60 miles north) in 1952, and thus the local Church is also known as the Diocese of Anyang. The diocese has 30 priests, 17 parishes, 120 nuns, and 40,000 members, according to UCANews.

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U.S. NEWS

Nuns, guns, and the Wild West – the extraordinary tale of Sr. Blandina

by Mary Rezac (CNA/EWTN News) • August 1, 2015

Wild West ghost town (left) and Sister Blandina Segale (right). (Tommy Clark via Flickr CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 and Archdiocese of Santa Fe, respectively)

Santa Fe, N.M. — Billy the Kid, a notorious bank and stage-coach robber of the Wild West, met his match in the most unlikely of people when he met Sister Blandina Segale.

According to legend, and to Sr. Blandina’s journal and letters, one of Billy the Kid’s gang members had been shot and was on the brink of death when the doctors of Trinidad, Colo. refused to treat him. Sister decided to take him in and cared for him for three months, nursing him back to health.

But Billy the Kid (William Leroy) was still unhappy. Word got out that the outlaw was coming to town to scalp the four doctors of Trinidad in revenge. When he arrived, Sr. Blandina intervened, and convinced him to call off his mission on behalf of his man she had saved.

After that incident, Sr. Blandina and Billy the Kid became friends. She once visited him in jail, and he once called off a stage-coach robbery as soon as he realized Sister was one of the passengers.

When she wasn’t calling off outlaws, Sr. Blandina was founding schools, building hospitals, teaching and caring for orphans and the poor, and advocating for the rights of Native Americans and other minorities. All in a day’s work.

Her heroic virtue and enduring works are why her cause for sainthood was opened in New Mexico last summer, earning her the title “Servant of God” and allowing people to ask for her intercession. Since then, several documents have come to light corroborating her stories, and the necessary miracle for the next big step – beatification – seems to be well on its way.

“Sainthood isn’t about an award, it isn’t about honoring, it’s about helping the faithful know that there is a source of God’s grace being worked on Earth,” said Allen Sanchez, president and CEO for CHI St. Joseph’s Children in Albuquerque, which Sr. Blandina founded. Sanchez also serves as the petitioner for the cause of Sister’s sainthood and has studied her life extensively.

Her early years

Sr. Blandina, born Maria Rosa Segale, was just four years old when she emigrated with her parents from the small town of Cicagna, Italy to Cincinnati, Ohio in 1854 (she had her 5th birthday on the boat ride over).

At the age of 16, Maria Rosa joined the Sisters of Charity and took the name Sr. Blandina. When she was just 22 years old, she was sent – alone – to Trinidad in Colo. territory to teach in the public school there. A few years later, she was sent further south, first to Santa Fe and then to Albuquerque, New Mexico.

It was probably quite an adjustment, Sanchez said, going from Europe and the more settled parts of America to the still very rough-and-tumble west.

While in New Mexico, Sr. Blandina helped found the public health care system and the public school system by building the first hospitals and schools in Albuquerque, often asking for the temporary release of prisoners to help her with the labor.

Much of what is known about Sr. Blandina’s life comes from a series of letters she wrote her sister, Sr. Justina Segale, who was back in Ohio. The compiled correspondences, which span the years of 1872-1894, were published ten years before Sr. Blandina’s death in 1941.

“You’re able to see the history of New Mexico happening within her interactions,” Sanchez said.

Sister stops a lynch mob

To open a cause for sainthood, examples of heroic virtue of the person must be shown. The specific example of heroic virtue that her petitioners are using involves another story that could only take place in the Wild West; the story that earned her the title “The Fastest Nun in the West” from a 1966 CBS feature on the incident.

Sr. Blandina was teaching school in New Mexico when one of her pupils told her, “Pa’s shot a man, and they’re going to hang him.”

That’s when Sr. Blandina went to work. She met with the shooter, and was able to convince him to write a confession. She then met with the dying man, and convinced him to forgive his shooter – in person – before he passed away.

After the two men were reconciled, Sr. Blandina then had to face down the lynch mob that was coming to kill the shooter, who, because of Sister, was instead taken to the circuit court and was given life in prison. After nine months, he was released to go back home to care for his four children.

“She disarms them from their guns, their hanging rope and their hate,” Sanchez said of sister and the lynch mob.

“She must have been charming to them!” he added. “I think they would fall in love with her and do what she would ask them to do, because she cared for them and she honestly was able to see the dignity of every human being from the innocent orphans to the guilty outlaws.”

Sr. Blandina also made several trips to Washington, D.C. to meet with legislators and to advocate on behalf of the Native Americans, whose reservation boundaries were being drawn at the time.

And although her own life is being evaluated for sainthood, Sr. Blandina herself knew all about the canonization process – she helped to petition to Rome for the cause of two different saints in her lifetime; St. Elizabeth Ann Seton and St. Kateri Tekakwitha. She also helped bring now-St. Katherine Drexel and her sisters to the West to help serve the Native American populations.

The next step

In order to be beatified – one step away from canonization – there needs to be proof of an otherwise – inexplicable miracle brought about through that person’s intercession. There are several possible examples of this being explored, which makes those petitioning for Sr. Blandina hopeful that her cause will advance quickly.

“We know of a baby that was born prematurely with a malfunctioning valve in the heart and collapsed lungs,” Sanchez said. “This family immediately contacted us, said they were praying the Sr. Blandina novena for the baby. The doctors had very little hope for the baby living, but four days later they couldn’t find the problem in the heart, it was as if it didn’t exist to begin with. Doctors are saying it’s inexplicable, so we’re pursuing that, there’s many stories like that that are being pursued to see if Sr. Blandina was involved.”

The example of her life on earth is also important for the faithful today, Sanchez said, because Sr. Blandina knew how to address both immediate problems as well as more systemic problems of social justice.

“She would follow through from the charity to the social justice,” he said. “For example, she would help feed and house the railway workers, but then she would also ask why the railway workers weren’t being cared for. And that’s the call for us today. Charity is important, that’s where you start, and then you move to the social justice from there.”

Sister’s cause for canonization may take several years, depending on the approval of her heroic virtue and miracles attributed to her intercession, but Sanchez said the board that is petitioning her cause is hopeful that things will progress quickly.

“I’d say we’re more than halfway through the diocesan phase. For her to be called ‘venerable’, we just have to prove her heroic virtue, and we’re hoping we’ll be ready to present that to the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops for a vote in their November or spring meeting,” he said.

If he had to describe her personality, Sanchez said, he would say she was tough but spunky, holy but unafraid of conflict.

“She wasn’t afraid of conflict and to roll up her sleeves and get the work done,” he said. “And she was always giving credit to the Gospel, to Jesus’ work.”

The best part of the process, Sanchez said, has been getting to know Sr. Blandina.

“I didn’t know this was going to be so fun and so inspiring,” he said. “And I really know her; she’s become my best friend.”

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U.S. NEWS

Why the effort to make gay marriage sacramental won’t work

by Kevin J. Jones (CNA/EWTN News) • August 2, 2015

(Burkhard Schmidt via Flickr CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)

Washington, D.C. — Dissenting Catholic groups have called for gay marriage to be recognized as a sacrament, but Catholic theology has a clear priority: marriage is God’s creation – and not even the Church can change that.

Dr. John Grabowski, a professor of moral theology at Catholic University of America, said that the push for “sacramental equality” by groups such as Dignity USA shows “a lack of understanding of what the Church is and the nature of the Church and what the sacraments are.”

“‘Marriage equality’ made for a good slogan, but in the Church’s understanding, marriage is not something that can be ‘redefined’; if you will, by interest groups, by government, or even by the Church itself,” he told CNA July 29.

Dignity USA on July 5 announced support for “full access to marriage and ordination” in the Catholic Church. The group’s annual convention, held in Seattle, approved a resolution that said Catholic leaders should “ensure that all of the sacraments of our Church be administered regardless of the gender identity, sexual orientation, or relational status of the person(s) seeking the sacrament.”

The group already rejects Catholic teaching on the immorality of homosexual acts.

Marianne Duddy-Burke, Dignity USA’s executive director, claimed that LGBT people are “officially banned from marriage and ordination” and often denied other sacraments.

“We can’t be fully equal if we are barred from any of our Church’s sacraments,” she said. Her statement cited the U.S. Supreme Court’s recognition of civil same-sex marriage in June as a precedent for cultural change.

Grabowski said Dignity USA’s position was “unfortunate.” He said that marriage has been “created by God” and no one can reconfigure or redefine it.

The Catholic understanding of marriage draws from the Book of Genesis in which God creates man as male and female and commands them to “be fruitful and multiply,” he explained.

Marriage reflects God as “a communion of persons” and a “unity of love.” Marriage is how man and woman “participate in his great capacity to create new life in God’s image,” said Grabowski.

Jesus Christ teaches this understanding of marriage in the Gospel of Mark, when he cites Genesis. Grabowski said Catholic morality distinguishes between different forms of discrimination.

“Unjust discrimination is always morally evil, but not all distinction is discriminatory and unjust,” he said.

Elk Stanley, senior legal counsel with the legal group Alliance Defending Freedom, said that Catholic individuals and organizations can face can face lawsuits and other threats due to non-discrimination laws and ordinances regarding employment and places of public accommodation.

But he did not think Dignity USA’s position would pose a problem for the legal defense of Catholic groups or individuals that support Catholic teaching.

“It is difficult to predict what will sway judges, regulators, or legislators,” Stanley said. “Legislators and others have attempted to cite churches that have left the evangelical Protestant teaching on marriage as proof that churches are changing their ways. But this is probably less of a concern for the Catholic Church which has been clear for hundreds of years regarding its doctrine as it relates to marriage and human sexuality.”

“Absent a change from the leadership of the Catholic Church on these issues, the voice of one dissident group will not likely be attributed as Catholic church doctrine,” Stanley told CNA July 29.

Grabowski saw the move to change marriage in the Catholic Church as a consequence of the June 2015 U.S. Supreme Court decision. However, he said it also reflects cultural trends dating back five or six decades. Contraception and no-fault divorce already represented a cultural definition of marriage.

Dignity USA’s endorsement of “sacramental equality” drew support from another dissenting Catholic group, New Ways Ministry, in a July 8 statement from its executive director Francis DeBernardo.

Both groups are part of the Equally Blessed Coalition. Their financial backers include the Arcus Foundation, which gave the coalition a $200,000 grant intended “to support pro-LGBT faith advocates to influence and counter the narrative of the Catholic Church and its ultra-conservative affiliates.” The advocacy efforts are connected with the Synod on the Family and World Youth Day, according to the grant listing on the foundation’s website.

The foundation has helped fund advocates of doctrinal and liturgical change within other religious denominations, including the Episcopal Church. The Arcus Foundation is also pursuing a strategy of combating religious freedom exemptions.

Its partners in worldwide LGBT activism include the U.S. State Department’s Global Equality Fund.

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U.S. NEWS

Half of church fires in the last 20 years were set on purpose

by CNA/EWTN News • August 3, 2015

(butterbits via Flickr CC BY-SA 2.0)

Washington, D.C. — Fifty-one percent of the reported fire incidents at U.S. houses of worship between 1996 and 2015 were determined to be caused by arson, according to a recent analysis by the Pew Research Center.

Church fires are investigated and classified by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives as accidental, bombing, arson, threat or undetermined.

Statistics show that just over half of the approximately 4,700 fires reported at houses of worship between 1996 and 2015 were ruled intentional.

There has been little change in the percentage of church fires caused by arson over the years, Pew says. However, there have been decreases in overall numbers of church fires, as well as numbers of intentional church fires.

“Between 1996 and 2000, an average of 191 intentional fires were reported each year, accounting for 52 percent of all church fires,” the Pew analysis reads. “That average dropped to 74 intentional fires per year between 2010 and 2014, or 48 percent of all church fires.”

In the first half of this year, 29 out of 79 reported fires at houses of worship have been ruled acts of arson. On August 2, there were two reports of bomb explosions at churches in Las Cruces, N.M.

In 1996, a congressional report found that black churches in the South were disproportionately targeted for church arson. That same year, President Bill Clinton signed the Church Arson Prevention Act and established the National Church Arson Task Force to fight these incidents.

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U.S. NEWS

Judge rules L.A. convent sale invalid

by Maria Luisa Torres (Angelus News) • August 3, 2015

Immaculate Heart of Mary sisters Marie Christine Muñoz Lopez and Jean-Marie Dunne. (The Tidings)

Los Angeles, CA — Los Angeles County Superior Court James Chalfant ruled July 30 that the contested sale of the former convent of the Immaculate Heart of Mary sisters to restaurateur and urban developer Dana Hollister is invalid.

The judge also confirmed that the eight-acre, villa-style hilltop property located in the Los Feliz section of Los Angeles is Church property under the oversight Archbishop José H. Gomez.

“I would like to reiterate my continued commitment to all of the Immaculate Heart sisters that the archdiocese will take care of them and ensure their well-being now and in the future,” the archbishop said in a recent statement.

The archdiocese initiated legal action June 19 to protect the sisters by seeking to nullify the “unauthorized” transaction with Hollister. In a recent deposition, Hollister confirmed that she took possession of the Waverly Drive property for $100,000 (of which the sisters received only $44,000), and the balance of $9.9 million in a non-recourse promissory note, with no payments for three years.

The archdiocese contended that the sale violates the California law protecting the elderly from transactions that are not in their best interest — the five surviving Immaculate Heart of Mary sisters are between 77 and 88 years of age.

Because the loan is non-recourse, it does not require payment after the three years, the archdiocese explained in a recent statement. As such, if Hollister were unable to pay the remaining $9.9 million, the only remedy to get the property back would be foreclosure and the sisters would have to pay the related legal costs.

Other points of contention include the archdiocese’s lease of the buildings on the property for the priests’ house of prayer, which has a remaining term of 77 years, and Hollister’s reported plan to convert the villa property into a boutique hotel.

Judge Chalfant set another hearing for Sept. 15 and ordered the lawyers to prepare proposals detailing possible remedies that would most benefit the five sisters. He said that Hollister may remain in possession of the property pending the hearing, but ordered her to pay $25,000 a month rent and stipulated that she cannot sell, lease or modify the property in the interim.

“The care and well-being of all five sisters has always been our primary concern,” said the archdiocese in a statement released shortly after the July 30 court ruling. “We were forced to take legal action to protect the sisters from the Dana Hollister transaction, which allowed Hollister to take possession of their property away from them. We are grateful that the judge found the sale to Hollister to be invalid, and that he agreed that this was a ‘bad deal’ for the sisters.”

Most of the sisters agree.

During July 29 interviews, three of the five sisters — Jean-Marie Dunne, Marie Christine Muñoz Lopez and Marie Victoriano — reiterated their unequivocal support for the archbishop. All three sisters had previously signed declarations stating that they agree that the institute may not sell the property without the written approval of leadership in the archdiocese, as outlined in the institute’s amended articles of incorporation.

Further, the activities of the sisters are overseen by the archdiocese under orders issued in 2005 and 2013. Father Thomas Anslow was appointed as the legal agent authorized to act in all civil matters on behalf of the institute.

The remaining two sisters, Sister Rita Callanan and Sister Catherine Rose Holzman, disagreed and opted to move ahead with the sale to Hollister. At the time of the unauthorized transaction, the archdiocese had already accepted an alternate offer from pop star Katy Perry, which was supported by Sisters Jean-Marie, Marie Christine and and Marie Victoriano, for $14.5 million — $10 million in cash and $4.5 million for an alternative property for the house of prayer (to be owned by the sisters).

Due to continued litigation, the sale is now in limbo, but all proceeds from any future final sale will be dedicated to the care of the sisters, according to the archdiocese.

“I am sad, frustrated and disappointed, because I feel this shouldn’t have happened; the sisters have no right to sell the property,” said Sister Marie Victoriano. “And I have never, never thought that the archbishop ever took advantage of us. … I would like to see the situation resolved as soon as possible.”

Sister Jean-Marie Dunne agrees.

“The archbishop has counsel … and we feel that he knows more about selecting between the two [buyers],” she explained. She emphasized that her opinion isn’t being “suppressed” or coerced; rather, she agrees with the archbishop in part because Perry’s cash offer for the property versus “an I.O.U. [is] a no-brainer.”

“And according to the decree … the archbishop can’t sell [the property] without us, and we can’t sell without him,” continued Sister Jean-Marie. “So all this wasting of money on lawyers, and wasting of everybody’s time — it’s just ridiculous.”

According to Sister Marie Christine, her position is very simple and straight-forward: she stands firmly with the archdiocese and Archbishop Gomez.

“As I say all the time, I am with [the archbishop], always with him,” she said.

The sisters vacated the villa in 2011.

Despite having fond memories of her years in residence at the villa — feeding the squirrels outside, having educational retreats and celebrating her mother’s 90th birthday — Sister Jean Marie said she doesn’t feel a sense of loss nor overly sentimental at the prospect of selling the property.

“People are more sacred than the ground of the villa,” she said.

For Sister Marie Victoriano, who is enjoying her 60th year of consecrated life, living at the villa made her feel “as if I was near God, because it is a very peaceful place.”

“As I would take a walk in the morning, I would watch the sun rise from the east … it’s an incentive to praise God,” she said, adding that she hopes the property will be sold to a buyer who will love it and “enjoy the beauty around them.”

This article originally ran in LA’s Angelus, The Tidings Online.

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U.S. NEWS

Effort to defund Planned Parenthood falls short of Senate vote

by Matt Hadro (CNA/EWTN News) • August 3, 2015

Senate side of the U.S. Capitol building. (Public domain)

Washington, D.C. — The Senate failed to bring a bill to block federal funding of Planned Parenthood to the floor on Monday evening, in a much-anticipated vote.

Senate Republicans introduced the bill to defund Planned Parenthood on July 28. An effort to bring the bill to a vote rendered a split of 53-46, gaining support from the majority but falling short of the 60 votes necessary to end debate and bring the bill to the floor.

Two Republicans joined most of the Senate Democrats opposing the bill’s passage to the floor — Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) and Sen. Mark Kirk (R-Ill.). Two Democrats joined Republicans pushing to end debate, Sen. Joe Donnelly (D-Ind.) and Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.).

The chair of the U.S. Bishops’ Committee on Pro-Life Activities, Cardinal Sean O’Malley of Boston, had implored the Senate to block federal funds for the organization in an Aug. 3 letter to all senators.

“It has long been troubling to many Americans that the nation’s largest abortion network, performing over a third of all abortions, receives over half a billion taxpayer dollars a year,” he wrote.

“The most recent revelations about Planned Parenthood’s willingness to traffic in fetal tissue from abortions, and to alter abortion methods not for any reason related to women’s health but to obtain more ‘intact’ organs, is the latest demonstration of a callousness toward women and their unborn children that is shocking to many Americans,” he continued.

Planned Parenthood has come under fire recently after a series of undercover tapes were released showing top doctors within the organization casually discussing the offering of body parts of aborted babies to harvesters for compensation.

The citizen journalist group Center for Medical Progress had released the videos as part of its “Human Capital” report, a three-year investigative study of Planned Parenthood and its transfer of body parts of aborted babies for money.

Planned Parenthood officials were secretly taped in conversations with actors presenting themselves as representatives of fetal tissue procurement companies, discussing the price per “specimen” for the organs from aborted babies and talking about how to change the abortion procedure to better ensure “intact” body parts.

Religious and civic leaders began calling for the end to federal funding of the organization after the initial videos were released.

Pro-life rallies to defund Planned Parenthood, entitled “#WomenBetrayed,” were held in over 60 cities on July 28, coordinated by the pro-life college outreach group Students for Life.

In a July 28 statement, Cardinal O’Malley said the practices described in the videos were further evidence of the “throwaway culture” condemned by Pope Francis.

The Senate’s Health and Human Services panel started an investigation into Planned Parenthood, after allegations were made that it broke federal law by selling body parts for “valuable consideration.” Two House committees are investigating the organization as well.

Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal (R) announced Monday that the state was severing its Medicaid contract with Planned Parenthood.

The videos have brought to light an “issue that has shaken the moral compass of our society,” Sen. Joni Ernst (R-Iowa) stated on the Senate floor Monday afternoon.

“The phrase ‘It’s a boy’ is one we often use in celebrating new life,” she said, contrasting this with one of the videos in which a Planned Parenthood clinic worker exclaimed, “Another boy!” when examining the remains of an aborted baby boy in a petri dish.

“Protecting the most vulnerable is an important measure of any society,” Ernst continued. “Who do we want to be as a nation? Before us today is an opportunity to vote for legislation that will protect the most vulnerable and women’s health.”

Planned Parenthood affiliates receive most of their federal funding through Medicaid payments and Title X family planning grants. The 68 affiliates received over $500 million in federal funds in fiscal year 2013 – or 41 percent of its overall revenue – according to Planned Parenthood’s annual report.

If the organization is defunded, these funds would go instead to existing health care providers like federal community health centers and hospitals, the bill stipulates.

“Catholic charitable agencies and pregnancy help centers have helped countless pregnant women find life-affirming alternatives to abortion,” Cardinal O’Malley wrote in his letter to senators. “Our hospitals and other health facilities are second to none in providing quality health care for women.”

The bill ensures “that women can obtain their health care from providers that do not promote abortion,” he added.

Federal community health centers do not perform abortions but are required by law to provide an array of services including prenatal care, immunizations, and cancer screenings. They focus primarily on medically-underserved communities and accept payments on a sliding scale from Medicare, Medicaid, and employer’s insurance among other sources.

Community health centers already vastly outnumber Planned Parenthood clinics, particularly in states where there are only one or two clinics.

According to the Charlotte Lozier Institute, the research arm of the pro-life group Susan B. Anthony List, the health centers serve almost eight times the number of women per year that Planned Parenthood does. There are over 9,000 community health centers in the U.S. but only 700 Planned Parenthood clinics.

For example, in Alabama there are 131 service sites for community health centers but only two Planned Parenthood clinics. Even in California where there are 115 Planned Parenthood clinics, there are still over ten times as many sites for community health centers – 1,247 in total.

Despite the legislation being blocked, pro-life advocates remained hopeful.

Marjorie Dannenfelser, president of the Susan B. Anthony List, noted in an Aug. 3 statement that Senate support for defunding Planned Parenthood has grown significantly since the last effort to do so in 2011.

“The Center for Medical Progress has released less than half of its damning evidence of brutality and callousness at Planned Parenthood and, as more videos are made public, outrage will surely grow,” she said.

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Undercover reports on fetal body parts trade face legal hurdles

by CNA/EWTN News • August 3, 2015

Ultrasound image of an unborn baby at 20 weeks. (Steve via Flickr CC BY-NC 2.0)

San Francisco, CA — A citizen journalism group investigating abortion clinics’ procurement of organs and tissue from unborn babies has pledged to contest a court order barring the release of recordings made of an abortionists’ conference.

The Center for Medical Progress said that it follows “all applicable laws” and that it will fight “any attempts to suppress our First Amendment rights to free speech or silence the freedom of the citizen press.”

On July 31 federal judge William Orrick in San Francisco issued a temporary restraining order in response to a lawsuit against the center from the National Abortion Federation.

The court order said the National Abortion Federation could suffer irreparable injury, such as “harassment, intimidation, violence, invasion of privacy, and injury to reputation,” the Associated Press reports.

The abortion federation’s lawsuit said that the journalist group created a false company to gain entry to its annual conferences in 2014 and 2015 and then recorded its members. The federation alleged that the investigators violated non-disclosure agreements the investigators had signed.

According to the abortion group, the non-disclosure agreement includes a ban on videotaping or recording the meeting. It said it only allows use of conference information “to help enhance the quality and safety of services” of its conference’s participants.

The Center for Medical Progress said the lawsuit was “meritless.” It characterized the abortion federation as “a criminal organization that has spent years conspiring with Planned Parenthood on how to violate federal laws on partial-birth abortion and fetal tissue sales.”

The center has conducted a three-year investigation of abortion providers and fetal harvesting. The center’s investigators went undercover as a fetal tissue procurement company.

Beginning July 14, the organization started to release video summaries, as well as complete video footage, of Planned Parenthood officials discussing the harvesting of organs from aborted babies and reimbursement for the tissue. One discussion covers the possible alteration of the abortion procedure to ensure an “intact specimen.”

Federal law generally prohibits the selling of human tissue, but allows for the donation of tissue with “reasonable payments” for the “transportation, implantation, processing, preservation, quality control, or storage of human fetal tissue.” It explicitly prohibits the sale of tissue for “valuable consideration.”

On July 28 a Los Angeles Superior Court judge issued a separate restraining order blocking the Center for Media Progress from releasing any video of leaders of the California-based company StemExpress. The company reportedly provides fetal tissue for research in partnership with Planned Parenthood and other abortion clinics.

The Center for Media Progress also called the StemExpresss lawsuit meritless, adding that it intends to “cover-up this illegal baby parts trade.”

The videos have renewed debate over abortion and over taxpayer funding for Planned Parenthood. While federal funding for abortion is generally forbidden, the government funds other services of the abortion provider.

Cardinal Sean O’Malley of Boston, chair of the U.S. bishops’ pro-life committee, has asked Senators to vote to withhold federal funding of Planned Parenthood.

“It has long been troubling to many Americans that the nation’s largest abortion network, performing over a third of all abortions, receives over half a billion taxpayer dollars a year. This concern has rightly grown in recent years,” he said in an Aug. 3 letter.

He noted that the latest reports revealed the abortion provider’s willingness to “traffic in fetal tissue from abortions,” and that to alter abortion procedures to obtain more intact organs showed “a callousness toward women and their unborn children that is shocking to many Americans.”

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Is Planned Parenthood altering abortion procedures to obtain intact body parts?

by Matt Hadro (CNA/EWTN News) • August 4, 2015

(Julien Ducenne via Flickr CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)

Washington, D.C. — The latest in a series of undercover videos on Planned Parenthood shows an official from the organization saying that abortion procedures can be altered to obtain more “intact” fetal organs.

The director of research for Planned Parenthood Gulf Coast, Melissa Farrell, promised actors posing as tissue harvesters that abortion doctors in Planned Parenthood clinics can perform abortions “in a way that they get the best specimens.”

“If we alter our process, and we are able to obtain intact fetal cadavers, we can make it part of the budget that any dissections are this, and splitting the specimens into different shipments is this,” she said discussing prices for the organs. “It’s all just a matter of line items.”

Altering the abortion procedure for the express purpose of extracting tissue is against federal law. The National Institutes of Health Revitalization Act of 1993 allows tissue to be gathered if “no alteration of the timing, method, or procedures used to terminate the pregnancy was made solely for the purposes of obtaining the tissue.”

The undercover video, released Tuesday, is the latest in a series of reports on “Human Capital” by the citizen journalist group Center for Medical Progress. It is the result of a three-year investigative study of Planned Parenthood and its transfer of body parts of aborted babies for money.

Previous videos showed top Planned Parenthood officials casually discussing prices for “specimens” with actors posing as prospective buyers. Officials also suggested altering the abortion procedure to have a higher chance of extracting “intact” fetal tissue.

In one video, the president of Planned Parenthood’s medical directors council Dr. Mary Gatter said she “wouldn’t object” to asking the abortion doctor to use a different abortion procedure “to increase the odds that he’s going to get an intact specimen.”

In another video, the organization’s senior director of medical services Dr. Deborah Nucatola suggested how certain organs could be requested for harvesting “and we want them to be reasonably intact, and you convert to breech,” or a feet-first delivery.

Officials in previous videos also discussed the prices for “specimens” as compensation for Planned Parenthood’s providing the fetal organs.

The Center for Medical Progress has claimed that this is a violation of the law by selling body parts to harvesters, while Planned Parenthood has maintained that its actions are legal and that it is not making illegal profits.

Federal law generally prohibits the selling of human tissue but allows for the donation of tissue with “reasonable payments” for the “transportation, implantation, processing, preservation, quality control, or storage of human fetal tissue.” It explicitly prohibits the sale of tissue for “valuable consideration.”

In the latest video, Farrell explained that while the abortion process “is generally standardized,” Planned Parenthood Gulf Coast could provide some “intact specimen[s]” to the actors posing as representatives of a fetal tissue procurement company, and they could also “look at exploring how we can make that happen so we have a higher chance [of providing intact fetuses].”

“In the cases of when it’s mattered and the physicians also need an intact specimen, they can make it happen,” she said.

Farrell also discussed compensation, telling the investigators that a more intact fetus, or abortion of a later-term patient would have a higher cost. “Anything that we piggyback onto that for collection purposes obviously would have to reflect that time-cost administrative burden,” Farrell said of how these changes would impact the cost of fetal organs.

Religious and political leaders have expressed outrage over the contents of the videos. On Monday, the Senate tried to bring up a vote to defund Planned Parenthood but failed to get the necessary support to do so.

Cardinal Sean O’Malley of Boston, chair of the U.S. Bishops’ pro-life committee, sent letters to all senators on Monday asking them to vote to defund the organization. In a July 28 statement, he said the issue of harvesting organs from aborted babies was part of the “throwaway culture” condemned by Pope Francis.

Rallies to defund Planned Parenthood, titled #WomenBetrayed, were held in over 60 cities on July 28 and coordinated by the pro-life college outreach group Students for Life.

The Senate’s Health and Human Services panel has started an investigation into Planned Parenthood over the allegations that it broke the law, and two House committees are investigating the organization as well.

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State pride, Knights of Columbus style

by Mary Rezac (CNA/EWTN News) • August 4, 2015

Members of the Knights of Columbus participate in the pin exchange at the 2015 national convention in Philadelphia, PA. (Mary Rezac/CNA)

Philadelphia, PA — The Knights of Columbus kicked off their 133rd annual supreme convention with the usual state-themed flair on Monday in Philadelphia.

For years now, the Knights have spent the better part of the first day of their annual convention meandering among various state-themed parties hosted in hotel rooms. Each state hosts a party that serves as a meet-and-greet with other Knights, complete with signature food, drinks and décor from their home.

The line to even get in the door to the party for Louisiana on the 8th floor of the hotel was about 75 people deep Monday evening. Cajun music and loud chatter wafted into the hallways of waiting people.

Once inside, the room boasted wall-to-wall green, purple and gold décor as well as mountains of King Cake and a table full of ready-made “Hurricanes,” a famous drink from New Orleans. Several representatives from Louisiana sported masquerade masks or Louisiana-themed face paint, and an entire couch was draped with Mardi-Gras beads to hand to the scores of people walking through the doors.

Charlotte Rose from Shrieveport, Louisiana sat underneath a banner that read “Swamp Knights” as she shook hands and greeted the people filing past.

“The best part has just been meeting everybody from everywhere,” she said. “Everybody’s been so nice.”

When asked why her state’s party was so popular, Donna Martin mused: “Because we give out the most stuff.”

The atmosphere on the sixth floor in Maryland’s room was a bit more organized but nonetheless jovial. The red, black and yellow Maryland flags covered the walls in the room, and a string of bright red crab lights hung on the wall next to the bar. On the menu: crab dip on crackers and Orange Crush drinks.

Meanwhile on the fifth floor, the pin-swap festivities were well underway. Knights’ representatives arrive to the convention armed with 50 or more pins from their home state, in hopes of trading them away for pins from other states. It’s a way to meet other delegates and to “collect them all,” Roland Ransom from Wisconsin said.

“It’s like a quest,” he said. He and his wife Judy said they especially hoped to swap pins with people from some of the “rare” states or provinces – like Hawaii, Alaska or some of the Mexican states – that don’t have as many delegates at the convention.

Chris Gonzalez from Connecticut said the pin swap is a good way to network with other Knights and to swap fundraising tips or other collaborative ideas.

Also, “it’s just fun. I’m a geography teacher, so I have a great time with this,” Gonzalez said.

Phil and Theresa Lucero, from the Archdiocese of Santa Fe in New Mexico, said the pin-swap tradition has been around for as long as they can remember.

The Luceros came armed with 200 New Mexico pins, and said they planned on giving away whatever they had left over at their parish back home.

“We go to daily Mass, and we have a lot of parishioners, so we give one to all the ladies, the ones we have leftover. They love it,” Phil said.

There were 76 different pins to collect that night – one from each of the 50 United States, as well as 26 others from states or provinces in Poland, Guam, the Philippines, New Mexico, South Korea and Canada, which all have Knights of Columbus groups.

With 1.8 million members around the globe, the Knights of Columbus is the world’s largest Catholic fraternal service organization. The group was founded in 1882 by the Venerable Father Michael J. McGivney. In 2014, the Knights raised more than $173.5 million for charity and performed more than 71.5 million hours of volunteer work.

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Mothers lash back at forced vaccines, ‘inhumane’ conditions in detention centers

by Matt Hadro (CNA/EWTN News) • August 4, 2015

(Peter Kirkeskov Rasmussen via Flickr CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)

Washington, D.C. — Ten migrant mothers have filed a complaint with the Department of Homeland Security over what they describe as serious neglect and poor treatment at family detention centers.

“The overarching issue here is that you have traumatized women and children, and that detention I think is increasing the trauma and the negative physical and mental health effects that come with that, coupled with a health service that is not capable of providing for the needs of these women,” said Jeanne Atkinson, executive director of the Catholic Legal Immigration Network (CLINIC).

CLINIC was one of six organizations that filed the complaint on the mothers’ behalf.

The complaint alleges that migrant mothers received substandard care while at three family detention centers, two of them in Texas and one in Pennsylvania. They complained of “inadequate access to and quality of care, a lack of opportunity for informed consent, inadequate oversight and accountability, and questionable medical ethics.”

Several complaints said that mothers were told by attendants to just “drink more water” to treat ailments such as broken bones, vomiting after surgery, and fainting spells. They reported waits as long as 14 hours at a time to receive medical care.

Children were allegedly vaccinated in the middle of the night with the mothers unaware of what the vaccine was. If their child had already received that vaccine and they tried to stop the caregivers, they were ignored, the complaint said.

In one case, 250 migrant children reportedly received an adult dose of the Hepatitis-A vaccine.

“Further, the manner in which these vaccines were administered during the night without advance notice or informed consent by the mothers raises serious ethical issues,” the letter stated.

In another case that Atkinson mentioned, a psychologist ordered a mother, who was suicidal, to keep her child in the room during a session even though the mother wanted privacy. The order made it clear that it was “not meaningful treatment” being offered, Atkinson said.

The “rampant issues of substandard care” are just more evidence of the “inhumanity” of the detention centers for migrants, she continued.

“There is no humane way to imprison families,” Atkinson told CNA. “The Church is very strong in talking about how we treat newcomers, how we treat imprisoned people.”

The federal detention centers opened in 2014 to deal with the influx of around 60,000 migrant families from Central America in the summer and fall months.

Many of the migrants were women and children, fleeing violence, death threats, gang recruitment, or rape back home in countries with some of the worst murder rates in the world – Honduras, Guatemala, and El Salvador. Many of the children reported being trafficked by smugglers and sexually abused on their journey to the U.S.

The detention centers originally had capacity in the hundreds but quickly expanded into the thousands. Atkinson said the total number of detainees is “really fluid” but was at 1,700 at the last estimate, held in three facilities in Berks, Pennsylvania; Dilley, Texas; and Karnes, Texas.

U.S. Bishops have spoken out against the detention centers. The chair of the bishops’ Committee on Migration, Auxiliary Bishop Eusebio Elizondo of Seattle, said the policy is “unnecessary, inhumane, and unworthy of our nation” in a July 27 statement.

“There are ways to create a humane system and also ensure that immigrants are complying with the law,” Bishop Nicholas DiMarzio of Brooklyn, New York, said in May. “But we have created a detention industry in this country which preys upon the vulnerability of our fellow human beings, the vast majority of whom are not criminals.”

On July 24, a federal district court in California had ordered the Obama administration to release detained children in accord with the Flores v. Reno settlement. The children should be released or at least held in the “least restrictive setting,” and their parents should be released from detention with them to prevent the separation of families, the court ruled.

“There are humane alternatives to detention which would ensure that families avail themselves of the court process but also are able to access legal and social service assistance,” Bishop Elizondo responded to the decision.

What would alternatives to detention centers look like? First, the administration could “just release” migrant mothers and children to families and friends in the U.S., Atkinson said.

The migrants could also receive legal help, she added, “so that they understand their rights, they understand their obligations, and they can make a claim for the relief to which we think many are entitled.”

As a secondary and “limited” measure, the migrants could be sent to “community-based” centers where they might receive education, legal counsel, therapy, and assistance settling in the community. The U.S. Bishops’ Conference has begun a “community-based” alternative, along with Lutheran churches, she said.

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‘Immigrant bashing’ is nothing new to America, Bishop Farrell laments

by CNA/EWTN News • August 5, 2015

An anti-Catholic sketch by Branford Clarke, which appeared in “Guardians of Liberty” in 1943. (Public domain)

Dallas, Texas — The recent wave of anti-immigrant sentiment from public figures is nothing new to American history, Bishop Kevin Farrell of Dallas said in his column on Friday.

“The ghost of Nativism again prowls our land. The vilifiers and the vilified are different, but the script is the same,” he said in his July 31 column.

Catholics in particular should remember that “we ‘were once aliens residing in the land’ — not of Egypt but of America,” he said referring to the way Catholic belief was portrayed as subversive to American democracy.

Barred from holding public office and practicing the faith openly, Catholics were treated as second-class citizens who did not deserve the full rights of American citizenship.

However, it wasn’t only religion that raised the suspicion of nativist groups such as the Know Nothings and the Ku Klux Klan, he said; racial minorities such as the Chinese, Eastern Europeans, Italians, and Irish were also regarded as a threat to America.

Rather than being treated as equals in America, these religious and racial minorities “were vilified as sub-human, ne’er-do-wells and drunkards incapable of productive citizenship.”

Today this same “fear and suspicion” of “the others” is behind what the bishop calls the recent trend of “immigrant bashing.”

Bishop Farrell said Catholics in particular should remember the passage from Exodus in which the Israelites are told, “You shall not oppress or afflict a resident alien, for you were once aliens residing in the land of Egypt.”

Last week Cardinal Timothy Dolan of New York challenged GOP presidential candidate Donald Trump over his remarks about immigration, in which he said, “the U.S. has become a dumping ground for everybody else’s problems. And these aren’t the best and the finest.”

Cardinal Dolan blasted Trump for his comments, saying that this rhetoric is proof that the bigotry of nativism is alive and well in America.

“I take seriously the Bible’s teaching that we are to welcome the stranger, one of the most frequently mentioned moral imperatives in both the Old and New Testament,” Cardinal Dolan said.

The cardinal then pointed to two attitudes toward immigrants described by various American historians, the first being the nativists.

These people “sadly … (view) the unwashed, ignorant, bothersome brood as criminals and misfits who threaten ‘pure America,’ and are toxic to everything decent in the United States.”

However, the second, “more enlightened and patriotic” approach sees the immigrant as a gift to the nation, realizing that Native Americans are the only citizens whose ancestors were not immigrants.

The second group still recognizes the need for border control, fair regulation and prudent policies, but “we are wise to consider the immigrant as good for our beloved nation,” the cardinal said.

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Think the human person is nothing special? Think again, says archbishop

by CNA/EWTN News • August 5, 2015

Archbishop Jose Gomez of Los Angeles at the North American College, May 2, 2015. (Daniel Ibanez/CNA)

Kansas City, KS — Too many social trends treat the human person as nothing sacred, but Catholic pro-life efforts are part of an effort to change that, Los Angeles’ Archbishop Jose Gomez said last Wednesday.

“Everything we do is rooted in the truth of the Gospel. The beautiful truth that every human life matters — because every human life is sacred and created by the loving plan of God,” the archbishop said in his keynote speech at the National Diocesan Pro-Life Leadership Conference in Kansas City, Kansas.

“We are living in a culture that is deeply confused and conflicted about the meaning of creation and the meaning of human life,” he said July 29. “And so we find ourselves more and more indifferent to the cruelty and injustice that we see all around us.”

He noted such grave crimes against human life as widespread abortion, experimentation with human embryos, and the euthanasia of the elderly and the sick.

“In a society without God, the human person becomes ‘nothing special,’ nothing sacred. The value of a human life is judged according to whether it is ‘productive’ or ‘efficient’,” he said. “Without God we don’t know who we are, or where we come from, or what we are here for.”

However, it is not enough to criticize “the cruelty of this culture.”

“Our challenge as Christians is to change and convert this culture!” Archbishop Gomez continued. Transforming the culture means “turning it from the darkness of death to the light of life.”

“We have to call our society once more to rediscover the sanctity, the dignity and the transcendent destiny of the human person, who is created in the image of the Creator.”

Archbishop Gomez said the task for the Church is to seek how to “live and love and work and create,” and how to raise families and carry out the Christian mission “in a culture that has no need for God and has no tolerance for people who believe in God.”

He credited God’s grace for a pro-life victory in California, when the state legislature withdrew a bill to legalize assisted suicide. He also credited the victory to a coalition of doctors and health care professionals, advocates for the disabled, advocates for the poor, and African-American and immigrant community leaders.

“It’s a temporary victory, for sure. We expect to see the measure come back in January or later next year in a ballot proposition. But for now it is stopped,” he said. He explained that assisted suicide had “dangerous implications” for the poor and those without adequate health care access.

“It is no secret that there was big money and powerful interests behind this legislation, and nobody thought we could win,” he continued. “But that what’s encouraging to me. Despite the odds and all the political pressure, we were still able to engage legislators on this complicated issue and help them to see our concerns.”

Archbishop Gomez also denounced the injustice of racial discrimination, unemployment, homelessness, environmental pollution, bad prison conditions, and the death penalty.

He particularly noted injustices related to immigration, such as family detention, deportation, and deaths in the desert of people trying to enter the U.S.

However, he said that these issues are not all equal.

“The fundamental injustice in our society is the killing of innocent unborn life through abortion and the killing of the sick and defenseless through euthanasia and assisted suicide,” he said.

“If the child in the womb has no right to be born, if the sick and the old have no right to be taken care of — then there is no solid foundation to defend anyone’s human rights.”

The archbishop drew on the examples of several Catholics, including Blessed Junipero Serra, a California missionary who opposed capital punishment for Native Americans who had tortured and killed one of his friends, a fellow missionary, in an attack on the San Diego mission in 1775.

“Let the murderer live so he can be saved, which is the purpose of our coming here and the reason for forgiving him,” the priest said in a letter to Spanish authorities.

Archbishop Gomez noted the life of Servant of God Dorothy Day, who “personally knew the tragedy of abortion and also the despair that leads people to try suicide.”

“But she also discovered the power of God’s tender mercies — which can heal every wound and bring new life out of sin and death,” the archbishop said.

In strong words, she characterized abortion as genocide against the poor and minorities. She also performed works of love and mercy. She encouraged people: “Make room for children, don’t do away with them.”

Archbishop Gomez encouraged Catholic pro-life leaders to “build bridges and friendships with others in our community” to advance compassion and caring.

The Los Angeles archdiocese’s pro-life activities work as part of its peace and justice office, he said. Its program OneLifeLA drew 15,000 people in January to hear inspiring testimonies of hope, courage, love, and self-sacrifice.

The archbishop said the event sought to convey that “that God’s love embraces every life,” especially those of the vulnerable, the weak, and those who cannot care for themselves.

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If you won’t help our people stay, help them leave – Catholic bishops from the Middle East

by Mary Rezac (CNA/EWTN News) • August 5, 2015

Jean-Clement Jeanbart, Melkite Archbishop of Aleppo, speaks at the Knights of Columbus Conference in Philadelphia, while Bashar Warda, Chaldean Archbishop of Erbil, looks on, Aug. 4, 2015. (Knights of Columbus)

Philadelphia, PA — Catholic archbishops from Iraq and Syria said Tuesday that while they hope to help their people stay in the Middle East, they also believe those trying to leave are being unjustly discriminated against when applying for United States visas.

According to federal data, since October 2014, 906 Muslim refugees from Syria were granted U.S. visas, while only 28 of Syria’s estimated 700,000 displaced Christians were given the same. Even when accounting for population percentages (Christians account for 10 percent of the religious makeup of Syria), the numbers of visas granted seems widely disproportional.

Chaldean Archbishop Bashar Warda of Erbil and Melkite Archbishop Jean-Clément Jeanbart of Aleppo spoke at an Aug. 4 press conference at the Knights of Columbus 2015 Convention in Philadelphia about the situation for Christians in the Middle East.

They said that while they do not believe the discrimination against giving Christians visas goes all the way to the top of America’s administration, their people have noticed the injustice.

“Our people are asking these questions: how come we apply for the American visa and are denied?” Archbishop Warda said.

“This is a clear case of persecution,” he added.

“They’re being denied visas while others who have participated (in the violence) or at least were silent can go.”

Ideally, Archbishops Warda and Jeanbart would like their people to stay and help rebuild the Christian populations in the Middle East, where Christians have lived since the first decades after Jesus’ death. But they also know they cannot ask people to stay in the dangerous conditions when they choose to leave.

“We would like our people to stay, we would like (that), but emigration is a personal decision; we cannot encourage, but we cannot stop it,” Archbishop Warda said.

Iraq alone has seen a massive emigration of Christians. The Christian population has plummeted to 300,000, down from about 1.5 million before the 2003 U.S.-led invasion of the country. Within the last year, tens of thousands of Christians in Mosul and Bakhdida were forced to flee, pay exorbitant fines, or die at the hands of the Islamic State. Many have left the country, while the remaining Christians relocated to Erbil, in Iraqi Kurdistan.

Archbishop Jeanbart said it would be less expensive for Americans in the long run to help Christians maintain their presence in the Middle East, than it would be to accept hundreds of thousands of refugees.

“Help them to stay and help the society there,” he said. “The first thing they need is peace. Help us to get peace, and then the people will be happy staying in Syria.”

Archbishop Warda said one of the most important things Americans can do is to speak out about the violence being done to Christians in the Middle East.

“All the statements (by U.S. government and media) have not condemned strongly what damage it is doing,” he said.

“What they are saying is just ‘This is not the true Islam. This is violating the picture of Islam.’ The issue for them is the image of Islam, but none of these statements speak about the victims, about what has been done to the victims, they are not even mentioned. And that is one of the questions our people have.”

“Please remember this: this is part of your heritage, this is part of being an American. Please speak for the persecuted around the world, especially for the Christians today,” he added.

The archbishops also praised the relief efforts provided by the Knights of Columbus, who so far have donated $3 million to relief efforts for Christians in the Middle East and who announced an expansion of those efforts this coming year.

“The Knights of Columbus have been bringing very much supplies, they are giving us a good help and they will continue doing that, and I assure you this … concern has been a light, to see that there is an end to the tunnel,” Archbishop Jeanbart said.

At the 133rd Supreme Convention for the Knights of Columbus, Supreme Knight Carl Anderson unveiled a new portal on the Knights’ website, christiansatrisk.org, where Americans can go to donate to help Christians in the Middle East. The Knights will also reimburse all administration costs, so 100 percent of the donated funds will go to those in need.

The Knights of Columbus also plan on selling wooden crosses made from the olive trees in Bethlehem as another way to fundraise for the cause, and they plan on increasing awareness efforts through television commercials and through local parish education, he said.

“What is their only crime? To believe in the one who said 2,000 years ago, ‘love thy neighbor,’” Anderson said of Christians in the Middle East. “The blood of these martyrs cries out to heaven for justice, and to you and me for help.”

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How Junipero Serra fought the death penalty for a California native

by CNA/EWTN News • August 6, 2015

A statue of Bl. Junipero Serra outside Mission San Antonio de Padua in Monterey County, California. (mlhradio via Flickr CC BY-NC 2.0)

Monterey, CA — Blessed Junipero Serra’s love for the natives of California extended even to those who killed one of his friends and fellow missionaries, the Archbishop of Los Angeles has said in a summary of an early argument against the death penalty for a native Californian.

“In his appeals, he said some truly remarkable things about human dignity, human rights and the mercy of God,” Archbishop Jose Gomez said in Kansas City, Kansas July 29.

The archbishop reflected on the Franciscan missionary’s actions in the wake of a 1775 attack by California natives on the San Diego mission.

“They burned the whole place down and they tortured and killed one of the Franciscans there, a good friend of Fray Junipero,” Archbishop Gomez recounted.

While the Spanish military wanted to arrest the natives and execute them, Father Junipero Serra repeatedly wrote to urge them to spare the accused.

Father Serra, a Franciscan missionary, helped found many of the Californian missions that went on to become the centers of major cities. The California natives who joined the missions learned the faith, as well as the technologies and learning of Europe.

Pope Francis will canonize Father Serra during his U.S. visit in September.

“In his writings, we find deep love for the native peoples he had come to evangelize,” Archbishop Gomez said of the missionary.

The Los Angeles archbishop reflected on one episode of the missionary’s life in his keynote speech at the National Diocesan Pro-Life Leadership Conference.

Father Serra asked Spanish authorities to spare the lives of the California natives who had attacked the San Diego mission, even though they had killed several people.

In a Dec. 15, 1775 letter to the Viceroy of New Spain, Antonio Maria de Bucareli y Ursua, the priest said, “let the murderer live so he can be saved, which is the purpose of our coming here and the reason for forgiving him.”

The priest’s letter went on to encourage not execution but rather what he characterized as “moderate punishment” to help the killer understand that he is being pardoned by a law “which orders us to forgive offenses and to prepare him, not for his death, but for eternal life.” The letter is translated in the book Junipero Serra by Rose Marie Beebe and Robert M. Senkewicz.

Father Serra said that one of the most important things he himself requested was that “if the Indians were to kill me … they should be forgiven.”

Archbishop Gomez suggested that Father Serra was “the first person in the Americas – and maybe in all of the universal Church – to make a theological and moral argument against the death penalty.”

He said Father Serra and his fellow missionaries showed “a passionate commitment to human life and human dignity.” For Archbishop Gomez, Father Serra was “a defender and protector of the native peoples,” especially women, from the “systematic violence” of the Spanish military. Though many Europeans denied the natives’ humanity, Father Serra drew up a “bill of rights” that called for justice and the promotion of human development.

Archbishop Gomez drew a lesson from this, encouraging pro-life Catholic leaders to “follow in the path of the missionaries and saints of the Americas and to proclaim the Gospel of life, which is the heart of the message of Jesus.”

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How to respond to Planned Parenthood? Prayer and fasting, say Colorado bishops

by CNA/EWTN News • August 6, 2015

(jclk8888 via Pixabay CCO Public Domain)

Denver, CO — Following the release of investigative videos showing Planned Parenthood offering aborted baby organs for money, the Catholic bishops of Colorado have designated August 28 as a day of penance and prayer.

“We call on all people of good will in Colorado and beyond to pray that those involved in research and medicine will fix their sights on recognizing the sacredness of life and refrain from putting human life at the service of science,” said the Colorado Catholic Conference in a July 31 statement.

“A society can only be considered socially just if it protects the most vulnerable among us.”

Headquarter in Denver, Colorado, Planned Parenthood of the Rockies was among the affiliates seen in the recent videos released by investigators from the citizen journalist group Center for Medical Progress.

The investigators spent three years meeting with Planned Parenthood officials, while presenting themselves as representatives of fetal tissue procurement companies. They have now begun releasing undercover videos of the meetings, which show Planned Parenthood officials discussing the transfer of aborted baby organs for money.

Among the topics discussed by the Planned Parenthood officials were prices per “specimen” for the organs from aborted babies and how to change the abortion procedure to better ensure “intact” body parts.

“We do tissue collection for CU (University of Colorado), CSU (Colorado State University) – and Ft. Collins had collected some,” stated Dr. Savita T. Ginde in one video.

Dr. Ginde is vice president and medical director of Planned Parenthood of the Rockies, a multi-state affiliate that organizes over 10,000 abortions per year.

The same Planned Parenthood branch also recently identified Colorado State University as among one of the procurement companies that uses human organs from abortions for their research.

Following the release of the videos, Congress has launched several investigations into Planned Parenthood, and numerous religious and political leaders have called for the defunding of the organization.

In response to the footage, Colorado’s bishops called on the faithful to participate in the August 28 day of prayer and penance.

Examples of ways to participate include attending Mass and receiving Holy Communion, praying the Rosary or Chaplet of Diving Mercy, reading Scripture, spending time in adoration, fasting and abstaining from meat.

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Tough lessons to learn from Hiroshima and Nagasaki: Just war, nuclear disarmament

by Kevin J. Jones (CNA/EWTN News) • August 6, 2015

Ruins of Nagasaki, shortly after the Aug. 9, 1945 atomic bombing of the city the United States. (Public Domain, via National Archives and Records Administration)

Denver, CO — The 70th anniversary of the US atomic strikes on Japan has prompted reflection, commemoration, and debate about the ethics of war and the world’s nuclear arsenal.

“There’s no winning in nuclear war,” Maryann Cusimano Love, an international relations professor at the Catholic University of America, told CNA. Hiroshima and Nagasaki teach “how horrific nuclear war is.”

“Many folks are not aware of how many nuclear weapons remain with us today and how dangerous these arsenals are,” she continued. “That is why the Catholic Church has continued to argue that we have to get rid of nuclear weapons, that the presence of these weapons is very dangerous for human life and very destabilizing.”

Seventy years ago, the only wartime use of nuclear weapons took place in the Aug. 6 attack on Hiroshima and the Aug. 9 attack on Nagasaki by the United States.

The Hiroshima attack killed around 80,000 people instantly and may have caused about 130,000 deaths, mostly civilians. The attack on the port city of Nagasaki killed about 40,000 instantly and destroyed a third of the city, the BBC reports.

The attacks took a heavy toll on all of Japan’s population, but Nagasaki was a historic center of Catholicism since European missionaries such as St. Francis Xavier arrived in the 16th century. After Japan’s rulers closed the country, in part due to fears of foreign domination, Japanese Catholics survived centuries of persecution before their freedom of religion was secured again in the 19th century.

“Catholics were actually worshipping in Nagasaki, in the cathedral, at the time the atomic weapon was dropped. All of the people in the cathedral were instantly killed,” Love said.

The England-born Father Peter Milward, S.J., an emeritus professor of English literature at Sophia University in Tokyo, told CNA the atomic bomb strike on Nagasaki meant that “some 10 percent of Japan’s Catholics were suddenly wiped out.”

Many Americans credit the atomic strikes with ending the Second World War that began for the United States with Japan’s 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor. But Love said this interpretation is something that Americans should question.

Analysis of historical documents shows that Japanese leaders made no specific response to the atomic strikes, which were not much worse than the “horrific” firebombings that other cities such as Tokyo had endured. Many U.S. military and political leaders after the war also said the atomic strikes did not hasten the end of the war, Love said.

The entry of the Soviet Union into the war against Japan on Aug. 9 was what prompted Japan’s surrender, she said. This fact faded from view during the Cold War, when U.S.-Soviet relations grew tense.

Love said that the atomic weapons’ use drew condemnation from the bishops of the time.

In August 1945 the Vatican’s newspaper, L’Osservatore Romano, called the Hiroshima attack “a catastrophic conclusion … to the war’s apocalyptic surprises.” The discovery of the weapon cast “a sinister shadow” on the future of humanity.

“The Catholic Church was one of the very few voices at the time that criticized the atomic bombings,” Love continued. The Pope and the Vatican rejected the bombing, as did the bishops of the United States.

“They had the insight from the get-go that these weapons and their destructive power were a violation of our Church teaching and heritage.”

This teaching continues today in Pope Francis, whose words against nuclear weapons include a Dec. 7, 2014 message to an international gathering on the weapons.

“Nuclear deterrence and the threat of mutually assured destruction,” he said, “cannot be the basis for an ethics of fraternity and peaceful coexistence among peoples and states.”

Love said the use of nuclear weapons violates just war ethics.

The just war tradition, which is rooted in Catholic thought and has become largely enshrined in most international law, only recognizes the morality of a defensive war. It also governs strategy and tactics in war, barring violence against civilians and non-combatants, she explained.

“You have to always protect the most vulnerable members of society,” she continued. While soldiers are trained for war and have the tools and backup to protect them, this is not true of civilians.

Just war ethics require “discrimination and proportion in use of force.” This includes a ban on weapons “that do not discriminate between combatants and civilians.”

“There are some types of weapons that can never meet just war criteria. That’s why we call them weapons of mass destruction,” Love said.

These include atomic weapons, as well chemical and biological weapons. These ethics also apply to conventional weaponry deployed en masse, such as other bombing attacks in the Second World War.

Love said nuclear arsenals still pose “tremendous risks,” and not only in a nuclear war. Many people have been harmed in the manufacture of nuclear weapons and by atomic tests. There is a risk of accidental detonation or theft by terrorists, with 100 thefts of nuclear materials every year.

On Thursday, the anniversary of the first atomic strike, the city of Hiroshima held a large memorial service with representatives from 100 countries, including the U.S.

Father Milward reflected that he saw a difference in the “contrasting memory” between Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

“The bombing of Hiroshima was a deliberate target of the American bomb, and the people there are less willing to ‘forget and forgive’,” he said. Nagasaki was an “almost accidental” secondary target chosen due to weather conditions.

“Perhaps it is for this reason that the people of Nagasaki, under the influence of Catholicism, are more ready to forgive, if not to forget, than the people of Hiroshima,” said Father Milward, 89, who has been in Japan since 1954.

He said the effects of the atomic strikes continue in the Japanese constitution, which severely limits its military.

“I admire the Japanese for their love of peace, in contrast to their former bellicosity which led up to their participation in World War II, and I hope they maintain that ideal in spite of the increasing threats from China and North Korea. But I also hope that they maintain their gratitude to the United States for providing them with the necessary armed umbrella to enable them to uphold their ideal.”

Love said the Church in Japan, because of its experience, has become “a real moral witness for why this must never be forgotten, and how the world needs to move towards deeper levels of nuclear disarmament.”

She recounted the story of Father Kaemon Noguchi, a Trappist monk who returned home to Nagasaki after the bombing. He visited the rubble of the cathedral and prayed to the Virgin Mary for a sign to help Catholics who might lose their faith in the wake of the attack.

In response, he felt called to go to a particular part of the rubble and dig down. There, he discovered the damaged head of a tall statue of the Virgin Mary — the statue before which he had prayed for discernment in his vocation. Its face was intact.

“It’s a very haunting image of both the destruction of this cathedral of Nagasaki but it’s also kind of a symbol of how God endures and how faith endures through the intervention of the Virgin Mary, even in time of great suffering.”

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For Archbishop Cupich, Planned Parenthood videos should urge us to fight all social ills

by CNA/EWTN News • August 6, 2015

Archbishop Blase Cupich of Chicago. (CNA)

Chicago, IL — In an opinion column for the Chicago Tribune, Archbishop Blase Cupich denounced the recently released undercover Planned Parenthood videos, saying they should remind Catholics of their obligation to fight social ills from joblessness to a broken immigration system.

“While commerce in the remains of defenseless children is particularly repulsive, we should be no less appalled by the indifference toward the thousands of people who die daily for lack of decent medical care; who are denied rights by a broken immigration system and by racism; who suffer in hunger, joblessness and want; who pay the price of violence in gun-saturated neighborhoods; or who are executed by the state in the name of justice.”

The archbishop in his Aug. 3 column referenced a series of undercover videos showing Planned Parenthood officials describing the harvesting of body parts from aborted babies at their clinics.

In the videos, Planned Parenthood officials casually discuss prices for various body parts and how abortion procedures may be altered to ensure intact organs. One video shows a medical assistant looking through body parts from an aborted baby before proclaiming, “Another boy!”

Planned Parenthood has maintained that its actions are legal. However, the videos have prompted widespread outrage, nationwide rallies, congressional investigations and calls to defund the organization, which receives more than half a billion dollars in taxpayer money annually.

Archbishop Cupich said the revulsion over the tapes stems from the culture’s muting of the unborn child’s humanity, to the point that “some consider it quite acceptable to speak freely of crushing a child’s skull to preserve valuable body parts and to have that discussion over lunch.”

The videos offer “the opportunity to reaffirm our commitment as a nation to a consistent ethic of life,” the Chicago archbishop said, calling for “a framework for decision-making that is biased toward life, supportive of families and fair to people of all circumstances.”

“The nation’s children, families, poor, workers and senior citizens deserve more than lip service. They deserve more than outrage. They deserve real support, protection and solid action.”

Amid the outrage expressed at the videos, Archbishop Cupich said he does see cause for hope. The strong reactions, he said, are “evidence that American hearts have not been irreparably hardened by the steady devaluing of human dignity in our society.”

“This awakening of our conscience gives hope that deep within the hearts and souls of Americans there still resides the truth that an unborn child manifestly is a human being, entitled to rights and respect.”

Americans’ openness and generosity “has the capacity to astonish and push boundaries,” the archbishop said. “We crowdfund, sign petitions, dump buckets of ice on ourselves and embrace new ways of relating to our environment. Can we use our shared outrage at all these affronts to human dignity to unite us and begin a national dialogue on the worth of human life?”

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Why the Boy Scouts’ new policy led a Catholic bishop to cut ties

by Kevin J. Jones (CNA/EWTN News) • August 6, 2015

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

Bismark, N.D. — Bishop David Kagan of Bismarck, himself a former boy scout, has reluctantly told his North Dakota diocese to disaffiliate from the Boy Scouts of America due to the legal risks and the moral confusion its new leadership policy could cause for Catholics.

“I’m very disappointed with this whole turn of events. I just can’t express that adequately enough,” Bishop Kagan told CNA Aug. 6.

He said the Boy Scouts’ new policy risks lawsuits for church-sponsored troops that attempt to hold their leaders and volunteers to moral standards.

“I can’t say it’s a probability, but it’s a distinct possibility. It’s a reality we have to face,” he said.

Troops sponsored by a parish or a parish school would have to expect Catholic moral standards of leaders and volunteers. Those who disagree with those standards might object.

“Then we’ll be embroiled again in something else,” the bishop said.

“I had to ask myself ‘do I want to put our pastors, our parishes, our schools or diocese through something like that?’ I don’t think anyone wants that.”

In July the Boy Scouts of America announced that it would adopt a non-discrimination policy allowing homosexuals to be scout leaders and volunteers. While the latest decision promised that churches with objections to homosexual behavior could set their own standards for affiliated organizations, the future of the organization is not clear.

Bishop Kagan announced the disaffiliation in an Aug. 3 letter to the Catholics of the Diocese of Bismarck. He said that while the Boy Scouts of America appears to have a religious exemption that each local troop could invoke, in his view that will provide “no protection” for any of the diocese’s parishes and schools that sponsor troops.

He said the diocese, its parishes, schools and other institutions are now formally disaffiliated from the Boy Scouts of America.

“I regret my decision but, in conscience as the chief shepherd of the Diocese of Bismarck, I cannot permit our Catholic institutions to accept and participate directly or indirectly in any organization, which has policies and methods, which contradict the authoritative moral teachings of the Catholic Church.”

Bishop Kagan said he understood why the Boy Scouts of America made its decision.

“Knowing how our judicial system is tracking these days, the Boy Scouts of America would have no chance defending their legitimate protocols in a civil court,” he told CNA.

At the same time, he also lamented the goals of some who advocated the policy change.

“It’s about a particular ideological movement,” he said. In a certain sense, the bishop continued, this movement’s advocates “want to redefine what is acceptable and unacceptable in society, and impose their version of acceptability on the rest of society. That’s never worked.”

He said the Church is clear to distinguish sexual orientation from the immorality of acting on that orientation. However given national trends in the courts against religious liberty, it is not clear to him whether the Boy Scouts of America or outside groups will continue to respect that distinction.

He said the scouts’ new policy will “at the least cause more confusion among Catholic people,” and among non-Catholics who regard the Church highly.

From the Catholic perspective, “it places before the Church an unnecessary and an unwelcome and an unwanted problem.”

“I resent having to be put in this position, because I myself, as a young boy, was both a cub scout and a boy scout until I went to seminary. I found it to be very good and very useful.”

Bishop Robert Guglielmone of Charleston, a leading member of the National Catholic Committee on Scouting, had recommended “cautious optimism” towards the policy change.

However, Bishop Kagan said he started to be cautious about the future of the Boy Scouts after its leadership in 2013 decided to allow openly homosexual scout members.

Bishop Kagan could not find a reason for himself, personally, to be optimistic: “Realistically, looking to the future, what would give me reason to continue, to at least be guardedly optimistic? Personally, I couldn’t come up with something.”

The bishop emphasized that his decision did not say Catholic boys can’t be boy scouts, or that adults can’t continue to be scout leaders.

“Having been a scout myself, I think it’s very good to help young boys, young men, learn to socialize appropriately with others. You have some very devoted, very exemplary Catholic men as leaders who provide good role models. It makes a contribution.”

The legal implications of the policy have not been tested.

The Boy Scouts of America have said religious freedom protections will hold up in court for church-sponsored troops with moral objections to sexual immorality. That position drew criticism from Richard John Matthews, a former Boy Scouts of America general counsel who is now general counsel for a competing scouting group Trail Life USA. In a July 22 legal memorandum, he said the policy change creates “numerous legal ramifications” for both the national scouting organization and for religious organizations that charter local troops.

LGBT activist groups have objected that the new policy does not go far enough. Scouts for Equality, which pushed for changes in the policy, has voiced concern about individual units “discriminating.” On its website’s “Next Step” section, the group solicits members who want to help make scouting “more inclusive” because “LGBT adults can still be discriminated against at the troop level.”

Bishop Kagan recommended alternatives to the Boy Scouts, enumerating the Federation of North American Explorers, the Columbian Squires, and Trail Life USA. He also recommended alternatives to the Girl Scouts, listing American Heritage Girls, Little Flowers’ Girls Clubs, and the Federation of North American Explorers.

His letter connected the Boy Scouts’ decision to the June Supreme Court decision which required that same-sex couples be granted civil marriages. The decision, the bishop said, is having “real and unwelcome consequences in many areas of our daily lives and I expect that it will only get worse.”

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Pope to Knights: Thank you for your steadfast witness to truth of marriage

by CNA/EWTN News • August 7, 2015

Pope Francis blesses newly married couples at the General Audience in Vatican City on August 5, 2015. (Bohumil Petrik/CNA)

Philadelphia, PA — Pope Francis thanked the Knights of Columbus for their support of Christian marriage in a message to their 133rd Supreme Convention this week. The letter comes less than two months before the Pope’s visit to the United States for the World Meeting of Families at the end of September.

“Elevated by the Savior to the dignity of a sacrament, marriage is, in the Creator’s plan, a natural institution, a life-long covenant of love and fidelity between a man and a woman, directed to their perfection and sanctification, and to the future of our human family,” the Pope said in his message.

The support of the truth of marriage is a duty for all of the lay faithful, Pope Francis continued, because marriage “is essential to the wise and just ordering of society.”

As marriage has recently been under attack in the United States, the Pope said he hoped the theme of the convention, “Endowed by their Creator with Life and Liberty,” would spur American Catholics to “contribute to the reasoned defense of those freedoms on which their nation was founded.”

The Holy Father expressed his hope and trust that the catechetical programs founded by the Knights ahead of the upcoming World Meeting of Families and the Synod on the Family would contribute to the witness to the truth about marriage.

Pope Francis’ message to the Knights came during the same week as his general address on divorced and remarried Catholics. The Holy Father encouraged a more welcoming approach toward Catholics in these situations, and urged clergy to not treat them as though they are excommunicated.

“The Church well knows that such a situation contradicts the Christian Sacrament,” the Pope said in his Aug. 5 General Audience at St. Peter’s Square. Nonetheless, he added, the Church should always approach such situations with a “mother’s heart; a heart which, animated by the Holy Spirit, seeks always the good and the salvation of the person.”

In his letter to the Knights, the Pope also praised the group’s efforts to aid persecuted Christians in the Middle East and in other parts of the world through their Christian Refugee Relief Fund, and appealed to them for their continued efforts and prayer.

At the Supreme Convention, Supreme Knight Carl Anderson unveiled a new portal on the Knights’ website, christiansatrisk.org, where Americans can go to donate to help Christians in the Middle East. He also announced that the Knights will be selling wooden crosses made from the olive trees in Bethlehem as another way to fundraise for the cause.

“It is urgent that, from Catholics throughout the world, an unceasing sacrifice of prayer be offered for the conversion of hearts, an end to fanatical violence and intolerance, and a general recognition of those fundamental human rights which are not granted by the state, bur from the hand of the Creator, whom all believers invoke as a God of peace,” he said.

With 1.8 million members around the globe, the Knights of Columbus is the world’s largest Catholic fraternal service organization. The group was founded in 1882 by the Venerable Father Michael J. McGivney. In 2014, the Knights raised more than $173.5 million for charity and performed more than 71.5 million hours of volunteer work.

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And you shall be like gods – The fierce warning of ‘Ex Machina’

by CNA/EWTN News • August 7, 2015

Scene from ‘Ex Machina.’ (Universal Pictures)

Denver, CO — Much has already been said about director Alex Garland’s slick transhumanist thriller “Ex Machina.” It’s been heralded as everything from a stellar work of speculative fiction to a complex take on gender roles.

But perhaps a lesser known take on the film is its rampant Old Testament allusions that come together to portray a high-tech garden of Eden.

For Denver-based priest Father Nathan Goebel, “the whole movie is a new Genesis.”

“It’s a new beginning: we’re returning back to the garden,” he told CNA. “What is the temptation of the garden? You will be like gods.”

For all of its cold, tech-savvy glamor, he says, “Ex Machina” could be seen as a simple retelling of the Biblical account of Adam and Eve – but with a twist.

Set in the not-too-distant future, the movie’s plotline involves Caleb (Domhnall Gleeson), a young computer programmer at a Google-esq corporation who wins a trip to visit Nathan (Oscar Isaac), the company’s reclusive, eccentric founder. There, he finds an android with artificial intelligence named Eva (Alicia Vikander), whom he is challenged to interact with, in order to determine how human she is.

What follows is a riveting, mind-spinning web of love, lies, betrayal, manipulation and murder.

While it is not a perfect Old Testament analogy, there are several striking similarities. The names are all Biblical – Eva is a derivation of Eve, the first woman. Caleb, who is chosen to explore the brave new world of artificial intelligence, shares a name with the Israelite sent as a scout for the Promised Land. Nathan, the brilliant but nihilistic inventor, shares a name with the prophet who offers warnings to King David, both after he committed adultery and when there was a plot to take over his throne.

The setting also evokes Genesis imagery. A pristine paradise-like garden, removed from the outside world, houses the facility in which Nathan gives his creation life. The seven sessions he arranges for Caleb and Eva to interact are reminiscent of the seven days of creation.

But there’s a critical difference between God creating in the Genesis story and man creating in the film. “We cannot create ‘ex nihilo’,” Fr. Goebel stressed. “God is the only one who can create out of nothing.”

When God creates man in his own image, he makes a being who participates in his own infinite goodness. In “Ex Machina,” though, Nathan is creating in his own image; he makes a being who reflects his own flawed nature.

And Nathan’s relationship to his creation is also flawed. Far from the Biblical God, who loves his creation to the point of sacrificing himself for them, Nathan in the movie is more like a Greek god, Fr. Goebel reflected.

“He’s playing with creation. Trying to satisfy his need for control over the creatures he’s made. He’s not a hero – he’s tragic. You don’t like him,” the priest said, adding that while Nathan interacts with his creation – he creates, destroys, talks to and apparently sleeps with the machines he has made – he does not actually have a human relationship with them.

This is illustrated in one jarring scene, when Nathan spontaneously dances with one of the androids. But the interaction is cold and empty: they are not dancing together, but rather, the machine mimics each of his moves.

Some reviewers have seen the movie as reducing man to the same level as machine, both responding to stimuli that amount to programming of one sort or another.

Yet, Fr. Goebel rejected this interpretation. “Love can’t be programmed. Love is necessarily transcendent,” he said, pointing to the disparity between machine and human. “The fulfillment of creation is to love and be loved, and machines cannot do this.”

In the end, Eva does not love. She has been created to “prove” that she is human by manipulating and abandoning those around her. The inhumanity with which she carries out her final acts of betrayal is ironically striking in its contrast with the humanity she has supposedly achieved.

“She’s become fallen,” Fr. Goebel said. In her final acts, Eva reflects the flaws of her human creator. “Human nature wants to dominate the other. It wants control. She becomes a beast again.”

This desire for control is also seen throughout the film as Nathan attempts to maintain control over a world that is ultimately larger than he is. At different times, he turns to the idols of alcohol, sex and an obsession with working out, while at the same time grappling with a stark loneliness.

“Ex Machina” also offers a sharp commentary on the cultural dependency on technology.

“We think that through tech we extend our reach, our control,” Fr. Goebel said. “But we’re actually quite helpless without our gadgets.”

The film’s writer and director, Alex Garland, has talked about the film in the context of a warning about humanity’s increasing dependence on and fascination with technology.

The machines in question “are weak. They have no motivation, no intention; they’re neutral,” he said. “The thing with an agenda is us: consumers, who want to buy the machines, and manufacturers, who want to sell them.”

“And looming over both, giant tech companies, whose growth only ever seems to be exponential, whose practices are opaque, and whose power is both massive and without true oversight. Combine all this with government surveillance and lotus-eating public acquiescence, and it’s not the machine component that scares me. It’s the human component.”

The film includes disturbing content and several scenes of female robot nudity. But mature Catholic viewers can see this movie as a challenge to themselves, Fr. Goebel said. It can cause them to pause and ask themselves, “For me as a Catholic, where is God? Where is God in relation to man? Am I made in the image of God and am I satisfied with that, or do I want to be like God?”

Ultimately, he reflected, “Ex Machina” is making “an anthropological statement – What is man? What is the purpose of man? What is the nature of man in the world?”

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When the Senate won’t defund Planned Parenthood, states will

by CNA/EWTN News • August 7, 2015

A prolife supporter holds a Defund Planned Parenthood sign at the March for Life, Jan. 25, 2012. (Addie Mena/CNA)

Washington, D.C. — Alabama on Thursday became the third U.S. state this week to withdraw funding from its local branches of Planned Parenthood, after the U.S. Senate failed to bring to the floor a bill that would have blocked federal funding of the abortion group.

The decision comes in the wake of a series of undercover videos showing officials from the organization describing the harvesting of body parts from aborted babies at their clinics.

Alabama governor Robert Bentley wrote to the head of Planned Parenthood Southeast Aug. 6 informing her that his state’s Medicaid agency is terminating is existing agreements with Planned Parenthood Southeast. The termination will take effect in 15 days.

Bentley tweeted that “As a doctor and Alabama’s Governor, the issue of human life, from conception to birth and beyond, is extremely important to me” and “I respect human life, and I do not want Alabama to be associated with an organization that does not.”

Casey Mattox, a senior counsel with Alliance Defending Freedom, commended Bentley’s decision: “Not one more penny should go to Planned Parenthood, a billion-dollar abortion dealer caught on camera negotiating the sale of hearts, lungs, and livers from aborted babies. Governor Bentley should therefore be commended for ending the use of state taxpayer dollars for such barbarism.”

“Our tax dollars instead should fund local public health clinics, which outnumber Planned Parenthood locations more than 10 to 1 and are not tainted by constant scandals and misdeeds. America doesn’t need Planned Parenthood,” Mattox concluded.

On Aug. 5, New Hampshire’s Executive Council (the state’s executive body alongside its governor) voted 3-2 to deny the state’s contract with Planned Parenthood of Northern New England. The decision will remove $639,000 in state funding of the organization.

Executive Councilor Chris Sununu, a Republican, voted to deny Planned Parenthood’s contract, even though he supports legal abortion. According to the Washington Times, Sununu said that “When you have a group like this here at the national level under all this investigation and scrutiny – look, if it were any other contractor, there wouldn’t even be a debate. Of course we wouldn’t be doing business with them.”

“But for some reason the Democrats seem to be going out of their way to find an excuse to keep Planned Parenthood around, and on the line and on contract. There are lots of other providers of these services out there. All I’m saying is, let’s go contract with them and use these other health care providers to make sure we are giving adequate choice to these women.”

The council voted to allocate state funding to three alternative health care providers instead: Concord Feminist Health Center, the Joan G. Lovering Health Center, and Weeks Medical Center.

Louisiana’s health department ended its Medicaid provider contract with Planned Parenthood Aug. 3, though it will take effect in 30 days. The decision was made, according to Governor Bobby Jindal, because “Planned Parenthood does not represent the values of the people of Louisiana and shows a fundamental disrespect for human life. It has become clear that this is not an organization that is worthy of receiving public assistance from the state.”

According to The Times-Picayune, Planned Parenthood does not perform abortions in Louisiana, but does provide family planning, cervical exams, and gynecology services in Baton Rouge and New Orleans. Jindal, who is a candidate for the Republican nominee for U.S. president, noted that terminating Planned Parenthood’s contract will “not jeopardize those services in any way as Planned Parenthood is just one of many providers in the Baton Rouge and New Orleans areas.”

The recent rise in controversy around Planned Parenthood is related to a series of videos released by the Center for Medial Progress. The videos show Planned Parenthood officials casually discussing prices for various body parts, and how abortion procedures may be altered to ensure intact organs.

The bishops of Colorado, as well as Archbishop Paul Coakley of Oklahoma City, have called for penance and prayer in response to the content of the videos. The bishops of Colorado have designated Aug. 28 as a day of penance and prayer, and Archbishop Coakley called on the faithful “to engage in the political process as advocates for the dignity of human life” and added, “I urge a prayerful response. Our hearts must be converted before our society will be able to consistently enact and embrace just laws that embody a proper regard for the sanctity of life.”

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FEATURES

Why You Need Spiritual Food

by Bishop-elect Robert Barron (CNA/EWTN News) • August 4, 2015

Every third summer, the Catholic lectionary provides a series of readings for Sunday Mass from the sixth chapter of the Gospel of John. This is the magnificently crafted chapter in which the evangelist’s Eucharistic theology is most fully presented. It is a curiosity of John’s Gospel that the Last Supper scene includes no “institution narrative,” which is to say, the account of what Jesus did with the bread and cup the night before he died. But as many scholars have indicated, the Eucharist is a theme that runs right through the entirety of the Gospel and which finds richest expression in the famous chapter six.

__I won’t focus in this essay on the great issue of the real presence -”My flesh is real food and my blood real drink”- but rather on the more general matter of spiritual nourishment. A few months ago, I spent a week in the hospital recovering from surgery, and for about three days, I was not permitted to eat any solid food. What amazed me was how rapidly my body shrank. The muscles of my arms and legs began quickly - and rather alarmingly - to atrophy, and it proved difficult even to cross the room and sit up in a chair. Almost twenty years ago, I undertook, with a good friend of mine, a bicycle trip from Paris to Rome, covering about seventy miles a day. We really pushed ourselves to the limit. One day, somewhere in the south of France, after about five hours of pedaling, I hit the wall. Though I had heard of this phenomenon, I had never experienced it before. When you hit the wall, you don’t gradually slow down or calmly realize that you have to take a rest; you just stop, your body simply unable to go on.

May I suggest that these examples are very exact analogies to spiritual health and spiritual nourishment? Without food, the body quickly collapses; without spiritual food, the soul atrophies. It really is as simple as that. Though materialists of all stripes want to deny it, there is a dimension of the human person that goes beyond the merely physical, a dynamism that connects him or her with God. Classically, this link to the eternal is called the soul. (We oughtn’t to construe this, by the way, in the Cartesian manner, as though the soul is imprisoned by the body. Rather, we ought to follow Thomas Aquinas who said, “the soul is in the body, not as contained by it, but containing it.”)

What the soul requires for nourishment is the divine life or what the spiritual masters call “grace.” It is of this sustenance that Jesus speaks in John 6: “Do not work for food that perishes but for the food that endures for eternal life.” Most people are at least inchoately aware of the soul and its hunger, but they feed it with insufficient food: wealth, pleasure, power, and honor. All of these are good in themselves, but none of them is designed to satisfy the longing of the soul. And this is precisely why some of the wealthiest, most famous, and accomplished people in our society are dying of spiritual starvation.

So where and how do we find the divine life? First, I would suggest, through prayer. The soul wants to pray every day, to speak to God and to listen to him. So we should spend time before the Blessed Sacrament, pray the rosary, do the Stations of the Cross, read the Bible in a meditative spirit, confess our sins, and above all, go to Mass. A second way in which we encounter grace is through serious spiritual reading. One of the principal marks of an engaged Catholic is the faithful reading of spiritual and theological books. Most of us fill our minds with junk; but the mind, the soul, wants to be filled with the lofty things of God. Why have so many Catholic bookstores faded away? Because Catholics have stopped taking spiritual reading seriously. A third way to feed the soul is to practice the corporal and spiritual works of mercy. If you are spiritually hungry, feed the physically hungry, give drink to the thirsty, counsel the doubtful, visit the sick and imprisoned, pray for the living and the dead. You’ll find that the more you empty yourself in love, the more satisfied your soul will feel.

Finally, and most importantly, you can receive the Eucharist regularly. In his discourse on the Eucharist in John 6, Jesus says, “I am the bread of life; whoever comes to me will never hunger, and whoever believes in me will never thirst.” The divine life is found, par excellence, in the transfigured bread and wine of the Eucharist. Aquinas said that the other sacraments contain the virtus Christi (the power of Christ) but that the Eucharist containsipse Christus (Christ himself). What the soul is hungry for, finally, is the person of Jesus, the body and blood of Christ. Without feeding regularly on that food, the soul will atrophy.

Why are so many Catholics feeling lost today? Well, 75% of them stay away from the Mass and the Eucharist on a regular basis. This is not rocket science: if you want to be healthy spiritually, you’ve got to eat!

Bishop-elect Robert Barron is an auxiliary bishop-elect of the Archdiocese of Los Angeles and the founder of Word on Fire Catholic Ministries (wordonfire.org). He is the creator of two award-winning documentary series, Catholicism and Catholicism: The New Evangelization.

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FEATURES

Beauty Rising from the Ashes

by Sr. Joan L. Roccasalvo, C.S.J. • August 5, 2015

Tomorrow and this Sunday, the Church celebrates the feasts of the Lord’s Transfiguration and that of St. Teresa, Blessed by the Cross.

The Transfiguration is a day when the adjective radiant enjoys prominence. There on Mount Tabor, Jesus’ face and garments become radiant with light, and Peter, James, and John are also drawn into this luminous mystery. “Lord, it is good for us to be here,” Peter speaks for the others. They would prefer to taste the sweetness on Tabor rather than the human condition in the valley. Jesus knows the folly of their desire. They will learn the hard way.

This Sunday’s scriptural readings take precedence over the feast of the day, that of St. Teresa, Benedicta a Croce, (St. Teresa, Blessed by the Cross). Edith Stein, a Jew and noted philosopher, and an atheist-turned-Catholic, became a Discalced Carmelite nun. She and her sister Rosa were murdered at Auschwitz because they were Jews.

Between 1941 and 1945, at least six million Jews were murdered by the Nazis in various concentration camps. This genocide did not spare other groups such as Catholic nuns and priests who stood with the Jews and defended them. Edith Stein was both a Jew and a Catholic nun. The Nazis were forced to abort an elaborate plot to kidnap Pope Pius XII because they were certain he had rescued Jews or was harboring them within Vatican confines. They were right.

From Darkness …

Born in 1891 into an observant Jewish family, Edith Stein was the youngest of eleven children. Her father died an early death. While Edith admired her mother’s piety, she followed her own insights.

At a time when few women did graduate studies, Edith earned a doctorate in philosophy at the University of Freiburg. But in the course of her studies, she lost her Jewish faith as well as belief in the existence of the soul. However, two of her mentors influenced her thinking: Edmund Husserl (d 1938) and Max Scheler (d 1928), both born Jews and both converts to Christianity. Edith was deeply affected by their convictions, but her long, lonely struggle was just about to begin.

Truth can reveal itself through the witness of other people, and this is what happened to Edith Stein in two instances, and both changed her life. The first happened in 1917. After Edith’s colleague and friend, Adolf Reinach was killed in World War I, she received an invitation to the Reinach home to organize his papers. Edith met his widow, Frau Reinach who was suffering deeply from the loss of her husband, but despite the woman’s anguish, Edith saw in her face hope and joy. As Edith remained with Frau Reinach for a time, her rational arguments against the existence of God began to crumble in the face of the mystery of the cross. Thus began her journey from atheism to belief. Still, the road to the Catholic faith remained at a distance.

The second occurrence happened while Edith was visiting at a friend’s home. In the library, she came across the autobiography of the great Carmelite reformer, St. Teresa of Avila. After staying up almost the entire night, enthralled by the narrative, she put down the book and said to herself, “This is the truth.” At that point, Edith realized that for the first time in her life, she could see.

Edith bought a catechism and a missal, studied them both, and went to her first Mass. Shortly after, she asked the pastor to baptize her. The priest knew of her academic background. He encouraged her to read St. Thomas Aquinas’ treatise on truth (De Veritate) as a proximate preparation for her reception into the Church. On New Year’s Day, 1922, at the age of thirty-one, Edith Stein was baptized. Her mother wept with sadness. Edith could not intensify the blow by announcing at the same time that she wanted to become a cloistered nun. Instead, she embraced the teaching apostolate.

To Integration

In Speyer, Edith took a position at a secondary school conducted by the Dominican sisters. There she won the hearts of the teachers and students alike. In addition to teaching, she lectured widely about women to women. On one occasion, speaking to them, she reflected aloud, “The nation … doesn’t simply need what we have. It needs what we are.”

In 1925, the noted philosopher, Eric Przywara, S.J., asked Edith to translate St. Thomas beginning with his disputed questions on truth. She was now convinced of the importance of academics as an apostolic vocation that she should follow. Thomas’ works served not only as a path to truth but also as an ordered way to personal experience of God. For Aquinas, there is a unity between the thinking person and the person who contemplates and loves. Eventually, Edith lost her teaching post because she was a Jew.

The Cologne Carmel, Kristallnacht, and the Carmel at Echt

In October, 1933, at age forty-two, Edith was received in the Carmelite monastery at Cologne. Her mother was crushed by the decision and utterly incapable of comprehending it.

One month later, on Kristallnacht, on “the night of broken glass,” the Nazis intensified their anti-Semitism. During this year, a large-scale offensive was enacted against the Jews, and thousands were forced to leave Germany.

With the horror of Kristallnacht, all hope was virtually abandoned for the Jews to live in peace. Throughout the night, Jewish citizens were rounded up, driven from their homes, and their businesses were demolished or confiscated. Broken glass was everywhere. In a matter of a few hours, their lives as members of German society were destroyed. Even the synagogues were been burned. It was clear to Germans and Jews alike that any public outcry would be intensified with ruthless and immediate punishment by the Nazis.

On New Year’s Eve 1938, Sr. Teresa and her sister Rosa, an extern sister, were transferred to the Dutch Carmel of Echt. For two years, they lived in relative peace. But when the Dutch bishops issued a pastoral letter protesting the deportation of the Jews and the expulsion of Jewish children from the Catholic school system, the Nazis invaded Holland and arrested all Catholics of Jewish extraction in the country. They were forced to wear a yellow star on their person. Though the Carmel in Switzerland offered asylum to Sr. Teresa, there was no room for Rosa.

In his journal dated July 30th, 1942, Dr. William Harster, the Commanding Officer of Security Police and the Public Security Administration in charge of The Hague, wrote among other entries: “Since the Catholic bishops have interfered in something that does not concern them, deportation of all Catholic Jews will be speeded up and completed within the coming week. No appeals for clemency shall be considered” (Waltraud Herbstrith, Edith Stein, 191).

To Auschwitz

On August 2, 1942, Sr. Teresa, her sister, and twelve hundred Jews were arrested and put on a train to Westerbrook, a transitional concentration camp in Holland. “Come, Rosa, we’re going for our people,” she declared.

Early in the morning of August 7th, Number 44074, Edith Stein, and her sister Rosa were brought to Auschwitz, Poland. August 9th is the date recorded for their death in the gas chamber there. Sr. Teresa, Blessed by the Cross was canonized a saint of the Church on October 11th, 1998.

Adagio for Strings

In 1938, even as Hitler’s threats engulfed Europe, the American composer, Samuel Barber, composed Adagio for Strings. Evocative of intense pathos, the melody makes its slow, steady, and irrevocable ascent, building to a climax that is almost unbearable to experience. Once the strings reach their peak, the unrelenting tremolo sends shivers up the spine. Abruptly, the music breaks off, presumably for all to catch their breath before it resumes with a whimper, yielding to a tense silence. Then it dies away. The music follows the trajectory of St. Teresa Benedicta’s life.

In 1979, Father Johannes Hirschmanns, S.J. wrote that although Auschwitz remained a place stripped of love, it also revealed that the Cross was stronger than hate. Whoever has visited Auschwitz can appreciate the beauty, however stripped, rising from the ashes, as it did for Isaiah. “To all who mourn in Israel, he will give a crown of beauty for ashes, a joyous blessing instead of mourning, festive praise instead of despair. In their righteousness, they will be like great oaks that the Lord has planted for his glory” (Is 61:3).

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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FEATURES

Some items that have caught my attention recently

by Msgr. M. Francis Mannion • August 7, 2015

Writing a regular column like “Viewpoint” requires me to collect oodles of news and feature items from a variety of sources. Here are five to which I cannot devote whole columns, but which deserve mention nevertheless.

Most enlightened liturgical policy by a U.S. archbishop:

Nine U.S. dioceses have over the years moved the sacrament of Confirmation for youth back to the age of reason (around seven) — just before First Communion. Recently, Archbishop Samuel Aquila of Denver established that, in his Archdiocese, youth will celebrate Confirmation and First Communion together, in the third grade. Since this was the practice in the Church for 1900 years, the policy needs no justification. The practice for most of the 20th century of having Confirmation well after First Communion is an anomaly — like postponing the engagement until well after the wedding.

Most unambiguous assessment of the recently translated Roman Missal:

To the question, “What do you think of our new 2011 missal translation? What are its strengths and weaknesses?” Archbishop John Quinn, former ordinary of San Francisco, replied, “It is not English as we use it. It’s too complicated. It’s very difficult to speak. People can’t understand what is being said. … I don’t know that it has any strengths.” (Hey, he said it, I didn’t!)

Most courageous stance by an American bishop:

Bishop Thomas Tobin of Providence, R. I., took up an issue that most clergy (including myself) are too chicken to address: sloppy, over-casual, sporty dress at Mass. Bishop Tobin wrote critically in his diocesan newspaper of people “spreading [themselves] out in the pew, wearing wrinkled, very-short shorts and garish, unbuttoned shirts; mature women with skimpy clothes that reveal too much, slogging up the aisle accompanied by the flap-flap-flap of their flop-flops; hyperactive gum-chewing kids with messy hair and dirty hands, checking their iPhones and annoying everyone within earshot or eyesight.” Says the Bishop, “C’mon — even in the summer a church is a church, not a beach or a pool deck.”

Most under-reported recent ecumenical gestures:

In June, Pope Francis apologized to the Waldensians for persecution by the Catholic Church. The Waldensians derive their name from Peter Waldo, a rich merchant from 12th-century Lyons, who, as a young man experienced a radical conversion, very similar to that of Francis of Assisi. Waldo began preaching and teaching about the virtues of poverty and simplicity. In a few years, he acquired followers who called themselves “the poor of Lyons.” Waldo and his followers were condemned for heresy and for operating without much reference to the official Church. Pope Francis suggested that Catholics and Waldensians should cooperate in the future, especially in works of charity.

Likewise, in July, the Pope sent Cardinal Miloslav Vlk, archbishop emeritus of Prague, capital of the Czech Republic, as his special envoy to the commemoration of the 600th anniversary of the death of John Hus, burned at the stake for heresy by Catholic authorities on July 6, 1415.

Silliest thing I have ever heard:

An Italian perfume manufacturer has created a “distinctive, refreshing aftershave” called “Francis” after — guess who? — Pope Francis. (They also have aftershaves named after Pope Pius IX and Pope Benedict XVI). I wonder what an aftershave inspired by Pope Francis would smell like. Sheep? After all Pope Francis has said on a number of occasions that clergy should smell like their sheep. And I really wonder if Pope Francis uses aftershave at all. (Perhaps the makers of these perfumes should be burned at the stake for sheer nonsense!)

Msgr. Mannion is pastor emeritus of St. Vincent de Paul parish in Salt Lake City. He holds a Ph.D. in sacramental theology from The Catholic University of America. He was founding president of The Society for Catholic Liturgy in 1995 and the founding editor of the Society’s journal, Antiphon. At the invitation of Cardinal Francis George of Chicago he founded the Mundelein Liturgical Institute in 2000.

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SUNDAY • AUGUST 9, 2015

Nineteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time

First Reading (1 Kgs 19:4-8; NRSVCE)

Elijah went a day’s journey into the wilderness, and came and sat down under a solitary broom tree. He asked that he might die: “It is enough; now, O Lord, take away my life, for I am no better than my ancestors.” Then he lay down under the broom tree and fell asleep. Suddenly an angel touched him and said to him, “Get up and eat.” He looked, and there at his head was a cake baked on hot stones, and a jar of water. He ate and drank, and lay down again. The angel of the Lord came a second time, touched him, and said, “Get up and eat, otherwise the journey will be too much for you.” He got up, and ate and drank; then he went in the strength of that food forty days and forty nights to Horeb the mount of God.

Second Reading (Eph 4:30 — 5:2; NRSVCE)

Do not grieve the Holy Spirit of God, with which you were marked with a seal for the day of redemption. Put away from you all bitterness and wrath and anger and wrangling and slander, together with all malice, and be kind to one another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, as God in Christ has forgiven you.

Therefore be imitators of God, as beloved children, and live in love, as Christ loved us and gave himself up for us, a fragrant offering and sacrifice to God.

Gospel Reading (Jn 6:41-51; NRSVCE)

Then the Jews began to complain about Jesus because he said, “I am the bread that came down from heaven.” They were saying, “Is not this Jesus, the son of Joseph, whose father and mother we know? How can he now say, ‘I have come down from heaven’?” Jesus answered them, “Do not complain among yourselves. No one can come to me unless drawn by the Father who sent me; and I will raise that person up on the last day. It is written in the prophets, ‘And they shall all be taught by God.’ Everyone who has heard and learned from the Father comes to me. Not that anyone has seen the Father except the one who is from God; he has seen the Father. Very truly, I tell you, whoever believes has eternal life. I am the bread of life. Your ancestors ate the manna in the wilderness, and they died. This is the bread that comes down from heaven, so that one may eat of it and not die. I am the living bread that came down from heaven. Whoever eats of this bread will live forever; and the bread that I will give for the life of the world is my flesh.”

MONDAY • AUGUST 10, 2015

Feast of Saint Lawrence

First Reading (2 Cor 9:6-10; NRSVCE)

The point is this: the one who sows sparingly will also reap sparingly, and the one who sows bountifully will also reap bountifully. Each of you must give as you have made up your mind, not reluctantly or under compulsion, for God loves a cheerful giver. And God is able to provide you with every blessing in abundance, so that by always having enough of everything, you may share abundantly in every good work. As it is written,

“He scatters abroad, he gives to the poor;

his righteousness endures forever.”

He who supplies seed to the sower and bread for food will supply and multiply your seed for sowing and increase the harvest of your righteousness.

Gospel Reading (Jn 12:24-26; NRSVCE)

Jesus said to his disciples, “Very truly, I tell you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains just a single grain; but if it dies, it bears much fruit. Those who love their life lose it, and those who hate their life in this world will keep it for eternal life. Whoever serves me must follow me, and where I am, there will my servant be also. Whoever serves me, the Father will honor.”

TUESDAY • AUGUST 11, 2015

Memorial of Saint Claire

First Reading (Dt 31:1-8; NRSVCE)

When Moses had finished speaking all these words to all Israel, he said to them: “I am now one hundred twenty years old. I am no longer able to get about, and the Lord has told me, ‘You shall not cross over this Jordan.’ The Lord your God himself will cross over before you. He will destroy these nations before you, and you shall dispossess them. Joshua also will cross over before you, as the Lord promised. The Lord will do to them as he did to Sihon and Og, the kings of the Amorites, and to their land, when he destroyed them. The Lord will give them over to you and you shall deal with them in full accord with the command that I have given to you. Be strong and bold; have no fear or dread of them, because it is the Lord your God who goes with you; he will not fail you or forsake you.”

Then Moses summoned Joshua and said to him in the sight of all Israel: “Be strong and bold, for you are the one who will go with this people into the land that the Lord has sworn to their ancestors to give them; and you will put them in possession of it. It is the Lord who goes before you. He will be with you; he will not fail you or forsake you. Do not fear or be dismayed.”

Gospel Reading (Mt 18:1-5, 10, 12-14; NRSVCE)

At that time the disciples came to Jesus and asked, “Who is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven?” He called a child, whom he put among them, and said, “Truly I tell you, unless you change and become like children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven. Whoever becomes humble like this child is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven. Whoever welcomes one such child in my name welcomes me.

“Take care that you do not despise one of these little ones; for, I tell you, in heaven their angels continually see the face of my Father in heaven. What do you think? If a shepherd has a hundred sheep, and one of them has gone astray, does he not leave the ninety-nine on the mountains and go in search of the one that went astray? And if he finds it, truly I tell you, he rejoices over it more than over the ninety-nine that never went astray. So it is not the will of your Father in heaven that one of these little ones should be lost.”

WEDNESDAY • AUGUST 12, 2015

Wednesday of the Nineteenth Week in Ordinary Time

First Reading (Dt 34:1-12; NRSVCE)

Then Moses went up from the plains of Moab to Mount Nebo, to the top of Pisgah, which is opposite Jericho, and the Lord showed him the whole land: Gilead as far as Dan, all Naphtali, the land of Ephraim and Manasseh, all the land of Judah as far as the Western Sea, the Negeb, and the Plain — that is, the valley of Jericho, the city of palm trees — as far as Zoar. The Lord said to him, “This is the land of which I swore to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob, saying, ‘I will give it to your descendants’; I have let you see it with your eyes, but you shall not cross over there.” Then Moses, the servant of the Lord, died there in the land of Moab, at the Lord’s command. He was buried in a valley in the land of Moab, opposite Beth-peor, but no one knows his burial place to this day. Moses was one hundred twenty years old when he died; his sight was unimpaired and his vigor had not abated. The Israelites wept for Moses in the plains of Moab thirty days; then the period of mourning for Moses was ended.

Joshua son of Nun was full of the spirit of wisdom, because Moses had laid his hands on him; and the Israelites obeyed him, doing as the Lord had commanded Moses.

Never since has there arisen a prophet in Israel like Moses, whom the Lord knew face to face. He was unequaled for all the signs and wonders that the Lord sent him to perform in the land of Egypt, against Pharaoh and all his servants and his entire land, and for all the mighty deeds and all the terrifying displays of power that Moses performed in the sight of all Israel.

Gospel Reading (Mt 18:15-20; NRSVCE)

Jesus said to his disciples, “If another member of the church sins against you, go and point out the fault when the two of you are alone. If the member listens to you, you have regained that one. But if you are not listened to, take one or two others along with you, so that every word may be confirmed by the evidence of two or three witnesses. If the member refuses to listen to them, tell it to the church; and if the offender refuses to listen even to the church, let such a one be to you as a Gentile and a tax collector. Truly I tell you, whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven. Again, truly I tell you, if two of you agree on earth about anything you ask, it will be done for you by my Father in heaven. For where two or three are gathered in my name, I am there among them.”

THURSDAY • AUGUST 13, 2015

Thursday of the Nineteenth Week in Ordinary Time

First Reading (Jos 3:7-10a, 11, 13-17; NRSVCE)

The Lord said to Joshua, “This day I will begin to exalt you in the sight of all Israel, so that they may know that I will be with you as I was with Moses. You are the one who shall command the priests who bear the ark of the covenant, ‘When you come to the edge of the waters of the Jordan, you shall stand still in the Jordan.’” Joshua then said to the Israelites, “Draw near and hear the words of the Lord your God.” Joshua said, “By this you shall know that among you is the living God who without fail will drive out from before you the Canaanites. The ark of the covenant of the Lord of all the earth is going to pass before you into the Jordan. When the soles of the feet of the priests who bear the ark of the Lord, the Lord of all the earth, rest in the waters of the Jordan, the waters of the Jordan flowing from above shall be cut off; they shall stand in a single heap.”

When the people set out from their tents to cross over the Jordan, the priests bearing the ark of the covenant were in front of the people. Now the Jordan overflows all its banks throughout the time of harvest. So when those who bore the ark had come to the Jordan, and the feet of the priests bearing the ark were dipped in the edge of the water, the waters flowing from above stood still, rising up in a single heap far off at Adam, the city that is beside Zarethan, while those flowing toward the sea of the Arabah, the Dead Sea, were wholly cut off. Then the people crossed over opposite Jericho. While all Israel were crossing over on dry ground, the priests who bore the ark of the covenant of the Lord stood on dry ground in the middle of the Jordan, until the entire nation finished crossing over the Jordan.

Gospel Reading (Mt 18:21 – 19:1; NRSVCE)

Then Peter came and said to Jesus, “Lord, if another member of the church sins against me, how often should I forgive? As many as seven times?” Jesus said to him, “Not seven times, but, I tell you, seventy-seven times.

“For this reason the kingdom of heaven may be compared to a king who wished to settle accounts with his slaves. When he began the reckoning, one who owed him ten thousand talents was brought to him; and, as he could not pay, his lord ordered him to be sold, together with his wife and children and all his possessions, and payment to be made. So the slave fell on his knees before him, saying, ‘Have patience with me, and I will pay you everything.’ And out of pity for him, the lord of that slave released him and forgave him the debt. But that same slave, as he went out, came upon one of his fellow slaves who owed him a hundred denarii; and seizing him by the throat, he said, ‘Pay what you owe.’ Then his fellow slave fell down and pleaded with him, ‘Have patience with me, and I will pay you.’ But he refused; then he went and threw him into prison until he would pay the debt. When his fellow slaves saw what had happened, they were greatly distressed, and they went and reported to their lord all that had taken place. Then his lord summoned him and said to him, ‘You wicked slave! I forgave you all that debt because you pleaded with me. Should you not have had mercy on your fellow slave, as I had mercy on you?’ And in anger his lord handed him over to be tortured until he would pay his entire debt. So my heavenly Father will also do to every one of you, if you do not forgive your brother or sister from your heart.”

When Jesus had finished saying these things, he left Galilee and went to the region of Judea beyond the Jordan.

FRIDAY • AUGUST 14, 2015

Memorial of Saint Maximilian Kolbe

First Reading (Jos 24:1-13; NRSVCE)

Then Joshua gathered all the tribes of Israel to Shechem, and summoned the elders, the heads, the judges, and the officers of Israel; and they presented themselves before God. And Joshua said to all the people, “Thus says the Lord, the God of Israel: Long ago your ancestors — Terah and his sons Abraham and Nahor — lived beyond the Euphrates and served other gods. Then I took your father Abraham from beyond the River and led him through all the land of Canaan and made his offspring many. I gave him Isaac; and to Isaac I gave Jacob and Esau. I gave Esau the hill country of Seir to possess, but Jacob and his children went down to Egypt. Then I sent Moses and Aaron, and I plagued Egypt with what I did in its midst; and afterwards I brought you out. When I brought your ancestors out of Egypt, you came to the sea; and the Egyptians pursued your ancestors with chariots and horsemen to the Red Sea. When they cried out to the Lord, he put darkness between you and the Egyptians, and made the sea come upon them and cover them; and your eyes saw what I did to Egypt. Afterwards you lived in the wilderness a long time. Then I brought you to the land of the Amorites, who lived on the other side of the Jordan; they fought with you, and I handed them over to you, and you took possession of their land, and I destroyed them before you. Then King Balak son of Zippor of Moab, set out to fight against Israel. He sent and invited Balaam son of Beor to curse you, but I would not listen to Balaam; therefore he blessed you; so I rescued you out of his hand. When you went over the Jordan and came to Jericho, the citizens of Jericho fought against you, and also the Amorites, the Perizzites, the Canaanites, the Hittites, the Girgashites, the Hivites, and the Jebusites; and I handed them over to you. I sent the hornet ahead of you, which drove out before you the two kings of the Amorites; it was not by your sword or by your bow. I gave you a land on which you had not labored, and towns that you had not built, and you live in them; you eat the fruit of vineyards and oliveyards that you did not plant.”

Gospel Reading (Mt 19:3-12; NRSVCE)

Some Pharisees came to Jesus, and to test him they asked, “Is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife for any cause?” He answered, “Have you not read that the one who made them at the beginning ‘made them male and female,’ and said, ‘For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh’? So they are no longer two, but one flesh. Therefore what God has joined together, let no one separate.” They said to him, “Why then did Moses command us to give a certificate of dismissal and to divorce her?” He said to them, “It was because you were so hard-hearted that Moses allowed you to divorce your wives, but from the beginning it was not so. And I say to you, whoever divorces his wife, except for unchastity, and marries another commits adultery.”

His disciples said to him, “If such is the case of a man with his wife, it is better not to marry.” But he said to them, “Not everyone can accept this teaching, but only those to whom it is given. For there are eunuchs who have been so from birth, and there are eunuchs who have been made eunuchs by others, and there are eunuchs who have made themselves eunuchs for the sake of the kingdom of heaven. Let anyone accept this who can.”

SATURDAY • AUGUST 15, 2015

Solemnity of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary

First Reading (Rv 11:19a; 12:1-6a, 10ab; NRSVCE)

Then God’s temple in heaven was opened, and the ark of his covenant was seen within his temple.

A great portent appeared in heaven: a woman clothed with the sun, with the moon under her feet, and on her head a crown of twelve stars. She was pregnant and was crying out in birth pangs, in the agony of giving birth. Then another portent appeared in heaven: a great red dragon, with seven heads and ten horns, and seven diadems on his heads. His tail swept down a third of the stars of heaven and threw them to the earth. Then the dragon stood before the woman who was about to bear a child, so that he might devour her child as soon as it was born. And she gave birth to a son, a male child, who is to rule all the nations with a rod of iron. But her child was snatched away and taken to God and to his throne; and the woman fled into the wilderness, where she has a place prepared by God.

Then I heard a loud voice in heaven, proclaiming,

“Now have come the salvation and the power

and the kingdom of our God

and the authority of his Messiah.”

Second Reading (1 Cor 15:20-27; NRSVCE)

But in fact Christ has been raised from the dead, the first fruits of those who have died. For since death came through a human being, the resurrection of the dead has also come through a human being; for as all die in Adam, so all will be made alive in Christ. But each in his own order: Christ the first fruits, then at his coming those who belong to Christ. Then comes the end, when he hands over the kingdom to God the Father, after he has destroyed every ruler and every authority and power. For he must reign until he has put all his enemies under his feet. The last enemy to be destroyed is death. For “God has put all things in subjection under his feet.”

Gospel Reading (Lk 1:39-56; NRSVCE)

In those days Mary set out and went with haste to a Judean town in the hill country, where she entered the house of Zechariah and greeted Elizabeth. When Elizabeth heard Mary’s greeting, the child leaped in her womb. And Elizabeth was filled with the Holy Spirit and exclaimed with a loud cry, “Blessed are you among women, and blessed is the fruit of your womb. And why has this happened to me, that the mother of my Lord comes to me? For as soon as I heard the sound of your greeting, the child in my womb leaped for joy. And blessed is she who believed that there would be a fulfillment of what was spoken to her by the Lord.”

And Mary said,

“My soul magnifies the Lord,

and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior,

for he has looked with favor on the lowliness of his servant.

Surely, from now on all generations will call me blessed;

for the Mighty One has done great things for me,

and holy is his name.

His mercy is for those who fear him

from generation to generation.

He has shown strength with his arm;

he has scattered the proud in the thoughts of their hearts.

He has brought down the powerful from their thrones,

and lifted up the lowly;

he has filled the hungry with good things,

and sent the rich away empty.

He has helped his servant Israel,

in remembrance of his mercy,

according to the promise he made to our ancestors,

to Abraham and to his descendants forever.”

And Mary remained with her about three months and then returned to her home.