VOLUME 1, ISSUE 35  •  AUGUST 29, 2015

Table of Contents

Copyright Notice

VATICAN NEWS

Pope calls for peace in Ukraine ahead of Independence Day

Pope: When Jesus’ words are hard to hear, you need faith to stay

Are Vatican officials involved in the Ashley Madison leak? Nope.

‘Teach your children how to pray!’ Pope tells parents

The modern world’s biggest challenge, according to Benedict XVI

Former nuncio Wesolowski, facing sex abuse trial, dies

Vatican: Pope did not endorse ‘gay penguin’ book

Seminar speakers advocate change on Communion for the divorced-and-remarried

WORLD NEWS

Rome angered over ‘Godfather’ themed funeral for alleged mob boss

Will the Catholic Church have a growing role in Korean reconciliation?

What is the devil’s favorite sin? An exorcist responds

Thai Catholics join in interreligious prayer service after Bangkok bomb

Amid threat of violence, CRS works to ease food shortage in Mali

Filipinos mourn the death of pioneer Bishop Francisco San Diego of Pasig

Catholics in Colombia assist thousands of their brethren forced out of Venezuela

Ahead of papal visit, Cuba’s Women in White fear government crackdown

Is this what Saint Rose of Lima looked like?

U.S. NEWS

Hilton hotels worldwide to remove on-demand porn

Archbishop Cordileone thankful for San Francisco teacher contract agreement

Tens of thousands protest at Planned Parenthood clinics across the country

PopUpPope brings hope to the inner city ahead of papal visit

Cardinal Levada voices regrets after DUI arrest in Hawaii

What does servant leadership look like on a global scale?

These students with special needs have a request of Pope Francis

A tech company may have received whole fetuses for tissue harvesting

Pop Artist. Provocateur. Catholic. Who was Andy Warhol?

Even Hurricane Katrina couldn’t keep this nun out of New Orleans

Catholic groups say this U.S. bill could fight modern day slave labor

It’s not over yet: Nebraska bishops, Catholics continue to fight death penalty

FEATURES

Stephen Colbert, J.R.R. Tolkien, John Henry Newman, and the Providence of God

Catholic Education II: Quality and Non-Quality

Don’t be fooled – ‘Grandma’ lacks any redeeming qualities

SCRIPTURE READINGS

Sunday • August 30, 2015

Monday • August 31, 2015

Tuesday • September 1, 2015

Wednesday • September 2, 2015

Thursday • September 3, 2015

Friday • September 4, 2015

Saturday • September 5, 2015

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Volume 1, Issue 35 • August 29, 2015

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VATICAN NEWS

Pope calls for peace in Ukraine ahead of Independence Day

by Ann Schneible (CNA/EWTN News) • August 23, 2015

Pope Francis gives the Angelus address in St. Peter’s Square August 9, 2015. (L’Osservatore Romano)

Vatican City — On Sunday the Holy Father again pleaded for peace in Ukraine as the nation faces ongoing cease-fire violations in a conflict that has claimed thousands of lives since early last year.

“With concern, I am following the conflict in eastern Ukraine, which has again worsened in recent weeks,” the pontiff said Aug. 23 during his weekly Angelus address.

“I renew my appeal that the commitments undertaken to bring about peace may be respected, and with the help of organizations and persons of good will, they might respond to the humanitarian emergency of the country.”

The Pope made these remarks from the papal palace to pilgrims and visitors gathered in Saint Peter’s Square, one day ahead of Ukraine’s national Independence Day.

The Holy Father’s words come amid ongoing cease-fire violations, with one person having been killed and four others injured in clashes in Donetsk in the last 24 hours, according to Reuters.

Ukraine is also preparing for a parliamentary vote on Aug. 31 to amend their constitution and grant special status to regions in eastern Ukraine with pro-Russian leanings, the agency reported.

Beginning with street protests in November 2013, the conflict escalated early the following year, in events which included the overthrow of President Viktor Yanukovych and the annexation of the Crimean Peninsula by Russia.

More than 6,500 people, including civilians, have been killed in the fighting between Ukraine’s military and pro-Russian separatists.

“May the Lord grant peace to Ukraine, which prepares to celebrate its national holiday tomorrow. May the Virgin Mary intercede for us!” the Pope said.

Earlier this year at the Vatican, Pope Francis held a meeting with Russian president Vladimir Putin, addressing the conflict in eastern Ukraine.

The June 10 meeting touched upon the need to pursue peace in Ukraine, the necessity to build dialogue, and the ongoing humanitarian situation.

Mention was also made of the serious humanitarian situation, with particular regard to the access of humanitarian workers to areas in need.

Putin has been a key player in the war in eastern Ukraine. According to the Ukrainian government and Western nations, Russian arms and soldiers are fighting alongside pro-Russian separatists in the east of the country.

Putin has denied that any Russian soldiers have entered Ukraine.

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VATICAN NEWS

Pope: When Jesus’ words are hard to hear, you need faith to stay

by Ann Schneible (CNA/EWTN News) • August 23, 2015

Pope Francis speaks to the crowd gathered in St. Peter’s Square on June 15, 2015 before the Angelus. (L’Osservatore Romano)

Vatican City — Those who turn away from the “uncomfortable” teaching on Jesus being the Bread of Life, Pope Francis said during his weekly Sunday Angelus address, do so not because of a lack of understanding, but a lack of faith.

“The true cause of misunderstanding (Jesus’) words is a lack of faith,” the pontiff stressed, speaking ahead of the Angelus from the papal palace to the crowds in St. Peter’s Square.

“All that we have in the world does not satiate our hunger of the infinite. We need Jesus, to be with him, to be nourished at his table, with his words of eternal life! To believe in Jesus means to put him at the center, the sense of our life.”

Pope Francis centered his Aug. 23 address on the day’s Gospel from John, in which Jesus pronounces himself to be the Bread of Life.

Reflecting on the scene, which follows the multiplication of the loaves and fishes, the pontiff observed that the disciples’ “great enthusiasm” dampens when Jesus says he has come that his flesh and blood might be food and drink. The Gospel recounts that upon hearing these words many of the disciples left and returned to their old lives.

These disciples who turned away did not understand Jesus’ mission as the Messiah, and found this language disturbing, the Pope said. However, although they failed to accept Christ’s words, they nonetheless understood what he was saying.

“In fact, they understood Jesus’ proposition well,” Pope Francis said: “so well that they did not want to hear it, since it is a proposition which sends their mentality into crisis.”

Jesus’ words always bring about a crisis in us, he continued, but he gives us the “key” for overcoming the “discomfort” his teaching.

There are three elements to this “key,” the Holy Father said: first, a recognition of Jesus’ divine origins; second, that his words could only be understood “through the action of the Holy Spirit”; and finally, that the absence of faith is the true cause of being unable to understand Jesus’ words.

Pope Francis said that, although he was deserted by the disciples after making these statements, Jesus nonetheless “does not retract or soften his words,” but rather “forces us to make a clear choice: to stay with him or to separate ourselves from him.”

The Gospel reading then recounts Jesus turning to the twelve Apostles, asking them if they will leave along with the other disciples following this teaching. In response, St. Peter says: “Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life.”

Observing that Peter did not say “where” but “to whom shall we go,” Pope Francis said “the fundamental problem is not leaving and abandoning the work that has begun, but it is to whom we go.”

“From Peter’s question, we understand that faithfulness to God is a question of fidelity to a person, with whom we are joined in walking together along the same road. And this person is Jesus.”

This relationship with Jesus, based on “true faith and love,” does not entail being “enchained,” but rather “profoundly free,” the Pope added.

“Each one of us can ask: who is Jesus for me? Is he a name, an idea, merely a historic figure? Or, is he really that person who loves me, who has given his life for me, and journeys with me?”

Pope Francis challenged those present to seek to know Jesus through his Word, through daily reading of the Gospel, adding that the more time we spend with Him the greater our desire to remain.

He then led the crowds in a moment of silence, in which he invited them to reflect on the question: “Who is Jesus for me?”

Concluding his Angelus address, the pontiff appealed to Mary to help us always “to go to Jesus to experience the freedom which he offers, and allow him to cleanse once again our choices from the worldly crusts, and from fear.”

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VATICAN NEWS

Are Vatican officials involved in the Ashley Madison leak? Nope.

by CNA/EWTN News • August 25, 2015

St. Peter’s Square. (Adrian Marin via Flickr CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)

Vatican City — Early this week, a leak of personal data from millions of users of Ashley Madison, a website designed to arrange extramarital affairs, wreaked havoc on and off the internet.

At least two suicides have been reported in conjunction with the hack, and a series of privacy lawsuits are in the works, not to mention the rocked or devastated marriages.

Shortly after the leak, several blogs also jumped on the fact that some of the e-mail addresses released in the hack were linked to the .va domain, the internet domain belonging to the Vatican (similar to .uk for United Kingdom domains or .nz for New Zealand domains).

At first glance, the claim seems questionable – why would top Church officials sworn to celibacy sign up for a website for married people, and no less one that promotes adultery?

It turns out, they want nothing to do with it.

None of the .va addresses in the leak check out as actually belonging to Vatican officials.

David Taylor of prooffreader.com went through all 222 addresses supposedly linked to the Vatican and found plausible explanations for each one. And, as an aside, Taylor wrote that he was “brought up Catholic, but I totally rebelled, so I don’t have a vested interest in protecting the Vatican from scandal, quite the opposite. I just believe in accurate reporting.”

“… even a casual perusal of these latter addresses reveals that something isn’t right. Does the Vatican have schools named after cities in Virginia or ISPs with the same names as those in Canada?” he wrote.

According to the prooffreader.com findings, almost every .va address used had a .va.us or a .va.gov equivalent, meaning that the addresses far more likely belonged to government officials in the state of Virginia who just forgot to add the final part of the e-mail address. Most of the names used before most of the .va e-mail addresses corresponded to cities in Virginia.

Ashley Madison does not confirm e-mail addresses, so typos and false e-mail addresses can slip through.

If the e-mail addresses did not have a Virginia government equivalent, it corresponded to a Canadian one (.ca.gov), but the user likely just slipped up and hit “v” instead of “c”. The two letters are right next to each other on a standard American keyboard. (Seriously. Look down at your hands.)

Only one address used vatican.va rather than simply .va, but Vatican officials use vatican.com e-mail addresses.

There were 55 e-mail addresses that Taylor said he could not connect to either Virginia or Canada, but that he said still didn’t seem to be in any way linked to the Vatican.

Several websites that enable searching through the leaked data also come with a disclaimer that because Ashley Madison does not verify e-mails, addresses with typos or fake e-mail addresses could be included.

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VATICAN NEWS

‘Teach your children how to pray!’ Pope tells parents

by Ann Schneible (CNA/EWTN News) • August 26, 2015

Pope Francis embraces a baby during the general audience in St. Peter’s Square on August 26, 2015. (L’Osservatore Romano)

Vatican City — On Wednesday, Pope Francis continued his weekly catechesis on the family, saying that parents have the responsibility to teach their children to pray.

Delivering his address to pilgrims and visitors, gathered under the hot sun for the weekly general audience in St. Peter’s Square, the pontiff stressed the importance of teaching children how to show love for God through prayer.

“It is beautiful when mothers teach their little children to blow a kiss to Jesus or to Our Lady. What tenderness there is in this!” he said.

“In that moment the child’s heart is transformed into a place of prayer. And this is a gift of the Holy Spirit.”

However, in off-the-cuff remarks, the Pope lamented how there are children who are not taught the most basic prayers by there parents, a phenomena he said he has witnessed in the city.

“There are children who have not learned how to make the sign of the cross!” he said. “You, mother, father! Teach your children how to pray, how to make the sign of the cross!”

Children should learn prayer with “the same spontaneity” as when they learn to say “daddy” and “mommy,” so that it stays with them forever, the Pope added.

The Pope’s August 26 address was the latest in a series of catechesis dedicated to the family. Since late year, the pontiff has been centering his Wednesday catecheses on this theme as part of the lead-up to the World Meeting of Families in September, as well as October’s Synod of Bishops on the Family.

In his catechesis, delivered in Italian, the Holy Father observed how many Christians know they need prayer, but do not have the time.

“Their regret is sincere, certainly, because the human heart always seeks prayer, even without knowing it; and if it does not find it, it does not have peace.”

It is for this reason that Christians must cultivate a love for God, he said.

While it is good to believe in God, to have hope in him to help at difficult times, and to be grateful to him, Pope Francis asked whether or not we also love him.

He cited the scripture passage from Deuteronomy, repeated by Christ in Matthew’s Gospel, in which we are called to love God with all our heart, our soul, and strength.

“(This) formula uses the intense language of love, poured into God,” the Pope said.

Pope Francis acknowledged that we are able see God as the one who gives us life and from whom even death cannot separate us, the “great Being” and “Judge” who made all things and controls every act, the Pope said. However, these concepts only find their full significance “when God is the love of our loves.”

“God could have simply made us know him as the supreme Being, given his commandments, and awaited the results.”

This he has done, but also “infinitely more,” the Pope said, adding in off-the-cuff remarks: “He accompanies us on the path of life. He protects us. He loves us.”

Pope Francis acknowledged how there is little time available in family life. However, by finding time to pray, we “give time back to God.” In so doing, we escape the obsession with not having enough time, rediscover “peace in the important things,” and “discover the joy in unexpected gifts.”

Encouraging the faithful to read the Gospel every day, as he has done on numerous occasions, the Holy Father said this is a particularly important practice for families.

“The Gospel, read and meditated on in the family, is like good bread which nourishes the hearts of everyone,” he said.

Pope Francis concluded: “In the family of prayer, in strong moments and in difficult periods, may we be entrusted to one another, in order that everyone of us in the family may be protected by God’s love.”

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VATICAN NEWS

The modern world’s biggest challenge, according to Benedict XVI

by Andrea Gagliarducci (CNA/EWTN News) • August 27, 2015

Benedict XVI at the Vatican in June 2005. (L’Osservatore Romano)

Vatican City — Benedict XVI considers the quest for God to be contemporary society’s foremost challenge, according to one of the emeritus Pope’s former students, who has organized the annual meeting of Ratzinger’s students to discuss that very topic.

The Ratzinger Schuelerkreis will gather Sept. 28-30 to discuss the theme set them by their former professor. The group has gathered to discuss topics in theology and the life of the Church since 1978, shortly after their mentor was pulled from academia to become a bishop.

“Benedict XVI identified, from his earliest theological studies, a faith in the progress of man which he deems to be an ideology,” Fr. Stephan Horn told CNA.

In reply to that ideology, Fr. Horn said, Benedict has maintained that “the center of history is the living God who opened himself in Jesus Christ, and true progress is found in faith.”

Fr. Horn, a Salvatorian, was Ratzinger’s academic assistant at the University of Regensburg from 1971 to 1977, and is now organizer of the annual Schuelerkreis meeting.

He related that the 40 or so members of the Schuelerkreis form a sort of “theological family,” and that in addition to the historial nucleus of the group, there was formed in 2008 a secondary group of younger theologians who have studied Benedict’s thought in-depth.

The idea for the annual meeting arose in 1977, when Ratzinger was appointed Archbishop of Munich and Freising, and when he moved to Rome in 1981 to take up the post of prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, it continued.

Benedict’s former students thought that the annual tradition would have stopped once Ratzinger was elected Pope, yet he wanted to maintain the tradition and continued to meet with his former students.

Since his 2013 resignation, Benedict has not attended the Schuelerkreis, except to say Mass for the group at its conclusion.

However, the Pope emeritus closely follows the works of his former students, and personally chooses the themes of discussion from among a set of three which the members of the Schuelerkreis present to him at the end of each annual gathering. In recent years, they have focused on the theology of the cross; the question of God amid secularism; and ecumenism.

Fr. Horn said Benedict “did not explain in-depth the reasons why he asked us to discuss ‘Speaking about God in the contemporary world’, but is evident that to him the Word of God is the true need of today’s world, and that the Church needs to find new ways to speak about God.”

Fr. Horn underscored that “today’s culture itself makes speech about God necessary, as there is a different trend – that is, speaking only about what man can do, about the so called ‘homo Faber’” and so there is a need for “a new way to search for truth and to meet the great challenges of modern man.”

According to Fr. Horn the search for new means to speak of God has been at the core of Benedict’s theological work since the Second Vatican Council.

“It been widely said that the Second Vatican Council spoke about the Church, and the relation between the Church and the world. But Joseph Ratzinger saw that the quest for God was the main issue at the Second Vatican Council, as was shown by the fact that the very first document issued by the council was the constitution on the liturgy,” Fr. Horn explained.

The emphasis on liturgy was further developed by Ratzinger when he was appointed Archbishop of Munich and Freising in 1977.

“During the years he was the Archbishop of Munich, Ratzinger focused also on liturgy, according to what he had developed in the previous years as a professor in Regensburg, when he tried to foster a way to translate the language of the faith for contemporary man,” Fr. Horn stressed.

Fr. Horn also higlighted that as Pope, Benedict emphasized the education of priests and the people of God, and he created a sort of “catechumenal theology.”

“Ratzinger has always thought that the search for truth does not merely come from an intellectual action, but it is rather one of the ways of life. And so theologians must be beside the catechumens – that is, all who are on a Christian path – speaking with them, developing theology and faith.”

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VATICAN NEWS

Former nuncio Wesolowski, facing sex abuse trial, dies

by CNA/EWTN News • August 28, 2015

Józef Wesolowski, former apostolic nuncio to the Dominican Republic. (Walter Sánchez Silva/CNA)

Vatican City — Jozef Wesolowski, the laicized, former apostolic nuncio to the Dominican Republic who faced criminal charges in Vatican City of possession of child pornography and pedophilic acts died on Friday at the age of 67.

The Holy See press office announced Aug. 28 that Wesolowski was found dead in his room at the Vatican’s Collegio dei Penitenzieri in front of a TV, which was turned on, at about 5 am by a Franciscan religious.

The Vatican has said that preliminary investigations indicate he died of natural causes, but an autopsy will be performed nonetheless.

In 2013, allegations arose that then-Archbishop Wesolowski had engaged in sexual misconduct. He resigned as apostolic nuncio to the Dominican Republic on Aug. 21 of that year. After the printing of the original accusations, a 13-year-old boy came forward with further allegations that Wesolowski had solicited him for sexual favors in exchange for money.

In a June 2014 canonical trial, the tribunal of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith found him guilty of sexual abuse. As a result, Wesolowski was laicized, a serious canonical penalty that renders one unable to celebrate the sacraments.

Following the canonical trial, Vatican City decided to also hold a criminal trial of Wesolowski. Due to his poor health, in September he was placed under house arrest rather than being jailed in Vatican City’s prison.

His criminal trial was to have started July 11, but it was postponed as Wesolowski had been hospitalized the day before, and could not attend his trial.

According to reports, Wesolowski was dismissed from hospital July 17, and had since then been residing in the College of Penitentaries in the Vatican, where he was living under house arrest.

A Holy See press office statement said July 20 that Wesolowski had been hospitalized because of a fall in blood pressure brought on by heat, stress, and age.

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VATICAN NEWS

Vatican: Pope did not endorse ‘gay penguin’ book

by CNA’s Vatican Observer Andrea Gagliarducci (CNA/EWTN News) • August 28, 2015

Penguin family on the Eckstroem Ice Shelf. (Anne Frohlich via Flickr CC BY-ND 2.0)

Vatican City — The Vatican has rejected claims in the media that Pope Francis is supporting a book on gay adoption, saying a letter responding to the author should not be interpreted as an endorsement.

In responding to the author’s letter, the Vatican Secretariat of State did not intend in any way to support “behavior and teachings which are not in accordance with the Gospel,” and using the Vatican response to imply otherwise “is completely out of place,” said Fr. Ciro Benedettini, deputy director of the Holy See Press Office, Aug. 28.

The Holy See statement came in response to a media frenzy following reports that Francesca Pardi, author of a children’s book supporting gay adoption, received a letter from Pope Francis that allegedly encouraged her to keep up her work.

Pardi’s book is titled “Piccolo uovo” – in Italian, “Little egg.” It includes the story of two gay penguins who adopt a baby penguin, among other non-traditional animal families.

The book won the 2012 Hans Christian Andersen Literature Award.

Pardi is the author of a series of books supporting the notion of gay family, including “Why do you have two moms?” And “What is Dad’s secret?”

“Piccolo uovo” had been included on a recommended reading list for children in primary schools in Venice. However, the city’s newly-elected mayor, Luigi Brugnaro, removed it in June.

Brugnaro said that while most of the books from the reading suggestion list could be used in primary schools, books on ‘gender theory’ – including “Piccolo uovo” – would not be permitted.

“No child will be discriminated against or treated differently, and integration will be encouraged, but it must be acknowledged that the majority of people have a Mom and a Dad,” he said.

In response, Pardi wrote a letter to Pope Francis, enclosing the catalogue of the books published by the publishing house “Lo Stampatello,” which she co-founded with her girlfriend.

In her letter, she argued that while the books support ideas of gay family and adoption, they do not contain ‘gender theory’ because they do not discuss sex or tell children they can choose their own gender.

On Aug. 28, Pardi said in a Facebook post that she had received “a private letter written by Msgr. (Peter) Brian Wells in the name of Pope Francis, on Vatican letterhead.”

She said that the letter was addressed to her and to her girlfriend, Silvia Maria Fiengo. She claimed that the Pope “had thanked her” for the “delicate gesture” and expressed wishes for “an always more fruitful activity in the service of young generations and the spread of genuine human and Christian values.”

Pardi added that the Pope gave her and Fiengo the Apostolic Blessing.

However, the Vatican says that the letter signed by Msgr. Peter Wells, assessor to the Secretariat of State, is not an indication of papal support.

Thanking people for their “delicate gesture” is part of the formula that is generally used whenever the Pope is offered a gift.

“(T)he Secretariat of State does not want in any way to back behaviors and teachings not in accordance with the Gospel,” Fr. Benedettini said. This is evidenced by the letter’s wish for more fruitful activity “and the spread of genuine human and Christian values.”

He also said that the Secretariat of State addressed the reception of the letter “with a simple and pastoral style,” and later “clarified (that) it was a private response, and for this reason it was not intended for publication (as it unfortunately happened).”

As far as the papal blessing, Fr. Benedettini clarified that “the blessing is for the person and not for (any) teaching against the Doctrine of the Church on gender ideology.”

He added that the Church’s position on gender ideology “has not changed, as the Holy Father reiterated many times.”

Using the contents of the letter to suggest otherwise, he concluded, “is completely out of place.”

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VATICAN NEWS

Seminar speakers advocate change on Communion for the divorced-and-remarried

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

Archbishop Paglia, president of the Pontifical Council for the Family, which sponsored seminars where scholars suggested admitting the divorced-and-remarried to Communion. (Bohumil Petrik/CNA)

Vatican City — Earlier this year the Pontifical Council for the Family organized three seminars which gathered scholars to discuss marriage and family life in the run-up to the Synod on the Family being held in October.

The lectures at these seminars were published June 2 by Libreria Editrice Vaticana in Italian as Famiglia e Chiesa, un legame indissolubile (Family and Church, an indissoluble bond), and feature a preface written by Archbishop Vincenzo Paglia, president of the Pontifical Council for the Family.

On the whole, the book suggests a “penitential path” that would allow the divorced-and-remarried to receive sacramental Communion while still engaging in sexual relations.

In a June 15 statement, the pontifical council said that “In view of the forthcoming Synod, we wanted to focus on some theoretical issues, identified as paradigmatic nuclei, crucial for the anthropological and theological reflection on marriage and family.”

The three seminars, held Jan. 17, Feb. 21, and March 14, gathered 29 scholars to discuss “Marriage: Faith, Sacrament, Discipline”; “Family, Conjugal Love and Generation”; and “The Wounded Family and Irregular Unions: What Pastoral Attitude.”

The seminars were attended by Archbishop Paglia; his deputy, Bishop Jean Laffitte; and Bishop Fabio Fabene, undersecretary of the Synod of Bishops, though none of them took part in the discussion.

The Pontifical Council for the Family noted that the “new, interesting book” includes, at its end, three brief summaries “that, building upon the issues raised during the debate, provide guidelines and prospects for reflection” on the topics of the three seminars.

Notable among the experts invited to the seminars is Fr. Eberhard Schockenhoff, who teaches moral theology at the University of Freiburg and who also participated in the May 25 “shadow council”, which pushed for acceptance of contraception, homosexual acts, and Communion for the divorced-and-remarried.

In one of his interventions at the seminars sponsored by the Pontifical Council for the Family, Fr. Schockenhoff stressed that “the possibility of an evolution of ecclesiastical doctrine on marriage is greater” than what can be suggested by “a statement that the Church cannot modify her praxis without betraying her traditions.”

To this end, Fr. Schockenhoff asked for an updating of Familiaris consortio, the 1981 apostolic exhortation of St. John Paul II which was the fruit of the Synod on the Family held in 1980.

The widest-ranging discussion was on the notion of sin and “unforgiveable sin.” Fr. Eduardo Scognamiglio, OFM Conv, a professor at the Southern Italy Theological Faculty, voiced hope that the Synod would “honestly discuss whether it is possible to deprive a member of the faithful of the Eucharist for all of his existence.”

Given this, the seminars articulated a proposal for a “penitential path” that would eventually allow the divorced-and-remarried to receive Communion – even though the penitence would not necessarily include foregoing sexual relations with one’s second “spouse.”

In Familiaris consortio, St. John Paul II taught that “Reconciliation in the sacrament of Penance which would open the way to the Eucharist, can only be granted to those who, repenting of having broken the sign of the Covenant and of fidelity to Christ, are sincerely ready to undertake a way of life that is no longer in contradiction to the indissolubility of marriage. This means, in practice, that when, for serious reasons, such as for example the children’s upbringing, a man and a woman cannot satisfy the obligation to separate, they ‘take on themselves the duty to live in complete continence, that is, by abstinence from the acts proper to married couples.’”

But Fr. Giampaolo Dianin, a professor of moral theology at the Theological Faculty of Triveneto, underscored that the 2014 synod’s final report does not explicitly refer to the commitment not to engage in sexual relations with one’s second “spouse”.

He outlined a “penitential path” under the responsibility of the bishop – or his delegates – which would result in either full or “partial” admission to the sacraments.

For Fr. Dianin, “partial” admission to Confession and Communion would occur only during the Easter season (and on special occasions).

He grounded this proposal for “partial” admission to the sacraments in the precepts of the Church that Confession be made at least once a year, and that one receive Communion at least once a year, during the Easter season. These precepts are rooted in the Fourth Lateran Council, held in 1215.

Fr. Dianin used the “Easter precept” to conclude that annual admission to Communion “cannot be denied to the divorced-and-remarried.”

The same logic was used by Archbishop Paglia, who told Famiglia Cristiana Aug. 12 that “one must not forget what the Fourth Lateran Council (1215) established with its so-called ‘Easter precept’, that Communion and Confession at leat once a year are necessary in the economy of salvation. There is room to reorder in a more logical way both the discipline and the doctrine for a pastoral path that can find broad consensus.”

Fr. Eugenio Zanetti proposed what he called a “path of conversion to love,” rather than a “penitential path”. This proposal would include a year of group prayer and reflection, intensified during Lent.

At a Confession made during Holy Week, the divorced-and-remarried would be granted absolution so long as they intend to abstain from sexual relations with their second “spouse” during the Easter Octave; they would then be admitted to Communion on the Octave day, which is Divine Mercy Sunday.

In stark contrast to majority of the group invited by the Pontifical Council for the Family stood Fr. José Granados, DCJM, who is vice-president of the Pontifical John Paul II Institute for Studies on Marriage and Family at the Lateran University.

Fr. Granados emphasized that any penitential path must conclude in a separation from a new union, or, when that is impossible, in the choice not to engage in sexual relations.

The group also discussed the issue of contraception, asking that the synod clarify the Church’s teaching on sexuality, overcoming what Fr. Gianluigi Brena, S.J. (a retired professor of the phenomenology of religion at the Aloisianum Philosophical Institute) called “an excessive severity and authoritarian regulations.”

Fr. Scognamiglio said that natural methods for the regulation of birth “must not be absolutized” and that “at the upcoming synod a mature reflection on faith and moral issues should emerge. We cannot replace the choices of couples; we can only educate them to choose with wisdom and maturity in faith.”

In general, the participants expressed a preference for natural means of the regulation of birth, but at the same time most showed an openness to discussing the issue of contraception.

The assembled group agreed that the Church should commit to presenting more clearly her teaching on marriage, especially during marriage preparation; that she should counsel and assist troubled couples; and that she should show the divorced-and-remarried that they are still welcome.

In the preface of the book, Archbishop Paglia wrote that “The Pontifical Council for the Family, in keeping with its statutory mandate, has responded to Pope Francis’ call also through the promotion of an International Research Seminar on some issues mentioned in the Lineamenta for the next Synod of Bishops.”

This comes in contrast to Cardinal Ennio Antonelli (who preceded Archbishop Paglia as president of the Pontifical Council for the Family and is now retired) who published, in several languages, The Marriage Crisis and the Eucharist, a short book arguing that the divorced-and-remarried need the Church’s support in conversion and spiritual growth – not a change in the practice on reception of Communion.

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Rome angered over ‘Godfather’ themed funeral for alleged mob boss

by CNA/EWTN News • August 22, 2015

Screenshot of the funeral of Vittorio Casamonica. (CNA)

Rome, Italy — An outlandish funeral for an alleged Italian mob boss, complete with a horse-drawn carriage, flower petals strewn from a helicopter and a brass band playing theme music from the movie “The Godfather” was slammed by Rome’s politicians Thursday as an intolerable display of impunity.

Hundreds gathered outside the church of San Giovanni Bosco on the outskirts of Rome to pay their respects to Vittorio Casamonica, 65, who’s been identified as the leader of the Casamonica clan, which has previously been accused of racketeering, extortion and drug trafficking.

According to local authorities, Vittorio Casamonica was “on the margins” of organized crime and hasn’t surfaced as a suspect in recent mafia probes.

Banners outside the church described him as the “King of Rome” and pictured him alongside the colosseum and St. Peter’s Basilica. “You conquered Rome, now you’ll conquer paradise,” read another.

The scene was broadcast across local TV stations all afternoon and evening.

The pastor, Rev. Giancarlo Manieri, said he had no control over what happened outside of his church, and according to ANSA news agency, the funeral ceremony inside was not atypical.

The funeral came just a day after a judge set Nov. 5th as the trial date for 59 people charged in recent mafia investigations in Rome.

Rosy Bindi, president of the parliamentary anti-mafia commission, said it was “alarming” that a funeral for someone purportedly caught up in the mob could be “transformed into an ostentatious show of mafia power,” according to reports from Fox News.

She added that it was proof of the stronghold of the mafia in Rome, and should serve as a call to action to redouble investigation efforts of corruption in government.

“Never again. Rome cannot be defaced by those who want it to became the set of the Godfather,” Matteo Orfini, president of the ruling Democratic Party, said on Twitter about the event.

Rome Mayor Ignazio Marino said it was “intolerable that funerals are used by the living to send mafia messages,” according to BBC reports.

Arturo Scotto and Celeste Costantino, of the Left Ecology Liberty (SEL) party, called on Interior Minister Angelino Alfano to explain how such a funeral could take place.

“These funerals might seem like a folkloric custom, but in reality, they send a clear message of impunity on the part of the clans: we still exist and we are powerful,” they said in a statement in Italian posted on Facebook.

Several commenters also noted that the Casamonica funeral took place at the same church were, in 2006, the Archdiocese of Rome blocked a funeral for Piergiorgio Welby, who had become a symbol of the “right-to-die” movement in Italy, which contradicts Church teaching.

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Will the Catholic Church have a growing role in Korean reconciliation?

by Andrea Gagliarducci (CNA/EWTN News) • August 25, 2015

Pope Francis is recieved at the presidential palace in Seoul, Aug. 14, 2014. (Alan Holdren/CNA)

Seoul, South Korea — With an increasing number of faithful, the Catholic Church in South Korea may foster a climate of reconciliation and peace, as the nation has reportedly made a deal with North Korea to avoid military escalation after days of fire exchanged between the nations.

South Korea’s Yonhap news agency reported Aug. 24 that North Korea had agreed to express regret over the injury of two South Korean soldiers by a landmine earlier in the month, and that South Korea agreed to stop propaganda broadcasts via loudspeakers located on the border between the countries.

The Catholic Church has grown significantly in South Korea since the Korean War ended in 1953, and its presence maybe be important in nurturing a culture of reconciliation, as was one of the main goals of Pope Francis’ visit to South Korea one year ago.

In 1960 there were some 500,000 Catholics in South Korea – less than two percent of the population. There are now 5.5 million Catholics in the nation, who constitute 11 percent of the population.

The Buddhist Research Institute predicted last year that in 2044, 56 percent of the population of South Korea will be Catholic, which would give the Church a significant impact on South Korean society.

Pope Francis visited South Korea Aug. 13-18 of last year. Among the trip’s goals was the promotion of reconciliation between North and South Korea, which are officially in a state of war, since the Korean War ended with only an armistice.

During his trip, Pope Francis said a Mass for Peace and Reconciliation in the Cathedral of Myeong-dong in Seoul. The fact that the Mass was held in the Seoul cathedral was meaningful, as the Archbishop of Seoul is also apostolic administrator of Pyongyang, the North Korean capital.

Pope Francis asked South Koreans during his homily to “bear convincing witness to Christ’s message of reconciliation in your homes, in your communities and at every level of national life.”

The Pope added: “I am confident that, in a spirit of friendship and cooperation with other Christians, with the followers of other religions, and with all men and women of good will concerned for the future of Korean society, you will be a leaven of the Kingdom of God in this land.”

During the trip, Pope Francis also called on Asian countries that do not have diplomatic ties with the Holy See to “start a dialogue among brothers,” since “Christians do not come as conquerors.”

This way, Pope Francis showed the twofold aspects of the Holy See’s commitment to Korea: on one hand, the missionary and catechetical effort, which aims at fostering and nurturing the seeds of a reconciled society within Koreans themselves; and one the other, the hope of strengthening diplomatic ties with North Korea, which is among the very few countries without diplomatic ties with the Holy See.

Pope Francis’ strategy to reach out for North Korea is that of a “diplomacy of martyrs”, which is related to his idea of an “ecumenism of martyrs.”

In North Korea’s case, the news was spread during the papal trip that North Korea could have in time its first canonized saint, Bishop Francis Hong Yong-ho of Pyongyang, whose death was officially acknowledged by the Vatican in 2013.

Born in 1906, Bishop Hong was disappeared by the government in 1949. He had been appointed vicar apostolic of Pyongyang in 1944. When the Second World War ended, Korea was divided into a Northern zone, occupied by Soviet Union, and a Southern zone, occupied by the U.S.

The two zones never reunited, and when the two countries of North and South Korea were formally established in 1948, many Catholics fled the north to escape the Communist cegime. According to some data, by 1950 North Korea had killed or disappeared 166 priests and religious.

Since his kidnapping, the Vatican long failed to acknowledge Bishop Hong’s death, in order to show that the tragedy the Church has suffered in North Korea is ongoing.

The 2013 decision to acknowledge the death was considered by Vatican observers who spoke with CNA an attempt to awaken the Catholics in North Korea, and to help their hidden work to nurture a reconciliation conscience in society.

A Catholic presence in North Korea has been maintained as well as it can. One of the key figures in this sense is Fr. Gerard Hammond, a 82 year old Maryknoll missionary who has lived in South Korea since 1960 and has made more than 50 trips to North Korea since 1995, bringing humanitarian aid.

In the end, Pope Francis’ presence in Korea fostered the Catholic presence in the South, which can also be of some benefit for the North.

In an interview with Catholic News Agency Aug. 2014, Thomas Han Hong-soon, former Korean ambassador to the Holy see, said that “South Korea is perhaps the only country in the world where the Catholic Church grows as much as the economy.”

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What is the devil’s favorite sin? An exorcist responds

by CNA/EWTN News • August 25, 2015

(Todd Page via Flickr CC-BY-NC-2.0)

Madrid, Spain — Is an exorcist afraid? What is the devil’s favorite sin? These and other questions were tackled in a recent interview with the Dominican priest, Father Juan José Gallego, an exorcist from the Archdiocese of Barcelona in Catalonia, Spain.

It has been nine years since Fr. Gallego was appointed as exorcist. In an interview conducted by the Spanish daily El Mundo, the priest said that in his experience, pride is the sin the devil likes the most.

“Have you ever been afraid?” the interviewer asked.

“In the beginning I had a lot of fear,” Fr. Gallego replied. “All I had to do was look over my shoulder and I saw demons … the other day I was doing an exorcism, ‘I command you! I order you!’ … and the Evil One, with a loud voice fires back at me: ‘Galleeeego, you’re over-doooing it.’ That shook me.”

Nevertheless, he knows that the devil is not more powerful than God. The exorcist recalled that “when they appointed me, a relative told me, ‘Whoa, Juan José, I’m really afraid, because in the movie ‘The Exorcist,’ one person died and the other threw himself through a window. I said to her ‘Don’t forget that the devil is (just a) creature of God.’”

When people are possessed, he added, “they lose consciousness, they speak strange languages, they have inordinate strength, they feel really bad, you see very well-mannered people vomiting and blaspheming.”

“There was a boy whom the demon would set his shirt on fire at night and things like that. He told me what the demons were proposing him to do: If you make a pact with us, you’ll never have to go through any more of what you’re going through now.”

Father Gallego also warned that “New Age” practices like reiki and some yoga can be points of entry for the demons. He also said that addictions are “a type of possession.”

“When people are going through a crisis they suffer more. They can feel hopeless, People feel like they’ve got the devil inside,” he said.

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Thai Catholics join in interreligious prayer service after Bangkok bomb

by Antonio Anup Gonsalves (CNA/EWTN News) • August 25, 2015

Msgr. Vissanu leads an interreligious prayer service in Bangkok for the victims of the Erawan shrine bombing, Aug. 21, 2015. (Catholic Bishops Conference of Thailand)

Bangkok, Thailand — Catholics in Bangkok gathered together with their fellow countrymen last Friday to pray for peace in the wake of the bombing at a Hindu shrine in the city which had killed 20 people and injured scores earlier in the week.

The Aug. 21 interreligious service held just outside the Erawan shrine included a Liturgy of the Word, and prayers for the bombing victims. More than 800 attended the service, where Pope Francis’ message of solidarity was read, and distributed to the crowd, including a government delegation.

“The Thai Catholic bishops and the faithful are deeply pained and express their deep solidarity in prayer with the victims in the targeted explosions at the Erawan shrine,” Msgr. Andrew Vissanu Thanya Anan, deputy secretary general for the Thai bishops’ conference, told CNA Aug. 23.

Msgr. Vissanu said that “people were deeply touched by Pope Francis’ message of solidarity, his concern, and his closeness, and in return have expressed their heartfelt gratitude.”

The Holy Father in his message expressed his heartfelt solidarity and offered his closeness with his prayers and invoking “divine blessings of peace and healing upon the Kingdom.”

“We know it’s hard and we need divine grace for healing,” Msgr. Vissanu reflected. “No malice and revenge can find lasting answers; but only love and prayer can heal and triumph over hate, and bring forgiveness for everlasting peace and development.”

“It is very touching and inspiring to see people of all religious feel the power of prayer and congregate together yearning for peace and to pray, when the such horrifying events normally trigger ripples of panic, hate, and vengeance.”

The local bishops welcomed Bangkok officials’ call for an interreligious prayer service, acknowledging prayer’s importance in binding communities and in promoting peace and harmony throughout Thailand.

Other Christian denominations also led prayer services, as did other religious groups.

Msgr. Vissanu recounted with sadness that a Chinese Catholic youth, Tee Wu Shenqi, was among the 20 people killed in the Aug. 17 bombing. His funeral Mass was said at the Ruamrudee Holy Redeemer Church Church in Bangkok, and was attended by his family, who travelled from China, as well as local Catholics.

Jithapha Aae, a young adult member of the parish, told CNA that “the bombing at Erawan, targeting innocent people offering prayers, is despicable and a heinous act, and we hope that prayers will bring hope and smiles in our land of smiles … we hope that people will be motivated and inspired to work to make a better world.”

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Amid threat of violence, CRS works to ease food shortage in Mali

by Kevin Jones (CNA/EWTN News) • August 26, 2015

(Helen Blakesley/CRS)

Bamako, Mali — Despite a hazardous situation in the African country of Mali, Catholic Relief Services is working to support displaced people and hungry school students, while calling for more humanitarian aid to help stabilize the country.

“Only last week, two CRS staff were stopped in Timbuktu while traveling by car, they were blindfolded and forced to kneel, and then all of their belongings were stolen,” Niek de Goeij, CRS country representative in Mali, told CNA Aug. 24. “They lived to tell the story, but this had a major impact on them, and it affects how and where we can work in the country.”

A recent increase in violence is compounding already difficult circumstances for the people of the nation, he said.

“The country faces many problems, not least the effort to re-establish a stable, inclusive and peaceful democracy across its territory. Hundreds of thousands of people remain displaced and hundreds of thousands more face acute food shortages each year,” de Goeij explained.

“With the right investments in the years to come, Mali could become a success story, but if not, there is a real risk of a further deterioration and destabilization of one of Africa’s largest countries.”

He said Mali is very poor, but has a “very rich culture.” Before the political instability, the west Africa country was an example of democratic stability and was favored by humanitarian donors. But the military conflict revealed “deep corruption and failing governance.”

The fall of the Libyan government in 2011 helped destabilize the region. Some soldiers who returned home to Mali joined a rebellion against the government, which displaced thousands of people. Many more were displaced after a coup in March 2012 led to a militant takeover of the country’s north.

Over 10,000 foreign United Nations soldiers are in the country to try to keep peace. Other world crises have made it difficult to mobilize support for Mali.

The country has been unstable, but violence has increased recently. Over 235,000 people have been displaced from their homes, CRS said.

Now, the agency is helping provide essential household supplies and direct cash to those affected.

The Mali government is a major partner with CRS programs in health and agriculture, but the government has no reach in the north outside of the major cities.

“For Catholic Relief Services, this means that the lack of law and order in the North can cause humanitarian emergencies, and it creates a very difficult and dangerous environment for CRS and partners to implement programs,” de Goeij said.

Despite the challenges, CRS is doing what it can to meet the needs of the people on the ground, while keeping its staff members safe. With support from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the agency helps provide 80,000 daily lunches to students.

“When I spoke with one of the parents on how this program impacted their children, she said that before the program, her children did not have the energy to walk to school, or if they made it to school they couldn’t learn because they were too exhausted. But since the program has been implemented, the children have the energy to make it to school, and because of the school lunches, they learned much better,” de Goeij said.

CRS has been working on programs in Mali since 1999. About 118 of CRS’ 125 Mali employees are themselves from Mali. The relief agency is among the top three international NGOs in the country, according to de Goeij. Each year, its programs reach about 1.5 million people, almost 10 percent of the country’s entire population.

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Filipinos mourn the death of pioneer Bishop Francisco San Diego of Pasig

by Antonio Anup Gonsalves (CNA/EWTN News) • August 26, 2015

Bishop Francisco San Diego, who died Aug. 26, 2015. (Catholic Bishops Conference of the Philippines)

Pasig, Philippines — Catholics in the Philippines are mourning Wednesday’s death of Bishop Francisco San Diego, who founded the Diocese of Pasig in 2003 and led it until his retirement in 2010.

Bishop San Diego, who was 79, died the morning of Sept. 26 of cardiac arrest while in his sleep at Cardinal Santos Hospital, the Pasig diocese announced.

His successor as Bishop of Pasig, Mylo Vergara, received his body into the Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception saying, “Indeed Bishop San Diego received the victory of God … he entered his cathedral not as a corpse but as a soul welcomed by God to eternal life.”

The Pasig diocese is saddened with the loss of Bishop San Diego, who had recently participated in a Mass of Thanksgiving for the 12th anniversary of the diocese’s founding, despite his frail health. He had had diabetes, and was recently diagnosed with lung cancer.

Tributes have begun flooding social media in the Philippines, and his body is being kept in the Pasig cathedral so that he can be mourned by the faithful. Bishop San Diego’s funeral Mass will be said Aug. 29, and his body interred at the cathedral.

Bishop San Diego was born in 1935 in Obando, north of Quezon City. He studied Latin at Our Lady of Guadalupe Minor Seminary, and later completed his philosophical and theological studies at San Carlos Seminary in Makati. He was ordained a priest of the Manila archdiocese in 1963.

As a priest, he worked in parishes, on Manila’s metropolitan marriage tribunal, and as a seminary professor. In 1979 he earned a doctorate in canon law from the University of Santo Tomas, and was named a monsignor in 1981.

In 1983 he was consecrated a bishop, and appointed coadjutor vicar apostolic of Palawan; he succeeded as vicar apostolic in 1987. He was transferred to the Diocese of San Pablo in 1995.

When the Diocese of Pasig was established out of the Archdiocese of Manila in 2003, he was appointed its first bishop. He served as its ordinary until retiring in 2010 at the age of 75. While he was the diocesan bishop, he facilitated the improvement and expansion of its cemetery, and created a retirement plan fund for its clergy.

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Catholics in Colombia assist thousands of their brethren forced out of Venezuela

by CNA/EWTN News • August 27, 2015

Flag of Columbia. (Politicnico Grancolombiano Deparatmento de Comunicaciones via Flickr CC BY-NC 2.0)

Cucuta, Colombia — With thousands of Colombian residents of Venezuela being driven from their homes amid a border crisis and martial law, the bishop of a Colombian border city is encouraging his people to assist the displaced.

Since last week, more than 6,000 Colombian residents of Venezuela have been expelled or have left voluntarily, after president Nicolas Maduro declared martial law and closed the border following the Sept. 19 injury of four Venezuelans by Colombian smugglers.

Bishop Victor Ochoa Cadavid of Cúcuta warned that Venezuela’s actions have unleashed a humanitarian crisis, and therefore asked that “the competent authorities address, in a timely and effective manner, the situation confronting the people expelled from our neighboring country.”

The bishop noted that the diocese is providing assistance to some 200 deportees through its Migration Center, “providing shelter, personal hygiene items, and food, with contributions coming from the Diocesan Food Bank and Jesuit Refugee Services.”

Bishop Ochoa added that the diocese is also providing food for the 207 persons housed in Cúcuta’s public schools and that they are “awaiting a contribution from the city administration to increase the aid.”

He also said that in La Parada, another border town located six miles south of Cúcuta, “Saint Peter the Apostle Parish is providing accommodation and food for 30 people, and they are moving forward with taking inventory of the needs in available lodging in the area. With the help of religious communities we are taking care of 196 deportees or people who are in need.”

The bishop was thankful that the fruits of this year’s Campaign for Christian Communication of Goods will be able to provide for “this complex situation, especially for children and youth.”

Maduro declared a state of emergency in Tachira state, which borders Colombia, on Aug. 20, after the clash between smugglers and Venezuelan soldiers.

A market for smuggling goods such as gasoline and foodstuffs from Venezuela to Colombia has developed because these goods are subject to price controls imposed by Venezuela’s socialist government. They are bought at a subsidized price, smuggled, and resold at market rates.

Colombian president Juan Manuel Santos criticized Maduro’s decision, saying that “If we co-operate, the only ones to lose are the criminals, but if the border is closed, there is no co-ordination and the only ones to gain are the criminals.”

He added that those deported have not been smugglers or paramilitaries, “but poor and humble families who only want to live and work.”

The state of emergency allows Venezuelan military authorities to search homes and businesses without a warrant.

Venezuelan armed forces have inspected some 2,400 homes in six border towns, spray painting 600 with the letter “D”, indicating they are to be demolished, and the rest with the letter “R”, indicating they had been reviewed.

Santos commented that “marking houses to later demolish them is totally unacceptable and reminds one of bitter episodes in history which cannot be allowed to recur.”

Talks between the Colombian and Venezuelan foreign ministers began Aug. 26 in an effort to return to a normal situation along their border.

More than 1,000 Colombian residents of Venezuela have been expelled, and an estimated 5,000 have left voluntarily.

Bishop Ochoa reflected, saying: “We invite everyone to pray for these families who are suffering because of the measures taken by the rulers of Venezuela.”

“We ask God to grant to all a space for understanding, solidarity, and fraternity, as befits two brotherly countries.”

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Ahead of papal visit, Cuba’s Women in White fear government crackdown

by CNA/EWTN News • August 27, 2015

Women in White. (Flickr via Dumplife Mihai Romanciuc CC-BY-NC-2.0)

Havana, Cuba — The leader of a human rights group is concerned that the Cuban government will repeat its 2012 crackdown on opposition activists when Pope Francis visits the nation next month.

During Pope Benedict XVI’s visit three years ago, Cuban officials made arrests and took other actions to keep the dissidents from communicating with each other, said Berta Soler, leader of Women in White, a group of wives and other relatives of jailed Cuban dissidents.

“We’re really worried,” Soler told CNA last week. “When Pope Benedict XVI came to Cuba they shut down telephone lines in an area of some 15 to 25 miles. They did the same to the cell phones of human rights activists and their close relatives.”

She said the government put them under surveillance three days before Pope Benedict’s arrival.

“Cuban officials began arresting all the human rights activists so we couldn’t participate in the Masses the Pope celebrated in Santiago de Cuba and Havana.”

Pope Francis will visit Cuba Sept. 19-22.

“We’re waiting (to see what will happen), we’re thinking the same thing is going to happen when the Holy Father Pope Francis comes,” Soler said.

Nevertheless, she stated that Women in White as well as other human rights activists will try to go to the Masses because “we want to be close to the Holy Father.” She said they know that they’re going to be arrested.

Soler met with Pope Francis in Saint Peter’s Square in May 2013 and sent a letter to the pontiff through the nunciature and through friends. She asked the Pope: “When you come to Cuba could you listen to us even for a few minutes?”

The dissident leader reported arrests of the Women in White and other opposition activists on recent Sundays.

“We’ve been going out now (to march) for 18 Sundays and we can take it for granted that the Castro regime is going to come after the Women in White and the human rights activists on Sunday, Aug. 23rd … because we’re deep into our #TodosMarchamos (We’re all marching) campaign to free the political prisoners.”

She said that the Castro government is assembling “paramilitary mobs organized and financed by (the regime) to physically and verbally attack us.” National police and state security agents are also involved.

According to Soler, at present “there are about 80 political prisoners and 42 who are only technically released or on parole.” The latter 42 could be arrested again and sent back to prison without trial at any moment.

On Sunday Aug. 16 more than 60 human rights activists along with some Women in White were restrained and arrested as they were marching after Mass at Saint Rita’s Church in Havana.

As expected, over 50 human rights activists and members of the Women in White were arrested in Havana on Sunday, Aug. 23 at the end of their protest march. Soler told the newspaper Martí News that excessive force was used in some arrests. Those detained were released five hours later in different parts of the city.

Some were released near nightfall in uninhabited areas where they were at risk of violence or assault, Soler charged.

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Is this what Saint Rose of Lima looked like?

by CNA/EWTN News • August 28, 2015

St. Rose of Lima. (Divulgaç o Ebrafol, Brazilian Team of Forensic Anthropology and Odontology)

Lima, Peru — The face of the first saint of the New World may be better known than ever, thanks to a team of scientists that has analyzed the skull of Saint Rose of Lima.

Scientists from the University of Saint Martin de Porres in Peru and the Brazilian Anthropological and Dental Legal Forensics Team reconstructed her face and the faces of two other saints who lived more than 300 years ago.

The Dominicans have preserved the skulls of Saint Rose, Saint Martin de Porres and Saint John Macias in Saint Dominic Church, located in the historic center of the Peruvian capital of Lima.

Under the care of Dominican friars and with strict security measures, the skulls were temporarily transferred to a clinic in Lima.

There, the researchers took computerized tomography images. This is a process used in diagnostic medicine using CT or ultrasound scans.

Saint Rose of Lima’s face was the first to be revealed. According to the news site Peru Catolico, the researchers said the reconstruction shows she was “a pretty woman with soft features and a well-distributed face.” Unlike her classical portrayals, the reconstruction indicates her eyes were large.

Saint Rose was born in Lima to Spanish parents in 1586. At a very young age, she chose to consecrate her life to God. She practiced very intense prayer and penance each day. Sometimes she deprived herself of food and sleep. She joined the Third Order of St. Dominic. After three years of illness, she died at the age of 31 in 1617.

Her feast day is celebrated on Aug. 23 in many parts of the world, while in Peru and several places it is observed Aug. 30. Her reconstructed image was unveiled at Saint Rose Parish on the Brazilian island of Guaruja on Aug. 23.

This coming November the research team will present the conclusion of their work in Peru. They will unveil the bust of Saint Rose and those of the two other saints.

St. Martin de Porres was the first black saint of the Americas. He was known for his generosity, his care of the poor, his love of animals, and his seemingly miraculous power to heal. He became a Dominican brother and died in 1639 at the age of 60.

St. Juan Macias, another Dominican saint, was a regular companion of St. Martin de Porres. He served as the porter at the Dominican convent in Lima. He was known for his evangelism, his service to the poor, and his miracles. He died in 1645.

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U.S. NEWS

Hilton hotels worldwide to remove on-demand porn

by CNA/EWTN News • August 22, 2015

(Petr Kratochvi CC0 1.0)

Washington, D.C. — International hotel and resort chain Hilton Worldwide has changed its policies to eliminate on-demand video pornography from its hotel rooms across the globe, according to an advocacy group.

The National Center on Sexual Exploitation announced the reported decision, saying that it “is grateful to Hilton for its decision to no longer seek profits from hardcore pornography.”

“We want to publicly thank Hilton for its decision to create a safe and positive environment for all of its customers,” said Dawn Hawkins, the group’s executive director, in an Aug. 17 statement.

“Hilton has taken a stand against sexual exploitation. Pornography not only contributes to the demand for sex trafficking, which is a serious concern in hotels, but it also contributes to child exploitation, sexual violence, and lifelong porn addictions,” Hawkins continued.

The connection between pornography and sexual exploitation has gained increasing attention in recent years.

In 2012, Catholic law professor Robert P. George of Princeton teamed up with prominent Muslim intellectual Shaykh Hamza Yusuf in writing letters to the CEOs of major hotel chains asking them to consider removing hotel room pornography, noting its “degrading, dehumanizing” and objectifying nature.

Pornography policies in U.S. hotel chains vary. Omni Hotels and Resorts stopped selling pornography in 1998 because the CEO believed that it was wrong to sell it. Marriot has said it is “phasing out” pornography sales, while the Hilton chain had previously defended its continued sales.

In 2013, Nordic Hotels – a major Scandinavian hotel chain – announced that it was eliminating pay-per-view pornography channels from its 171 hotels.

“The porn industry contributes to trafficking, so I see it as a natural part of having a social responsibility to send out a clear signal that Nordic Hotels doesn’t support or condone this,” said Petter Stordalen, the owner of Nordic Hotels.

He said he decided to stop selling the material after he started to work with UNICEF’s campaign to help the child victims of human trafficking and sexual exploitation, who number over 1.2 million annually, the British newspaper The Guardian reported.

CNA contacted Hilton Worldwide about the reported change in policy, but did not receive a response by deadline.

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U.S. NEWS

Archbishop Cordileone thankful for San Francisco teacher contract agreement

by CNA/EWTN News • August 23, 2015

(Dystopos via Flickr CC BY-NC 2.0)

San Francisco, CA — Efforts to promote Catholic culture in the San Francisco archdiocese’s high schools and to agree on a contract acceptable for the schools’ teachers concluded on Wednesday with a new contract.

The months-long dispute months drew protests, interference from activist groups, and the attention of wealthy critics of Catholic teaching.

“I want to thank the union and administration negotiating teams for their hard work over the past few months in coming to this agreement. They have negotiated just wages and benefits for our high school teachers, who are among the finest teachers in northern California,” Archbishop Salvatore Cordileone said Aug. 19.

The archbishop said he appreciated “very much” the negotiations’ “rich discussion about the mission and purpose of Catholic education and the vital role that our high school teachers play in carrying out that mission.”

He said the discussions “reinforced and clarified” the purposes and roles that were referenced in previous contracts.

“I pass on my special thanks to all our teachers who ratified this agreement,” Archbishop Cordileone said.

The teachers ratified the three-year contract by a vote of 90 to 80. The contract covers teachers at the Archdiocese of San Francisco’s four Catholic high schools. It provides a two percent pay raise in each of the three years. Disputes over teacher conduct both in the workplace and outside of the workplace would be governed by grievance procedures, SFGate.com reports.

The contract says the purpose of Catholic schools is “to affirm Catholic values through the Gospel of Jesus Christ.” It says that teachers are expected to support the school’s purpose “in such a way that their personal conduct will not adversely impact their ability to teach in our Catholic high schools.”

The contract did not include specific morality clauses, the news site SFGate.com reports. The archdiocese’s first proposed of the teacher contracts identified teachers as having a “ministerial role.” The language echoed a 2012 Supreme Court decision which recognized that teachers at religious schools can be held to standards of behavior without putting religious schools at risk of employment lawsuits.

The initial version of the San Francisco archdiocese faculty handbooks also explained Catholic teaching on controversial issues such as Catholic religious doctrine, sexual morality, and the ethics of assisted reproductive technologies, such as IVF. These passages were particularly criticized and the archdiocese later modified the handbooks.

The emphasis on Catholic teaching caused strong reaction among some in San Francisco, a city known for its dedication to LGBT advocacy and for its strong taboos against traditional Christianity and sexual morality.

The agreement on the contract closes a period of protests and critical media coverage.

Ted deSaulnier, an executive member of the teachers’ union and a religion teacher at Archbishop Riordan High School, supported the contract.

“I believe in the end the archbishop compromised and that we negotiated in good faith and he did as well,” he told SFGate. “I want the most protection for any Catholic school teacher to have the fullest and most complete private life they can have,” adding that “Our contract is not going to solve the conflict between a 2,000-year-old religious institution and the changing landscape of civil rights in the United States.”

Nina Russo, the archdiocese’s interim superintendent of schools, said the archdiocese looks forward “to our students returning to a year of learning and rich, meaningful experiences in both academics and school life.”

“We appreciate the concerted efforts of teachers and school leadership to prepare for this new school opening with the highest degree of commitment and professionalism,” she said.

In the initial controversy, some local politicians threatened legal action against the archdiocese, and the San Francisco Board of Supervisors passed a resolution critical of the handbook changes. More than 350 employees, about 80 percent of the staff and faculty at the archdiocese’s four high schools, signed a petition against the handbook additions. Some students, teachers, and parents also engaged in several protests.

Archbishop Cordileone also drew support from many Catholics, including hundreds of supporters who attended a May picnic. Some of the archbishop’s supporters did not speak out for fear social and career pressure.

Sam Singer, founder of the influential San Francisco-based communications firm Singer Associates, told the SF Weekly in February that “concerned parents” were paying for his services in their dispute with the archbishop. Singer’s social media accounts publicized negative interpretations of the archbishop and the archdiocese while promoting stories siding with the protesters.

At one point, dozens of prominent San Franciscans, including several Catholics, took out a full-page ad in the San Francisco Chronicle. The ad, an open letter, asked Pope Francis to remove Archbishop Cordileone.

Long before the schools controversy, some critics have faulted the archbishop for his support of marriage as a union of one man and one woman in state law.

Archbishop Cordileone has headed the San Francisco archdiocese since 2012, and has served on the U.S. bishops’ committee for the defense of marriage, as well as on a governing body for Courage, a ministry for people with same-sex attraction who want to live a life consistent with Catholic faith and morals.

The archbishop is one of the U.S. bishops’ alternate delegates to the 2015 Synod on the Family.

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Tens of thousands protest at Planned Parenthood clinics across the country

by CNA/EWTN News • August 23, 2015

Rally held in support of cutting Planned Parenthood funding. (Olivier Douliery/Getty Images)

Denver, CO — Hundreds of demonstrations were held outside of Planned Parenthood clinics across the U.S. this weekend with protesters calling on the federal government to stop funding the abortion giant.

After videos were released last month showing Planned Parenthood officials discussing their fetal tissue donation program in graphic detail, the Chicago-based Pro-Life Action League called on a national day of protest.

Eric Scheidler, the group’s executive director, said that “with 240 out of 342 cities reporting” over 58,000 people turned out to protest Aug. 22.

“Great day! Except for Planned Parenthood!” he tweeted that evening.

His organization teamed up with other pro-life groups including 40 Days for Life, Created Equal and 40 Days for Life to organize the national protest in a matter of a few weeks.

#ProtestPP was trending on Twitter Saturday as photos of the crowds poured in.

Charmaine Yoest, President and CEO of Americans United for Life, posted photos on Twitter of demonstrations around the country showing crowds of protesters wrapped around city blocks in front of Planned Parenthood facilities.

Lila Rose of Live Action posted along with a collage of protesters holding signs with the slogan “Planned Parenthood sells baby parts” and commented that, “America is waking up and speaking out! May we see a world where every life is protected.”

In the videos released by the citizen journalist group Center for Medical Progress, Planned Parenthood officials discussed the collection and transfer of body parts from aborted fetuses, compensation and itemization of the parts, and possible alteration of abortion procedures to obtain more intact specimens.

In the most recent video, a former StemExpress technician described harvesting organs from “the most gestated fetus and closest thing to a baby that I’ve seen.”

The videos have sparked investigation and calls for the removal of funding to Planned Parenthood from both congressional and state legislators and officials. The organization receives more than $500 million a year from the federal government.

Planned Parenthood maintains that it has been acting within federal law, and that any donation of fetal organs of aborted babies are made with the mother’s consent and are not done for “valuable consideration.”

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PopUpPope brings hope to the inner city ahead of papal visit

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

PopUpPope in Philadelphia. (PopUpPope)

Philadelphia, PA — In his nearly two-and-a-half year papacy, Pope Francis has spoken countless times about bringing the hope of Christ to society’s most wounded and forgotten. With a life-sized cut-out of the Pope, and a combination of social media and street evangelization, one small initiative is doing just that.

The website for PopUpPope features hundreds of photos of people posing with cardboard cut-outs of Pope Francis. However, for co-founder Christa Scalies, the initiative is more than giving people the chance to take a “selfie” with the pontiff. It’s all about the encounter.

“We have sort of the curiosity-seekers,” said Philadelphia-native Scalies in an interview with CNA, “the tourists, the people who love Pope Francis, and other people that will just be drawn in.”

“If we could utilize a cardboard image of the Pope, on the street, to engage people in conversation, if they’re interested in coming, getting a photo, talking with us, and it gives them a happy moment,” she said, it “engages them in some sort of conversation.”

The most meaningful interactions are with the suffering: the homeless, the drug-addicted, and those suffering from mental health issues, she said. Co-founder Paul Turner, a catechist, wheelchair bound, and formerly homeless himself, is able to direct the poor and homeless they meet to resources they might need.

“For me, those are the best encounters,” Scalies said, because these are the people who may be hopeless.

“They might not believe in God. “They might not have any faith. But, (it is having) an encounter with another human being that says: I see you, I recognize you.”

“We ask them their name,” she said.

PopeUpPope was inspired partly by Pope Francis’ upcoming trip to the U.S. September 22-27, which will culminate in his visit to Philadelphia for the World Meeting of Families.

The idea further materialized when Scalies and Turner, who are both currently based in Wilmington, Delaware, found images of people in the Philippines posing with cardboard cut-outs of Pope Francis, posted around the time of his pastoral visit to the Asian nation.

“Our concept is that we want to be able to engage with people right there, on the spot, and have a conversation with them, pray with them,” Scalies explained, adding that they will sometimes quote from the Bible and other inspirational sayings.

“Our intention isn’t to proselytize and take out a Bible and say, ‘You have to believe this!’ It’s about connecting, and love, and mercy. That’s really what it’s about for us.”

Going out as a team into the streets of Wilmington, Delaware, they are prepared if the conversation goes in the direction of faith, she said. “Paul is a catechist, and can engage in those conversations.”

“On the other hand we thought, if it gives us the opportunity of something that’s new, to engage somebody that might not normally be drawn to a cardboard image of a Pope, it gives us a chance to engage them in conversation, and give us an opportunity to offer them some personal hope.”

Unlike other initiatives which set up “selfie stations” for people looking to take their photo with the cardboard Pope facsimile, Scalies and Turner go out to the streets with the Pope Francis cut-out, and use people’s reactions as an opportunity to interact with them.

Scalies recalled one instance of a man named Joseph who approached them during one day of street evangelization. “We talked to him. He looked over to me and said: ‘Can I have a hug?’”

In another instance, a woman came up to the PopUpPope team, mesmerized by the image of Pope Francis, Scalies said.

“She started to engage us in conversation, and was explaining to us – even though she wasn’t Catholic – how much she loves the Pope, and admires the Pope, and how touched she was.”

While taking a photo with the cardboard Pope, “she just stood up and looked at him,” she said. “You could tell there was something spiritual happening for her at that moment.”

Scalies attributes these encounters, not to herself, but to the image of Pope Francis. “It was because we were out on the street engaging people, and opened ourselves up to having that encounter with people on the street.”

“That’s what the Pope has asked us to do,” she said: “To literally take it to the street.”

This enthusiasm surrounding Pope Francis served, in part, as the inspiration behind the name, PopUpPope. “Because it’s cardboard, it literally folds on itself, and then pops into place,” she said.

“The other part of that logic was, when the Pope ‘pops up’ somewhere in the world, people get excited.”

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U.S. NEWS

Cardinal Levada voices regrets after DUI arrest in Hawaii

by (CNA/EWTN News) • August 25, 2015

Cardinal William Levada, emeritus prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. (Mazur/catholicnews.org.uk)

Honolulu, Hawaii — Cardinal William Levada, a retired Vatican official, was arrested last week for allegedly driving under the influence while vacationing in Hawaii with some of his priest friends.

“I regret my error in judgment. I intend to continue fully cooperating with the authorities,” he said in an Aug. 24 statement released by the Archdiocese of San Francisco, where he resides.

The 79-year-old cardinal was stopped late Thursday night in the city of Kailua-Kona on the island of Hawaii, the Hawaii Tribune-Herald reports. A police spokeswoman said a patrol officer saw his car swerve while he was driving alone on Queen Kaahumanu Highway.

He was charged and released after he posted $500 bail. He is required to appear in court Sept. 24.

From May 2005 through July 2012 the cardinal headed the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. Benedict XVI, the congregation’s former prefect, had chosen Levada to take his place in the dicastery.

Cardinal Levada was Archbishop of San Francisco from 1995-2005 and is a past Archbishop of Portland in Oregon. He had also been a priest and auxiliary bishop in the Los Angeles archdiocese.

He retired in 2012 and took part in the 2013 conclave that elected Pope Francis. He now lives in Menlo Park, fewer than 40 miles southeast of San Francisco.

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What does servant leadership look like on a global scale?

by Hillary Mast (CNA/EWTN News) • August 25, 2015

Men work on rebuilding homes in Visayas, Philippines in the aftermath of Typhoon Haiyan. (Jennifer Hardy/Catholic Relief Services)

Baltimore, MD — For Catholic Relief Services’ president Dr. Carolyn Woo, the way to lead others is to humbly admit when you don’t know something.

“You need to accept the fact that there are a lot of things you don’t know. There are a few things you do know, and you have to use what you do know for the good of others,” she told CNA in a recent interview about her new book, Working for a Better World, published by Our Sunday Visitor.

Woo didn’t come to her position by a traditional route; she was on the Board of Directors for CRS from 2004 to 2010, but her background is in business and academia. She served as the dean of the Mendoza College of Business at Notre Dame from 1997 to 2011. Before that, she was the vice president of academic affairs at Purdue, where she also earned several degrees and taught as a professor.

But after she missed one of her search committee meetings to find a new CRS president, her colleagues told her she should be open to being a candidate for the position.

“I thought somewhere along the line they would send me one of those ‘thank you very much for your interest’ letters. And, it’s just that the letter never came.”

It wasn’t until she was one of the three remaining candidates from a pool of some 400 people that she realized she might actually be chosen for the position.

“When I was not eliminated, it was like, ‘Aha! Perhaps this might be more real. Perhaps I would have to end up making a decision of whether I would or would not go to CRS.’”

So when she took her place in 2012 as head of the 5,000 person organization, she knew she would step aside for those who were experts in their fields.

She learned from one of her mentors that “you have to trust that people know what you know and they know what you don’t know.”

That’s an approach that CRS has long embraced. The organization goes into a particular area with the support of the local bishop, while also partnering with other, sometimes better established, aid groups in a particular region.

While half of all organizations that CRS partners with are Catholic, the other half is made up of other religious groups or NGOs.

For example, Woo said, while on a recent trip to Ethiopia CRS was working on reducing harmful practices for young girls such as early marriage and genital mutilation. Although CRS has a strong relationship working with the Bishops Conference of Ethiopia and the Association of Member Episcopal Conferences in Eastern Africa, they also work with local elders and religious leaders.

“To have that type of impact you really have to approach faith leaders of different faiths, because they are the elders and the teachers and it’s their influence and their encouragement that can get these practices to stop,” she said. “For transformation to come, you have to work across the society.”

Working alongside members of other religions not only helps provide material support to the local area, but can bring peace and stability to a region as well.

“Interfaith relationships are very important,” Woo said. “If those are poor or those are hostile, it tends to break out into violence … wherever there is a relative degree of stability, we want to enhance that stability. We want to enhance that we are not rivals, and we’re not enemies. We work together.”

Even though there are always more people in need throughout the world, Woo said she doesn’t get discouraged or depressed.

“Mother Teresa was right: she didn’t solve poverty, but all she did was what she could at the moment that the need was there,” she said. “And then there is a tomorrow.”

And that’s something CRS has been doing for the past 72 years: doing what they can, where they can.

What began as a service to help resettle European refugees from World War II has now grown to serve people in 101 countries with everything from helping obtain impact investing to disaster relief to education.

Woo likened CRS’ work to that of planting a seed. It’s a very small task, but when you take a step back and look at what it’s grown into you think, “I didn’t do that part of it,” she said. “That’s what you see all the time.”

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These students with special needs have a request of Pope Francis

by Matt Hadro (CNA/EWTN News) • August 26, 2015

Catholic Coalition for Special Education video. (YouTube)

Washington, D.C. — A group representing Catholic students with intellectual disabilities is hoping a U.S. visit from Pope Francis could spark nothing less than a renaissance in Catholic education.

“We hope that Pope Francis will further open up the doors with the very welcoming message that he seems to convey to people that are on the margins of society, often neglected or overlooked,” said Francesca Pellegrino, founder of the Catholic Coalition for Special Education, a Maryland-based group that helps local Catholic schools accommodate students with intellectual disabilities.

Pope Francis has already demonstrated his care for students with special needs, she added. For instance, his February Google Hangout with students who have disabilities showed that he is “focusing on this [issue] more than folks have in the past.”

In advance of the papal visit to the U.S. capital, the coalition produced a welcome video of students showing iconic Washington, D.C. landmarks like the Lincoln Memorial and the White House. The video’s title is “We all have a treasure inside!” and it is taken from Pope Francis’ Feb. 5 Google Hangout, where he told children with special needs that when “we share our own treasure with others, it multiples along with the treasures that come from the others we meet.”

The official schedule for the Pope’s U.S. visit does not include a meeting with students with disabilities. However, advocates remain hopeful that his previous words will inspire Catholic leaders to prioritize schooling options for students with intellectual disabilities.

Already, the coalition has provided $800,000 in seed grants to 26 area schools to help them better accommodate students with special needs. This assistance helps with the hiring of specialized teachers, special education training for existing teachers, and the purchasing of any special equipment these students might need in the classroom.

The coalition’s area of operation runs from St. Mary’s County in Southern Maryland up north to the town of Emmitsburg on the Pennsylvania border – where St. Elizabeth Ann Seton once established a boarding school for young girls in the early 1800s. Although the coalition is having a regional impact, demand for accommodations at Catholic schools is still outpacing provision for students with special needs.

Parents in the Washington, D.C. area have very few Catholic schooling options for their children with intellectual disabilities, particularly in Catholic high schools. Children from the same family end up attending separate schools because of the lack of options.

John Paul Lavallee is an exception to this trend, though. He will be attending Bishop McNamara Catholic High School in Forestville, Md. because the coalition provided the school with a grant for his education, and the school has a program to accommodate his needs. John Paul has autism.

The St. Joseph’s Program which he will be participating in offers “extra support that is tailored to each student’s needs so that they can keep up in the classroom,” his father Fernand explained.

This fall, John Paul will study Algebra I, English, History of American Law, and Physics, among other classes, and he wants to take a web design class. Outside of class he enjoys doing what many other teenagers would – going to the gym, playing with his dog, and hanging out with siblings.

He’s also a gifted writer – his pro-life essay won first prize at both the Maryland Right to Life essay competition and the National Right to Life competition. He hopes to see Pope Francis when he visits D.C., and his family might travel up the east coast to the World Meeting of Families in Philadelphia.

When he was younger, John Paul’s parents embarked on an intensive search just to find a Catholic grade school that could accommodate his educational needs. He wanted to attend the same school his older brother and sister went to, but the school couldn’t take him – a “heartbreaker, for us as a family, for John Paul,” his father recalled.

At first, no other elementary school could accommodate him, but his parents were “thrilled” when he was accepted at Our Lady of Lourdes School in Bethesda, Md.

When he was ready for high school, they had to search again for a school that could accommodate him.

“And sadly, in the Maryland-D.C. area, really MacNamara was the only choice for a boy,” Fernand Lavallee told CNA. “There were some schools in Northern Virginia that we had looked at. This program seemed to be the best all-around fit.”

When he attends McNamara as a freshman this fall, John Paul will not be the first student at the school who has been sponsored by CCSE. But the coalition still had to provide grant money to expand the school’s existing program to accept him.

Why are there so few Catholic schools that can accommodate students with autism, Down syndrome and other challenges? Many schools just feel they don’t have the necessary resources or knowledge, said Pellegrino.

“It’s not easy,” she admitted, “a lot of it is about fear of trying something that’s not been tried before, that’s a little bit different.”

“And just as we, as parents, have to stretch to be the best parents that we can be for our children with disabilities, so too we’re sort of calling on the schools to stretch a little bit to be the best that they can be for their students,” she continued.

“I think that’s what God calls all of us to be. He sent us these challenges to be better human beings.”

Theresa Brogan, a freshman at the Academy of the Holy Cross in Kensington, Md., is another one of the students welcoming Pope Francis to D.C. in the coalition’s video. She’s a member of the Best Buddies Club and likes hip-hop dancing, acting, baking cookies, and playing sports.

She says she will try to attend the canonization Mass for Bl. Junipero Serra when Pope Francis visits Washington, D.C. “You will love it here,” she wishes to tell the Pope.

Theresa was welcomed at St. John the Evangelist School in Silver Spring, Md., a “wonderful message” that is sadly “not often the case,” Pellegrino said. The former head of the school, the late Sister Kathleen Lannak, IHM, was a long-time supporter of accommodating students with intellectual disabilities.

“One of the first times I met her, the conversation had turned to how expensive it might be to have a program that’s all-inclusive,” Fernand Lavallee recalled of Sister Kathleen. “And she seemed almost insulted that the conversation would turn to that. She said ‘this is absolutely the right thing to do, and God will provide a way.’ She said it with such faith and such conviction.”

“That was the right attitude. And she made it happen here.”

Some schools – like St. John’s – are already trying to accommodate students with disabilities, even at no extra expense to the parents. And some of those schools are in the poorest communities in the area, Lavallee noted.

“I think there’s a presumption as well that it can only be done in the wealthier parishes, which is not necessarily the case in practicality,” said Melissa Sloan, whose first-grade son, Eddie, has Down syndrome and attends St. John the Evangelist school in Silver Spring, Md.

“(E)ven without a lot of money and with the help of organizations like CCSE, it can actually be done in parishes that are not the most wealthy,” she added.

Ultimately, there is something very Christian about schools not separating students based on their perceived abilities but educating them all together, parents say.

To encounter others with certain abilities and disabilities is simply Christian realism, and how we’re supposed to live, said Lavallee.

“To give people a notion that you only deal with high-achieving people or highly-academic people, that that’s the world you’re going to participate in, it’s a disservice to everyone.”

In Catholic education, there is a notion of helping each person reach their potential to serve the Lord, Pellegrino said. Yet “in some instances, children with disabilities are not presumed to be competent.”

“People will say ‘oh, well he can’t do this, he can’t do that, he can’t do the other thing.’ Well tell me about what he can do, because we all have gifts,” she stressed.

Another benefit of children attending a Catholic school is that they can evangelize their parents. “As parents of kids in Catholic school, we’re still growing in our own faith,” acknowledged Eddie Sloan’s father, Neil. “Being able to go to a Catholic school as a family keeps us more involved in the parish.”

Ultimately, CCSE would like more of a national voice, especially at the U.S. Bishops’ Conference. Pellegrino hopes they will get an invite from the bishops and the National Catholic Education Association to meet and talk about “how we can really work on all of this together.”

There is currently “no central governing authority on Catholic special education issues,” she added.

“I would also hope that more of the shepherds, the bishops take the opportunity to look closer and see this part of their flock and what they can do, and promote the inclusion,” she added. When Pope Francis has pleaded in the past for priests and bishops to “smell like the sheep,” she said, “these are the sheep.”

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A tech company may have received whole fetuses for tissue harvesting

by Matt Hadro (CNA/EWTN News) • August 26, 2015

Ultrasound image of unborn child. (Public domain image from CDC/Jim Gathany)

Washington, D.C. — Is a fetal tissue supplier receiving whole fetuses from abortion clinics? That’s what one citizen journalist group claims from video of a secretly-recorded conversation released Tuesday.

At issue is a statement by the CEO of the California-based fetal tissue supplier StemExpress, Cate Dyer. In a dialogue about procuring liver tissue, Dyer said that StemExpress receives “intact cases” from abortion clinics.

Whether by “cases” she meant intact livers or intact fetuses is debated. The group that recorded and produced the video, the Center for Medical Progress, claims she is clearly referring to wholly-intact fetuses, which if true could mean that abortion clinics are performing live-birth abortions, they say.

StemExpress, however, replied in a written statement that Dyer was specifically referring to intact livers and that the company has never received a whole fetus from an abortion clinic.

The Center for Medical Progress released the video Sept. 25 after a federal court’s temporary injunction was lifted on Friday. StemExpress had secured the injunction in July to prevent undercover videos featuring its top executives from being made public.

At the beginning of the discussion on liver tissue, Dyer asked one of the actors posing as a tissue “buyer” what volume of liver tissue they could provide her.

“So liver, and what about intact specimens,” the buyer responded. A problem for fetal tissue suppliers is ensuring that tissue obtained from abortions is “intact” enough to be used for research.

“If you have intact cases, which we’ve done a lot, we’ve sometimes shipped those back to our lab in its entirety and that would also be great if you have those,” Dyer said.

“The entire case?” one of the actors replied. “Yeah, yeah,” Dyer responded, because tissue procurement at abortion facilities, she added, “can go really sideways, depending on the facility, and then our samples are destroyed, and we’re like, ‘Really?’”

StemExpress said in a written statement that the company “has never requested, received or provided to a researcher an ‘intact fetus’.”

The term “intact case” is routinely used in a “clinical abortion context,” David Daleiden, project lead for the Center for Medical Progress, explained to CNA.

“In the [abortion] clinics, they have problems with the procurement [of tissue],” he said, and Dyer admits that the abortion procedure often does not leave the tissue intact. Thus, StemExpress would need a wholly-intact fetus from which to procure fetal tissue, CMP claims.

Elsewhere in the conversation, Dyer refers to “cases” as whole abortions and not just body parts such as livers, Daleiden said. In two separate instances, she appears to refer to a “case” as a whole aborted fetus from which StemExpress procures fetal tissue.

Regarding the abortion procedure and its damaging effect on fetal tissue, Dyer says that at a clinic “the suction destroys everything and it gets to the point where you could look at 60 cases and get nothing.”

Elsewhere, she talks about the number of abortion “cases” that clinics might perform in a day, and the quality of fetal tissue that may be procured there.

“If you’re a physician in Nebraska, well, not Nebraska but somewhere else right? Minnesota or something and you’re doing ten cases a day, you know, and you can take your time and do a thorough job and go home at the end of the day, that might be good for you and the tissue would be good. Then you go to Planned Parenthood six blocks away, they’re doing fifty cases a day and you couldn’t collect one thing, if you tried.”

Planned Parenthood considers a “case” to be one whole aborted baby from which multiple organs can be extracted, according to one of its top doctors.

In another undercover video previously released by the Center for Medical Progress on July 14, Planned Parenthood’s senior director of medical services, Dr. Deborah Nucatola, was asked what the organization considers one “specimen.”

“One case,” she answered. She clarified that “if you end up shipping four individual specimens, that’s still one patient.”

“Yea, that’s what I was going to say. If we take kidney, liver, thymus and say bone marrow —” one of the actors posing as a tissue “buyer” responded, and Nucatola interjected “Yeah, to us it’s all just one.”

Dyer made other admissions in the Aug. 25 video, that sanitary conditions at some abortion clinics are quite poor and StemExpress is also a big supporter of abortion rights.

“I’ve seen really rampant, rampant problems with bacteria in certain clinics,” she said. “ I’ve seen staph come out of clinics.”

“You know, we’re so much more the advocate, we’re like the total pro-choice advocate, NAF [National Abortion Federation] supporters,” she admitted, “we sponsor events, we sponsor NAF, we give money to these organizations. We’re totally committed to everything, with supporting the clinics.”

She also joked about the harvesting of body parts of aborted babies, noting that researchers are uncomfortable when receiving fetal tissue at laboratories.

“They’ll open the box, go, ‘Oh God!’” Dyer noted, laughing. “So yeah, so many of the academic labs cannot fly like that, they’re not capable.”

Tuesday’s video is the latest in the “Human Capital” series produced by the Center for Medical Progress, a three-year investigation into the fetal body parts trade. The group began releasing the videos on an almost-weekly basis beginning on July 14.

Previous videos featured secretly-taped conversations with top Planned Parenthood doctors, who told of how their affiliates supply body parts of aborted babies to fetal tissue procurement companies.

In one of the videos released July 30, the vice president for Planned Parenthood of the Rocky Mountains Dr. Savita Ginde suggested that babies are delivered at clinics before an abortion can be performed, leaving open the question of whether clinics were performing live-birth abortions.

“Sometimes, if we get, if someone delivers before we get to see them for a procedure, then we are intact, but that’s not what we go for. We try for that to not happen,” she said.

In the first video in the series released July 14, Nucatola was seen discussing compensation prices for the fetal body parts and describing in grisly detail the process of obtaining fetal tissue from an aborted baby.

In the second video released the following week, the president of the organization’s medical directors council, Dr. Mary Gatter, joked about the pricing of fetal body parts, saying she wanted a “Lamborghini.” Additionally, Gatter suggested that the abortion procedure could be changed to better obtain an “intact specimen.”

CMP had also taped conversations with StemExpress executives about their participation in the fetal body parts trade, but these specific videos had been temporarily banned for release by the federal court order.

The group did feature testimony of a former StemExpress technician, Holly O’Donnell, about the company’s partnership with Planned Parenthood clinics, in videos released Aug. 12 and Aug. 19.

Fetal tissue was extracted from aborted babies without the mother’s consent, O’Donnell claimed in the video released Aug. 12.

She also told of her having to harvest tissue from a baby whose heart was beating after an abortion. “I’m sitting here and I’m looking at this fetus, and its heart is beating, and I don’t know what to think,” she said. “I don’t know if that constitutes it’s technically dead, or it’s alive.”

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Pop Artist. Provocateur. Catholic. Who was Andy Warhol?

by Adelaide Mena (CNA/EWTN News) • August 27, 2015

Andy Warhol. (Thomas Hawk via Flickr CC BY-NC 2.0)

Washington, D.C. — Chances are you’ve heard of the phrase “15 minutes of fame.” And you’ve probably seen the neon-colored canvases of Campbell soup cans or Marilyn Monroe’s face – even if you don’t know the artist behind them.

For those who’ve never studied Andy Warhol and his prolific body of work, they’ve still most likely encountered it in many of the pop icons of the late 20th Century.

But while Warhol may be known best for the his visionary depiction of fame and popular culture, his art can also be understood as iconic – in another, much more literal, way.

Why? Because he was an ardently practicing Byzantine Catholic, say those close to the artist and his work. In fact, they say, Warhol’s art is actually best understood through the lens of faith and iconography.

However, these same voices warn that both the art world and Catholics alike have tended to oversimplify or ignore aspects of the man that, to this day, refuses to be categorized.

“Warhol’s a very complicated person and whatever angle we really try to take to his art, we can take one angle to come from but it’s always going to be incomplete if we don’t take another angle as well,” said art historian Dr. James Romaine.

Romaine, who also serves as president of the international Association of Scholars of Christianity in the History of Art, said that the widespread read on Warhol’s work – that it’s largely a critique of consumerism – actually isn’t at odds with a more religious interpretation of his art.

“The more popular description of Warhol’s work being concerned with popular culture, commodity culture, I think that’s all true,” he told CNA.

“And I don’t see it as being inconsistent in any way with what we’ve already talked about with sacred art,” he said. “I see these same sides of Warhol’s work as enhancing each other.”

So who was Andy Warhol? Or should we say – who was Andrew Warhola?

A Humble Beginning

The artist who would become Andy Warhol was born as Andrew Warhola on Aug. 6, 1928, in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. His parents, Ondrej and Julia Warhola immigrated to the United States in 1914 and 1921, respectively, from what is today Slovakia. They raised their family of three sons in the Byzantine Catholic Church. Andrew was often sick as a child, and spent much time bedridden, collecting pictures and drawing. His father passed away in an accident when he was just 13.

After high school, Warhol studied commercial art at the Carnegie Institute of Technology, later renamed Carnegie Mellon University. Following graduation in 1949, he moved to New York City, where he worked in magazine illustration and advertising, and also started signing his last name “Warhol,” rather than “Warhola.” His mother joined him in New York in 1952, where she lived with her son until her death in 1972.

Throughout the 50s and 60s, Warhol gained attention for his painting techniques, and later photography, film, installments and multi-media exhibitions. The late 1960s also brought Warhol close to death when he was shot near the entrance to his Factory workspace. After the shooting, Warhol continued to work prodigiously, co-founding Interview Magazine, designing record covers, producing television programs, and continuing to paint both commissioned works and his own artistic series.

He passed away suddenly on Feb. 22, 1987, during a routine gallbladder surgery.

In the nearly 30 years since the artist’s death, his art has left a lasting impact on society not only due to the vast popularity of his work, but the major themes he wrestles with and explores.

“Warhol has been celebrated by critics and art historians for his ability to probe some of the most challenging themes of modern society: identity politics, celebrity, death, religion, desire, and the capitalist machine,” said Jessica Beck, assistant curator for The Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh.

“From the very beginning of his career, Warhol had a particularly keen understanding of the power and weight of images,” she told CNA, “and he was able to produce a body of work that remains extremely relevant and accessible to contemporary audiences.”

But while a small amount of religious work has been explored by scholars such as Lynne Cooke and Jane D. Dillenberger, largely these themes – “relative to the Pop paintings of Campbell’s Soup and Coca-Cola or the celebrity portraits” – are “somewhat under-researched,” Beck said.

An Abiding Faith

For Warhol, faith was an integral part of family life and a daily practice – and both of these remained important to the artist until his death, according to his nephew, Donald Warhola.

While many assume he was non-religious, Andy Warhol “was far from an atheist,” Warhola told CNA. “He was a practicing Byzantine Catholic, and actually attended a Roman church later in his life.”

This dedication to the faith was a critical part of Andy’s daily life. Warhola recalled that his uncle would visit his neighborhood Roman Catholic parish in New York City “and pray every day.” After Warhol passed away, the priest approached the Warhola family at his memorial “and said to us that he was going to miss his daily talks with Uncle Andy.”

From among Warhol’s personal collection displayed in the Warhol Museum after his death are religious items such as a sculpture of the Sacred Heart.

But for the Warhola family, the Catholic faith was more than daily practice, and was a key part of their family life and source of personal strength.

“Sunday was meant for worship,” Donald said. He added that his grandparents – Andy Warhol’s parents – raised their sons to place Church and visiting with family first on Sundays. Even when Andy Warhol moved from Pittsburgh to New York City in order pursue his art career, faith remained an important familial touchstone.

“Always he would ask if I went to Church because it was a Sunday,” Warhola said of his phone calls with his uncle. “He was very religious: it was a very big part of his upbringing as well as mine.”

“I know Uncle Andy was the character who had that through his upbringing and I know that he depended on God for strength.”

Donald Warhola also got to know his uncle in a working environment was well, installing a computer system for Andy for several months before his death at Andy Warhol Enterprises in New York. At work, Donald describes his uncle as “quiet” but also a hard worker and fair employer, bringing their family emphasis on hard work into the workplace.

“He wasn’t too much different, but it was interesting to see Uncle Andy in that element and his work element as opposed to the more casual, laid back visiting at his place.” These “really basic and old school” lessons from his uncle stuck with the then-24-year-old Warhola.

Donald recounted meeting someone in New York who wanted to design the young worker a “fancy business card” to use for future job searches. Uncle Andy told him “a fancy business card won’t get you work,” but promised that if he did a good job at his work, he would write his nephew a good referral and help find him a good job.

“The funny thing is that after that, on jobs that I took, it seems that I never got business cards,” he laughed. “Subconsciously something landed in my mind to avoid business cards.”

Other colleagues of Warhol also noticed the artist’s Catholic faith and devotion, such as Bob Colacello. He relayed that Warhol’s faith “was not an act,” after attending Mass with Warhol and visiting the shrine of the Virgin of Guadalupe, according to Jane Dillenberger’s work in “The Religious Art of Andy Warhol.”

Warhol’s diaries also provide a record of his internal religious life, documenting weekly Mass attendance, volunteer work at a parish soup kitchen, and his experience of meeting and shaking hands with then-pontiff Saint John Paul II in 1980.

He also recorded his anxiety being surrounded by the “scary” crowds in St. Peter’s Square waiting for the Pope, although he fought off his nervousness in order to sign autographs for several nuns. Warhol additionally wrote that he screamed after the assassination attempt on John Paul II in 1981.

Art as Iconography

Just as faith played an important place in Warhol’s life so too did it surface as an important topic in his art. He worked on several explicitly religious pieces, including appropriations and reinventions of Raphael’s “Madonna” and da Vinci’s “Last Supper.” A camouflage version of the latter, Romaine observed, can be interpreted as “bringing back the halo on and over Christ’s head,” which was removed in da Vinci’s original humanist painting.

For Romaine, however, Warhol’s religious themes run into all his work – even that thought of as non-religious. “If I had to describe Andy Warhol’s work in just one or two sentences, I would describe it as the world seen not as it is, but the world seen as it might be transformed by grace.”

Romaine explained that in the Eastern Catholic churches, religious icons play a vital role in worship and spiritual life. As opposed to altar pieces or other sacred art in the Western Church, “the icon is more of a specific presence of the saints there with an icon,” he said. “The sacred image is not directly bringing the Virgin Mary into the Church, whereas with the icon, the presence of the saints is believed to be more directly there.”

He said that by viewing Warhol’s work – particularly his paintings – with an eye towards iconography, “I see all of Warhol’s work as potentially sacred.” As an example, Romaine pointed to the now-iconic printing of the Campbell soup can.

“Soup cans are disposable food,” he said. “But the way Warhol depicts them, he removed them from a time and place context in which they’re disposable, into a timeless realm in which they’re almost like icons.”

The soup can also had a ritual tie to Warhol’s life. He recalled Warhol’s brother mentioning “Andy eating Campbell’s soup every day, having a soup and sandwich soup every day, and the importance of religious imagery in their home” – including over the kitchen table where Warhol ate his soup.

Similarly, Romaine said, people are presented in a glorified, redemptive manner in Warhol’s paintings.

The artist finished the now-classic screen print of Marilyn Monroe shortly after the actress’s sudden death after a tumultuous life. Yet, Warhol’s work “doesn’t depict her as a tragic figure,” he remarked, “not that we shouldn’t have sympathy for her.”

“He celebrates her. He sees her in a way as being, in fact, beautiful.”

Warhol also portrays Elizabeth Taylor, another actress dealing with scandal at the time of the painting.

“He’s depicting those women at critical moments in their lives. Warhol depicts her as kind of redeeming her through his imagery.”

“If you’re familiar with the Christian concept of the transfiguration … Christ appears to his disciples not as he is, but in a glorified way. He’s not just this guy walking around, but he’s glorified.

Romaine commented that in the way the soup can or Marilyn Monroe, or Liz Taylor are presented, it reminds him of the Transfiguration, where Christ is presented to the disciples in the fullness of His glory. Likewise, in these images, Romaine said, “I kind of see Warhol seeing the whole world as potentially glorified.”

This glorification of the popular is one of the markers of Warhol’s art, Romaine noted. “His work is so much connected with the lowest of the low commodity culture makes the transfiguration that takes place in his work, all the more miraculous, all the more important.”

“If he’s depicting the Virgin Mary as sacred, it’s sort of obvious already, but if you’re depicting the soup can as sacred, it’s really transformative.”

Daniel Warhola agreed that, while “we never had a conversation on that topic,” it makes sense to him that Eastern iconography would have an influence on his uncle’s artwork.

“Perhaps I’m jaded because I grew up in the same environment but to me it seems obvious: the Byzantine Catholic Church is all about Heaven on Earth and you are stimulating the various senses and your eyes with the various icons and beautiful stained glass windows, and you know that the smell of incense and the sounds,” he stated.

Among the important sensory parts of the liturgy, he continued, are “the icons, sort of the celebrities of religion.”

“To me it’s very obvious that the way he presented his pop art, you take these iconic figures out of society, Marilyn Monroe, Elizabeth Taylor, and make them iconic in the way he presented them.”

A Complicated Man

However, while Andrew Warhola was a man of faith and his Catholic understanding of the world did make its way into his art, Andy Warhol also dealt intimately with themes such as fame, popular culture, mass production and sexuality – that would become nearly ubiquitous in the 30 years after his death.

“I’ve just always thought Uncle Andy was able to predict what was going to be popular ahead of his time,” Donald Warhola said. He called his uncle’s work “progressive” in that it “was ahead of his time.”

“From a standpoint of when I look at the body of work that he did in the 60s and 70s, even 80s, he was always touching on what was going to be popular in the future.” Warhola pointed to his uncle’s prediction that “in the future everyone will be world-famous for 15 minutes” and art projects such as the filming of ordinary people living their lives.

“I think if you look at reality TV, some people, not everyone, are intrigued by just watching someone live their life,” he said, adding that while Warhol was exploring the medium of what has become reality TV in the 60s and 70s, at the time.”it was not popular and it was controversial and not understood.”

“It was almost like he was looking for future trends in his art.”

Some of the trends Warhol explored extensively were that of sexuality and sexual orientation, which he revisited throughout his professional career.

“There’s no question that Andy Warhol was homosexual,” Romaine said. Indeed, several scholars, such as Dillenberger, have documented that he was open about his attractions since the 1950s, and several of his art projects explore his fascination with voyeurism and the sexually explicit.

However, in interviews late in his life Warhol also proclaimed that he was “still a virgin” and eschewed participation in the acts he depicted. “After twenty-five,” Warhol told Scott Cohen in a 1980 interview, “you should look, but never touch.”

“I don’t know exactly what that means for him, but because of his religious upbringing but even more so because of his intense shyness he wrestled with any sort of a sexual relationship,” Romaine commented. “His art then becomes a means by which he can realize some of the sexual longing that he has that he’s not able to realize in relationships.”

These tensions between faith and sexuality, introversion and explicitness wrapped themselves around some of Warhol’s work with identity, Romaine said, bringing up the series “Ladies and Gentlemen,” portraits of drag queens and transsexual attendees at New York clubs.

“It’s a sort of play on the perception and the answer is ‘yes’ – it’s both a lady and a gentleman: there’s this slippage of identity.”

The “and” in the title, Romaine continued, is “insightful” and important to understanding the point Warhol explored in the piece. “It’s sort of the one image that portrays being a drag queen as a sort of divided identity,” Romaine continued, and in putting both parts of the “lady” and the “gentleman” portrayed together in one series he’s attempting to resolve “a conflict.”

In looking back, Warhol’s nephew also sees the question of identity as one that concerned his uncle personally and that Andy Warhol explored in his work.

“I’ve always thought,” Warhola told CNA, “that there’s two personas: there’s the Andrew Warhola persona that I, for the most part, got to know, and the Andy Warhol persona.”

“And I think that the Andy Warhol persona that almost gave my uncle the permission to do the things that Andrew Warhola would not feel comfortable doing or being.”

“It’s almost like an actor who goes out and plays a role, then they’re able to act out maybe different aspects of their personality or life that they’re not totally comfortable with as their own individual,” Donald said. “That’s just my own interpretation: I just think that maybe Uncle Andy experienced that.”

Warhola also suggested that perhaps some of the character Andy Warhol became and the work the artist produced was itself a type of creation. This persona, Warhola added, grew and changed with public expectations and “wherever people took that, he was okay with it.”

“Almost like he could see himself as a work of art, and let you create the narrative,” his nephew said. “‘I’ll put out the information out there and you can create the narrative as you see fit. I’ll be what you almost want me to be,’ in some ways.”

There may be another reason for allowing for a tension between his public and personae, Warhola added: business. “Also my uncle saw that controversy sells, and that if you’re getting attention, it doesn’t matter if it’s positive or negative – that’s what you need to be out there.”

Art as Reconciliation

Towards what would be the the end of his life, however, Andrew Warhola shifted focus from feeding the expectations others had for Andy Warhol.

“He wasn’t painting necessarily for other people, but was more painting from his soul, and he did a lot of various religious works,” Donald Warhola noted, bringing up “The Last Supper” paintings and the “Heaven and Hell” series.

“The themes kind of changed – at least what caught my attention changed,” he said. “It seemed like again he wasn’t worried so much about ‘gee, what can I paint that everyone’s going to like?’ It was more like he was trying to make statements with his artwork.”

Warhola added that while earlier in his uncle’s career, the artist was concerned with staying “totally relevant” to avoid fading from popularity like other contemporary artists, later on Warhol eventually stopped orienting his artwork around other’s expectations. “At a certain point, he just figured ‘I’m going to paint what I want to paint.’”

“After that it was more subtle, and then I think he became more profound closer to his death.”

Romaine suggested, however, that the resolution of identity and other themes in Warhol’s work can be seen throughout his career – and underlying that resolution is a distinctly Catholic theme.

He directed attention to the resolution of male and female identities in “Ladies and Gentlemen” and other paintings, brought together with the understanding of iconography he sees in Warhol’s corpus.

The resolution, Romaine said, is “this striving for grace in a broken world.”

Another example of an artistic imagining that not only elevates the base, but resolves conflict and redeems a subject, Romaine said, are the prints of Marilyn Monroe.

“Marilyn Monroe at the time he paints her is a picture of identity conflict,” he said, “And in his image, I think he tries to pull her together.”

“This desire in his depictions of Marilyn, to reconcile these different Marilyns with each other I think projects from his own desire in his own life of having so many internal conflicts: of being on the one hand successful, and on the other feeling like a failure, on being on the one hand desirous of relationships and being unable to realize them,” Romaine said.

“These conflicts that exist at the very core of Warhol’s being, then drive him to create an art in which these conflicts are reconciled. Conflicts that can’t be reconciled in life can be reconciled in a work of art.”

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U.S. NEWS

Even Hurricane Katrina couldn’t keep this nun out of New Orleans

by Kate Veik (CNA/EWTN News) • August 27, 2015

Flooding after Hurricane Katrina. (News Muse via Flickr CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)

New Orleans, LA — For Sister Greta Jupiter, SSF, it was an odd sensation driving through New Orleans East in the months after Hurricane Katrina. Her neighborhood was quiet. The power, out. Gone was the familiar white noise of birds chirping. There was no traffic, save for military and first responders.

“I felt like I was in the middle of a war zone,” she told CNA. “It was just that devastating.”

The month was October 2005 and Sr. Greta was making her first, unofficial visit to New Orleans, her hometown and the seedbed of her religious vocation, since Hurricane Katrina. Sr. Greta and her fellow Sisters of the Holy Family had been staying at a convent and a private home in Lafayette.

Before driving into the water-logged city, Sr. Greta was required to get a tetanus shot and several other vaccinations. She wore a mask and rubber boots. Her goal was to visit Saint Mary’s Academy, a private all-girl’s high school her community had established more than 160 years prior. She was principal of the academy at the time.

She’d heard rumors the school had been spared from massive flooding after the city’s levees failed. More than 80 percent of New Orleans was underwater, but she still hoped against hope that St. Mary’s was in the lucky 20 percent.

It wasn’t.

St. Mary’s had been submerged in more than eight feet of water. The water had since drained, but the first level of the school was still sitting in six inches of black mud. Mold climbed up the walls and several classrooms had been completely emptied of desks, computers and chairs.

“That was the end of everything,” Sr. Greta said.

On the drive back to Lafayette that October day, Sr. Greta turned several thoughts over in her mind. “Lord, give me some direction,” she prayed. “Where do you want me to go from here? Can the school be rebuilt? Will the people come back? Is New Orleans East something of the past?”

This month marks 10 years since Hurricane Katrina paved its destructive path across the southern coast of the United States, causing some $108 billion in damages. The Category 3 hurricane was one of the strongest storms to strike the U.S. coast in a century, according to FEMA. The hurricane and its aftermath killed more than 1,800 people – the vast majority of whom were in Louisiana.

Those who didn’t lose their lives to Katrina lost their homes, their jobs and their community. Sr. Greta and the Sisters of the Holy Family were no exception: the community’s school, nursing home, and motherhouse were rendered unusable by the floodwaters.

“I just didn’t know what to think or believe because I had never, ever experienced anything like this,” Sr. Greta said. “It was not anything that anyone could have been prepared for or could have even imagined. It was like an atomic bomb exploded or something.”

The sisters were weighing their options when then-Archbishop Clifton Hughes announced that the diocese would return to the city to rebuild. The sisters decided to follow suit.

“There’s no way that the Archdiocese of New Orleans can be in existence if the Sisters of the Holy Family cannot be there,” Sr. Greta said. “The Sisters of the Holy Family was founded in New Orleans and for the people in New Orleans first.”

The Sisters of the Holy Family were founded in New Orleans in the 1800s to minister to slaves and the poor. St. Mary’s Academy was the first Catholic secondary school for African American girls in New Orleans.

Sr. Greta’s first order of business was to reach out to all of St. Mary’s senior students, whose final year at the all-girls high school had been disrupted by Hurricane Katrina. Many of the students and their families had temporarily settled in Houston or Atlanta. Sr. Greta invited the seniors to return to New Orleans for St. Mary’s traditional ring ceremony, during which seniors receive their class rings marking their last year at the school. More than half of the school’s seniors were able to return for the celebration at New Orleans’ St. Louis Cathedral.

Sr. Greta said the ring ceremony was the first sign of hope for the future of St. Mary’s Academy.

“Those students who were able to come back to the city … when they came back and they saw their other classmates, they just screamed and cried,” she said. “Parents and students were happy to have some feeling of belonging again to the school.”

“St. Mary’s was still alive.”

The academy was able to offer classes again as early as January, through a collaboration with two other Catholic schools in the area. The “MAX school” represented St. Mary’s Academy, St. Augustine High School and Xavier University Preparatory School. Former students of the three schools were able to register for classes on a first-come, first-serve basis – and the MAX school had a full enrollment, despite the fact that many former students were unable to return to New Orleans.

That spring, students at the “MAX school” marched in a parade for Mardi Gras.

Sr. Greta said the “MAX school” was an anchor of hope for students and their families who were still picking up the pieces of their lives after Katrina.

“The important thing for us at the time was to try to bring some normalcy to the lives of the students,” she explained. “Just like I was homeless at one time, they were homeless. And not only homeless but school-less and friend-less because they were disassociated with the friends they went to school with … (they were) people among strangers.”

“We wanted to bring them back to their comfort zone to a place that they felt that they were part of a family.”

In fall of 2006 – exactly one year after Hurricane Katrina – St. Mary’s Academy opened a full academic program for grades 1-12 in St. James Major Catholic Church, which was not in use at the time. The program included a boarding house for children whose families were unable to return to New Orleans because their homes had been destroyed.

The following year, the program moved into portable classrooms on St. Mary’s Academy’s original grounds. And in 2010, St. Mary’s Academy moved into a brand new building on their original grounds. The school now offers classes for pre-K through 12th grade.

For Sr. Greta, Hurricane Katrina “showed us that people do care and that there is good in everything.”

“God allows things to happen for a reason,” Sr. Greta said. “We don’t really know what those reasons are and we may not get the answer right away but … in the end, you’ll find out that there was a good reason for it.”

Even with the brand new building, Hurricane Katrina has still left a mark on the students of St. Mary’s Academy. Many girls experience anxiety and stress when it rains or when there are reports of hurricanes nearby. But Sr. Greta believes the community at St. Mary’s Academy can help students heal.

“We’re home, we’re anchored, and we are your family,” Sr. Greta said.

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U.S. NEWS

Catholic groups say this U.S. bill could fight modern day slave labor

by CNA/EWTN News • August 28, 2015

(Wagner T. Cassimiro Aranha via Flickr CC BY 2.0)

Washington, D.C. — A proposed federal bill to combat human trafficking and forced labor in the corporate supply chain is an opportunity for Catholics to speak up in defense of oppressed people around the world, its supporters say.

“As Catholics in the United States, we work to fight human trafficking because it is an affront to the lives and dignity of our brothers and sisters who are its victims,” Catholics Confront Global Poverty said in an Aug. 21 action alert.

“Thanks in large part to growing awareness, education and outreach, more companies are aware of the possible existence of modern-day slavery in their global operations and supply chains,” the group said.

Catholics Confront Global Poverty is a joint initiative of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops and Catholic Relief Services. The initiative is backing proposed federal legislation that would require companies to make public information about their products’ supply chains to ensure their products do not result from child labor, forced labor, slavery and human trafficking.

The Catholic initiative asks Catholics and others to contact Congress in support of the Business Supply Chain Transparency on Trafficking and Slavery Act of 2015.

The bill was introduced in the House of Representatives July 27 by Rep. Carolyn B. Maloney (D-N.Y.) and co-sponsored by Rep. Chris Smith (R-N.J.). The legislation deems forced labor, slavery, human trafficking and the worst forms of child labor as “among the most egregious forms of abuse that humans commit against each other.” The bill notes the United States’ role as the world’s largest importer.

Catholics Confront Global Poverty says companies have a responsibility to address human rights and issues like exploitation in their supply chains.

The Catholic initiative cited Pope Francis’ Jan. 1 World Day of Peace message, which stressed business’ duty to be vigilant so that “forms of subjugation or human trafficking do not find their way into the distribution chain.”

“Together with the social responsibility of businesses, there is also the social responsibility of consumers,” the Pope added. He said every person should be aware that purchasing is “always a moral – and not simply an economic – act.”

The Catholic backers of the proposed U.S. law have a long history of helping trafficking victims. The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops and its partners have provided intensive case management to over 2,300 survivors of trafficking and over 500 of their family members in over a decade.

For its part, Catholic Relief Services has enacted 100 programs in over 35 countries to reduce human trafficking. The agency has taken part in many public-private initiatives to engage corporations to eliminate the worst forms of slave labor.

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U.S. NEWS

It’s not over yet: Nebraska bishops, Catholics continue to fight death penalty

by CNA/EWTN News • August 28, 2015

Bishop James Conley of Lincoln prepares to administer Confirmation to prisoners during a Mass said at the Nebraska State Penitentiary, March 31, 2015. (Southern Nebraska Register)

Lincoln, NE — Nebraska’s three Catholic bishops have asked all people of goodwill to continue to fight the death penalty, after it won a last-minute reprieve in the state Wednesday.

The group Nebraskans for the Death Penalty, largely financed by Nebraska Gov. Pete Ricketts and his supporters, said it had gathered 166,692 signatures from all 93 of the state’s counties, enough to briefly halt the repeal of the death penalty approved by the state’s unicameral legislature in May.

The advocacy group needed roughly 114,000 signatures to immediately halt the repeal of the death penalty, a move which will likely place the fate of capital punishment in the hands of Nebraska voters in 2016.

“Nebraskans sent a strong message about crime and punishment in our state by signing this petition in extraordinary numbers,” said state treasurer and former attorney general Don Stenberg, a co-chair of the petition drive, according to the Associated Press.

The three Nebraskan bishops, who said in May that capital punishment “cannot be justified” in the state at present, asked in a statement Thursday that all people of goodwill join them in continued opposition to the death penalty.

“Justice requires punishment, but it does not require that those who have committed serious crimes be put to death,” the bishops said in their Aug. 27 statement.

“For the Catholic community, this issue – like all life issues – involves more than public policy,” they said. “It involves our faith and the central principle that human life is sacred. Reflection on the God-given dignity of every human person should guide all our decisions about life, including refraining from the use of the death penalty.”

The bishops join the three most recent Popes – St. John Paul II, Benedict XVI, and Francis – in opposing capital punishment in most cases. As explained in the Catechism of the Catholic Church, because life is sacred, the death penalty should only be used if there are no other means with which to protect the public.

In paragraph 2267, the catechism notes that in the modern world, scenarios in which the death penalty is an absolute necessity “are very rare, if not practically nonexistent,” language borrowed from St. John Paul II’s 1995 encyclical Evangelium vitae.

The collected signatures from Nebraskans for the Death Penalty were delivered Wednesday to the Nebraska secretary of state’s office, which will verify them with each country as belonging to registered voters. If the necessary number was obtained, the death penalty repeal will be blocked until voters decide on the issue in the November 2016 general election.

Even if the repeal is blocked, Nebraska still has no way to execute people on death row, as it lacks two of the three legally required lethal injection drugs.

In recent years, many domestic pharmaceutical companies have decided they do not want to be associated with the taking of life and have therefore stopped providing lethal drugs. This causes states to look for companies abroad, but since the European Union holds the death penalty as a violation of human rights, it is illegal for European pharmaceutical companies to sell the drugs to the United States.

When the Nebraska legislature repealed capital punishment in May, overriding Ricketts’ veto, it became the first conservative state to do so in 42 years.

In their statement, the Nebraska bishops vowed to keep fighting capital punishment, which they say does not clearly deter crime and disproportionately affects minorities and the poor.

“Other means are available to punish criminals and to protect society that are more respectful of human life,” they said.

“This is the message Nebraska’s three bishops will take to the state’s 375,000 Catholics in the coming year to encourage support for upholding the prohibition of the death penalty.”

Nebraska’s three bishops are Archbishop George Lucas of Omaha; Bishop James Conley of Lincoln; and Bishop Joseph Hanefeldt of Grand Island.

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FEATURES

Stephen Colbert, J.R.R. Tolkien, John Henry Newman, and the Providence of God

by Bishop-elect Robert Barron • August 25, 2015

Just last week, Stephen Colbert gave an interview in which the depth of his Catholic faith was on pretty clear display. Discussing the trauma that he experienced as a young man-the deaths of his father and two of his brothers in a plane crash - he told the interviewer how, through the ministrations of his mother, he had learned not only to accept what had happened but actually to rejoice in it: “Boy, did I have a bomb when I was ten; that was quite an explosion … It’s that I love the thing that I wish most had not happened.” Flummoxed, his interlocutor asked him to elaborate on the paradox. Without missing a beat, Colbert cited J.R.R. Tolkien: “What punishments of God are not gifts?” What a wonderful sermon on the salvific quality of suffering! And it was delivered, not by a priest or bishop or evangelist, but by a comedian about to take over one of the most popular television programs on late night.

But what particularly intrigued me was the reference to Tolkien, which was culled, not from The Lord of the Rings or The Hobbit, but from a letter that the great man wrote to an inquirer, who had wondered whether Tolkien took death with sufficient spiritual seriousness in his literary work. Like Colbert, Tolkien had suffered enormous trauma as a young man. His father died in 1896, when Tolkien was only three, and his mother Mabel took him and his younger brother back to England (the family had moved to South Africa for economic reasons). Upon their return to her hometown of Birmingham, Mabel decided to become a Roman Catholic, a move that was met with enormous opposition on the part of her family, who essentially disowned her and left her in destitution. During this terrible period, Tolkien’s mother turned to the priests of the Birmingham Oratory, who cared for her needs both spiritual and financial and who took a keen interest in her fatherless children.

In 1904, Tolkien and his brother became orphans when their mother died of diabetes. Years later, the famous author mused that his mother was a kind of martyr, since she had been in effect hounded to death for her decision to become a Catholic and to raise her sons in the faith. Frightened, alone, and adrift, the boys were taken in by Rev. Francis Xavier Murphy, a priest of the Oratory. The kindly man, whom Tolkien always referred to affectionately as “Fr. Francis,” became a father figure, instructing the young men in matters both sacred and secular and teaching, as Tolkien would later put it, the meaning of “charity and forgiveness.” Tolkien named his eldest son for the priest, and many have suggested that there is a fair amount of Fr. Murphy in Gandalf and other wisdom figures in the master’s oeuvre. It was assuredly Fr. Francis who taught the young Tolkien, who had endured more trials than any child ought to endure, that “all of God’s punishments are gifts.”

But where had the priest learned that lesson? The Birmingham Oratory had been established in the mid-nineteenth century by the legendary John Henry Newman, who at the time had just become a Roman Catholic, thereby excluding himself from the institutions of British society. When he set up the Oratory in the industrial city of Birmingham, Newman was passing through a real “Lenten” period, for he was excoriated as a traitor by the Anglican establishment and looked upon with suspicion by Catholics. In time, Newman would reemerge as a cultural leader within British society, and his Oratory would become a center for Catholic evangelism in England. But this would happen only through Newman’s dark night experiences. What his Oratorian disciples, including Fr. Francis, would have taken in is the lesson that “punishments” often turn out to be precious gifts.

What this chain of influences teaches us - and here I come to the point of this essay - is that God’s providence is a mysterious and wonderful thing. Were it not for John Henry Newman’s establishment, through much suffering, of the Birmingham Oratory, there would never have been a Fr. Francis Xavier Murphy, and if there had never been a Fr. Murphy, the young Tolkien boys might easily have drifted into unbelief or spiritual indifference, and if J.R.R. Tolkien had not taken in the lessons he learned from his mentor, he would never have shared the insight about God’s gift that brought such comfort to a young Stephen Colbert in his moment of doubt and pain.

One of the most potent insights of the spiritual masters is that our lives are not about us, that they are, in fact, ingredient in God’s providential purposes, part of a story that stretches infinitely beyond what we can immediately grasp. Why are we suffering now? Well, it might be so that, in St. Paul’s language, we might comfort someone else with the same consolation we have received in our suffering. And that someone might be a person who has not even been born. St. John Paul II commented that, for people of faith, there are no coincidences, only aspects of God’s providence that we have not yet fully understood. The line that runs from Newman to Murphy to Tolkien to Colbert was not dumb chance, a mere coincidence; rather, it was an instance of the slow but sure unfolding of the divine plan.

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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Catholic Education II: Quality and Non-Quality

by Sr. Joan L. Roccasalvo, C.S.J. • August 26, 2015

In November 1980, Barbara Tuchman, a noted historian and twice-winner of the Pulitzer Prize, published a controversial essay in the New York Times Magazine entitled “The Decline of Quality.” Her piece commands attention for all associated in any way with the education of our youth.

Tuchman argues that, despite our improved material progress, the decline of quality permeates our culture. Not a politically correct statement to make outright. Craftsmanship, the arts, morals, politics, and worst of all, education, have deteriorated in quality. This is due to the era of the mass output, she contends.

We are a culture dominated by commercialism, directed to popular consumption rather than to the taste of the most discerning. To describe this phenomenon, Tuchman suggests a system of Q and non-Q, quality and non-quality. Quality in human achievement resists mediocrity, taken to mean less than good. Non-quality implies mediocrity of purpose or effort.

What Is Quality?

The word quality may be understood in two ways. First, the nature or essential characteristic of something. A healthy apple shows forth its quality and its beauty. An apple turning brown lacks quality and beauty.

Second Meaning of Quality

The second meaning of quality deals with man-made efforts to express the form’s excellence.

Since the first appearance of “60 Minutes” in the 1970’s, the TV magazine program has won numerous awards for its outstanding reportage. Every Sunday night, about fourteen million viewers watch the program. What has made “60 Minutes” such a success? First, the form is simple, clear, and concise: the sole and solitary ticking of a stop-watch that begins and ends the program, two or three in-depth interviews, each with commercial break. Next, the internal structure is set-up with point-counterpoint, and narrative talk-over. Finally, the program is highly regarded for its well-spoken journalists; truthful, unbiased journalism; its scoops, probing interviews, and popular appeal. Through the years, the form has remained unchanged because of its high standards of excellence. No one has as yet suggested doing otherwise.

Other examples. We value quality of character by taking the measure of a person. Through the intuitive eye, every day we size up people because character is expressed in word and action.

Don’t we value quality time with family and friends? Quality time for rest and relaxation? Quality in food and in clothing? Quality was an essential to the great artists, for they aspired to the highest standards. A building, a picture, a piece of music, whether sacred or profane, is said to be defective, even ugly, if it lacks quality. Gregorian Chant is a treasury of sacred music as yet unparalleled in quality.

Most of us cannot quite define the second meaning of quality, but Tuchman does so in a clear and practical way as outlined below:

“Quality is the investment of the best skill and effort possible to produce the finest and most admirable result possible.

Its presence or absence characterizes every man-made object, service, skilled or unskilled labor – laying bricks, painting a picture, ironing shirts, practicing medicine, shoemaking, research and scholarship, writing a book. And, of course, teaching in our schools.

You do it well or you do it half-well. Materials are sound and durable, or they are sleazy. Apply this to education.

Quality is achieving or reaching for the highest standard as against the sloppy or fraudulent. Quality is honesty of purpose as against catering to cheap or sensational sentiment. It does not allow compromise with the second rate.

Quality can be attained without genius.

Quality is that attribute inherent in a given work, and not in the eye of the beholder. Most people know the difference between what is quality and what is slipshod — between New England white-steepled churches and Howard Johnson’s orange-roofed eateries, between Fred Astaire and Johnny Carson. We may add: between PBS and Comedy Central, between Bach and Rock/Rap.

Every day we experience sloppy performance in manual, clerical, and bureaucratic work. “Much of it is slow, late, inaccurate, and inefficient, either from lack of training or from lack of caring or both.” Why bother? Why knock yourself out?

Non-Quality Education

Tuchman concedes that America has some superb schools, public and private, but the dominant tendency in them is toward non-quality. “Education for the majority has deteriorated for want of demanding effort.” Put another way, we settle for less when we should be aiming for more. Again, why knock yourself out?

A prevailing attitude has seeped in to both teaching and learning. Children, it is argued, should not be corrected for fear of harming their self-esteem. Competition is bad. Learning must be fun. Students must be allowed to study whatever they like; therefore, courses are listed as electives. Read the curriculum, and you will see how little is required by way of substance. Children are permitted to fritter away their time instead of learning the discipline of studying.

Quality in Teaching the Catholic Faith

The Church will not have an intelligent, well-informed, and devout adult membership if we do not proclaim the beauty of the faith to our students, and to others, for that matter. And it is beautiful: the beauty of men and women as images of God, the beauty of prayer and a personal relationship with Jesus Christ, and through him the Father and the Holy Spirit, the beauty of our Creed and sacraments, especially Eucharist and Reconciliation, the beauty of living the liturgical year, the church’s ‘year of grace,’ lifelong devotion to the Mother of God and St. Joseph who willingly assumed their roles in the history of our redemption. Our children must be taught personal piety that is integrated within the Body of Christ.

“Why can’t the English teach their children how to speak?”

In the musical, “My Fair Lady,” there is a song that pokes fun at those whose native language is English: While the English can’t teach their children how to speak, “the Scots and the Irish leave you close to tears. There are even places where English completely disappears. In American, they haven’t used it in years!”

The next privilege in providing a quality education to our students is to teach them good communication skills. Developing a love for reading makes their world grow larger. The mechanics of proper speaking and writing are more essential than ever at a time when proper English is well under assault in social media. What does it mean to be well spoken? It includes proper diction, the choice and use of grammatically-correct words and phrases in speech and writing. Clear enunciation avoids swallowing words and garbled speech, as so many do on television news programs. Teaching quality communication skills will prove to be a gift for the future success of our students.

In the musical, “My Fair Lady,” Professor Henry Higgins places marbles in the mouth of Eliza Doolittle to improve her pronunciation from unintelligible cockney to that of an English lady.

His action recalls the fourth-century orator Demosthenes, who as a young man, suffered from a speech impediment. It may have been a stutter or an inability to pronounce the “r” sound, or both. He devised a series of exercises for himself to improve his speech by practicing with stones in his mouth. This forced him to work extra hard at getting the sounds out with clear diction. When his diction became clearer, he discarded the stones and found he was able to enunciate must more effectively than before. He also practiced reciting speeches over the roar of the ocean waves.

Professor Higgins prods Eliza, entreats Eliza: “Think of what you’re trying to accomplish. Think of what you’re dealing with — the majesty and grandeur of the English language — the language of Shakespeare and Milton. It’s the greatest possession we have. The noblest thoughts that ever flowed through the hearts of men are contained in its extraordinary imaginative and musical mixture of sounds. And that’s what you’ve set out to conquer, Eliza. And conquer you will.”

And conquer she did. Eliza Doolittle was transformed from a common flower girl with a Cockney accent into a radiant “Hungarian princess” who spoke beautifully and impressed the dignitaries at the ball.

Hard work, a labor of love, and a new life for Eliza and for Henry.

This article is part of a series on Catholic education. To read the first part of this series, click here.

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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Don’t be fooled – ‘Grandma’ lacks any redeeming qualities

by Carl Kozlowski • August 27, 2015

We’ve entered the dog days of summer, in which all the cool movies were released weeks ago, and we’re stuck with the movies consigned to the cinematic trash heap. This week’s big releases, “American Ultra” and “Hitman: Agent 47,” were barely even shown to critics, if at all.

But sneaking into the bottom of the pile is one movie, “Grandma,” that most critics seem to like – with 80 percent approval according to Rotten Tomatoes, a site that collects dozens of the nation’s critics’ reviews. Don’t believe the hype on this one, though, as it’s the most vile movie to come down the pike in years.

Maybe ever. And I’ve seen a lot of movies, folks. This isn’t so much a movie, as it is an 80-minute piece of pro-abortion propaganda that Planned Parenthood itself couldn’t have made more offensive.

The plot is simple, as a nasty, foul-mouthed small-town lesbian grandma (one of those oppressed small-town women who had to hide their true nature and get married before America came to its senses, of course) named Elle (Lily Tomlin) finds that her granddaughter Sage (Julia Garner) has gotten pregnant and wants an abortion that she has no funds for. Over the course of a day, we follow Elle as she takes Sage on a string of ugly visits to friends and family in search of raising the $600 needed for the abortion.

The two confront the father of the child, Sage’s worthless boyfriend (Nat Wolff); an old boyfriend of Elle’s (Sam Elliott); a transsexual hairdresser friend of Elle’s (Laverne Cox) who says Elle helped her with something in the past that’s implied to be morally illicit; Elle’s much-younger ex-girlfriend (Judy Greer) and finally Elle’s daughter (Marcia Gay Harden), whom she convinces to pay for the remaining portion of Sage’s abortion fee.

In other words, it’s just a sweet little slice of small-town American life. Or rather, how Hollywood likes to imagine small-town America, while actually scoffing at it from their elite West Coast perches.

Throughout, the subject matter is utterly offensive and the characters are shrill, profane, unlikeable loudmouths, with no one winning over any sane viewer’s heart. Writer-director Paul Weitz co-directed the morally abominable “American Pie” and sinks to even lower depths here, which is a shame because he’s also proven capable of making wonderfully heartfelt movies like “About A Boy.”

It’s a shame that Lily Tomlin, who in the 1970s and ‘80s was a comic genius, seems committed to advancing as thoroughly twisted a message as possible into her work as she fades out into the twilight of her years. A lesbian herself, who married her longtime partner in 2013, Tomlin has also managed to draw critical praise in recent months as the co-star (with Jane Fonda, go figure) of “Frankie & Grace,” a Netflix sitcom about two senior citizen females who discover their longtime husbands have been carrying on an affair together for decades.

Shame on Martin Sheen for taking on the role of one of those husbands and making light of what has to be a devastating situation for the thankfully rare women who go through it in real life. But the critics loved that show too, proving that there’s no message too weird and immoral to gain praise from the mainstream media.

But “Grandma” is a truly curious case, a movie in which even if you think Tomlin’s character is doing a great thing, has a tone-deaf ear for what’s funny and what’s just histrionic anger. Be thankful for the fact that its studio is only putting it out in a small release that’s unlikely to expand far into the Middle American towns it claims to respect but in actuality despises.

Utterly lacking in redeeming values, “Grandma” is unpleasant to sit through from start to finish. It’s too bad its funders didn’t terminate the production funding instead.

Carl Kozlowski has been a professional film critic and essayist for the past five years at Pasadena Weekly, in addition to the Christian movie site Movieguide.org, the conservative pop culture site Breitbart.com Big Hollywood, the Christian pop culture magazine Relevant, and New City newspaper in Chicago. He also writes in-depth celebrity interviews for Esquire.com and The Progressive. He is owner of the podcasting site radiotitans.com, which was named one of the Frontier Fifty in 2013 as one of the 50 best talk-radio outlets in the nation by talkers.com and will be re-launching it in January 2014 after a five-month sabbatical. He lives in Los Angeles.

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SUNDAY • AUGUST 30, 2015

Twenty-second Sunday in Ordinary Time

First Reading (Dt 4:1-2, 6-8; NRSVCE)

Moses said to the people, “So now, Israel, give heed to the statutes and ordinances that I am teaching you to observe, so that you may live to enter and occupy the land that the Lord, the God of your ancestors, is giving you. You must neither add anything to what I command you nor take away anything from it, but keep the commandments of the Lord your God with which I am charging you.

“You must observe them diligently, for this will show your wisdom and discernment to the peoples, who, when they hear all these statutes, will say, ‘Surely this great nation is a wise and discerning people!’ For what other great nation has a god so near to it as the Lord our God is whenever we call to him? And what other great nation has statutes and ordinances as just as this entire law that I am setting before you today?”

Second Reading (Jas 1:17-18, 21b-22, 27; NRSVCE)

Every generous act of giving, with every perfect gift, is from above, coming down from the Father of lights, with whom there is no variation or shadow due to change. In fulfillment of his own purpose he gave us birth by the word of truth, so that we would become a kind of first fruits of his creatures.

Welcome with meekness the implanted word that has the power to save your souls.

But be doers of the word, and not merely hearers who deceive themselves.

Religion that is pure and undefiled before God, the Father, is this: to care for orphans and widows in their distress, and to keep oneself unstained by the world.

Gospel Reading (Mk 7:1-8, 14-15, 21-23; NRSVCE)

Now when the Pharisees and some of the scribes who had come from Jerusalem gathered around Jesus, they noticed that some of his disciples were eating with defiled hands, that is, without washing them. (For the Pharisees, and all the Jews, do not eat unless they thoroughly wash their hands, thus observing the tradition of the elders; and they do not eat anything from the market unless they wash it; and there are also many other traditions that they observe, the washing of cups, pots, and bronze kettles.) So the Pharisees and the scribes asked him, “Why do your disciples not live according to the tradition of the elders, but eat with defiled hands?” He said to them, “Isaiah prophesied rightly about you hypocrites, as it is written,

‘This people honors me with their lips,

but their hearts are far from me;

in vain do they worship me,

teaching human precepts as doctrines.’

You abandon the commandment of God and hold to human tradition.”

Then he called the crowd again and said to them, “Listen to me, all of you, and understand: there is nothing outside a person that by going in can defile, but the things that come out are what defile.

“For it is from within, from the human heart, that evil intentions come: fornication, theft, murder, adultery, avarice, wickedness, deceit, licentiousness, envy, slander, pride, folly. All these evil things come from within, and they defile a person.”

MONDAY • AUGUST 31, 2015

Monday of the Twenty-second Week in Ordinary Time

First Reading (1 Thes 4:13-18; NRSVCE)

But we do not want you to be uninformed, brothers and sisters, about those who have died, so that you may not grieve as others do who have no hope. For since we believe that Jesus died and rose again, even so, through Jesus, God will bring with him those who have died. For this we declare to you by the word of the Lord, that we who are alive, who are left until the coming of the Lord, will by no means precede those who have died. For the Lord himself, with a cry of command, with the archangel’s call and with the sound of God’s trumpet, will descend from heaven, and the dead in Christ will rise first. Then we who are alive, who are left, will be caught up in the clouds together with them to meet the Lord in the air; and so we will be with the Lord forever. Therefore encourage one another with these words.

Gospel Reading (Lk 4:16-30; NRSVCE)

When Jesus came to Nazareth, where he had been brought up, he went to the synagogue on the sabbath day, as was his custom. He stood up to read, and the scroll of the prophet Isaiah was given to him. He unrolled the scroll and found the place where it was written:

“The Spirit of the Lord is upon me,

because he has anointed me

to bring good news to the poor.

He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives

and recovery of sight to the blind,

to let the oppressed go free,

to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.”

And he rolled up the scroll, gave it back to the attendant, and sat down. The eyes of all in the synagogue were fixed on him. Then he began to say to them, “Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.” All spoke well of him and were amazed at the gracious words that came from his mouth. They said, “Is not this Joseph’s son?” He said to them, “Doubtless you will quote to me this proverb, ‘Doctor, cure yourself!’ And you will say, ‘Do here also in your hometown the things that we have heard you did at Capernaum.’” And he said, “Truly I tell you, no prophet is accepted in the prophet’s hometown. But the truth is, there were many widows in Israel in the time of Elijah, when the heaven was shut up three years and six months, and there was a severe famine over all the land; yet Elijah was sent to none of them except to a widow at Zarephath in Sidon. There were also many lepers in Israel in the time of the prophet Elisha, and none of them was cleansed except Naaman the Syrian.” When they heard this, all in the synagogue were filled with rage. They got up, drove him out of the town, and led him to the brow of the hill on which their town was built, so that they might hurl him off the cliff. But he passed through the midst of them and went on his way.

TUESDAY • SEPTEMBER 1, 2015

Tuesday of the Twenty-second Week in Ordinary Time

First Reading (1 Thes 5:1-6, 9-11; NRSVCE)

Now concerning the times and the seasons, brothers and sisters, you do not need to have anything written to you. For you yourselves know very well that the day of the Lord will come like a thief in the night. When they say, “There is peace and security,” then sudden destruction will come upon them, as labor pains come upon a pregnant woman, and there will be no escape! But you, beloved, are not in darkness, for that day to surprise you like a thief; for you are all children of light and children of the day; we are not of the night or of darkness. So then let us not fall asleep as others do, but let us keep awake and be sober. For God has destined us not for wrath but for obtaining salvation through our Lord Jesus Christ, who died for us, so that whether we are awake or asleep we may live with him. Therefore encourage one another and build up each other, as indeed you are doing.

Gospel Reading (Lk 4:31-37; NRSVCE)

Jesus went down to Capernaum, a city in Galilee, and was teaching them on the sabbath. They were astounded at his teaching, because he spoke with authority. In the synagogue there was a man who had the spirit of an unclean demon, and he cried out with a loud voice, “Let us alone! What have you to do with us, Jesus of Nazareth? Have you come to destroy us? I know who you are, the Holy One of God.” But Jesus rebuked him, saying, “Be silent, and come out of him!” When the demon had thrown him down before them, he came out of him without having done him any harm. They were all amazed and kept saying to one another, “What kind of utterance is this? For with authority and power he commands the unclean spirits, and out they come!” And a report about him began to reach every place in the region.

WEDNESDAY • SEPTEMBER 2, 2015

Wednesday of the Twenty-second Week in Ordinary Time

First Reading (Col 1:1-8; NRSVCE)

Paul, an apostle of Christ Jesus by the will of God, and Timothy our brother,

To the saints and faithful brothers and sisters in Christ in Colossae:

Grace to you and peace from God our Father.

In our prayers for you we always thank God, the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, for we have heard of your faith in Christ Jesus and of the love that you have for all the saints, because of the hope laid up for you in heaven. You have heard of this hope before in the word of the truth, the gospel that has come to you. Just as it is bearing fruit and growing in the whole world, so it has been bearing fruit among yourselves from the day you heard it and truly comprehended the grace of God. This you learned from Epaphras, our beloved fellow servant. He is a faithful minister of Christ on your behalf, and he has made known to us your love in the Spirit.

Gospel Reading (Lk 4:38-44; NRSVCE)

After leaving the synagogue Jesus entered Simon’s house. Now Simon’s mother-in-law was suffering from a high fever, and they asked him about her. Then he stood over her and rebuked the fever, and it left her. Immediately she got up and began to serve them.

As the sun was setting, all those who had any who were sick with various kinds of diseases brought them to him; and he laid his hands on each of them and cured them. Demons also came out of many, shouting, “You are the Son of God!” But he rebuked them and would not allow them to speak, because they knew that he was the Messiah.

At daybreak he departed and went into a deserted place. And the crowds were looking for him; and when they reached him, they wanted to prevent him from leaving them. But he said to them, “I must proclaim the good news of the kingdom of God to the other cities also; for I was sent for this purpose.” So he continued proclaiming the message in the synagogues of Judea.

THURSDAY • SEPTEMBER 3, 2015

Memorial of Saint Gregory the Great

First Reading (Col 1:9-14; NRSVCE)

For this reason, since the day we heard it, we have not ceased praying for you and asking that you may be filled with the knowledge of God’s will in all spiritual wisdom and understanding, so that you may lead lives worthy of the Lord, fully pleasing to him, as you bear fruit in every good work and as you grow in the knowledge of God. May you be made strong with all the strength that comes from his glorious power, and may you be prepared to endure everything with patience, while joyfully giving thanks to the Father, who has enabled you to share in the inheritance of the saints in the light. He has rescued us from the power of darkness and transferred us into the kingdom of his beloved Son, in whom we have redemption, the forgiveness of sins.

Gospel Reading (Lk 5:1-11; NRSVCE)

Once while Jesus was standing beside the lake of Gennesaret, and the crowd was pressing in on him to hear the word of God, he saw two boats there at the shore of the lake; the fishermen had gone out of them and were washing their nets. He got into one of the boats, the one belonging to Simon, and asked him to put out a little way from the shore. Then he sat down and taught the crowds from the boat. When he had finished speaking, he said to Simon, “Put out into the deep water and let down your nets for a catch.” Simon answered, “Master, we have worked all night long but have caught nothing. Yet if you say so, I will let down the nets.” When they had done this, they caught so many fish that their nets were beginning to break. So they signaled their partners in the other boat to come and help them. And they came and filled both boats, so that they began to sink. But when Simon Peter saw it, he fell down at Jesus’ knees, saying, “Go away from me, Lord, for I am a sinful man!” For he and all who were with him were amazed at the catch of fish that they had taken; and so also were James and John, sons of Zebedee, who were partners with Simon. Then Jesus said to Simon, “Do not be afraid; from now on you will be catching people.” When they had brought their boats to shore, they left everything and followed him.

FRIDAY • SEPTEMBER 4, 2015

Friday of the Twenty-second Week in Ordinary Time

First Reading (Col 1:15-20; NRSVCE)

Jesus is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation; for in him all things in heaven and on earth were created, things visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or powers — all things have been created through him and for him. He himself is before all things, and in him all things hold together. He is the head of the body, the church; he is the beginning, the firstborn from the dead, so that he might come to have first place in everything. For in him all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell, and through him God was pleased to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, by making peace through the blood of his cross.

Gospel Reading (Lk 5:33-39; NRSVCE)

Then the scribes and Pharisees said to Jesus, “John’s disciples, like the disciples of the Pharisees, frequently fast and pray, but your disciples eat and drink.” Jesus said to them, “You cannot make wedding guests fast while the bridegroom is with them, can you? The days will come when the bridegroom will be taken away from them, and then they will fast in those days.” He also told them a parable: “No one tears a piece from a new garment and sews it on an old garment; otherwise the new will be torn, and the piece from the new will not match the old. And no one puts new wine into old wineskins; otherwise the new wine will burst the skins and will be spilled, and the skins will be destroyed. But new wine must be put into fresh wineskins. And no one after drinking old wine desires new wine, but says, ‘The old is good.’”

SATURDAY • SEPTEMBER 5, 2015

Saturday of the Twenty-second Week in Ordinary Time

First Reading (Col 1:21-23; NRSVCE)

You who were once estranged and hostile in mind, doing evil deeds, he has now reconciled in his fleshly body through death, so as to present you holy and blameless and irreproachable before him — provided that you continue securely established and steadfast in the faith, without shifting from the hope promised by the gospel that you heard, which has been proclaimed to every creature under heaven. I, Paul, became a servant of this gospel.

Gospel Reading (Lk 6:1-5; NRSVCE)

One sabbath while Jesus was going through the grainfields, his disciples plucked some heads of grain, rubbed them in their hands, and ate them. But some of the Pharisees said, “Why are you doing what is not lawful on the sabbath?” Jesus answered, “Have you not read what David did when he and his companions were hungry? He entered the house of God and took and ate the bread of the Presence, which it is not lawful for any but the priests to eat, and gave some to his companions?” Then he said to them, “The Son of Man is lord of the sabbath.”