VOLUME 2, ISSUE 10  •  SEPTEMBER 3, 2016

Table of Contents

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VATICAN NEWS

Pope Francis tells a fractured world: God’s mercy gives hope for change

Did you know Mother Teresa experienced visions of Jesus?

Open your hearts to those ‘defeated by life,’ Pope Francis says

Pope Francis meets Mark Zuckerberg and his wife at the Vatican

Have you been performing works of mercy? If so, the Vatican wants to know

Mother Teresa ‘radically loved her neighbor’

Pope Francis creates new Vatican office for integral human development

Priest related to Princess Diana on the path to sainthood

Have the courage to ask for forgiveness, Pope Francis says

Openness to grace strengthens human reason, Pope reminds cardiologists

Francis welcomes peace deal in Colombia

Pope Francis declares care for creation a new work of mercy

Cardinal Turkson: The human person is central to care for creation

Mother Teresa once made an incognito visit to a prison in Rome

WORLD NEWS

Firefighters sent by Pope rescue 3-old-boy after earthquake

Mother Teresa’s global impact at center of U.N. exhibit

Overturn of burkini ban does not end France’s cultural debate

Priest suffers minor injuries after failed suicide bomb, axe attack at Mass

Carl Anderson: Our Lady of Guadalupe paves a path for the Americas

Catholic and Shia Muslim leaders unite to condemn WMDs, terrorism

‘I was sure that it was Mother Teresa who healed me’

Will Egypt take step towards religious freedom with new law?

Eucharist desecrated, Missionaries of Charity assaulted in Argentina

This is Mongolia’s first native priest: Father Joseph Enkh Baatar

For Archbishop Gómez, mercy makes Christians credible

What the Church in South Sudan is doing amid a humanitarian crisis

In Ethiopia, Church-run small business program aims for a better tomorrow

How a Catholic program helps Pakistan’s women farmers

The Marian Shrine of Walsingham and Christian pilgrimage

Key bishop: ‘We don’t know’ if Fr. Tom Uzhunnalil is still alive

U.S. NEWS

Sexual orientation and gender identity: What does the science say?

As cost of EpiPen soars, what are the ethics of drug pricing?

What’s behind the jump in maternal mortality rates in Texas?

A ‘Catholic problem’ for Trump? It’s hard to say, actually

To help desperate refugees, Mormons and Catholics join hands

For this disability advocate, Colorado assisted suicide measure still not safe

The U.S. has resettled 10,000 Syrian refugees in the last year

To this Christian woman, headscarves are a religious freedom issue too

How the Church is fighting Zika virus in the U.S.

It is not policy to deny IUD removals, Catholic hospital clarifies

Soros money tried to exploit Pope’s U.S. visit to influence 2016 elections

Diocese of Lincoln sees strong turnout at first Sacred Music Clinic

FEATURES

Reaping the Whirlwind: In the wake of the Obergefell opinion, is legalizing polygamy next?

Apologists, Catechists, Theologians: Wake Up!

Mariano Rivera, Pentecostal Christians, and the Catholic Church

This journalist first told the world about Mother Teresa

Mother Teresa’s canonization portrait – and what the artist thought of her

SCRIPTURE READINGS

Sunday • September 4, 2016

Monday • September 5, 2016

Tuesday • September 6, 2016

Wednesday • September 7, 2016

Thursday • September 8, 2016

Friday • September 9, 2016

Saturday • September 10, 2016

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Volume 2, Issue 10 • September 3, 2016

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VATICAN NEWS

Pope Francis tells a fractured world: God’s mercy gives hope for change

by CNA/EWTN News • August 27, 2016

Pope Francis at the general audience in St. Peter’s Square on Dec. 16, 2015. (Daniel Ibanez/CNA)

Bogotá, Colombia — Just as God trusts us and expects us to change, we must treat others “never based on fear but on the hope God has in our ability to change,” Pope Francis said in Saturday remarks that rejected the despair of a fractured culture.

“Which will it be: hope for change, or fear?” the Pope asked a gathering of Catholic leaders Aug. 27. “The only thing acting out of fear accomplishes is to separate, to divide, to attempt to distinguish with surgical precision one side from the other, to create false security and thus to build walls.”

By contrast, acting on the basis of hope for change and conversion is something that “encourages and incites.”

He said hope “looks to the future, it makes room for opportunity, and it keeps us moving forward.” Fear-based action bespeaks guilt and punishment, while action based on the hope of transformation “bespeaks trusting, learning, getting up, constantly trying to generate new opportunities.”

The Pope’s words came via video message to Bogota, Columbia, where the Celebration of the Extraordinary Jubilee of Mercy drew participants from all the countries of South America. Over a dozen cardinals and more than 120 bishops registered for the event, as did rectors of national Marian shrines, religious superiors, and directors of associations and new ecclesial communities. The event aims to show the communion of the churches of the Americas. It was jointly organized by the Pontifical Commission for Latin America and the Latin American Episcopal Council.

Pope Francis said he was pleased that all the countries of America were taking part. “Given the many attempts to fragment, divide and set our peoples at odds, such events help us to broaden our horizons and to continue our handshake; a great sign that encourages us in hope,” he said.

The Pope repeated his previous lamentations of a fragmented, throwaway culture, a culture that is “tainted by the exclusion of everything that might threaten the interest of a few.”

“A culture that is leaving by the roadside the faces of the elderly, children, ethnic minorities seen as a threat,” he said. “A culture that little by little promotes the comfort of a few and increases the suffering of many others. A culture that is incapable of accompanying the young in their dreams but sedates them with promises of ethereal happiness and hides the living memory of their elders. A culture that has squandered the wisdom of the indigenous peoples and has shown itself incapable of caring for the richness of their lands.”

“We live in a society that is bleeding, and the price of its wounds normally ends up being paid by the most vulnerable,” he added. “But it is precisely to this society, to this culture, that the Lord sends us. He sends us with one program alone: to treat one another with mercy. To become neighbors to those thousands of defenseless people who walk in our beloved American land by proposing a different way of treating them.”

The Pope’s remarks drew on St. Paul’s First Letter to Timothy.

“Paul minces no words: Jesus Christ came into the world to save sinners, of whom Paul considers himself the worst,” the Pope explained. “He is clearly aware of who he is, he does not conceal his past or even his present. But he describes himself in this way neither to excuse or justify himself, much less to boast of his condition.”

“For all our sins, our limitations, our failings, for all the many times we have fallen, Jesus has looked upon us and drawn near to us. He has given us his hand and showed us mercy,” he continued. “All of us can think back and remember the many times the Lord looked upon us, drew near and showed us mercy. All those times that the Lord kept trusting, kept betting on us. “

The Pope encouraged his audience to concentrate on remembering their sin, not their alleged merits, and to grow in “a humble and guilt-free awareness of all those times we turned away from God – we, not someone else, not the person next to us, much less that of our people – and to be once more amazed by God’s mercy.”

Mercy is not simply a beautiful word. It is a concrete act of drawing close to others and making them feel that “the last word has not yet been spoken” in their lives. These people must be treated in such a way “that those who feel crushed by the burden of their sins can feel relieved at being given another chance.”

“Paul’s God starts a movement from heart to hands, the movement of one who is unafraid to draw near, to touch, to caress, without being scandalized, without condemning, without dismissing anyone. A way of acting that becomes incarnate in people’s lives,” the Pope added.

The way of mercy can seek what is best for the other person “in a way they can understand.”

He noted the action of the merciful father in the Parable of the Prodigal Son. He said that Christians are sometimes tempted to be scandalized, like the older son in the parable who begrudged his father’s mercy towards his wayward brother.

“We might be scandalized that he did not upbraid him but instead treated him for what he was: a son,” the pontiff continued. Pope Francis suggested this is due to “spiritual Alzheimer’s,” which is “when we forget how the Lord has treated us, when we begin to judge and divide people up.”

“We take on a separatist mindset that, without our realizing it, leads us to fragment our social and communal reality all the more,” he said. “We fragment the present by creating ‘groups’. Groups of good and bad, saints and sinners.”

What made St. Paul a disciple was “the trust God showed in him despite his many sins.” If we have the best plans, projects and theories about what to do, but lack mercy, “our pastoral work will be cut off midway.”

He questioned whether the bishops teach the path of showing mercy in their pastoral plans, parish structures, seminaries, missionary activity, clergy meetings and theology.

“Today we are asked especially to show mercy to God’s holy and faithful people – they know a lot about being merciful because they have a good memory – , to the people who come to our communities with their sufferings, sorrows and hurts,” the Pope exhorted. “But also to the people who do not come to our communities, yet are wounded by the paths of history and hope to receive mercy.”

“Mercy is learned, because our Father continues to forgive us. Our peoples already have enough suffering in their lives; they do not need us to add to it,” the Pope said. “To learn to show mercy is to learn from the Master how to become neighbors, unafraid of the outcast and those ‘tainted’ and marked by sin. To learn to hold out our hand to those who have fallen, without being afraid of what people will say. Any treatment lacking mercy, however just it may seem, ends up turning into mistreatment.”

Pope Francis encouraged the Catholic cardinals, bishops, and other leaders to be grateful that God “trusts us to repeat with his people the immense acts of mercy he has shown us.”

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VATICAN NEWS

Did you know Mother Teresa experienced visions of Jesus?

by Hannah Brockhaus (CNA/EWTN News) • August 27, 2016

Mother Teresa. (India 7 Network via Flickr CC BY 2.0)

Vatican City — Even her friend of more than 30 years, Father Sebastian Vazhakala, did not know Mother Teresa had conversations with and visions of Jesus before forming the Missionaries of Charity.

It wasn’t until after her death, for the vast majority of people, that this part of Mother Teresa’s spiritual life was uncovered. “It was a big discovery,” Missionary of Charity priest, Fr. Vazhakala told CNA.

When Mother Teresa’s cause for canonization was opened, just two years after her death in 1997, documents were found in the archives of the Jesuits in Calcutta, with the spiritual director and another of Mother Teresa’s close priest friends, and in the office of the bishop, containing her accounts of the communications.

Fr. Vazhakala, who co-founded the contemplative branch of the Missionaries of Charity alongside Mother Teresa, said he has a document handwritten by Mother Teresa where she discusses what Jesus spoke to her directly during the time of the locutions and visions.

During a period lasting from Sept. 10, 1946 to Dec. 3, 1947, Mother Teresa had ongoing communication with Jesus through words and visions, Fr. Vazhakala said. This all happened while she was a missionary sister in the Irish order of the Sisters of Loreto, teaching at St. Mary’s school in Calcutta.

Mother Teresa wrote that one day at Holy Communion, she heard Jesus say, “I want Indian nuns, victims of my love, who would be Mary and Martha, who would be so united to me as to radiate my love on souls.”

It was through these communications of the Eucharistic Jesus that Mother Teresa received her directions for forming her congregation of the Missionaries of Charity.

“She was so united with Jesus,” Fr. Vazhakala explained, “that she was able to radiate not her love, but Jesus’ love through her, and with a human expression.”

Jesus told her what sort of nuns he wanted her order to be filled with: “‘I want free nuns covered with the poverty of the Cross. I want obedient nuns covered with the obedience of the Cross. I want full-of-love nuns covered with the charity of the Cross,’” Fr. Vazhakala related.

According to the Missionary, Jesus asked her, “Would you refuse to do this for me?” “In fact, Jesus told her in 1947,” Fr. Vazhakala explained, “‘I cannot go alone to the poor people, you carry me with you into them.’”

After this period of joy and consolation, around 1949, Mother Teresa started to experience a “terrible darkness and dryness” in her spiritual life, said Fr. Vazhakala. “And in the beginning she thought it was because of her own sinfulness, unworthiness, her own weakness.”

Mother Teresa’s spiritual director at the time helped her to understand that this spiritual dryness was just another way that Jesus wanted her to share in the poverty of the poor of Calcutta.

This period lasted nearly 50 years, until her death, and she found it very painful. But, Fr. Vazhakala shared that she said, “If my darkness and dryness can be a light to some soul let me be the first one to do that. If my life, if my suffering, is going to help souls to be saved, then I will prefer from the creation of the world to the end of time to suffer and die.”

People around the world know about Mother Teresa’s visible acts of charity toward the poor and sick in the slums of Calcutta, but “the interior life of Mother is not known to people,” said Fr. Vazhakala.

Mother Teresa’s motto, and the motto of her congregation, was the words of Jesus, “I thirst.” And that they could quench the thirst of Jesus by bringing souls to him. “And in every breathing, each sigh, each act of mind, shall be an act of love divine. That was her daily prayer. That was what was motivating her and all the sacrifices, even until that age of 87, and without resting,” he said.

Mother Teresa never rested from her work during her life on earth, and she continues to “work” for souls from heaven. “When I die and go home to God, I can bring more souls to God,” she said at one point, Fr. Vazhakala noted.

She said, “I’m not going to sleep in heaven, but I’m going to work harder in another form.”

Mary Shovlain contributed to this report.

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VATICAN NEWS

Open your hearts to those ‘defeated by life,’ Pope Francis says

by CNA/EWTN News • August 28, 2016

Pope Francis meets with refugees on the Greek island of Lesbos on April 16, 2016. (LOR)

Vatican City — In the wake of the Norcia earthquake, Pope Francis again offered prayers and said he hopes to visit the victims. He also reflected on the gospel call to help the poor.

“Today, Jesus gives a voice to those without a voice and asks each of us an urgent appeal to open our hearts and make our own the sufferings and anxieties of the poor, the hungry, the marginalized, refugees, those defeated by life, those who are rejected by society and the arrogance of the strongest,” the Pope said during his Angelus message on Sunday.

He discussed the gospel parable of a wedding feast where a guest who takes the highest seat of honor must move to the lowest seat when someone of a higher rank arrives.

“Jesus makes us understand the necessity of choosing the last place, to search the smallness and obscurity,” Pope Francis said Aug. 28.

Pride and vanity are the cause of many evils in the world, the Pope explained. When we lower ourselves, then it is God who lifts us up. He highlighted the duty of Christians to be humble and he warned against seeking the reward of men instead of the reward of eternal life given by God, which is a place “close to his heart.”

The Pope led pilgrims in praying a Hail Mary for victims of last week’s central Italy earthquake, saying he hopes to visit them “as soon as possible.”

Pope Francis again expressed his “spiritual closeness” to the dead and survivors of the Aug. 24 quake and said that the Church “shares their suffering and their concerns.”

The death toll from the 6.2-magnitude earthquake has reached at least 281, with more than 200 people rescued from the rubble.

The Pope’s message for the Angelus repeated his frequent call to serve those on the peripheries.

Our hospitality must not be based off of an interest in recognition or receiving something in return, the pontiff said. He quoted Jesus’ words in the Gospel that when giving a banquet “invite the poor, the crippled, the lame and the blind; and you will be blessed because they cannot repay.”

The Pope said that in Sunday’s reading, “Jesus shows his preference for the poor and the excluded, who are the privileged of the kingdom of God, and launches the Gospel message that it is important to serve others for love of God.”

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VATICAN NEWS

Pope Francis meets Mark Zuckerberg and his wife at the Vatican

by Elise Harris (CNA/EWTN News) • August 29, 2016

Pope Francis meets with Facebook co-founder and CEO Mark Zuckerber and his wife Priscilla Chan at the Vatican on Aug. 29, 2016. (L’Osservatore Romano)

Vatican City — On Monday Pope Francis met with Mark Zuckerberg, co-founder and CEO of social networking giant Facebook, at the Vatican, marking the latest in a string of visits from other major tech-heads this year.

According to an Aug. 29 communique from the Vatican, Francis and Zuckerberg, who was accompanied by his wife Priscilla Chan, “spoke of how to use communication technologies to alleviate poverty, encourage the culture of encounter and bring a message of hope, especially to the most disadvantaged.”

The theme of poverty and bringing a message of hope to the poor and marginalized is something Francis has spoken about ceaselessly since his election, barely stopping to take a breath in the past three years.

Though he has publicly admitted in interviews to not owning a cell phone or using the computer, it seems that Pope Francis sees the value of the digital age, specifically in terms of the benefits new technologies can bring to evangelization and promoting human dignity.

His meeting with Zuckerberg and Chan marks the fourth time he has met with a major tech head this year.

On Jan. 15 he welcomed Eric Schmidt, chairman of Google parent company Alphabet, for a private meeting at the Vatican. A week later, he granted another private audience to Apple CEO Tim Cook.

The Pope has also made an effort to engage with big name celebrities who share topics of interest such as Leonardo DiCaprio, with whom he met Jan. 28 in an encounter that focused on issues related to climate change and the environment.

He has also started to make waves on social media, opening a Twitter account in 2012 and launching his own Instagram March 19, just weeks after his Feb. 26 meeting with the CEO and co-founder of Instagram, Kevin Systrom at the Vatican’s Apostolic Palace.

The reason behind Francis’ meeting with Zuckerberg, who co-founded Facebook with college roommates and fellow students at Harvard in 2004, could be prompted by Zuckerberg and Chan’s decision in 2015 to give away virtually all of their $45 billion in Facebook Inc. shares.

As of August 2016, Zuckerberg has an estimated net worth of $53.7 billion, making him one of the top 5 richest people in the world.

When Pope Francis notes, then, as he has frequently done, that according to some studies “80% of the world’s riches are in the hands of 17% of the population,” he’s referring to Zuckerberg.

However, after their daughter Maxina was born in late 2015, Zuckerberg and Chan announced Dec. 2, 2015, in an open letter to her that they would be donating 99 percent of their Facebook stock during their lives through the “Chan Zuckerberg Initiative,” aimed at advancing human potential and promoting equality “for all children in the next generation.”

In their letter, the couple said they had a “moral responsibility” not just to their daughter, but “to all children in the next generation” to make the world a better place.

“Our society has an obligation to invest now to improve the lives of all those coming into this world, not just those already here,” they wrote. “But right now, we don’t always collectively direct our resources at the biggest opportunities and problems your generation will face.”

The couple said their goals in donating their funds would focus on “advancing human potential and promoting equality,” and would consist of several long-term investments made in areas such as health and education, while at the same time working to decrease inequality and use technology to bring about positive change.

Previously, in 2012, Zuckerberg and Chan had agreed to put the majority of their wealth to similar use with The Giving Pledge, a campaign founded by Bill Gates and Warren Buffett in 2010 to encourage the world’s wealthiest people to use their money toward philanthropic causes.

In May, a report from Gizmodo dropped the equivalent of a social media bomb when several former Facebook employees said the company routinely suppressed conservative news in the social media giant’s “trending news” section.

The former Facebook news curators said they were sometimes instructed to insert stories into the “trending” section that had not earned enough attention to be a trending topic, or that they had the freedom to “blacklist” topics that they didn’t want to appear in the section, meaning that the section was not organically curated by the interests of other Facebook users, contrary to popular thought.

Although Facebook denied any allegations of bias and said they had launched an investigation into the issue, the episode has left many skeptical, and doubts remain.

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VATICAN NEWS

Have you been performing works of mercy? If so, the Vatican wants to know

by Elise Harris (CNA/EWTN News) • August 30, 2016

(Dmytro Zinkevych via Shutterstock.com)

Vatican City — In honor of all “workers and volunteers of mercy,” the Vatican is asking those who volunteer in different service opportunities to share their testimony on social media with the hashtag #BeMercy.

Launched by the Pontifical Council for the Promotion of the New Evangelization, the #BeMercy initiative is meant to coincide with the special Sept. 2-4 Jubilee for Workers and Volunteers of Mercy, and is part of Pope Francis’ wider Holy Year of Mercy.

“Charity, love and mercy are different words to express the same reality: God’s love,” Archbishop Rino Fisichella, president of the Council for the New Evangelization, told CNA in an interview.

“God is close to you and God is always helping you,” he said, noting that love, charity and mercy aren’t limited to just helping people, but “become a great witness for us in the moment we are able to forgive people.”

“That will be really the challenge for us today: to be witnesses of pardon and forgiveness.”

The idea to share testimonies of volunteer service is meant to show the fact that within the Church there are many who daily perform the concrete works of mercy Pope Francis has encouraged during the Holy Year.

Since the new initiative is meant to be a special part of the special Jubilee for Workers and Volunteers of Mercy, the council is asking that faithful take to social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, Instagram, etc., to share how they have volunteered their time serving others with the hashtag #BeMercy.

For those who might not know if they qualify as a volunteer of mercy, Archbishop Fisichella said those who fall into the category include “everybody who takes care of a friend or sister. Everybody who is in the condition to help people daily, in silence, in a concrete way, visiting sick people, visiting prisoners, helping poor people, assisting people who are hungry.”

“We have an infinite way of (living the) works of mercy and in this way we have infinite workers of mercy,” he said, adding that everyone in this category is invited to join the jubilee celebration in order “to receive the thank you of Pope Francis.”

Official events for the Jubilee of Workers and Volunteers of Mercy start Friday, Sept. 2 with adoration and confessions in designated churches throughout Rome, followed by a welcoming ceremony at Castel Sant’Angelo, which sits at the end of Via Conciliazione, the large street leading up to St. Peter’s Basilica.

The following morning, jubilee participants will have a special audience with Pope Francis in St. Peter’s Square during which he will give a catechesis on themes related to the Holy Year.

After the audience, pilgrims will have the opportunity to pass through the basilica’s Holy Door, and attend adoration and confession in certain parishes.

On Sunday, Sept. 4, the jubilee will conclude with the canonization Mass for Bl. Mother Teresa of Calcutta, considered one of the greatest witnesses of mercy in our time, celebrated by Pope Francis in St. Peter’s Square.

Speaking of Mother Teresa’s witness to mercy, Archbishop Fisichella said that in addition to honoring all those who give their time in service to others with a special jubilee, Pope Francis also wanted to provide “spiritual assistance” to all those who work in the field, and “who will be the icon of mercy in our sanctuary except Mother Teresa?”

Mother Teresa, he said, “was close to the poorest among the poor and probably for this reason Pope Francis had this inspiration to canonize Mother Teresa and to give a concrete sign how we can be workers of mercy daily.”

Even if Mother Teresa isn’t officially declared a patron for workers of mercy, “she is the icon and the spiritual assistance for everybody,” the archbishop said.

On the topic of security, Archbishop Fisichella stressed that Italian and Vatican police are taking extra precautions to ensure everyone’s safety, so there is no need to fear.

Though groups and pilgrims are still trickling into Rome, the city has already begun to fill up ahead of Mother Teresa’s canonization Sunday.

Archbishop Fisichella said that while he doesn’t have a number as to how many pilgrims might show up, nearly 500,000 came when Padre Pio’s remains were brought to Rome for the launch of the Jubilee, and “so I think that more or less it will be the same number” for Mother Teresa.

For those who aren’t able to make it to the Mass or who aren’t even Catholic, Mother Teresa serves as “a universal sign of goodness, of piety, of mercy, of love,” and will be appreciated as such throughout the world, the archbishop said.

He pointed to Mother Teresa’s often repeated phrase that “I probably don’t speak your language, but I can smile,” noting that one doesn’t have to be Catholic to share in this act of mercy, because “smiling is a universal language.”

“When you are a witness of mercy, a witness of charity, a witness of God’s love,” he said, “a smile, joy, is your universal language.”

Though he never met Mother Teresa personally, Archbishop Fisichella said he has met and spent time with the Missionaries of Charity on several occasions, and “they continue to work with the witness of Mother Teresa, with the ideal of Mother Teresa and with the same charity.”

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VATICAN NEWS

Mother Teresa ‘radically loved her neighbor’

by Hannah Brockhaus (CNA/EWTN News) • August 31, 2016

Mother Teresa in 1980. (L’Osservatore Romano)

Rome, Italy — Mother Teresa didn’t try to solve all of the world’s problems: she simply lived her life in radical service and love of her neighbor, expecting God to take care of the rest, said her spiritual advisor.

“Hindus, Muslims, and Christians alike saw in her a role model. She was popular because she was authentic and she loved people genuinely,” Msgr. Leo Maasburg told CNA.

CNA interviewed Msgr. Maasburg in anticipation of Mother Teresa’s canonization, which takes place in Rome Sept. 4. During the Q&A, the priest talked about her spiritual philosophy, how she helped society in India, her under-recognized political interest and her “darkness of the soul,” among other things.

Msgr. Maasburg, a priest of the Archdiocese of Vienna who was ordained in 1982, met Mother Teresa a few years into his priesthood, remaining her good friend until her death in 1997. Over the years, Msgr. Maasburg joined Mother Teresa and her religious sisters on various travels, including to Rome, India, and Armenia. He also acted as her spiritual advisor, translator, and confessor, and he is the author of Mother Teresa of Calcutta: A Personal Portrait.

The full text of the interview follows:

CNA: You spent much time with Mother Teresa. Is there something about her that has remained untold?

Msgr. Maasburg: There are probably many stories and details that remain yet to be told. Mother Teresa was someone who tried rather to act than to talk. At the same time, she was deeply rooted in prayer. I think this is what made her so effective. Everything she did, she tried to do for and with “the first and only love of her life”: Jesus. And this is probably related to something that we still have to discover and seek to understand more clearly: the spirituality of Mother Teresa. With her canonization, the Church invites us to advance further into the relationship that she entertained with the divine. There is a whole spiritual philosophy to be discovered when we contemplate her life, deeds, and words. I also believe that her political views on society and her messages to the world’s elite when receiving the Nobel Peace Prize or addressing the UN General Assembly have not had the attention they would deserve. Mother Teresa was more than just a Catholic nun with a big heart for the poor. She was a missionary and an ambassador for the sanctity of life, never growing weary of advocating for the dignity of the unborn, the sick, and the dying.

CNA: Critics of Mother Teresa often address the way she pushed people to accept suffering. Are these critics preposterous? How did she address the various problems of the Indian society?

Msgr. Maasburg: Mother Teresa once was confronted with a famous metaphor: Someone asked her if it would not be better to teach the poor how to fish instead of simply feeding them the fish. She agreed, but also answered: ‘My poor are too weak to hold the fishing rod. When they recover in my homes I send them to you so that you can teach them how to fish.’ Although she was always interested in politics, she never tried to be a politician. She attempted to radically love her neighbor – and expected Jesus to take care of the rest. She addressed the problems of the Indian society by living the gospel among the poor. And misery rooted in unimaginable poverty is, and was, certainly one of the sub-continent’s gravest problems. But the cure that she wanted to give the people was not a medical, but a spiritual one: unconditional and tender love and care.

CNA: How has India changed thanks to Mother Teresa’s work? And how can it still change?

Msgr. Maasburg: People called Mother Teresa the Queen of India. This shows how much they loved her. Hindus, Muslims and Christians alike saw in her a role model. She was popular because she was authentic and she loved people genuinely. Her example certainly helped to nurture the understanding in the country that every human being, regardless of their social status, deserves to be treated with respect and has an innate dignity. She was also famous for being a Missionary of Charity and for living her faith openly. Today, some states in India show a tendency to curb religious freedom through anti-conversion laws. Some radical groups try to ignite violence against Christians and Muslims. India can and should be a country where people of different religions respect and live peacefully next to each other.

CNA: Mother Teresa also experienced the “darkness of the soul,” as many saints before and after her. How can this darkness of the soul be explained? And how can Mother Teresa’s experience teach us to get out of a “darkness of the soul?”

Msgr. Maasburg: It is not easy to explain the “darkness of the soul” since it is a mystical experience. Sometimes saintly people receive it as a particular gift from God. It allows them to share in the redemption of mankind, which has distanced itself from God through sin. Mother Teresa’s experience will not teach us how “to get out” of this darkness, it can help us to bear it if we are granted the honor to experience it. However, it is certainly not an easy experience. In her letters, Mother Teresa described it as experiencing the absence of God. Remaining faithful in this suffering has a deeply spiritual effect on souls.

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VATICAN NEWS

Pope Francis creates new Vatican office for integral human development

by Elise Harris (CNA/EWTN News) • August 31, 2016

Pope Francis waves to pilgrims during his May 25, 2016 General Audience in St. Peter’s Square. (Daniel Ibáñez/CNA)

Vatican City — On Wednesday the Vatican announced Pope Francis’ decision to form a new mega-dicastery merging the Vatican offices for Justice and Peace, Migrants, charity and healthcare.

Dedicated to “Promoting Integral Human Development,” the new department – also called a dicastery – was announced in an Aug. 31 communique from the Vatican.

The announcement was accompanied by the Motu Proprio “Humanam progressionem,” meaning “Human Development,” by which Pope Francis formally established the dicastery “Promoting Integral Human Development.”

Set to take effect Jan. 1, 2017, the new congregation will take on the tasks of the Pontifical Councils for Justice and Peace, Migrants and Itinerant Peoples, Cor Unum, and Healthcare Workers.

It will be headed by Cardinal Peter Turkson, who since March 2013 has served as president of the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace.

Francis’ decision to establish the new dicastery is part of his ongoing reform of the Roman Curia, and is a fruit of meetings with his Council of Cardinals, who advise him on matters of Church governance and reform.

During their Sept. 14-16, 2015, meeting at the Vatican, the Council of Cardinals submitted a proposal to the Pope to establish two new mega-dicasteries, one dedicated to Laity, Family and Life, and one dedicated to Justice, Peace and Charity.

The new congregation for Laity, Family and Life was officially announced by Francis during the October 2015 Synod of Bishops on the Family, and is headed by Bishop Kevin Farrell of Dallas. It will officially go into effect tomorrow, Sept. 1.

In addition to taking on the tasks of the pontifical councils for the laity and the family, the new department for Laity, Family and Life will also assume the competencies of the Pontifical Academy for Life.

While the original name of the new congregation for Integral Human Development was initially expected to include the elements of the councils it will merge, the final choice is a reflection of Pope Francis’ own personal style and is reminiscent of themes he has spoken of frequently since his election.

In his Motu Proprio “Humanam progressionem,” signed Aug. 17, Pope Francis stressed that the Church is called to promote the integral development of the human person in the light of the Gospel, which “takes place by attending to the inestimable goods of justice, peace, and the care of creation.”

He approved the statutes for the new dicastery “ad experimentum,” explaining that it will be competent “particularly in issues regarding migrants, those in need, the sick, the excluded and marginalized, the imprisoned and the unemployed, as well as victims of armed conflict, natural disasters, and all forms of slavery and torture.”

As of Jan. 1, 2017, the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, the Pontifical Council Cor Unum, the Pontifical Council for the Pastoral Care of Migrants and Itinerant People, and the Pontifical Council for Health Care Workers “will cease exercising their functions,” and the new mega-dicastery will take effect.

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VATICAN NEWS

Priest related to Princess Diana on the path to sainthood

by CNA/EWTN News • August 31, 2016

Princess Diana. (Pulseman via Flickr CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)

London, England — A relative of Princess Diana, Prince William and Prince Harry has moved one step closer to sainthood.

According to reports from the British news source Catholic Herald, a 20-year investigation into the life and works of Father Ignatius Spencer has recently been approved by Vatican historians.

The positio, or document used in the process to declare someone “venerable,” has officially been passed to the theologians of the Vatican Congregation for the Causes of Sainthood.

If sufficient “evidence of sanctity” is found, they will appeal to Pope Francis to declare the Passionist priest “venerable,” the second of four major steps on the path to canonization as a saint in the Catholic Church.

Fr. Ignatius Spencer was born George Spencer in 1799 and was an Anglican clergyman in the area of Althorp, Northamptonshire, where Lady Diana was buried after she was killed in a Paris car crash in August 1997.

Fr. Spencer converted to Roman Catholicism at the age of 31, scandalizing some in the Victorian society.

The Spencer family, mostly members of the Church of England, were the fifth wealthiest family in the country at the time.

Early on in his priesthood, Fr. Spencer was attracted to the active contemplative community of the Passionists. He became known for his ecumenical efforts in pursuit of “unity in truth,” the same quest for truth that led him to the Catholic faith.

According to Fr. John Kearns, the British Passionist Provincial, Fr. Spencer also maintained his love for cricket, calling it “my mania.”

He was also known for his work with the poor, particularly with Irish immigrants. He once said that he wished he could die like Jesus - “in a ditch, unseen and unknown.” The words ended up being prophetic, because Fr. Spencer died alone after having a seizure on a country lane near Edinburgh, Scotland. His body is entombed in the Church of St Anne and Blessed Dominic in St Helens, Merseyside.

Fr. Spencer is the great-great-great uncle of the Princess Diana, as well as the great uncle of Winston Churchill.

Once Fr. Spencer is declared venerable, the next step in his canonization process would be beatification, which would require evidence of a miracle that occurs through the intercession.

Bishop Mark Davies of Shrewsbury told the Catholic Herald that Fr. Spencer’s life is a “heroic and often neglected” chapter of Catholicism in England.

“In facing the challenge of secularism, Fr Ignatius and his fellow Passionists – Blessed Dominic Barberi and Mother Elizabeth Prout – remind us of the missionary energy and purpose which marked ‘the second spring’ of the Catholic Church in England.”

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VATICAN NEWS

Have the courage to ask for forgiveness, Pope Francis says

by Elise Harris (CNA/EWTN News) • August 31, 2016

Pope Francis waves to pilgrims during his Aug. 31, 2016 General Audience in St. Peter’s Square. (Daniel Ibáñez/CNA)

Vatican City — On Wednesday Pope Francis stressed the importance of having the courage to recognize our sins and ask God for forgiveness, moving forward rather than getting stuck in feelings of shame and rejection.

“How many times do we feel rejected internally because of our sins!” the Pope said Aug. 31, noting that what the Lord tells us in these moments is “have courage, come. For me you are not discarded, have courage.”

In the face of our sins Jesus calls us sons and daughters, he said, adding that “this is the moment of grace, of forgiveness, a moment of inclusion in the life of Jesus, in the life of the Church. It’s the moment of mercy.”

To hear someone say “you are no longer discarded, I forgive you, I embrace you,” is truly “the mercy of God,” he said, adding that “we must have courage to go to him and ask forgiveness for our sins, and then move forward with courage.”

Pope Francis spoke to pilgrims present in a rainy St. Peter’s Square during his Wednesday general audience, continuing his ongoing catechesis on mercy for the Jubilee.

He picked up from where he left off last week, having postponed his catechesis due to the massive earthquake that left several towns in Central Italy in shambles, focusing on the Gospel passage in Matthew in which a woman with hemorrhages touches Jesus’ cloak with the hope of being healed.

Speaking of how the woman, blending in with the crowd, believed that just touching Jesus’ cloak would be enough to heal her ailment, the Pope marveled at her faith, saying she is able to think like that “because she was animated by so much faith and so much hope and, with a touch of cunningness, achieved what was in her heart.”

The woman, he noted, had been sick for many years and had visited several doctors, spending all of her money on painful treatments only to get worse.

As a result, she was “rendered impure” and “excluded from the liturgy, from married life, from normal relationships with others.”

“She was a woman discarded from society,” Francis said, explaining that because of this, “she felt that Jesus could free her from sickness and from the state of marginalization and indignity in which she found herself. In a word, she felt that Jesus could save her.”

When Jesus turned around to see who had touched him, he “admired her faith,” and transformed it “into salvation,” the Pope continued, adding that in the encounter with Christ, “the path of liberation and salvation opens for all; men and women of every time and place.”

Pope Francis then noted now due to her state of exclusion, the woman “acted in secret, behind Jesus’ back” in order not to be seen.

However, instead of looking at her state of rejection and reproaching her, Jesus instead treats her with mercy and tenderness. Jesus, the Pope said, “knows what happened and seeks a personal encounter with her, the one the woman deeply desired.”

“This means that Jesus doesn’t just welcome her, but considered her worthy of the encounter to the point that he gave her the gift of his work and attention.”

In telling the woman “courage, daughter, your faith has saved you,” Jesus has expressed “the entirety of God’s mercy” for the people he encounters, particularly for those who have been discarded, Francis said.

Not only does Jesus restore her health, but he fulfills her hopes by abolishing her despair, he restores her to the community and “frees her from social and religious discrimination,” he said.

What Jesus gives, then, “is total salvation, which reintegrates the woman’s life into the sphere of God’s love and, at the same time, restores her to her full dignity.”

Francis closed his address by noting that Jesus is the only source “from which salvation springs forth for all men,” and stressing that “faith is the fundamental disposition to welcome it.”

“Jesus, yet again, with his demeanor full of mercy, indicates to the Church the path to take in order to go to the encounter of every person, so that each one may be healed in body and spirit, and recover their dignity as a child of God.”

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VATICAN NEWS

Openness to grace strengthens human reason, Pope reminds cardiologists

by Hannah Brockhaus (CNA/EWTN News) • August 31, 2016

Pope Francis greets members of the European Society of Cardiology on Aug. 31, 2016. (L’Osservatore Romano)

Vatican City — The Church supports the work of studying God’s creation in the human body and encourages the sciences in service to the weak and infirm of society, Pope Francis told cardiologists Wednesday.

“Nature, in all its complexity, and the human mind, are created by God; their richness must be studied by skilled men and women, in the knowledge that the advancement of the philosophical and empirical sciences, as well as professional care in favour of the weakest and most infirm, is a service that is part of God’s plan,” the Pope said Aug. 31.

“Openness to the grace of God, an openness which comes through faith, does not weaken human reason, but rather leads it towards knowledge of a truth which is wider and of greater benefit to humanity,” he added in his speech given to 35,000 specialists from 140 countries during the world congress of the European Society of Cardiology being held in Rome this week.

Pope Francis thanked those present for their dedication, not only to scientific study and discussion, but also to all those who are sick.

He recalled that “the scientist, in his or her research, is never neutral, in as much as each one has their own history, their way of being and of thinking,” and that they therefore require “in a sense, a purification” by which “the toxins which poison the mind’s pursuit of truth and certainty are removed,” enabling “a more incisive understanding of the meaning of things.”

“We cannot deny that our knowledge, even our most precise and scientific knowledge, needs to progress by asking questions and finding answers concerning the origin, meaning and finality of reality; and this includes man,” he said.

“The sciences alone, however, whether natural or physical, are not sufficient to understand the mystery contained within each person. When man is viewed in his totality – allow me to emphasize this point, we are able to have a profound understanding of the poorest, those most in need, and the marginalized.”

It is by being seen in his totality that patients can “benefit from your care and the support and assistance offered by the public and private health sectors. We must make great efforts to ensure that they are not ‘discarded’ by a culture which promotes a ‘throwaway’ mentality,” he exhorted.

Pope Francis noted how physicians may feel “trepidation and awe” when faced with the vast road of scientific study and discovery still to be made, and that the Magisterium of the Church affirms the importance of scientific research in the protection of human life. “The Church understands that efforts directed to the authentic good of the person are actions always inspired by God,” he said.

Cardiologists, by their work, are able to heal physical illness and are able to perceive that there are laws “engraved within human nature” that cannot be changed or manipulated, but must be respected, in order to cooperate with the designs of the creator.

“For this reason, it is important that men and women of science, as they examine themselves in the light of that great mystery of human existence, do not give in to the temptation to suppress the truth,” Pope Francis said.

“You look after the heart. How much symbolism is enshrined in this word!” he said. “How many hopes are contained in this human organ! In your hands you hold the beating core of the human body, and as such your responsibility is very great!”

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VATICAN NEWS

Francis welcomes peace deal in Colombia

by Hannah Brockhaus (CNA/EWTN News) • August 31, 2016

Colombian pilgrims in St. Peter’s Square on April 20, 2016. (Daniel Ibanez/CNA)

Vatican City — On Wednesday Pope Francis expressed his pleasure that peace negotiations between the Colombian government and FARC rebels have been finalized, though he declined to send a representative to help select judges for a truth and justice commission.

The Pope “reiterates his support for the goal of attaining the peace and reconciliation of the entire Colombian people, in light of human rights and Christian values, which are at the heart of Latin American culture,” stated an Aug. 31 communique from the Vatican Secretary of State.

Pope Francis had declined an Aug. 12 invitation to appoint a representative to the committee in charge of selecting judges for the Special Jurisdiction for Peace, explaining that given “the universal vocation of the Church and the mission of the Successor of Peter as Pastor of the People of God” it would be more appropriate for another party to fulfill this task.

A ceasefire came into effect in Colombia this week as a result of a peace accord reached Aug. 24 between the Colombian government and the country’s largest rebel group, Revolutionary Armed Forces of Columbia (FARC), intended to end the country’s 52-year conflict.

Since 1964, as many as 260,000 people have been killed and millions displaced in Colombia’s civil war. The Marxist FARC rebels and the Colombian government have been engaged in peace talks in Cuba since 2012.

The conflict has engendered right wing paramilitaries aligned with the government, as well as secondary rebel groups such as the National Liberation Army.

The agreement still needs to be approved by Colombians in a popular vote, scheduled to take place Oct. 2. Many have welcomed the peace accord, but some – including former president Alvaro Uribe – charge that it is too lenient on the FARC.

The deal would incorporate some of FARC’s leadership into the government in exchange for their disarmament and renunciation of kidnapping and drug trafficking.

Pope Francis has voiced his support for an end to the violence in Colombia before, most recently during an in-flight Q&A with journalists during a return flight to Rome Sept. 27, 2015.

In response to a question regarding his feelings about a peace accord to be signed in March 2016 – an agreement which ultimately fell through – Pope Francis responded that when he heard the news of the upcoming signing he said, “Lord, help us reach March.”

“I was very happy and I felt like I was a part of it because I’ve always wanted this,” the Pope said. “I spoke to (Colombian) President Santos twice about this problem and not only me, but the Holy See. The Holy See was always willing to help and do what it could.”

Regarding this week’s finalization of the 297-page peace accord, Pope Francis entrusted the peace process in Columbia to the Blessed Virgin Mary.

“Pope Francis commends the peace process in Colombia to the maternal protection of the Most Holy Mother of God, Queen of Peace,” the official communique reads, “and he invokes the gift of the Holy Spirit to enlighten the hearts and minds of those who are called to promote the common good of the Colombian nation.”

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VATICAN NEWS

Pope Francis declares care for creation a new work of mercy

by Elise Harris (CNA/EWTN News) • September 1, 2016

(Gez Xavier Mansfield via Unsplash)

Vatican City — On Thursday Pope Francis yet again showed his knack for surprises and his openness to “newness” by adding the care of creation to the traditional sets of both the corporal and spiritual works of mercy.

“We usually think of the works of mercy individually and in relation to a specific initiative: hospitals for the sick, soup kitchens for the hungry, shelters for the homeless, schools for those to be educated, the confessional and spiritual direction for those needing counsel and forgiveness.”

However, when we look at the works of mercy as a whole, “we see that the object of mercy is human life itself and everything it embraces,” the Pope said in his message for the World Day of Prayer for the Care of Creation, published Sept. 1.

Since human life itself and all that it entails naturally includes caring for creation, Francis proposed “a complement” to the two traditional sets of seven corporal and spiritual works of mercy.

“May the works of mercy also include care for our common home,” he said, explaining that as a spiritual work of mercy, care for creation “calls for a grateful contemplation of God’s world which allows us to discover in each thing a teaching which God wishes to hand on to us.”

As a corporal work of mercy, he said, it “requires simple daily gestures which break with the logic of violence, exploitation and selfishness and makes itself felt in every action that seeks to build a better world.”

Instituted by Pope Francis in 2015 shortly after the release of his environmental encyclical “Laudato Si,” the World Day of Prayer for the Care of Creation takes place each year on Sept. 1.

Francis’ decision to implement the event is in keeping with themes expressed in the encyclical, and is also seen as a sign of unity with the Orthodox Church, which established September 1 as a day to celebrate creation in 1989.

The seven traditional corporal works of mercy include concrete acts of charity such as feeding the hungry; giving drink to the thirsty; clothing the naked; sheltering the homeless; visiting the imprisoned; visiting the sick and burying the dead.

The spiritual works, on the other hand, entail actions like instructing the ignorant; counseling the doubtful; admonishing the sinner; bearing wrongs patiently; forgiving offenses willingly; comforting the sorrowful and praying for the living and the dead.

Caring for creation, then, marks a new opportunity not only to get a green thumb, but to practice mercy while doing so.

At a Sept. 1 news conference announcing Pope Francis’ message for the 2016 event, Cardinal Peter Turkson, President of the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace and president-elect for the newly established dicastery for Promoting Integral Human Development, said a new work of mercy dedicated to creation reflects Pope Francis’ intentions in writing Laudato Si.

After evaluating and amending our own lives in terms of how we personally care for creation, “Pope Francis is calling us toward a new work of mercy.”

“Nothing unites us to God more than an act of mercy, for it is by mercy that the Lord forgives our sins and gives us the grace to practice acts of mercy in his name,” the cardinal said, quoting the Pope’s environmental encyclical.

“This is really the final step of ecological conversion, a true internalization of an ecological sensibility,” he said, echoing Pope Francis’ own words that that caring for creation is truly a “complement (to) both the spiritual and corporal works of mercy.”

Francis’ message “is the next logical step” after writing Laudato Si, Cardinal Turkson said, because “it is showing us how to internalize its teaching in our lives and in our world.”

The Pope, he said, “is asking us to live Laudato Si. Are we ready to respond to the Holy Father’s invitation – and challenge?”

In comments to journalists, Terence Ward, author of the book “The Guardian of Mercy” on famous Renaissance painter Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio’s work “The Seven Works of Mercy,” and who was also present at the Sept. 1 news conference, said the new work of mercy is meant to be a concrete action that “helps you change your way of thinking.”

“It’s not about changing the world tomorrow, it’s about changing ourselves and how we look at the world,” he said, explaining that for Pope Francis, care for creation is “it’s an overarching work of mercy from which all others follow.”

To give tainted water or food to the thirsty of hungry “doesn’t make sense,” nor does sheltering someone in a house about to fall apart, he said, noting that the Pope is inviting us “to reflect” on the new work and how it can be put to action in our daily lives.

In his message, divided into 6 points, Pope Francis noted the frequent remarks of Patriarch Bartholomew I of Constantinople on the need to care for our common home, drawing attention “to the moral and spiritual crisis at the root of environmental problems.”

Quoting his encyclical Laudato Si, Francis cautioned that “God gave us a bountiful garden, but we have turned it into a polluted wasteland of debris, desolation and filth.”

“We must not be indifferent or resigned to the loss of biodiversity and the destruction of ecosystems, often caused by our irresponsible and selfish behavior,” he said, adding that “2015 was the warmest year on record, and 2016 will likely be warmer still.”

Mankind is called to “till and keep” the earth in “a balanced and respectful way,” he said, noting that “to till too much, to keep too little, is to sin.”

He encouraged Christians to make an examination of conscience, evaluating the ways in they have contributed to “the disfigurement and destruction of creation,” given that “we all generate small ecological damage.”

After doing a sincere examination of conscience, “we can confess our sins against the Creator, against creation, and against our brothers and sisters,” he said, explaining that we confess sins against the environment because “we are penitent and desire to change.”

The grace received from confession must them be put into action with concrete ways of thinking and acting that are more respectful of creation, he said, suggesting the reduction of water use, recycling, carpooling, turning off unused lights and limiting the amount of food cooked to only what will be consumed as ideas to start with.

Care of creation should also contribute “to shaping the culture and society in which we live,” Pope Francis said, adding that economics, politics, society and culture “cannot be dominated by thinking only of the short-term and immediate financial or electoral gains.”

“Instead, they urgently need to be redirected to the common good, which includes sustainability and care for creation.”

Francis concluded his message by stressing that despite our faults and the daunting challenges posed by caring for the environment, “we never lose heart.”

The Creator, he said, “does not abandon us; he never forsakes his loving plan or repents of having created us … for he has united himself definitively to our earth, and his love constantly impels us to find new ways forward.”

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VATICAN NEWS

Cardinal Turkson: The human person is central to care for creation

by Hannah Brockhaus (CNA/EWTN News) • September 1, 2016

(Joshua Earle via UnSplash)

Vatican City — As the Catholic and Orthodox worlds unite to celebrate a day of prayer for the care of creation, the Vatican’s social justice head is offering a reminder that the human person must be at the center of efforts to better the environment.

“It’s very simple: the core of development is the human person. And that’s why Pope Benedict referred to development as a vocation. It’s a vocation that we people have and that basically is a spiritual reference,” Cardinal Turkson told CNA Sept. 1.

“It’s so important that we get a very clear perspective about what we’re doing, about the dignity of people, about their own relationship and dignity, (and) relation with God,” he said.

The cardinal stressed that it’s especially important to remember that “in rendering service in any country to anybody, we seek to improve upon the image of God that already exists in the person.”

Cardinal Turkson spoke to CNA on the same day that Pope Francis released his message for the World Day of Prayer for the Care of Creation, which takes place each year on Sept. 1 and was instituted in 2015 shortly after the release of the Pope’s environmental encyclical “Laudato Si.”

In addition to serving as president of the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, Cardinal Turkson is the president-elect for the newly established dicastery for Promoting Integral Human Development. He was a key player in drafting the environmental encyclical.

In his role as head of the new Vatican department, which will go into effect Jan. 1, 2017, the cardinal will oversee the Holy See’s involvement in issues surrounding migration, slavery, poverty and exclusion, as well as armed conflicts and natural disasters.

In a Sept. 1 news conference on Pope Francis’ message for the World Day of Prayer for the Care of Creation, Cardinal Turkson emphasized that care of creation is about care of people: “When we hurt the earth, we also hurt the poor, whom God loves without limit.”

“So we are being asked to complement both the spiritual and corporal works of mercy with care for our common home,” he said, referencing Pope Francis’ message suggesting that an eighth spiritual and corporal work of mercy – care for creation – be added to the traditional sets of seven each.

When asked if he knew about this “eighth work of mercy,” Turkson replied that he had not had any discussion with Pope Francis about it.

When it comes to examples of how to put the human being and human dignity at the center of all we do, Cardinal Turkson pointed to Mother Teresa, who will be canonized Sunday, as a key figure.

“So now with Mother Teresa, the celebrating of her sainthood in the next few days becomes a big invitation to all of us to know the significance of under-girding our life of service and ministry, of all kinds, with a deep personal life of spirituality and prayer,” he said.

“So thank God for Mother Teresa, and for the example she’s giving to all of us.”

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VATICAN NEWS

Mother Teresa once made an incognito visit to a prison in Rome

by Alvaro de Juana (CNA/EWTN News) • September 2, 2016

Missionaries of Charity at a prison in Rome. (Daniel Ibáñez/CNA)

Rome, Italy — Twenty-two years ago, Mother Teresa of Calcutta quietly visited the Regina Coeli prison in Rome, and now, just days before her canonization, she has “returned” for another visit, thanks to the help of technology.

The Regina Coeli prison in Rome, located not far from the Vatican, hosted an emotional encounter of detainees and two Missionaries of Charity – members of the congregation that Mother Teresa founded – who were able to bring the soon-to-be saint to life through a documentary film teaching more about her.

The prison currently houses 900 detainees, but in years prior, it had come to hold some 1,200. Father Vittorio Trani, a Conventual Franciscan and prison chaplain for 38 years, knew them all. He explained to CNA that Mother Teresa visited the prison in May 1994.

“She came somewhat incognito. I gave permission so they would let her in (because of the heavy security measures) but I didn’t tell anyone about it. She came in and attended Mass with a few detainees. It was very emotional,” he related.

“We had set aside a nice chair for her in the middle, but when she came and saw it, she looked at me and said no and went to another simple chair that was in the back,” the priest recalled with a smile.

“Like other great saints, Mother Teresa has a lot of importance here also because the detainees see her as someone close (to them), she had that ability to be close to people,” he noted.

The priest explained that “we organized this encounter; it’s a very good occasion for the prisoners who don’t know her to get to do so” but especially to “bring them the message she came to announce to them.”

“This Sunday, the day of the canonization, we will celebrate a Mass, and then afterwards everyone will be able to see the ceremony on the television they have in their cells,” he said.

Fr. Trani said that “pastoral ministry in this prison is somewhat different” because “they stay here for a short time, just until the first court proceedings.”

“We do a pastoral ministry of encounter, where we sow and then we’ll see if it remains and then bears fruit, but we give them a word of hope and try to stand alongside the person.” In addition, we have celebrations such as the Eucharist and periods of prayer,” he added.

In his opinion, prison “is one of the privileged places where God is most felt” because “the reality of being without freedom or without family leads all of them to reflect on what is the fundamental point of their lives.”

Father Brian Kolodiejchuk, the postulator for the cause of Mother Teresa, was also at the event, along with Sister Patrick – a representative of the congregation in Calcutta – and Sister Cyrenne. They carried in procession a reliquary of Mother Teresa’s blood from the prison chapel.

Sister Cyrenne explained to the detainees that the future saint “needs to be placed within a specific historical situation.”

“God called her and entered into our history, he became present, he called and there was a response of love. Mother Teresa said ‘yes.’”

The concluding highlights of the visit were the testimonies read by some of the detainees, visibly moved, in which they especially spoke of the need to have peace and hope.

Once the encounter was over, Sister Patrick and Sister Cyrenne gave out holy cards of Mother Teresa to everyone and placed a medal of the saint of Calcutta around their necks as they spoke with them and encouraged them.

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WORLD NEWS

Firefighters sent by Pope rescue 3-old-boy after earthquake

by CNA/EWTN News • August 26, 2016

Police officers view the remains of a building in Amatrice, Italy that was destroyed during an earthquake on August 25, 2016. (Carl Court/Getty Images)

Rome, Italy — A group of Holy See firefighters sent by Pope Francis to an earthquake-devastated town in Italy rescued a three-year-old boy from the rubble of his home.

According to Vatican Radio, the firefighters were able to rescue the little boy, but were unable to save the lives of his parents or 10-year-old sister. The family had been buried in the rubble of their home in the town of Amatrice when it collapsed in the August 24 earthquake.

The group of firefighters was sent by the Holy Father after a 6.2-Richter scale earthquake tore through Northern Italy. They brought rosaries and images blessed by the pontiff, and worked to rescue victims.

In addition to firefighters, the Pope sent a group of Vatican police to the area on August 25.

Vatican Radio reported that at the Pope’s August 25 Mass in the Casa Santa Marta chapel, prayers were offered for all those affected by the event.

The death toll from the earthquake has reached at least 281, with more than 200 people rescued from the rubble. Because the quake occurred in the early morning, many people were sleeping and unable to escape, increasing the number of people buried when buildings collapsed. Amatrice was among the hardest-hit areas.

Along with the firefighters and police, there are several doctors and nurses from the Vatican prepared to travel to the earthquake-affected areas if their help is needed.

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WORLD NEWS

Mother Teresa’s global impact at center of U.N. exhibit

by Andrea Gagliarducci (CNA/EWTN News) • August 28, 2016

Mother Teresa prayer card for WYD pilgrims in Krakow, Poland on July 25, 2016. (Kate Veik/CNA)

New York City, N.Y. — Mother Teresa’s tireless work for the poor and her relevance for global affairs will be featured at the United Nations, whose New York headquarters will host several events on her life as an unprecedented tribute to a saint of the Catholic Church.

Msgr. Leo Maasburg will be among the participants in the U.N. commemorations. He told CNA that Mother Teresa “was more than just a Catholic nun with a big heart for the poor.”

“She was a missionary and an ambassador for the sanctity of life, never growing weary of advocating for the dignity of the unborn, the sick and the dying,” he said.

Msgr. Maasburg said he believes her views on politics and society and her messages to the world’s elite “have not had the attention they would deserve.”

The priest, who was born in Austria, was Mother Teresa’s spiritual director for several months in 1988 when she opened her first houses in Moscow and Armenia. He also traveled with her to India, Rome and many other places around the world.

Msgr. Maasburg said the nun was “someone who tried to act rather than to talk.”

“At the same time, she was deeply rooted in prayer, and I think this is what made her so effective,” he said, adding “everything she did, she tried to do for and with the first and only love of her life: Jesus.”

The United Nations’ conference building in New York will host a Mother Teresa exhibit Sept. 6-9.

The exhibit, titled “Leave No One Behind,” is organized by the Holy See Permanent Observer Mission to the United Nations and the Alliance Defending Freedom legal group.

At the close of the exhibit, a conference will discuss Mother Teresa’s enduring message to the international community. Msgr. Maasburg will be among the conference speakers.

Mother Teresa’s life and work and its relevance to the international community will also be in focus.

The nun addressed the U.N. General Assembly for its 40th anniversary in October 1985.

Her Nobel Prize acceptance speech 1979 is still considered a milestone. She mentioned abortion as one of the biggest threats to peace, saying “the nations that have legalized abortion are the poorest countries.”

That very passage was on the mind of Alan Sears, president and CEO of Alliance Defending Freedom International. He told CNA that “there can be no true peace as long as any society is committed to the taking of life, especially in the womb.”

“For too long,” he said, “abortionists and their allies promoted and profited from infanticide throughout Europe with few to stand against them. ADF International was formed to advance Mother Teresa’s legacy, and to advocate for life in courts, government chambers and in the courtroom of public opinion across the globe.”

Sears added that aside from her work with and for the poor, Mother Teresa “was also an outspoken advocate for the protection of life — from the unborn to the sick and dying – and the family.”

He stressed that ADF International “seeks to honor her legacy by defending the sanctity of life, family and marriage, and religious freedom at international organizations like the United Nations.”

Mother Teresa, he said, “was the perfect example of how God’s truth, when conveyed with grace and love, can bring peace to all.”

For Sears, religious freedom must be continually defended “to ensure that all are free to spread that same message.”

Msgr. Maasburg added that Mother Teresa’s spirituality is something that needs more examination and understanding.

This spirituality is one that suffered the “darkness of the soul,” as other saints before her. This is “a mystical experience,” Msgr. Maasburg said. Sometimes saintly people receive it as “a particular gift from God.”

“It allows them to share in the redemption of mankind which has distanced itself from God through sin,” he explained.

Mother Teresa’s experience “will not teach us how ‘to get out’ of this darkness, (but) it can help us to bear it if we are granted the honor to experience it.”

“It is certainly not an easy experience,” he said. In her letters, the nun described this experience as “the absence of God.”

“(To) remain faithful in this suffering has a deeply spiritual effect on souls,” the monsignor said.

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Overturn of burkini ban does not end France’s cultural debate

by Mary Rezac (CNA/EWTN News) • August 29, 2016

Burkini. (Kzenon via Shutterstock.com)

Paris, France — The lifting of a controversial burkini ban in one beach town along the French Riviera may signal an end to similar policies in the country - but it has not put an end to cultural tensions surrounding it.

The Council of State, France’s highest administrative court, ruled that the burkini ban in the town of Villeneuve-Loubet “seriously and clearly illegally breached fundamental freedoms,” including freedom of belief.

A burkini (also spelled burqini) is a type of full-body swimwear that some Muslim women wear in order to cover their arms, legs and hair. Citing concerns over terrorism and overt displays of religious affiliation, several coastal towns in France have issued bans against such swimwear in the past few weeks. The policies cite the French Republic’s concept of laïcité (roughly, secularism), saying that women need to dress for the beach in a way that respects “good morals and secularism.”

Tensions in the country have been high after French civilians have been the target of several attacks perpetrated by extremists with the Islamic State. The most recent attacks happened on Bastille Day on July 14, when a terrorist killed 84 people while plowing through crowds with a truck, and again less than two weeks later, when a French Catholic priest was murdered while saying Mass.

Grégor Puppinck, director of the European Centre for Law and Justice in Strasbourg, France, told CNA that while he was glad that the burkini issue may be over, it is not the end of the cultural conflicts in the country.

“I’m quite pleased that it is being lifted … in terms of individual freedoms it is quite important,” he said.

But the burkini ban is just one example of the conflict of cultures that is now out in the open in France, as it grapples with a greater influx of immigrants who do not share traditional French values, Puppinck added.

“We now are in a critical time of our history, and we are realizing that Muslims are Muslims. We believed for decades that the immigrants could become secular, and could adhere to secular values. And now we are witnessing in a large extent the failure of this idea, and now we see that this whole portion of the French population does not want to share these values of our modern, contemporary culture,” he said.

The burkini bans have sparked outcry and debate worldwide, with some people posting photos on social media showing Muslim women being fined by police and removing their clothing in order to comply with the bans.

Many people on Twitter criticized the bukini ban by posting photos of Catholic religious sisters in full habits at the beach.

Bishop Nunzio Galantino, the secretary-general of the Italian bishops’ conference, also criticized the burkini ban, saying that he found it “ironic” that officials are concerned about women who are overdressed while going out for a swim.

“It’s hard to imagine that a woman [in a burkini] who enters the water is there to carry out an attack,” Bishop Galantino said in an interview with Corriere della Sera.

“I can only think of our nuns, and I think of our peasant grandmothers who still wear head coverings,” he said.

Religious sisters in full habit, including a long skirt, long sleeves and a veil, are a common sight on the beaches of Italy.

Italy’s interior minister, Angelino Alfano, told the Corriere della Sera daily newspaper that he thinks the burkini ban could have the opposite of its intended effect.

“The interior minister’s responsibility is to ensure security and to choose the severity of responses which, however, must never become provocations that could potentially attract attacks,” Alfano said.

The recent overturning of the ban in Villeneuve-Loubet could signal the eventual end to the policy across the country. According to the New York Times, Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve suggested in a statement that it was time for the local officials to back down, saying it was now “up to each and every one to responsibly seek to ease tensions, which is the only way to avoid disturbances to public order and to bolster coexistence.”

But later on Friday, French Prime Minister Manuel Valls said in a statement on Facebook that the ruling “doesn’t exhaust the debate that has opened up in our society on the question of the burkini.”

Puppinck told CNA that Christians should be cautious in considering the secular government to be an ally.

“And we should remember that 100 years ago, the same Republican values were used against the Catholics,” Puppinck said. At that time, the Third Republic officially established state secularism in France, causing a subsequent wave of anti-Catholicism, which included the end of government funding for religious schools, mandatory civil marriage and the removal of chaplains from the army.

“So we should remember that the French Republic has always been anti-religious, so Christians should not imagine that the Republic is in some extent their ally, but keep faithful to our own hope and religion and values and faith.”

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Priest suffers minor injuries after failed suicide bomb, axe attack at Mass

by CNA/EWTN News • August 29, 2016

(Orangecatteam via Shutterstock.com)

Jakarta, Indonesia — A priest suffered minor injuries after a man armed with a suicide bomb and an axe attacked at Sunday Mass in Indonesia this weekend.

A woman sitting next to the would-be suicide bomber at St. Joseph Catholic Church in Medan told the Jakarta Post that she noticed the man was fidgeting throughout Mass and unable to follow the liturgy.

When Father Albertus Pandiangan began his homily, the woman said the main connected two cables, presumably to detonate the suicide bomb, causing a small explosion.

According to reports from The Guardian, local chief detective Nur Fallah said the explosion was “like a firecracker, but the firecracker didn’t explode, it only fumed.”

Realizing the suicide bomb had failed, the attacker ran toward the priest armed with an axe and a knife. Parishioners were able to restrain him, and Fr. Pandiangan suffered only a minor injury to the left hand, according to authorities.

While the attacker reportedly carried a piece of paper with a hand-drawn Islamic State flag on it, the motive of the attack is still under investigation.

National Counterterrorism Agency (BNPT) chief Suhardi Alius told Jakarta Globe that authorities believe the suspect is only a “puppet” in the attack, considering his young age.

Christians have been the target of several attacks in the country, which has the largest Muslim majority population in the world.

In addition, recent months have seen attacks around the world, many of them connected to ISIS sympathizers. Last month, an 84-year-old priest was killed by two gunmen while celebrating Mass in France. And on July 14, Bastille Day, a terrorist killed 84 people while plowing through crowds in Nice, France with a truck.

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Carl Anderson: Our Lady of Guadalupe paves a path for the Americas

by CNA/EWTN News • August 29, 2016

Supreme Knight Dr. Carl A. Anderson address the 129th Knights of Columbus Supreme Convention during the States Dinner. (Peter Zelasko/CNA)

Bogotá, Colombia — Our Lady of Guadalupe is the model for how Christian works of mercy can cross cultural divides in the Americas, Supreme Knight of Columbus Carl Anderson told a major Catholic gathering in Colombia on Monday.

Anderson recounted the story of the appearances of Our Lady of Guadalupe to St. Juan Diego, an indigenous man living in early colonial Mexico in 1531.

When Our Lady of Guadalupe healed Juan Diego’s uncle, she “transcended cultures and welcomed everyone, while leading them to Christ,” Anderson said Aug. 29.

He voiced hope that the Knights of Columbus, the Catholic laity in the Americas, and the entire Church would continue the Virgin Mary’s witness.

“When we act in witness to our faith through these corporal and spiritual works of mercy, we engage in a ‘charity that evangelizes’ across cultural and other divides,” he said.

Anderson spoke at the Celebration of the Extraordinary Jubilee of Mercy, held in Bogota, Colombia Aug. 27-30. The event drew Catholic cardinals, bishops and other leaders from all the Americas and received a special video message from Pope Francis.

The celebration was jointly organized by the Pontifical Commission for Latin America and the Latin American Episcopal Council (CELAM).

Anderson told the gathering that the Western hemisphere has a unique collective history of Christianity.

He drew on Pope Francis’ statement that the proclamation of the Gospel should be the aspiration of all the laity, who are “called to evangelize by virtue of their baptism.”

These words of encouragement have a meaning for the laity who unite to serve God and neighbor.

“And such unity has also been seen as integral at the continental level as well,” he said.

Several Popes, including Pope Francis, have sought to describe the hemisphere as simply “America,” Anderson explained.

St. John Paul II’s apostolic exhortation “Ecclesia in America” deliberately spoke of North, South and Central America as one “America.” In the Pope’s own words, this word choice aimed to express existing unity and also pointed to “a closer bond” possible for America’s people as the Church promotes “the communion of all in the Lord.”

Anderson reflected on the founding of the Knights of Columbus in 1882 to help Catholics, many of whom were immigrants, at a time when they faced suspicion and discrimination in employment and society. He cited a founding member of the Knights who said the organization was designed “to unify American Catholic citizens of every nation and origin … giving scope and purpose to their aims as Catholics and as Americans.”

“From almost the very beginning that unity was manifested as we counted membership that was not just Irish, but French-Canadian, Hispanic, Italian and African American,” Anderson said.

The Catholic fraternal organization now has 1.9 million members worldwide.

Anderson noted the Knights’ history of service for all races and ethnicities, its opposition to groups like the Ku Klux Klan, and its effort to promote the history of minorities in the U.S. including Jews, African-Americans and Germans.

“While reaching out the margins, we have worked to make sure that Catholics were not subject to exclusion as well,” he said.

The Knights provided humanitarian assistance and raised public awareness during anti-Catholic persecution in Mexico in the 1920s, and are doing the same for Middle East Christians today. The organization has aided earthquake relief in Haiti, flood relief in Louisiana, and helped support the religious freedom of the Little Sisters of the Poor against restrictive U.S. government mandates.

“This unified approach to the corporal and spiritual works of mercy has always informed our outlook,” Anderson said. “So where people are hungry, we feed them, where they are cold, we provide warm clothing, where their faith is wavering, we evangelize, where the lives of the innocent, the elderly and the unborn are not valued, we stand with them and serve as their voice. Where there is a mother in a crisis pregnancy, we are there to help her, and her child.”

He noted Pope Francis’ encouragement for people who give alms to interact with the poor and physically touch them.

“That sort of personal touch that goes to the margins and brings the mercy and love of God to those there through charity is central to the Knights of Columbus,” said Anderson.

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Catholic and Shia Muslim leaders unite to condemn WMDs, terrorism

by CNA/EWTN News • August 30, 2016

A nuclear bomb explosion at the Nevada Test Site on April 18, 1953. (National Nuclear Security Administration/Nevada Site Office)

Rome, Italy — Shia Muslim religious leaders from Iran and U.S. Catholic bishops say they have a common fight against weapons of mass destruction, terrorism, and violent religious extremism.

“Christianity and Islam share a commitment to love and respect for the life, dignity, and welfare of all members of the human community,” they said in an Aug. 18 joint declaration. “Peaceful coexistence is built on equity and justice. We call upon all to work toward developing a culture of encounter, tolerance, dialogue, and peace that respects the religious traditions of others.”

The two delegations agreed that belief in one God unifies Jews, Christians, and Muslims.

“Religious leaders must provide moral guidance and speak out against injustice and anything that is harmful to humankind,” said the declaration, titled “Gathered in the name of God.”

Cardinal Theodore McCarrick, Archbishop Emeritus of Washington, signed the document, as did Bishop Oscar Cantú of Las Cruces, who chairs the U.S. bishops’ Committee on International Justice and Peace.

The joint declaration followed a June 5-10 meeting in Rome. The dialogue built upon a meeting in Qom, in northern Iran, in March 2014 which focused on the elimination of nuclear weapons.

Bishop Cantú said the joint declaration is the fruit of “sincere dialogue between two religions that are united in their concern for the life and dignity of the human person.”

“Together, we commit ourselves to continued dialogue on the most pressing issues facing the human family, such as poverty, injustice, intolerance, terrorism, and war,” he added, according to the U.S. bishops’ conference.

The Iranians who signed the document are Ayatollah Ali-Reza A’arafi, president of Al-Mustafa International University, and Dr. Abdul-Majid Hakim-Elahi, director of the International Affairs Office of the Society of Qom Seminary Scholars.

The joint declaration rejected the development and use of weapons of mass destruction as well as “all acts of terrorism.”

“Together we are working for a world without weapons of mass destruction. We call on all nations to reject acquiring such weapons and call on those who possess them to rid themselves of these indiscriminate weapons, including chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons,” the declaration said.

The religious leaders similarly opposed “indiscriminate sanctions” and other policies that harm innocent civilians, like the forced expulsion of people from their homelands.

They also rejected extremism.

“We remain gravely concerned by the spread of extremist ideologies, often fueled by superficial and erroneous readings of religious texts, that negate the inherent worth and dignity of every person, regardless of religious belief,” their declaration said. “We call upon religious and community leaders to confront the spread of such ideologies that induce sectarianism and violence.”

They characterized violent extremism and terrorism as “perversions of authentic religious belief.”

“The guilt of terrorist acts should not be assigned to members of an entire religion, nationality, culture, race, or ethnic group,” they added. “Countering violent extremism requires firm determination and cooperation to address its root causes.”

“We call upon all to work toward developing a culture of encounter, tolerance, dialogue, and peace that respects the religious traditions of others,” they said.

“Serving God requires working for the welfare of all His creatures and the common good of humanity. Religious leaders must provide moral guidance and speak out against injustice and anything that is harmful to humankind,” said the declaration.

Other bishops in the Catholic delegation included Bishop Richard Pates of Des Moines nd Auxiliary Bishop Denis Madden of Baltimore. The five-member Iranian delegation was headed by Ayatollah Mahdi Hadavi Moghaddam Tehrani and Ayatollah Abolghasem Alidoost.

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‘I was sure that it was Mother Teresa who healed me’

by Elise Harris (CNA/EWTN News) • August 30, 2016

Mother Teresa in 1981. (Marquette University via Flickr CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)

Rimini, Italy — The Brazilian man who received the miracle allowing for Mother Teresa’s canonization has shared his story, saying he and his wife were ordinary believers who received an extraordinary sign of God’s mercy.

“From the beginning, the diagnoses weren’t good and they seemed only worse. (But) from that moment, inside this great suffering, we understood that something had happened,” Marcilio Haddad Andrino said of his miraculous healing.

“I was sure that it was Mother Teresa who healed me.”

Andrino, who comes from Santos, Brazil, was healed through the intercession of Mother Teresa – the miracle that paved the way for her canonization, which is set for Sept. 4.

He spoke with journalists during the Aug. 19-25 annual Rimini Meeting in Italy alongside his wife Fernanda, who each shared their own perspective of Marcilio’s illness and miraculous healing.

Fernanda, sharing her perspective of her husband’s long, drawn-out illness, explained that Marcilio had been sick for two years and had seen countless doctors, but with no diagnosis.

“It was a wait full of anguish, because he was very sick for two years and we didn’t know what was wrong,” she said, explaining that the first attempt for treatment “was unsuccessful. So the doctor changed therapy, but Marcilio continued to deteriorate.”

She recalled how it wasn’t until Marcilio was hospitalized in October 2008 that they finally received their answer.

After running a series of tests “the doctor looked at the exam and, enlightened by the Holy Spirit, understood that Marcilio had eight brain abscesses,” she said.

“We always prayed to Mother Teresa,” she said, noting that her parish priest had given her a relic of Mother Teresa before the couple got married.

“I put the relic on Marcilio’s head, where he had the abscesses. I recited the prayer of beatification and also what came from my heart,” she said, noting that “it wasn’t easy, but this period enriched me a lot, it enriched our love, our faith … today I can say it was worth it.”

Marcilio, speaking of the moment he was healed, said he woke up Dec. 9, 2008, just a few months after he was diagnosed, with an “unbearable” headache that left him unable to speak, and asked his wife to pray for him.

“From that moment many doctors came to visit me and found that my situation was very serious,” he said, explaining that he was eventually taken to the hospital and prepped for surgery.

However, Marcilio said he never made it in. Instead, he awoke inside the operating room with “a great peace inside me and I no longer had the headache. I didn’t understand what was happening to me.”

The doctors, he said, told him that since he was feeling better they were going to move him to intensive care and put off the surgery until the next day.

Marcilio said he slept through the night without any problems, and that when he met with the doctor the next day, was told to return to his room if the headache still hadn’t come back.

Upon returning to the room “I learned that the abscesses were greatly reduced, just as the hydrocephalus,” Marcilio said, referring to the medical term for the abnormal build-up of fluid in the skull, causing the brain to swell.

“The abscesses were reduced by 70% and the hydrocephalus had disappeared,” he said, explaining that after another three days of testing “not even the scars of the abscesses were visible.”

“At that time I discovered that I was cured,” he said, noting that he was able to return home for Christmas.

Fernanda, recounting her experience of the event, said that when she returned to the hospital with Marcilio’s parents the day after he was admitted, the doctors told her he was stable and had returned to his room, instead of going into surgery.

“(The doctor) didn’t tell me that he was cured but I already knew it strongly from what I had prayed to God through the intercession of Mother Teresa,” she said, adding that when she went to Marcilio’s room and saw him sitting up and speaking, “I understood that Mother Teresa had healed him.”

She said Marcilio was “very surprised” by what happened and attributed the fact that he was feeling better to one of the antibiotics he took after being admitted.

However, the doctor, Fernanda recalled, told them that “No antibiotic exists that takes effect immediately, the day after … someone up there loves you a lot.”

Marcilio explained that after leaving the hospital, he and Fernanda spoke with their parish priest about what had happened. The priest, who had accompanied the couple throughout Marcilio’s illness and who had given him last rites, told them to write to the Missionaries of Charity explaining what happened.

“My case was a very difficult one clinically,” Marcilio said, explaining that his wife prayed for him “ceaselessly,” and they were certain “that a miracle happened … I was sure that it was Mother Teresa who healed me.”

He noted that the miracle didn’t just heal his brain, but went a step further.

“When I began to feel sick, Fernanda and I had been recently married,” he said, explaining that the doctor gave them the grim news that they would never be able to have children due to the treatments Marcilio would have to undergo.

Although devastated, the couple accepted it, telling themselves that “if God wants it, we will have children.”

Six months after his healing, the couple moved to Rio de Janiero and Marcilio returned to work. It was around the same time Fernanda began to experience nausea.

When the doctor told them she was pregnant, Marcilio said they didn’t initially believe it, but that after having some tests, they confirmed that “the child was there.”

Marcilio said his life has significantly changed since receiving the miracle: “My faith has grown a lot, I see the grace. I was sick, I couldn’t walk, I always had to be helped. Today I walk, I have a family, and I’m very grateful.”

Having been young when Mother Teresa was alive, Marcilio said he knew her story generally like everyone else, but only began to study her life in depth after he was healed.

Now, eight years after the miracle, he and Fernanda continue to carry their relic of Mother Teresa everywhere they go, and pray to her with their children.

“When I see my children, I see Mother Teresa. This miracle has made my family stronger and more unified,” he said, explaining that his children know everything about his illness and healing.

“They always accompany us and, when we go to the sisters to pray, they understand everything and they pray with us.”

Although he was Catholic before his illness, Marcilio said his faith has grown since his healing, and now he is convinced that miracles exist.

“Mother Teresa’s message is that the mercy of God is for everyone,” he said, noting that he and Fernanda are just “normal people” like everyone else.

“God chooses those who make his mercy known so as to reach everyone, as in the case of Mother Teresa, who cured everyone without distinction,” he said, expressing his hope that her canonization “teaches all peoples to have compassion on each other.”

While he is one of the few to experience a miracle such as this, Marcilio stressed that “God’ mercy is for everyone. I received this miracle, but God also chooses you. We are all chosen.”

Fernanda, for her part, said she feels an “enormous gratitude” whenever she sees Marcilio and their children.

“I thank God and Mother Teresa each time I look at them, each time I see them, my gratitude grows,” she said, expressing her confidence that “all the prayers were heard by God” and that “he always gives us his love.”

“On the day of the canonization, I think I won’t have the right to ask anything more of God: I can only be grateful.”

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Will Egypt take step towards religious freedom with new law?

by Matt Hadro (CNA/EWTN News) • August 30, 2016

The dedication Mass of the first Catholic church on the Sinai peninsula, Our Lady of Peace, in Sharm El-Sheik on Feb. 15, 2015. (Aid to the Church in Need)

Cairo, Egypt — Christians in Egypt are hoping that a new law will make it easier for them to build churches, particularly after old laws effectively forced Christians to celebrate Mass in house churches.

“It is vital that the final law that gets passed should be acceptable to all parties and fully consistent with Article 235 of the constitution,” Dwight Bashir, co-director of policy and research at the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom, stated to CNA.

Article 235 of the 2014 Constitution of Egypt mandated that the country’s parliament would “in its first legislative term” pass a new law about building churches “in a manner that guarantees the freedom to practice religious rituals for Christians.”

However, the parliament did not pass the law in its first term, and set a new deadline by the end of September.

Christians have encountered serious obstacles to building new churches in Egypt, thanks to old laws that require approval from the local community and from the president.

The group Coptic Solidarity noted that “over the past six decades” only two churches per year have been approved in Egypt, and there are only 2,600 churches in the entire country – “about one church for every 5,500 Christian citizens.” Meanwhile, there is “one mosque for every 620 Muslim citizens,” the group said.

Christians have resorted to having Mass said in their houses or other buildings, “triggering countless acts of mob violence, often backed by official indifference, complacency, or state intervention charging Copts on the spurious basis of using unauthorized places of worship.”

Thus, the new law to which the amendments are attached was supposed to ease the process of church building; Christians wouldn’t have to get approval from the president, but rather from the local leader, and there was reportedly a four-month timetable for an approval.

A few days ago, however, Coptic Christian leaders refused to support proposed amendments to the law, calling them “unacceptable.” They have since come to an agreement after meeting with the president, and the cabinet is expected to send a draft of a bill to parliament.

The Church stated that the law “needs an open mind when it comes to practical, not literal implementation,” as reported by the outlet Mada Masr.

Christians in Egypt have suffered violence and attacks on their churches, particularly since the summer of 2013 after the Muslim Brotherhood was unseated from power. The State Department reported that 78 “churches and other Christian buildings” were attacked, and the military has restored 26 of them.

However, there have also been attacks on Christians in recent months. A church in southern Egypt was burned down by a mob, and perhaps most infamously a Christian woman in her seventies was beaten, stripped, and dragged through the streets because her son allegedly had an affair with a Muslim woman.

The perpetrators have operated many times with impunity.

“There also continues to be inadequate accountability for past violent attacks,” USCIRF noted in its 2016 report on religious freedom, adding that “most perpetrators from large-scale incidents that occurred between 2011 and 2013 – and even before that – have not been prosecuted.”

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Eucharist desecrated, Missionaries of Charity assaulted in Argentina

by CNA/EWTN News • August 30, 2016

Missionaries of Charity. (Blazl via Flickr CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)

Buenos Aires, Argentina — The community of the Missionaries of Charity in Mar del Plata, Argentina, became the target of criminals late last week, as three men broke in, beat the sisters and desecrated their chapel.

According to reports, three unidentified men entered the house of the community – which was founded by Blessed Mother Teresa of Calcutta – at around 7:30 p.m. Thursday, August 25.

After beating and gagging the five sisters who reside there so they could not cry for help, the criminals ransacked every corner of the house and finally took 50 Argentinian pesos (approximately $3.30), which was the only cash the sisters had.

They also entered the chapel in search of valuable objects. They opened up the tabernacle and emptied out the consecrated hosts that were there in the ciborium, presumably to steal the sacred vessel. When they realized that it was not made of gold, they left it behind.

The congregation was founded by Blessed Mother Teresa of Calcutta, who will be canonized by Pope Francis on September 4. The community has been present for 20 years in the city of Mar del Plata in the Buenos Aires province.

Their mission there focuses mainly on giving free care to terminally ill HIV/AIDS patients at the Queen of Peace Home.

On August 22, just three days before the attack, Bishop Antonio Marino of Mar del Plata had visited the community, in recognition of the upcoming canonization of their foundress and the Feast of the Immaculate Heart of Mary.

This marks the second time in recent weeks that the Eucharist was desecrated in Argentina. On August 15, the Feast of the Assumption of the Virgin Mary, unidentified men entered Our Lady of Mercy parish in the Santa Fe province of Argentina, where they desecrated and stole a bronze tabernacle containing consecrated hosts.

An act of reparation was offered on August 17 in the desecrated church, which consisted of a Eucharistic Holy Hour and then a Mass presided by the Archbishop of Santa Fe, José María Arancedo.

“This calls us to increase our love for Jesus in the Eucharist, to strengthen our hearts joined to him, to strengthen our faith in the Lord, because these are times of the persecution of the Church, and like the first Christians we need to be strengthened and encouraged to walk with resolve on the path of faith,” he said.

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This is Mongolia’s first native priest: Father Joseph Enkh Baatar

by Antonio Anup Gonsalves (CNA/EWTN News) • August 30, 2016

Fr. Joseph Enkh Baatar celebrates his first Mass on Aug. 28, 2016. (Mbumba Prosper, CICM)

Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia — On Sunday Mongolia witnessed the ordination of its first indigenous priest, Fr. Joseph Enkh Baatar, a 29-year-old man who represents the first fruits of 24 years of missionary work in the east Asian country.

Bishop Wenceslao Padilla, the prefect of Ulaanbaatar, ordained Joseph Enkh Baatar a priest at an Aug. 28 Mass at St. Peter and Paul Cathedral in the Mongolian capital.

“Fr. Joseph’s ordination is a blessing of God and a moment of immense joy and inspiration for our young Mongolian Church,” Chamingerel Ruffina, a member of the organizing committee for communications at the National Catechetical Center of Mongolia, told CNA Aug. 30.

The first modern mission to Mongolia was established in 1922 and was entrusted to the Congregation of the Immaculate Heart of Mary. But under a communist government influenced by the Soviet Union, religious expression was soon thereafter suppressed.

Bishop Padilla, a member of the Congregation of the Immaculate Heart of Mary, was one of the first three missionaries allowed into Mongolia in 1992, after the fall of communism. He became superior of the mission in Mongolia, and was instrumental in helping to discern Fr. Baatar’s vocation.

The bishop praised God for the historic moment of the apostolic prefecture’s first native vocation, and prayed that many more such vocations would arise to help the local Church.

The Mass was concelebrated by Archbishop Osvaldo Padilla, apostolic nuncio to Mongolia and Korea; Bishop Lazarus You Heung-sik of Daejon, in South Korea; and more than 100 priests from South Korea and Hong Kong.

More than 1,500 persons attended the Mass, including dignitaries of foreign embassies, local Orthodox churches, and Buddhist monks. The Mass was followed by joyous festival.

Ruffina commented that “This meaningful liturgical celebration of the sacrament of priestly ordination conducted in their own indigenous language gave an opportunity to the faithful to actually witness in proximity, to celebrate, and to understand the various steps in preparation for the priesthood and the ordination rite.”

The faithful of Mongolia had prepared for the event by reciting a novena to St. Paul to strengthen their missionary spirit during the Year of Mercy.

Fr. Baatar was born June 24, 1987. He lost his father at a young age, and his sister introduced him to the Catholic faith. His dream of joining the priesthood was initially postponed, due to his family’s strong desire that he complete his university studies.

After graduating with a degree in biotechnology and with the support of his family, he then applied to become a seminarian for the Prefecture Apostolic of Ulaanbaatar.

Fr. Baatar entered the Daejeon seminary in South Korea, and was ordained a deacon in December 2014.

Concluding the Mass, the newly ordained priest profoundly thanked his family and his mentors at the seminary, especially Bishop You. He also praised the important role played by Bishop Padilla through his support of his vocation.

Fr. Baatar urged the faithful to pray for his priestly ministry so that he could faithfully fulfill his ordination motto, chosen from the gospel of Luke: “Deny yourself, take up your cross daily, and follow me.”

“I thank the Lord who has called me to serve Him through the priesthood. I am also grateful to all the people who have helped me respond to this calling,” Fr. Baatar expressed.

Bishop You reminded the new priest that “the best way of announcing the good news is a life of witnessing.”

Commenting on the vast missionary work that lies ahead in Mongolia, the South Korean bishop said, “Fr. Joseph, being a Mongolian citizen, has to live as a missionary in his own country.”

Ruffina also recounted that the parishioners of Saint Mary’s parish gave Fr. Baatar a Bible which was handwritten by the parishioners themselves.

A young family ministry volunteer, Clara Gantesetseg, told CNA that “the ordination gift of Fr. Joseph Enkh is sign of hope to our people in Mongolia, and a special a gift during this Year of Mercy.”

Clara noted that “Fr. Joseph’s indigenous roots, his cultural and life experiences of his own and the people, will help to transcend the teachings of the Church to the local culture for better understanding, and also will foster interreligious dialogue.”

Among the guests at the Mass was the Abbot Dambajav of Dashi Choi Lin Buddhist Monastery. He praised the efforts of the Catholic Church and encouraged Fr. Baatar to take up the responsibility of helping the Mongolian people. He also gave the new priest a blue khadag, a ceremonial scarf, as a mark of friendship.

Ruffina pointed out that the Buddhist monk’s participation and his kind words of encouragement will further forge bonds of friendship and interreligious dialogue between the communities for peaceful co-existence.

A little over half Mongolia’s population is Buddhist, and following the decades of communist rule, 39 percent of Mongolia’s population is non-religious. Islam, shamanism, and Christianity have mere footholds among the people.

The Prefecture Apostolic of Ulaanbaatar serves all of the estimated 1,200 Catholics in the country, which has a population of 3 million. In 2014, the local Church had three diocesan priests, who were aided by 14 religious.

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For Archbishop Gómez, mercy makes Christians credible

by CNA/EWTN News • August 31, 2016

Archbishop Jose Gomez of Los Angeles speaks at a press briefing at the Vatican on Oct. 22, 2015. (Daniel Ibanez/CNA)

Bogotá, Colombia — Christian mercy has the power to break down the barriers of a changing world where people have forgotten the presence of God, Archbishop Jose H. Gómez of Los Angeles has said.

“Mercy is missionary. It is driven by a universal love for humanity, by desire for the salvation and liberation of the human person,” he said Aug. 30. “Mercy aims to draw men and women out of their solitude and into an encounter of brotherhood and sisterhood in fellowship with the living God.”

Mercy helps transform one’s outlook to “to see the world through the merciful eyes of Christ,” the archbishop continued.

“When mercy becomes the fundamental outlook and practice of the Christian disciple, we begin to see the outlines of an entirely new culture. A culture of encounter rooted in compassion – especially for the poor and dispossessed, for the lonely and those left discarded on the ‘peripheries’,” he said, using a common image of Pope Francis.

Archbishop Gómez spoke on the last day of the Celebration of the Extraordinary Jubilee of Mercy held in Bogota, Colombia Aug. 27-30. The event drew Catholic cardinals, bishops, and other leaders from all the Americas and received a special video message from Pope Francis.

The event was jointly organized by the Pontifical Commission for Latin America and the Latin American Episcopal Council.

Archbishop Gómez said news media wrongly depicted Pope Francis’ emphasis on mercy as a break with preceding Popes.

“Pope Francis did not ‘invent’ mercy,” he added. Rather, mercy has been at the heart of the Christian proclamation from the start.

“In his dying and rising, Jesus Christ revealed the truth that God is a Father who is rich in mercy,” the archbishop said.

The Pope’s image of the Church as a field hospital suggests that God’s mercy is “the medicine needed by a humanity that is deeply wounded by modernity.”

“Mercy is healing medicine – not only for the physical wounds inflicted by the many wars, injustices and slaveries of body and mind we find in modern society,” the archbishop continued. “Mercy also speaks to the existential woundedness of people living in a culture where the memory of God is dimming, where people are no longer able to feel God’s presence and activity in the world.”

For Archbishop Gómez, the Pope’s vision is that of a priest who has spent much time in the confessional, as both a confessor and a penitent. He suggested that Pope Francis’ approach was anticipated in St. John Paul II’s 1980 encyclical Dives in Misericordia, or “Rich in Mercy.”

Christians must enter into the reality of people who are broken and wounded, who feel abandoned by the Church, or who have grown indifferent to God, the archbishop advised.

In the U.S., he said, “there is a growing coldness of heart, a harsh and fearful rhetoric in our media and politics, a growing inability of ordinary people to empathize with the humanity of others.”

He noted the cruel treatment of refugees and undocumented migrants, debates over social programs for the poor and the homeless, and severe punishments and poor conditions for criminals.

Archbishop Gómez suggested secularization and de-Christianization are the dominant realities in the Americas and throughout the West. Wondering whether the Church has come to terms with these threats to Christian institutions and souls, he said they are the “great test” for the Church.

“I speak from my perspective in the United States. But I think all of us can agree that the elites who govern and shape the direction of our societies are deeply secularized and hostile to religion, religious values and traditional culture,” he said.

Where there is no violent persecution, elites use the “raw power of law and public policy” to impose their views and to deny freedoms of those who disagree with them.

The archbishop said Catholicism faces “a powerful and false ‘humanism’” that purports to describe human happiness and flourishing under hedonistic, materialistic assumptions, adding that these assumptions are “completely opposed” to revealed truths of Christianity.

The witness of works of mercy is even more important in a society that denies the reality of God and the relevance of faith.

“In a post-Christian society, mercy – lived through works of love – becomes the best ‘proof’ for God’s presence and power,” he said. “By our love and tenderness, by our joy, we attract others to the cause of our joy, to the person of Jesus Christ. By our love and tenderness, we make God’s own mercy a reality that our neighbors can believe in and give their lives to.”

Archbishop Gómez cited the example of St. Junipero Serra as a true missionary of mercy.

“Like the first missionaries to this continent, we need to proclaim the beautiful reality of God’s compassion and tenderness,” he said. “The glad tidings of God’s complete mercy and love — and his desire that everyone might find the salvation he wants for us.”

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What the Church in South Sudan is doing amid a humanitarian crisis

by Matt Hadro (CNA/EWTN News) • August 31, 2016

Sudanese woman. (United Nations Photo via Flickr CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)

Washington, D.C. — Amid a civil war, a humanitarian crisis, and the threat of mass starvation, the Church in South Sudan is still working to bring Christ to a troubled country.

After meeting with Archbishop Paulino Lukudu Loro of Juba, Rep. Chris Smith (R-N.J.) noted that “the Church plays a key role, as always and everywhere, in the provision of humanitarian aid,” and that “the bishops I met with are just absolutely committed to living out Matthew 25, the vulnerable people and helping people as if they were Christ.”

Smith, chair of the House Subcommittee on Global Human Rights, just returned from a fact-finding human rights mission to South Sudan where he met with religious, humanitarian, and political leaders , including the Archbishop Lukudu, President Salva Kiir Mayardit, and Defense Minister Kuol Manyang Juuk.

South Sudan became an independent country in 2011 but it has been torn by a civil war since December 2013, between the state forces – the Sudan People’s Liberation Army – and opposition forces, as well as sectarian conflict.

A peace agreement was signed but it was broken by violence earlier this summer, which prompted the South Sudan Council of Churches to publicly condemn the violence and pray for peace. A ceasefire was then ordered by President Kiir and then-Vice President Machar in July. Machar, the former rebel leader, ended up fleeing the country.

The scale of the humanitarian crisis in South Sudan is immense: similar to that of the Middle East with the Islamic State, Smith noted to CNA.

There are an estimated 1.7 million people displaced within the country, more than 800,000 refugees, and almost 3 million people at risk of “life-threatening hunger,” according to congressional testimony by a USAID official earlier this year. Many are without food and medicine, Smith said.

Almost 6 million people “are facing a severe hunger crisis” there, Catholic Relief Services reports.

Archbishop Lukudu “described a loss of hope upon many people,” Smith said, and he related to Smith how “the great expectations from five years ago when they became independent have, for the time being, crashed and burned, although hope remains eternal.”

“So he expressed grave concerns about the humanitarian crisis, the crisis of leadership,” Smith said. The bishops of the country have also been “scrambling to provide shelter” and “safe refuge” for the many refugees there, he added.

Some of the top concerns that Smith said he addressed in his meetings with South Sudan’s president and defense minister were atrocities such as rape inflicted upon civilians and missionaries by soldiers, as well as the recruitment of children as soldiers.

South Sudan is also listed as a Tier 3 country for its human trafficking problem. Tier 3 countries, under the Trafficking Victims Protection Act, are among the “countries whose governments do not fully comply with the minimum standards and are not making significant efforts to do so.”

Recruitment of child soldiers in South Sudan is “among the worst in the world” Smith said, with an estimated 16,000 child soldiers since the conflict intensified in December 2013. The special danger of child soldiers, he noted, is what violence does to a young person’s psyche, especially as they transition into adulthood.

Ethnic violence and the victimization of aid workers by state and opposition soldiers are other grave problems in the country. Aid workers are especially at risk. There are 2,000 international and 18,000 South Sudanese aid workers in the country, and many are “beaten,” “killed,” or “stopped” from aid work by fighters, Smith said.

There were more major attacks on aid workers in the South Sudan than in any other country in 2015, the group Humanitarian Outcomes has reported.

Recently, amid the civil war, South Sudanese soldiers entered the Terrain compound in the capital city of Juba and attacked international aid workers. “A woman in my own district” who worked with an aid organization “was raped when the Terrain compound was raided,” Smith said.

“A lot of foreign aid workers, U.S. and international workers were there. They killed a couple of people, and just beat people horribly, and they were South Sudanese soldiers,” he continued.

Despite calls for help, United Nations peacekeeping forces just up the road did not come to the aid of the victims, Smith added. Incidents like that have been a recurring problem among UN forces who are supposed to protect the innocent but are not, he said.

Smith noted in a statement that he got commitments from the president and defense minister that a “zero-tolerance policy” against “rape, sexual violence and human trafficking” by all soldiers in the conflict would be implemented.

Although there have been money and supplies sent to the country, access remains the biggest obstacle to serving the more than 6 million citizens who need humanitarian assistance, Smith said. The geography of the region, the remoteness of certain areas of humanitarian need, and soldiers acting as obstacles to aid being delivered, have all combined to thwart the aid reaching the people who need it.

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WORLD NEWS

In Ethiopia, Church-run small business program aims for a better tomorrow

by CNA/EWTN News • September 1, 2016

Ethiopian women at the market. (Nick Fox via Shutterstock.com)

Addis Ababa, Ethiopia — Making a living is tough in parts of Ethiopia, but a Catholic-run program aims to change that.

“When we first began people said to us that we were wasting our time and we would not be successful but we were not discouraged and continued to strive. Within just a year look at what a different story it has become,” said Addisu Mutturu, a beneficiary of the program.

The program, called Supporting Horn of Africa Resilience, is run under the Ethiopian Catholic Church Social and Development Commission in association with Caritas Ethiopia, the Catholic News Agency for Africa reports.

The program aims to encourage personal savings through small savings groups. It encourages young people to save 20 percent of startup capital costs for small business then helps them raise the rest of the costs. It connects them to a local microfinance institution that can train them on business plans and management based on their situation.

The program has a project in Ethiopia’s Boloso Sore District that helps youth raise seedlings and pays them daily wages as laborers. It especially aims to help women and young people.

Mutturu, who heads the local project team, said the project has extended into poultry production and cattle breeding. It purchased 16 oxen for fattening without taking out a loan.

He recounted the many difficulties he faced after he finished high school and failed to pass the university entrance exam. He could not get a job in his home village, so he moved to the national capital, Addis Ababa, where life was “very difficult.”

He worked as a vendor and a taxi assistant but fell into substance abuse and became a petty thief.

After he returned home, he became a beneficiary of the project. He is working every day and supporting his family’s household.

“I realize that being employed by the government and migrating are not the only means, and if you work hard enough there are many opportunities for making money and growing right in my home village,” he said.

Another participant, Melese Morebo, can now support his family. He said the business group helped develop a collaborative culture to achieve its progress.

Alemitu Alemu, another project beneficiary, failed to finish high school and left home for a job opportunity that never developed. She ended up having to become a peanut vendor.

She returned home with the intention it would be temporary, but the project now provides her a living income and a bit of savings. She no longer needs to worry about poverty and does not see a need to leave home.

“Today is great and tomorrow will be better,” she said.

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How a Catholic program helps Pakistan’s women farmers

by Antonio Anup Gonsalves (CNA/EWTN News) • September 2, 2016

Women participate in agricultural activities in Pakistan’s Sindh province in June 2011. (Asian Development Bank via Flickr CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)

Lahore, Pakistan — Women farmers in Pakistan received helping hands last month from Caritas Pakistan, the Catholic bishops’ arm for social development.

The agency sponsored a four-day workshop to help women farmers develop their skills and economic competitiveness, with a focus on environmental sustainability.

“Empowering and strengthening the skills of women plays an important role in community development and agriculture is one of the important sectors,” Amjad Gulzar, executive director of Caritas Pakistan, told CNA Aug. 30.

Gulzar said the event aimed to bring together women farmers and beneficiaries of women empowerment groups and entrepreneurship programs, providing a platform for them “to voice their issues and gather relevant learning skills from one another.”

The third Women Farmers Conference, held in Lahore Aug. 16-18, brought together 140 women from across Pakistan. This year’s theme was “Empowering Women, Empowering Pakistan.”

Archbishop Joseph Coutts of Karachi delivered a message of encouragement to the delegates. He emphasized promoting the rights and opportunities of “the most ignored section of women like ‘Haris’ (peasants), small farmers and tenants for their integrated development.”

The participants also shared their positive approaches, methods, and challenges during the inter-group discussion session.

Razia Mushtaq, a farmer from Sargodha (about 80 miles northwest of Faisalabad), shared her experience using a biofuel plant and recycling cattle dung to produce clean renewable energy for cooking. She reuses waste slurry on the fields to renew soil fertility and increase productivity.

The women farmers composed a final resolution highlighting their commitment to learning. They also created an action plan for various purposes: mobilizing women in response to climate change; training other women; gaining and disseminating information to others; and promoting sustainable agriculture and home grown vegetables to minimize malnutrition and food insecurity.

Gulzar praised the important role of the women in family and agriculture in Pakistani society. Highlighting the challenges faced by rural farmers, he encouraged them to update their skills and be open to learn new organic methods that will benefit the economy and healthy community development.

“This event is a tribute to the contribution of women engaged in different sectors,” Gulzar added. “Caritas Pakistan expects that more annual programs will be carved out to ensure that the workshop and training will benefit women and the development of the community.”

Fouzia Waqar, who chairs the Punjab Commission on the Status of Women, was a speaker at the event. She pointed to a commission report that highlights the 70 percent of rural women who are involved in the agricultural sector, mainly as cotton and vegetable pickers. Despite their disproportionate numbers, women receive less than 10 percent of government benefits for subsidized seeds and fertilizers, agricultural training and other activities.

Summera Saleem, a senior program officer at the Aurat Foundation, said many rural women are not legal owners of their livestock and face other problems, such as illiteracy.

The speakers said that women in rural areas work from 16 to 18 hours but are underpaid. They receive half the wages as male farmers, and child marriage is also a problem for some.

The speakers explained different opportunities available to the women farmers and also spoke about climate change’s effect on women’s social and economic lives.

The Caritas representatives showcased various ongoing initiatives and contributions of Caritas Pakistan that have helped beneficiaries regardless of race or religion.

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WORLD NEWS

The Marian Shrine of Walsingham and Christian pilgrimage

by Ann Schneible (CNA/EWTN News) • September 2, 2016

Dominican friars lead a pilgrimage to Walsingham in May 2010. (Lawrence OP via Flickr CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)

Norwich, U.K. — For more than 950 years, pilgrims have been making their way to a small medieval village in England’s Norfolk region to visit the site of a Marian apparition and what is believed to be the oldest shrine to Our Lady in the world.

Save for a tiny chapel on the outskirts of the town of Walsingham, and a single stone arch of what had been the priory, almost nothing remains of the original pilgrimage site which was decimated during the English reformation under the orders of Thomas Cromwell.

Yet several centuries after its destruction, hundreds of thousands of people flock yearly to the Catholic shrine. In fact, the numbers seem to be on the rise.

What is it that continues to draw pilgrims to venerate a site where little to nothing of its architectural origins remain, nearly a thousand years after the first apparitions took place?

“The importance of shrines is not that they are historical artifacts,” said the rector of Walsingham, Msgr. John Armitage, in a phone interview with CNA. “It’s a link between heaven and earth.”

The origins of the devotion to Our Lady of Walsingham date back to the year 1061, when the Virgin Mary appeared a noblewoman named Richeldis de Faverches in a series of visions. During the visions, Richeldis was brought in an ecstasy to the house in Nazareth where Gabriel announced the news of Christ’s birth. Mary then requested that an exact replica of the house be built in Walsingham, which would come to be known as the Holy House.

“From that time, through till the reformation, in 1538, Walsingham was one of the great shrines of Christendom,” and the only shrine dedicated to Our Lady, Msgr. Armitage said.

It is a great source of pride that Walsingham is the site of the oldest Marian shrine in the world, he said.

“Indeed, if you go to Nazareth, and you stand in front of the Holy House in Nazareth, if you look up, you’ll see all the different images of the Shrines to Our Lady around the world. And the first one that is displayed there is the shrine of Our Lady of Walsingham.”

Although the shrine itself was destroyed in 1538, a small nearby chapel where pilgrims en route to Walsingham would stop remained. “It’s where the pilgrims would come and before they entered the shrine ground, they would go to confession and then they would take their shoes off, and leave them at the slipper chapel – hence its name – and would walk barefoot into the shrine in the village.”

This tradition continues to this day, the rector added. “Once (the pilgrims) have finished their devotion at the slipper chapel shrine, they then walk along what’s called the Holy Mile into the village.”

After the shrine was rebuilt in the 20th century, the site began to see a resurgence of pilgrims which continues to this day.

“Walsingham is a great crossroads of Catholics in England,” Msgr. Armitage said, and many consider it to be the “spiritual heart” of the country.

The shrine has become an active pilgrimage site, and offers daily Mass, Eucharistic Adoration, and opportunities for prayer and reflection. It is also currently undergoing expansion of its services, with the construction of a new pilgrimage center and the establishment of a new media center run by EWTN.

“There is a strong connection here,” Msgr. Armitage said. “People do come. We have around about 300,000 people who pass through Walsingham over the course of the year, ranging from organized pilgrims to just people passing.”

The rector said he has noticed a recent increase in the number of pilgrims to the site, especially during the Year of Mercy.

“I think sometimes people come on pilgrimage when they’re a bit lost about their faith,” he said. “They want to go to a place of pilgrimage.”

“The important thing about places of pilgrimage is not that they are just like going to visit an old castle. You go to a place of pilgrimage because something happened.”

For instance, in visiting Nazareth, pilgrims experience the place where “the Word was made Flesh, and lived among us.”

Likewise, this experience of a historical event is connected with a shrine, such as that of Walsingham, Msgr. Armitage explained: “the World was made flesh, and lived among us here. Something happened here.”

“It’s an expression of the Incarnation. Here, in our world, in a particular moment in history, something of God happened.”

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Key bishop: ‘We don’t know’ if Fr. Tom Uzhunnalil is still alive

by Hannah Brockhaus (CNA/EWTN News) • September 2, 2016

Fr. Tom Uzhunnalil. (ANS Agenzia Info Salesiana)

Rome, Italy — As the situation in Yemen continues to worsen, Bishop Paul Hinder on Friday requested prayers for priests, for the Missionaries of Charity, and for kidnapped priest Fr. Tom Uzhunnalil, whose situation is uncertain.

“I do not know how we can continue in the present situation,” said a visibly moved Bishop Hinder. “And pray for Fr. Tom, if he’s dead or not. We don’t know.”

The Apostolic Vicariate of Southern Arabia spoke briefly Sept. 2 at the end of a symposium on Mother Teresa, foundress of the Missionaries of Charity, who will be canonized Sunday. The event was hosted by Asia News in Rome. Not originally scheduled to speak, the bishop apologized that his remarks were unprepared, as he had just left his office in Abu Dhabi that morning.

“I suffer due to the situation that has arisen in Yemen, where 7 million people die of hunger; there is security for no one, it’s not a question of being Christians or Muslims,” he said. “The insecurity is general in the entire country, caused by the civil war.”

The bishop offered an update on Fr. Tom Uzhunnalil, an Indian national who was abducted March 4 when four gunmen attacked a Missionaries of Charity-run retirement home in Aden, the provincial capital of Yemen, killing 16 people, including four Missionary of Charity sisters.

It remains unclear who was behind the kidnapping. The plight of Fr. Tom garnered significant international attention when rumors arose that he was to be crucified on Good Friday. However, these rumors were later discredited.

While reports earlier this year indicated that Fr. Tom was safe and perhaps close to release, Bishop Hinder cautioned that the priest’s condition remains unknown.

As the situation in Yemen worsens, they are having difficulty bringing any priests and sisters into the country, the bishop noted, asking for prayers for that intention, explaining that several sisters and their patients had recently been removed from Yemen “for weeks or maybe months,” and asked for prayers for the remaining sisters and for priests still waiting to go there but delayed by problems in acquiring visas.

“The community located in Ta’izz had to leave their house, because they found themselves in the middle of two sides of the war and had to move to Sanaa. We are waiting to be able to send them back, but in this moment it is not possible,” said the bishop.

“We find ourselves in a situation in which the sisters have lived for months without the Eucharist,” he lamented. “And I can imagine the pain that creates for them, if you know Mother Teresa, who will soon be a saint.”

Bishop Hinder talked about the bravery of the Missionaries of Charity, even following the martyrdom of four of their sisters. “Some days after the sisters were killed, March 4, I met the only survivor,” he said. “The first thing she said to me is: ‘I want to return, as soon as possible and as soon as I have permission.’”

“Imagine this zeal in this situation of martyrdom. It … has entered the Congregation from their foundress,” he shared. “My predecessor has met many times with the Mother Superior in Sanaa, and he said: ‘Thanks to you we have priests here with us.’”

The Missionaries of Charity sponsor the visas for the priests in Sanaa and Tais. “I have always admired them: when I went to them in my visits, their spirit of simplicity and joy … I always saw the sisters smiling. My predecessor said: ‘But how do they do it in this situation?’”

The civil war in Yemen began in March 2015. That month Houthi rebels, who are Shia Muslims, took over portions of Yemen seeking to oust its Sunni-led government.

Saudi Arabia, which borders Yemen’s north, has led a coalition backing the government. Both al-Qaeda and the Islamic State have set up strongholds in the country amid the power vacuum.

The civil war has killed more than 6,000 people, according to the United Nations.

“I invite you to pray for the priests and that others can unite to them. The mission in the state of war, despite the difficulty, must continue,” Bishop Hinder said.

“Fr. Tom was abducted: he had returned to Yemen, asking me and the provincial for permission. I told him: ‘If you want, I will help you enter my country.’ Certainly today it’s painful to think about,” he said.

“But I am still convinced it was right. In war you can never predict what happens.”

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U.S. NEWS

Sexual orientation and gender identity: What does the science say?

by CNA/EWTN News • August 27, 2016

(Fieldwork via Shutterstock.com)

Washington D.C. — For most young people who experience feelings of gender dysphoria, the experience is in fact temporary, and a non-heterosexual orientation is not as fixed as sometimes claimed, a new overview of the relevant research says.

“Only a minority of children who experience cross-gender identification will continue to do so into adolescence or adulthood,” said the report, published in The New Atlantis Journal.

As many as 80 percent of men who reported same-sex attraction as adolescents no longer do so as adults. There were “similar but less striking” results for women. The idea of innate sexual orientation is “not supported by scientific evidence,” the report said.

Titled “Sexuality and Gender: Findings from the Biological, Psychological, and Social Sciences,” the report reviews various research studies to examine claims about sexuality and gender.

It was authored by Dr. Lawrence S. Mayer, Ph.D., a biostatistician and epidemiologist now a scholar in residence at Johns Hopkins University; and by Dr. Paul R. McHugh, M.D., a professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Johns Hopkins University.

The report considers various claims like the basis and permanence of gender identity and sexual orientation.

It found there is a lack of scientific evidence for claims that gender identity is an innate property “independent of biological sex.” Scientific evidence also does not support claims that a person might be “a man trapped in a woman’s body.”

Gender identity problems can arise for someone with Intersex conditions, where a person has ambiguous biological sex due to genetic abnormalities.

However, brain structure comparison of transgender and non-transgender individuals show only “weak correlations” between brain structure and cross-gender identification. These correlations are not evidence that this identity has a basis in the biology of the brain.

Similarly, sexual orientation’s neurological basis can be overstated. Against the “born that way” claim, the report authors write: “While there is evidence that biological factors such as genes and hormones are associated with sexual behaviors and attractions, there are no compelling causal biological explanations for human sexual orientation.”

The report also considered sexuality, mental health, and social factors.

Non-heterosexuals are two to three times as likely to have experienced childhood sexual abuse.

The authors weighed the evidence that non-heterosexual attractions, desires and behaviors may increase the risk of suffering sex abuse, or that sexual abuse may cause non-heterosexual attractions, desires and behaviors. They said that more research is needed before claiming a link between sex abuse and non-heterosexual attractions.

Non-heterosexuals do face elevated risk of adverse health and mental health outcomes. They are estimated to have a 1.5 times higher risk of anxiety and substance abuse than the heterosexual population. They face double the risk of depression and 2.5 times higher risk of suicide.

The transgender population, recently estimated to make up 0.6 percent of the total population, suffers a lifetime suicide attempt rate of 41 percent, compared to 5 percent of the overall population.

There is “limited, inconsistent and incomplete” evidence that social stressors like discrimination and stigma “contribute to the elevated risk of poor mental health outcomes for non-heterosexual and transgender populations.”

The report said clinicians and policymakers should not assume that models focused on social stressors offer a complete explanation for these health differences.

“Just as it does a disservice to non-heterosexual subpopulations to ignore or downplay the statistically higher risks of negative mental health outcomes they face, so it does them a disservice to misattribute the causes of these elevated risks, or to ignore other potential factors that may be at work.”

Adults who undergo sex reassignment surgeries continue to show a high risk in mental health, being about 5 times more likely to attempt suicide and 19 times more likely to die by suicide compared to a control group.

Regarding therapies for children that delay puberty or modify sex characteristics of adolescents, there is “little scientific evidence” for their therapeutic value, the report said.

At the same time, “some children may have improved psychological well-being if they are encouraged and supported in their cross-gender identification.”

“There is no evidence that all children who express gender-atypical thoughts or behavior should be encouraged to become transgender,” the report added.

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U.S. NEWS

As cost of EpiPen soars, what are the ethics of drug pricing?

by Matt Hadro (CNA/EWTN News) • August 29, 2016

EpiPen. (Adam Campbell via Flickr CC BY-ND 2.0)

Washington, D.C. — Amidst national outrage over the steep cost hike of a potentially life-saving drug, questions have been raised about the market ethics of drug pricing.

There are “a lot of factors” behind price increases in the prescription drug market, Dr. Jack Hoadley, a health policy analyst and researcher at Georgetown University, told CNA. Thus, it’s hard to attribute the 400 percent rise in cost of the EpiPen to one particular cause, he said.

However, if Mylan – the manufacturer of the EpiPen – was simply “taking advantage of a partial monopoly,” he continued, than one “could raise the question” about the ethics of the cost increases.

The EpiPen is an injection device used on a patient whose allergic reaction has become a medical emergency. Some 3.6 million Americans were prescribed an EpiPen last year, according to the Wall Street Journal.

In very serious cases, an allergic reaction can become Anaphylaxis, a life-threatening condition with symptoms including trouble breathing, reduced blood pressure, gastrointestinal problems, and itchy skin. Some of the most common reactions of Anaphylaxis are from peanut and shellfish allergies, bee stings, and latex exposure.

These severe allergies require a hospital visit and an immediate injection of epinephrine, the drug in EpiPens.

Since it acquired the EpiPen in 2007, Mylan has been raising the cost of the device. In 2007, two pens cost just over $100, but now they cost over $600, according to the New York Times. EpiPens can only be used once because of a spring-loaded mechanism for dispensing the epinephrine that activates upon injection.

The news of the price hike has led to widespread outcry, with some critics citing Pope Francis, who has spoken out numerous times about the dangers of a free market when it is not governed by Christ-like principles and morals.

Hoadley suggested that if the EpiPen price hike is an example of drug makers taking advantage of very limited competition, at the expense of people who need the drug, ethical questions could be raised.

Different consumers will be affected by the cost hike in different ways, he noted.

For instance, someone without insurance will have to pay the high out-of-pocket costs for the EpiPen. A low-income family whose children are on Medicaid or the Children’s Health Insurance Program may obtain it for a small co-pay or even for free, and the cost would be passed on to the states or federal government.

For those with private insurance, it would depend on their plan. In the short-term, there only might be a small increase in their co-pay, but a large increase in their premium later on.

In cases where a health plan doesn’t cover an EpiPen, however, patients may be on the hook for most or all of the cost of new pens.

A number of reported upgrades were made to the device over the years, like a retractable needle and better grip for the pen. Many factors go into the cost of drugs, Hoadley explained, like the cost of ingredients, and producing and manufacturing a drug. Still, the cost of the epinephrine dosage in EpiPens has been estimated by experts to be only several dollars.

But market forces can also play a big role in costs, he said, as when a drug company is devoid of real competition and there are no real “market countervailing pressures” for a drug company.

In this particular case of EpiPens, he said, one competitor left the market over “FDA issues.” A competing pen, Auvi-Q is no longer available, and the FDA rejected another generic alternative to the EpiPen, according to the Times.

A generic alternative still exists – Adrenaclick – for a lower cost, Consumer Reports has noted.

Mylan has also pushed for its product to be in public schools as an emergency device. A federal law signed by President Obama in 2013 – which Mylan actively lobbied for – rewarded the states that mandated epinephrine injectors in schools. Mylan’s program EpiPens4Schools provides several free pens per year for qualifying public schools.

Mylan announced last week that it was taking measures to supposedly make it easier for patients to obtain EpiPens. They said they were “doubling eligibility for our patient assistance program,” so that “a family of four making up to $97,200 would pay nothing out of pocket for their EpiPen Auto-Injector.” They also offered a “savings card” to trim costs by almost half for a two-pack of pens for those paying “full list price.”

“We recognize the significant burden on patients from continued, rising insurance premiums and being forced increasingly to pay the full list price for medicines at the pharmacy counter,” Mylan CEO Heather Bresch said in a statement.

Then on August 29, amid continuing outcry, the company announced that it would release a generic version of the product – containing the same drug and auto-injection function – for $300 per two-pack, half the price of the name brand version.

It is unclear whether the announcement will be enough to satisfy critics.

However, Hoadley said, Mylan’s cost increase is a “symptom of some of the issues that we’re dealing with” in the larger prescription drug market as a whole, where cost hikes of drugs have been linked by some to companies using “market leverage.”

For instance, Martin Shkreli – former CEO of Turing Pharmaceuticals – made headlines after Turing increased the cost of its anti-parasite drug Daraprim from $13.50 to $750. Subpoenaed by Congress, he simply told members that he would “invoke my Fifth Amendment privilege against self-incrimination.”

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What’s behind the jump in maternal mortality rates in Texas?

by Matt Hadro (CNA/EWTN News) • August 29, 2016

(Chris Martino via Flickr CC BY-NC 2.0)

Washington D.C. — A jump in Texas’ maternal mortality rate has sparked criticism that the closures of abortion clinics in the state caused a shortage in life-saving prenatal health care – but is that true?

“There have been abortion clinic closures, but abortion clinics here in the state of Texas, none of them provided prenatal care,” Abby Johnson, former Planned Parenthood clinic director and founder of And Then There Were None ministry which helps abortion clinic workers escape the industry, told CNA.

Ultimately, she added, “we don’t know anything about these women” so it is hard to conclude any one reason behind the increase in Texas’ maternal mortality rate from 2010-14.

A study conducted by Obstetrics & Gynecology journal found that Texas’ death rate for expecting mothers was much higher than the national average after 2010. The rate there doubled in 2011 and 2012, the report noted.

Some advocates quickly speculated that the state’s cuts to public health funding for “family planning” in 2011 and its regulation of abortion clinics – which was just ruled unconstitutional by the Supreme Court – shut down abortion clinics that purportedly offered mothers life-saving prenatal care, and thus could have caused a spike in pregnancy-related deaths.

One column in the Dallas Morning News asked “Where, oh where, are all those lawmakers who cited ‘women’s health’ as their rallying cry in defunding Planned Parenthood, shuttering clinics, and forcing sonograms and delays on abortion patients? These women are dying – why aren’t aren’t [sic] they sounding the sirens and ringing the alarm bells? Why don’t we see the same political zeal on behalf of dying women?”

CNN suggested that the cuts, clinic closures, and maternal death spike could all be related, reporting that “in Texas, where clinics serving women have shuttered and their health interests have been battled all the way up to the US Supreme Court, the rate of pregnancy-related deaths more than doubled over the course of two years.”

However, the actual study was careful not to draw any direct conclusion from the numbers, saying they were abnormally high.

“There were some changes in the provision of women’s health services in Texas from 2011 to 2015, including the closing of several women’s health clinics,” the report noted. “Still, in the absence of war, natural disaster, or severe economic upheaval, the doubling of a mortality rate within a 2-year period in a state with almost 400,000 annual births seems unlikely.”

“A future study will examine Texas data by race-ethnicity and detailed causes of death to better understand this unusual finding,” it added.

The abortion clinics that closed did not offer prenatal care, Johnson maintained. And “Texas is funding women’s health at a historically-high level,” she added.

PolitiFact actually declared that to be true last year, providing 2014-15 numbers from the state’s health commission showing a $100 million expansion on “primary health care” as well as more than $24 million in breast and cervical cancer screening.

“There are some other factors” that could have affected the numbers, Johnson noted.

The state does have a high immigrant population where pregnant mothers coming to the U.S. may have received prenatal care in another country. There are also other health issues, like Texas having one of the highest obesity rates in the country, she noted.

However, it would be impossible to know what exactly is behind the mortality rate increase without more data, Johnson insisted. Regardless, mothers must take their prenatal health seriously.

“We always need to encourage women to begin prenatal care early, take care of themselves during their pregnancies, make wise decisions during their pregnancies,” she said.

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A ‘Catholic problem’ for Trump? It’s hard to say, actually

by Matt Hadro (CNA/EWTN News) • August 30, 2016

Donald Trump at the Republican National Convention in Cleveland, OH on July 18-21, 2016. (Addie Mena/CNA)

Washington, D.C. — With some recent election polls showing Hillary Clinton with a large lead over Donald Trump among Catholics, does Trump have a “Catholic problem” as some are saying he does?

“It’s another data point that shows how difficult it’s going to be for Trump to win in November,” Dr. Matthew Green, a politics professor at The Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C., said of the poll numbers. “It’s increasingly looking dire for the Trump campaign.”

However, Dr. Mark Gray of the Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate at Georgetown University cautioned against reading too much into those polls. “For now be wary of claims either candidate has a ‘Catholic problem’,” he wrote in a blog post on the matter. “We have too little data and what we do have presents a mixed picture.”

Recent Washington Post-ABC News poll numbers show Hillary Clinton with a commanding 27-point lead over Trump among Catholics. Other recent numbers – like from the Public Religion Research Institute – show Clinton winning much of the Catholic vote, including the vast majority of Hispanic Catholics.

Pew Research numbers from July showed Clinton with a 16-point lead over Trump among Catholics. Trump actually won the white Catholic vote 50 to 46 percent in that poll, but lost the Hispanic Catholic vote 77 to 16.

And in the Washington Post-ABC News poll, Clinton was winning a substantial margin of Catholic voters who were weekly churchgoers – a constituency that is “traditionally Republican-leaning,” Green noted.

However, many election polls are not revealing the religious split of respondents. And of the few polls that are, in one case the numbers wildly fluctuated.

While in July, Pew reported that Clinton led Trump by 16 points among Catholics, in August Clinton’s support among Catholics dropped 16 percent. Trump actually won the Catholic vote in that poll of registered voters, 42 percent to Clinton’s 40 percent, with 12 percent voting for third party candidates Gary Johnson and Dr. Jill Stein.

What is to be made of all these numbers? Dr. Gray cautioned that they may not reflect the electorate that turns out at the polls on Election Day.

“A majority of Americans see these candidates as unfavorable,” he wrote of both Clinton and Trump. “The 2016 election is not about voting for a candidate as much as it is voting against one. Turnout will be key.”

Many people who do not normally vote could show up at the polls in November, he said, and conversely those who normally vote might stay home, disenchanted by the candidates.

Also, most of the election polls aren’t reporting the religion of the respondents, he added, making it impossible to “aggregate” all the election polls and see better where the Catholic support lies.

“With nearly all of the exit polls for the primaries excluding a religious affiliation question the data just aren’t out there,” he wrote.

However, if the polls showing Clinton far ahead of Trump among Catholics are correct, it could mean big trouble for Trump, Dr. Green explained.

Catholics usually show where the general electorate stands, he said. For instance, according to Pew Research exit polls, Catholics narrowly voted for Al Gore in 2000, when he barely won the popular vote. In 2004, they voted for Bush 52-47 percent, when he won the popular vote 51-48 percent.

In 2008 Catholics voted for President Obama 54-45, when he won the popular vote 53-46 percent, and they voted for him again in 2012 50-48 percent, when he won the popular vote by that same margin.

So if Catholics really are supporting Clinton now by a wide margin, and the numbers hold until Election Day, it could suggest that Trump loses the general electorate as well, Green said.

What might be the causes of these numbers among Catholics? It “could be that Trump has done everything from insulting the Pope to talking rather callously about immigration, which matters to a lot of Catholics,” he noted.

“Most Catholics are at least aware of the history of anti-Catholicism in this country, and may be somewhat unsettled by some of the rhetoric coming out of the Trump campaign about immigration.”

Trump also hasn’t really reached out to Catholic voters like he has to other voting groups, Green insisted.

“He’s doing these appeals not based on Catholicism, Catholic values, or the Church,” Green said. “He’s doing them based on economic issues or fear of immigration.”

“So that might happen to pull some Catholics in those areas his way, but it’s a far cry from the George W. Bush strategy where you look for ‘value voters’ and what appeals to them. I don’t get the impression that Trump is particularly interested in that,” he explained.

Catholic voters as a whole are also most concerned about the same issues the general public is concerned with, according to the July Pew numbers.

When asked by Pew what issues were “very important” for them in the 2016 election, Catholics answered foremost the economy (84 percent), then terrorism (81 percent), health care (78 percent), and immigration (75 percent). Abortion and marriage were near the bottom of the list in terms of how many Catholics deemed them “very important” issues.

“There are plenty of Catholic voters who are very religious, and religious values and beliefs matter a great deal to them,” Green said.

So the decreased interest in social issues like abortion and marriage may reflect a “general” decline of interest in those issues, but it may also simply be a result of “values voters” feeling like they don’t have a real choice between the two candidates, he said.

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To help desperate refugees, Mormons and Catholics join hands

by CNA/EWTN News • August 31, 2016

A young Syrian refugee. (Thomas koch via Shutterstock.com)

Washington D.C. — The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has given $1.25 million in aid to Catholic refugee relief efforts.

“Together, as people of faith, we know that refugees desperately need our help – and this generosity allows us to serve many more,” said Bishop Eusebio Elizondo, auxiliary bishop of Seattle and chairman of the U.S. bishops’ Committee on Migration.

The LDS Church, whose members are colloquially known as Mormons, gave cash and donated goods to aid newly arrived refugees. The refugees are helped through Catholic dioceses’ resettlement offices under the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops’ Migration and Refugee Services. The donation will help welcome refugees and help them build new lives, the U.S. bishops’ conference reported.

Bishop W. Christopher Waddell, second counselor in the Presiding Bishopric of the LDS Church, spoke about the aid.

“We are grateful for the ongoing relationships we have with people of faith for the opportunities it provides to assist in one of the fundamental principles of the gospel – caring for those that may feel like strangers among us,” he said Aug. 30. “This includes those who have been driven from their homes and find themselves in new and unfamiliar circumstances.”

Bishop Waddell said the donation is part of the LDS Church’s ongoing relationship with the U.S. bishops’ conference and part of “our collective resolve to follow Jesus Christ and assist in bettering the lives of refugees.”

Bishop Elizondo said he is “extremely grateful” to Bishop Waddell and the LDS Church for their support.

Violence in Central America has pushed tens of thousands of unaccompanied minors to flee to the U.S. in recent years. In 2015 the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees reported record numbers of people worldwide have been uprooted from their homes by war and persecution.

Migration and Refugee Services represents the U.S. bishops in migration policy, communication, advocacy, education and other services to migrant populations. Those assisted include immigrants, refugees, victims of human trafficking, and unaccompanied minors.

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For this disability advocate, Colorado assisted suicide measure still not safe

by Mary Rezac (CNA/EWTN News) • August 31, 2016

(Andy Dean Photography via Ahutterstock.com)

Denver, CO — Voters in Colorado will decide whether to legalize assisted suicide in their state in November, after a campaign gathered enough signatures to put the proposal on the ballot.

If passed, the measure known as the Colorado End-of-Life Options Act would allow for someone with a terminal illness to request a lethal prescription from their physician. The person must be at least 18 years old, deemed mentally competent, and have a diagnosis from two physicians of six months or fewer to live. The measure also requires that they self-administer the drug, called secobarbital, which is also used for lethal injections in some states.

But these safeguards are not enough to keep Coloradans safe from coercion and error, argues Carri Ann Lucas, an attorney and board member for Not Dead Yet, a disability rights group that advocates against assisted suicide measures.

“Nobody wants themselves or their family members to suffer, but they haven’t thought through all of the policy implications of a decision like this, and passing a measure like this,” Lucas said.

“I think Compassion and Choices is just trying to play on the ignorance of voters and count on the ignorance of voters,” she added. “If people are educated about this proposal, they will not support it.”

The new initiative, largely pushed for by Compassion and Choices, counts on voter ignorance about safeguards and legal concerns surrounding physician assisted suicide in order to pass, Lucas said. It comes after two assisted suicide measures – one initiated in the Senate and one in the House – failed to make it to a floor vote in the state legislature. Last year, the Colorado legislature rejected a similar bill, citing concerns about the lack of safeguards in place.

One of the big issues with the newest proposal, Lucas said, is that it does not require a physician or medical professional to be present at the time of the drug’s administration, meaning that there is a concerning margin for error and no one to help if something goes wrong.

“There’s nothing stopping someone from abusing an elder or family member by flipping these medications into their applesauce and feeding them to the individual,” she said. “But also there’s no assurance that these drugs will work as intended, and nobody’s there to ensure that people are safe at the time that they’re administered, that there aren’t any adverse effects that need to be treated at the same time.”

“These are the same types of drugs that are used for lethal injection and we know how that can go awry at times, so that’s certainly a concern,” she added.

Another concern is the conflict of interest in the witnesses of the decision to seek assisted suicide, Lucas said. Under the proposed initiative, a friend or family member would be able to legally witness a loved one’s decision to seek assisted suicide.

“As an attorney, I can’t have an interested party witness a will, so we’re going to now let an interested party help sign a request to seek a lethal prescription?” Lucas asked.

“There aren’t safeguards to ensure … that family members aren’t coercing people into seeking assisted suicide, so somebody who’s an heir to an estate can take their loved one to a doctor’s office and witness their request, even though they stand to inherit from the person if they follow through on that request,” she added.

Additionally, the supposed safeguard about mental competency is another concern, Lucas said. In the language of the proposal as it stands, individuals seeking assisted suicide are only give a psychological evaluation if the doctor deems it necessary – meaning many people with depression or other mental health problems could slip through the cracks, and be killed instead of treated.

The debate surrounding the issue has been heated, and has many news outlets in Colorado grappling with the semantics of it all, debating whether to continue calling the taking of lethal prescriptions “assisted suicide” or “medical aid in dying” – which is used by groups like Compassion and Choices, which advocates for legalized assisted suicide.

Several disability groups in Colorado have joined forces with each other as well as groups of physicians and faith-based groups to fight assisted suicide legislation in the past two years. The disability rights groups argue that assisted suicide discriminates against the disabled as well as people with a low income, because it is cheaper for insurance companies to pay for someone’s death than to pay for lifelong medical care.

In Oregon, the first state to legalize assisted suicide, there have been cases of cancer patients who are denied chemotherapy treatment, but instead are offered lethal prescriptions.

The groups have also argued that doctors can make mistakes when diagnosing terminal illnesses – a person who is given six months to live may outlive their diagnosis, sometimes by many years.

As with past assisted suicide legislation, the problem with the Colorado End-of-Life Options Act is that there is too wide a margin for error, Lucas said.

“Frankly, no safeguards have been proposed that would alleviate our concerns.”

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The U.S. has resettled 10,000 Syrian refugees in the last year

by Matt Hadro (CNA/EWTN News) • August 31, 2016

A young Syrian refugee at school in Ramtha, Jordan on Oct. 27, 2014. (Kim Pozniak/Catholic Relief Services)

Washington, D.C. — As the Obama administration announced Monday that the U.S. had met its goal of accepting 10,000 Syrian refugees in fiscal year 2016, religious freedom advocates voiced approval.

The U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom praised the administration, hailing the accomplishment as “an important step, but only a first step, given the severity of the [Syrian] conflict, the implications for regional and international security, and the vulnerably of Syrian civilians who have been subjected to the most appalling mistreatment from both the Assad regime and its opponents, including ISIL.”

President Obama announced last fall that the U.S. would try to increase its intake of refugees from Syria to 10,000 in the fiscal year 2016, pointing to the humanitarian crisis that has unfolded there because of sustained conflict.

“We know that it certainly is not feasible for millions of Syrians to come to this country. But what we can do is make sure that we are doing everything we can to try to provide for their basic needs,” White House press secretary Josh Earnest stated.

Previously, the U.S. had accepted only about 2,000 Syrian refugees since the beginning of the civil war there, including 1,682 in fiscal year 2015 alone.

On Monday, Secretary of State John Kerry announced the goal of 10,000 had been met: “Today, by committing additional resources to our refugee admissions process and maintaining our rigorous screening process and commitment to the security of the American people, we have reached that goal.”

The conflict in Syria has run for over five years and is not expected to end any time soon, having been estimated to have caused almost half a million deaths. It has created the largest number of refugees of any current conflict, with millions having fled the country and over 6 million currently displaced within Syrian borders. There have been over 4.7 million registered refugees from Syria, Catholic Relief Services noted.

After November terror attacks in Paris that killed 130 and injured hundreds, where a terrorist involved was later alleged to have entered Europe by posing as a Syrian refugee seeking asylum, many called for a halt on refugee resettlement in the name of national security.

Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump proposed a ban on Muslims entering the country until greater security precautions could be enforced. His running mate Mike Pence, governor of Indiana, tried to stop the resettlement of Syrian refugees in his state.

Catholic Charities of the Archdiocese of Indianapolis still resettled a Syrian refugee family under the direction of Archbishop Joseph Tobin, and against the wishes of Governor Pence.

Refugee resettlement experts had insisted at the time that the U.S. resettlement program was secure and did not need an overhaul or a temporary fix.

“A rigorous, multi-layered, and lengthy vetting and security clearance procedure is in place to screen refugees,” Dr. Susan Weishar, a migration fellow at the Jesuit Social Research Institute who directed immigration and refugee services for Catholic Charities of the Archdiocese of New Orleans for 14 years, stated to CNA.

The U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom has also insisted that the resettlement system is secure, and had advocated for increasing the refugee intake.

“USCIRF has called for the United States to admit 100,000 refugees from Syria, subject to the refugee resettlement process’ rigorous interviews and background checks,” USCIRF stated on Tuesday.

“This rigorous individual vetting allows the United States to welcome Syrian refugees, protect national security, and respond effectively, humanely and generously to this unprecedented challenge.”

Bill O’Keefe, Vice President for Advocacy at Catholic Relief Services, voiced similar views.

“We are pleased to see that the Obama administration has made good on its promise of admitting 10,000 Syrian refugees within this fiscal year, but as a global leader we can, and we must, do better,” he said.

“In fact this is a relatively modest figure considering the global scale of the crisis and the amount of resources we have at our disposal to address it. The Administration should capitalize on the momentum they’ve built in recent months to speed up the admissions process by significantly increasing the target number of Syrian refugee admissions for the year ahead.”

Secretary Kerry also said on Monday that “more needs to be done” to remedy the humanitarian crisis in Syria.

“We recognize that more needs to be done to help those who are besieged inside Syria; more has to be done to assist refugees; more has to be done to support Syria’s neighbors, Lebanon, Jordan, and Turkey; and more has to be done to resolve this brutal conflict that has cost far too many lives and forced far too many people from their homes,” he stated.

On September 20, President Obama will host the Leaders’ Summit on Refugees, a high-level event on the margins of the UN General Assembly to increase humanitarian assistance and create more long-term, durable opportunities for refugees – not just for the millions of Syrian refugees, but for those fleeing intense strife and persecution in all places.

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To this Christian woman, headscarves are a religious freedom issue too

by CNA/EWTN News • September 1, 2016

(BestPhotoStudio via Shutterstock.com)

Montgomery, AL — A devout Christian woman has said Alabama county officials violated her rights by forcing her to remove her headscarf for her driver’s license photo when she considers it part of her religious practice to cover her hair.

Yvonne Allen of Tuskegee, Ala. said the Lee County clerk told her only Muslim women are allowed to cover their hair.

“I was devastated when they forced me to remove my headscarf to take my driver license photo,” Allen said in a statement. “Revealing my hair to others is disobedient to God. I should have the same right as people of other faiths to be accommodated for my religious beliefs.”

The lawsuit, filed by the American Civil Liberties Union in Montgomery federal court, names as plaintiffs Becky Frayer, the chief clerk of the Lee County Probate Judge’s office, and Probate Judge Bill English, her supervisor.

The lawsuit says that the officials violated Allen’s rights under the Alabama constitution and the U.S. Constitution’s establishment clause and free exercise clauses of the First Amendment.

Allen says that the practice of covering her hair is rooted in her reading of St. Paul’s words in 1 Corinthians Chapter 11 regarding women and head coverings.

“I have followed this command every day since and believe that removing my headscarf in public is extremely shameful and dishonors God,” she said.

In an April 25 statement at the ACLU website, Allen said she was treated in a way that was “humiliating and demeaning.”

The Alabama Department of Motor Vehicles clerk spoke to her “in a smug and condescending tone” and said that Christian women don’t cover their hair, she charged.

Alabama law enforcement rules allow a headscarf to be worn as long as it does not cover the face, the Associated Press reports.

Susan Watson, executive director of the ACLU of Alabama, said the government “cannot discriminate between faiths in granting religious accommodations,” the Alabama news site AL.com reports.

The lawsuit seeks unspecified damages and a court order allowing Allen to re-take her photo with her head covered.

The ACLU, the legal group representing Allen, has in the past been a frequent opponent of religious freedom. It has filed lawsuits that seek to force Catholic hospitals to perform abortions and sterilizations at their facilities.

It is also a player in a well-funded campaign against religious exemptions which it considers discriminatory.

Grant listings show that the Arcus Foundation, founded by billionaire heir Jon Stryker, has given the ACLU’s foundation $600,000 for its campaign to “end the use of religion to discriminate” and another $100,000 to support “communications strategies to convince conservative Americans that religious exemptions are ‘un-American’.”

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How the Church is fighting Zika virus in the U.S.

by Adelaide Mena (CNA/EWTN News) • September 1, 2016

Aedes aegypti mosquito. (Nuwatphoto via Shutterstock.com)

Miami, FL — With Zika virus reaching the continental U.S. in recent weeks, scientists are scrambling to find a cure and a vaccine. Meanwhile, the local Church is stepping up to help protect the most vulnerable populations.

“This is a public health crisis and we are working with people,” Richard Turcotte, CEO of Catholic Charities of the Archdiocese of Miami, told CNA.

Within the Archdiocese of Miami – an area that now contains two local Zika transmission zones – Catholic Charities serves nearly 4,000 people a year, through 14 different social service programs that include counseling, elderly services, substance abuse recovery and homeless shelters.

The organization is focusing on prevention by working to reduce the likelihood of mosquito bites, particularly among the homeless population and children.

In the areas specifically affected by Zika, Catholic Charities runs a child development center and a homelessness center. The organization has already made changes to its day-to-day operations aimed at protecting the people it serves from the mosquitoes that carry the virus.

First, Catholic Charities has installed mosquito traps and initiated daily inspections of both facilities to make sure there’s no standing water where mosquitoes can breed.

As an added layer of protection, the childcare center has altered its schedule so that children do not need to go outside during the daytime, when the mosquito species that spreads Zika virus is most active.

Catholic Charities is also offering its clients information from the CDC about the disease’s symptoms and prevention.

The Zika virus garnered international attention in 2015 after areas of Brazil noted a spike in cases of the birth defect microcephaly – a condition marked by abnormally small heads, brains, and developmental delays – following a recent outbreak of the virus in areas of northeastern Brazil. By early 2016, the virus had spread to other areas of South America, Central America, the Caribbean, Mexico and the United States.

Research on the virus has confirmed the link between Zika virus infection during pregnancy and severe neurological birth defects, including microcephaly and incomplete brain development. Recent studies have also suggested that adult brain cells may be susceptible to Zika virus as well. Possible connections have been found between Zika virus and two autoimmune disorders: ADEM and Guillain-Barré syndrome.

Health officials recently found evidence of local Zika virus transmission in two separate areas around Miami, Florida. The discovery of the local transmission of the virus prompted a federal health advisory that pregnant women not visit the affected areas of Miami, the first such travel warning ever issued to an area in the continental United States due to an infectious disease.

Officials are worried that the outbreak could get worse. The Center for Disease Control estimates that by the end of 2016, Zika may infect as much as a quarter of the population of Puerto Rico, the United States’ most populous territory, with over 3 million inhabitants.

Steps focused on prevention and eradication of the virus – such as those being implemented by Catholic Charities – are not only sound public health policy, but also help to respect the dignity of the human person and the good of society, said John DiCamillo, ethicist for the National Catholic Bioethics Center.

DiCamillo applauded efforts such as the removal of mosquito breeding sites, targeting the breeds that spread Zika, and other prevention measures such as screens, air conditioning nets, bug repellant and public health education. These actions, he said, can help restrict the transmission of mosquito-borne illnesses for the entire population, which is particularly important as the danger of Zika among adults is becoming more known.

He criticized efforts to promote abortion as a solution to the spread of the disease, saying that this approach misses the point. “If we’re going about directly killing people who are part of a society as a means of protecting a society, then we’re doing something that’s fundamentally self-contradictory.”

“It’s important to remember that in each of these cases we’re dealing with a human life, a human person, who is being impacted by the disease, and at no point does that give us the right as a society, much less as a parent, to directly intend the destruction of that individual,” he said.

He added that while it may be “perfectly legitimate for public health authorities to encourage the avoidance of pregnancy,” contraception should not be advocated as a legitimate means of halting the disease. Contraption does nothing to stop the spread of Zika, he noted, and the Church teaches that its use is immoral because it violates the nature of the sexual act. “We can’t do evil that good may come of it,” DiCamillo stressed.

As the Zika outbreak continues in the United States and in the Western Hemisphere more broadly, DiCamillo hopes that prevention methods will follow the lead of Catholic Charities and center around evidence-based strategies of mosquito control and eradication.

“I’d love to see a much greater focus or emphasis on the prevention of the spread of the disease through the prevention of mosquito bites,” he told CNA.

“That’s I think universally acknowledged by anyone in the scientific community or medical community as being the best way to prevent the disease and any of its harmful consequences – to go to the root and prevent the bites of mosquitoes.”

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It is not policy to deny IUD removals, Catholic hospital clarifies

by Mary Rezac (CNA/EWTN News) • September 1, 2016

A bronze cast of an IUD. (Sarah Mirk via Flickr CC BY 2.0)

Chicago, IL — A woman with a dislodged intrauterine device claims she was turned down for removal of the device at a Catholic hospital because her doctor said the procedure went against Catholic rules on contraception.

However, relevant directives from the U.S. bishops do not prevent the removal of contraceptive devices.

Melanie Jones, 28, slipped and fell in her bathroom, dislodging her copper IUD to the point that it needed removal. She visited her doctor at Mercy Medical Group at Dearborn Station, an off-site location of Chicago’s Mercy Hospital and Medical Center.

She claims her doctor said she could not remove the IUD due to the hospital’s policy of following the U.S. Catholic bishop’s ethical and religious directives for health care. Jones said the doctor also told her that every other hospital in her network followed the same restrictions.

Distraught, Jones filed a complaint with the American Civil Liberties Union of Illinois, and contacted her insurance, after which she was able to find a hospital that removed her IUD five days later.

If the doctor at Mercy did refuse to remove the IUD on grounds of Catholic teaching, the doctor acted in error and did not follow the Catholic bishop’s directives or Mercy Hospital policy, the hospital said in a statement to Rewire.

“Generally, our protocol in caring for a woman with a dislodged or troublesome IUD is to offer to remove it,” the statement said.

Eric Rhodes, senior vice president of administrative and professional services for the hospital, said Mercy was reviewing its education process on Catholic directives for physicians and residents.

“That act [of removing an IUD] in itself does not violate the directives,” Marty Folan, Mercy’s director of mission integration, told Rewire.

The Ethical and Religious Directives for Catholic Health Care Services published by the U.S. bishops’ conference reaffirm ethical standards for health care and provide authoritative guidance on moral issues facing Catholic health care.

Regarding contraception, the directives state that “Catholic health institutions may not promote or condone contraceptive practices,” but they do not prohibit the removal of long-acting contraceptive devices.

The ACLU has long opposed Catholic hospitals operating according to Catholic teaching. The ACLU and the group the MergerWatch Project co-authored a 2013 report that claimed the growth of Catholic hospitals was a “miscarriage of medicine.”

In 2015, the ACLU sued Trinity Health Corporations, one of the largest Catholic health care operations in America and of which Mercy hospital is a member, for their refusal to perform abortions and tubal ligations. The lawsuit was dismissed.

More recently, a 2016 ACLU report found that one out of every six beds in the country’s acute care hospitals is in a hospital with Catholic affiliations and that Catholic hospitals make up 15 percent of the country’s hospitals. The report claims that because these hospitals follow Church teaching in regards to reproductive care, they put women at risk.

After news of the recent report broke in May, Marie Hilliard, the director of public policy for the National Catholic Bioethics Center, told the Guardian that if the directives are properly followed, a woman’s life should not be at risk.

“If the directives are properly applied, there should be no compromise of the wellbeing of human beings,” Hilliard said.

CNA contacted Mercy Hospital for comment on this story, but did not receive a response by deadline.

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Soros money tried to exploit Pope’s U.S. visit to influence 2016 elections

by Kevin Jones (CNA/EWTN News) • September 1, 2016

Pope Francis celebrates Mass in St. Peter’s Basilica on September 2, 2015. (L’Osservatore Romano)

Washington D.C. — Billionaire George Soros’ Open Society Foundations sought to use Pope Francis’ visit to the U.S. to influence the 2016 elections and cultivate influence within the Catholic Church, according to leaked documents attributed to the major grant makers.

The documents said $650,000 in funds were committed for the foundations’ grantees PICO Network and Faith in Public Life to respond to the papal visit. The foundations said they “placed a bet” in early 2015 that the grantees would “be able to make the most of his trip.”

“In order to seize this moment, we will support PICO’s organizing activities to engage the Pope on economic and racial justice issues,” said the documents.

The documents, published on the site DCLeaks.com, appear to be May 2015 and October 2015 board meeting books of the foundations’ U.S. Programs division and a February 9, 2016 memo on the U.S. Programs’ Opportunities Fund.

“By harnessing the Papal visit to lift up the Pope’s searing critique of what he calls ‘an economy of exclusion and inequality’ and his dismissal of ‘trickle down’ theories, PICO and FPL will work to build a bridge to a larger conversation about bread-and-butter economic concerns and shift national paradigms and priorities in the run-up to the 2016 presidential campaign,” said the May 2015 document.

The October 2015 document said the Pope’s visit was an opportunity for the two grantees to focus on refugees, migrants, over-incarceration, and immigrant rights “while also bringing new energy into the 2016 presidential conversation.” The February 2016 memo said the funding allowed organizations to maximize the impact of the Pope’s visit to emphasize “the humanity of prisoners, immigrants and the poor.”

The texts suggested this activity would include using the influence of Cardinal Oscar Rodriguez Maradiaga and sending a delegation to the Vatican to allow the Pope to “hear directly from low-income Catholics in America.” Cardinal Maradiaga, the Archbishop of Tegucigalpa, Honduras, co-ordinates the Council of Cardinals advising Pope Francis.

Deeply influential, the Open Society Foundations are involved in many domestic and overseas activities.

Their funding for the papal visit efforts supported the work of Faith in Public Life in media framing and public opinion activities, including a poll on Catholic voters, Pope Francis and income inequality. The efforts aimed to secure media coverage for the message that fighting inequality is “pro-family.”

The Open Society Foundations planned to host a November 2015 “Francis effect” briefing for funders including the Ford Foundation that would feature its two grantees, labor unions, and the National Domestic Workers Alliance.

The February 2016 memo said the funded activity aimed to secure “buy-in of individual bishops to more publicly voice support of economic and racial justice messages” with the aim that this would begin to create, in the memo’s understanding, “a critical mass of bishops who are aligned with the Pope.”

“PICO and FPL have been able to use their engagement in the opportunity of the Pope’s visit to seed their position in the long-term project of shifting the priorities of the U.S. Catholic Church to focus on issues of injustice and oppression,” the memo said.

According to the memo, the Pope invited PICO to help plan the Third World Meeting of Popular Movements.

“Resistance to this inside the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops has been stark, and grantees are engaged in a live fight with a faction of the Church that seeks to curb the Pope’s influence on social justice issues,” the memo claimed.

The documents are not always accurate. The memo erroneously indicated the World Meeting of Popular Movements would take place in 2016, rather than 2017.

It added that Faith in Public Life and PICO can strengthen the foundations’ program goals if they can “shift the U.S. Catholic Church to be a voice on behalf of the poor and communities of color.” The memo said this is a long-term process that is “now underway.”

A spokesperson for the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops declined to comment on the story.

An Open Society Foundations spokesperson responded to CNA Aug. 30, saying, “The Pope has personally championed many of the social justice issues we work on at the foundations. We saw his visit as an opportunity to further discussion and policy debate on those issues.”

The foundations characterized the document leak, which some have attributed to Russian intelligence, as “a symptom of an aggressive assault on civil society and human rights activists that is taking place globally.”

The PICO Network told CNA that the Open Society Foundations was “one of many individuals and foundations” that supported its work on income inequality, immigration reform and criminal justice “highlighted by Pope Francis and championed by the U.S. Catholic Church for many decades.”

“We are pleased that our efforts in conjunction with the Pope’s historic visit to the U.S. helped to share and advance his mission and message about the importance of the Catholic Church and people from all faiths standing with the poor and the powerless,” PICO said.

The network said it continues to work with the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace and the U.S. bishops to advance Catholic Social Teaching. This includes a planned convening of the World Meeting of Popular Movements in the U.S. in 2017.

PICO did not answer questions about the alleged conflict within the U.S. bishops. It said Cardinal Maradiaga has supported its work with Central American faith communities for 10 years and spoke at a PICO launch event for its “Year of Encounter with Pope Francis” in early 2015.

PICO, founded in 1972 by Father John Bauman, S.J., describes itself as a nationwide network of faith-based organizations. It claims 1,000 member institutions in 17 U.S. states and claims success in increasing access to health care while improving public schools, affordable housing and neighborhood safety.

The other grantee involved, Faith in Public Life, has at times undermined the U.S. bishops.

When the bishops launched their first religious freedom event, Fortnight for Freedom, in 2012 to protest Obama administration mandates violating Catholics’ religious freedom, Faith in Public Life Catholic program director John Gehring spread talking points against the bishops.

Other Open Society Foundations documents discuss its backing for Catholics in Alliance for the Common Good, whose first contact with the foundations was in 2006.

It also backed the petition site Faithful America in order to mobilize “progressive faith voices.” The site has sometimes targeted Catholic bishops and organizations that stand by Catholic teaching.

Other leaked documents appear to show the Open Society Foundations contributed $1.5 million to support Planned Parenthood’s $7-8 million lobbying response to videos allegedly proving the abortion provider was engaged in the illegal sale of fetal body parts. The foundations are also funding pro-abortion rights groups to target Ireland’s pro-life law as a potential model to end abortion restrictions in other Catholic countries like Poland.

The Catholic Legal Immigration Network is among the foundations’ many grantees.

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Diocese of Lincoln sees strong turnout at first Sacred Music Clinic

by Cathy Bender (Southern Nebraska Register) • September 1, 2016

Sacred Music Clinic in the Diocese of Lincoln. (Cathy Bender/Southern Nebraska Register)

Lincoln, NE — The Diocese of Lincoln held its first “Sacred Music Clinic” Aug. 27 at St. Thomas Aquinas Church on the campus of the University of Nebraska in Lincoln.

The event was sponsored by the diocesan liturgical commission at the suggestion of Bishop James Conley.

The turnout of diocesan musicians – cantors, adult or youth choir directors, singers, organists and other instrumentalists – far exceeded organizers’ expectations. A total of 230 people attended from 59 parishes in the Diocese of Lincoln and two parishes from the Archdiocese of Omaha.

“We were overjoyed with the turnout,” said Father Daniel Rayer, chancellor and chairman of the diocesan liturgical commission. “It far exceeded our expectations. We maxed out the facility so we are thankful to the participants for bearing with cramped spaces.”

He said that several members of the diocesan commission who have attended the annual Catholic Music Association of America colloquium – as Bishop Conley did this summer – wanted to start a smaller version for musicians in the diocese. The goal of the commission is to make this clinic an annual event.

“I think the response of the people indicates that there is a hunger for formation in the sacred liturgy,” Father Rayer said. “The Church offers us direction for beautiful liturgy in her liturgical documents. Our aim is to offer assistance to our musicians to help them implement the Church’s vision for sacred music in the liturgy. As Bishop Conley reminded us in his homily at Morning Prayer, this implementation will need to take place in ‘small steps’ and in a way that takes into consideration the talents, abilities, and needs of each parish all while aiming for the beauty called for by the Church.

“We want to strive for excellence in the liturgy since this is where we come to worship God and we should give our best to God,” he continued. “This was our first event, so there is much room for us to grow and learn on how we can better help our musicians.”

The clinic, which was open to beginning, intermediate and advanced musicians, included presentations by several experienced educators, including organist Matthew Meloche, director of sacred music at Sts. Simon and Jude Cathedral in Phoenix, and Adam Bartlett, a composer, conductor and teacher of sacred music. Local instructors and directors included Nicholas Lemme, the Latin chant director at Our Lady of Guadalupe Seminary in Denton, and Amy Flamminio, who was recently named choir director at the Cathedral of the Risen Christ in Lincoln, and Jessica Ligon, music teacher at Cathedral School. Father Michael Zimmer, diocesan master of ceremonies, led a breakout session on Church documents pertaining to music and liturgy.

As Father Rayer reiterated in his homily at the closing Mass, “We’re called to sing the Mass, not just to sing at Mass.”

“Chant has really been the Church’s musical tradition for centuries.” Literally practicing what he had preached, Father Rayer chanted the Eucharistic prayer, something he’d been hesitant to do in his priesthood.

“I am not a natural musician,” Father Rayer said, “so I had to listen to audio recordings of it and practice it many times. It was worth the commitment to do that and I plan to sing it at Mass on special feasts in the future. Audio recordings of the priest’s chants of the Roman Missal are all available on the internet. With a little time and practice, most priests should be able to sing the chants proper to them.”

All participants were welcomed to test out the skills they were learning. Breakout sessions focused on different aspects of liturgical music such as chant, organ accompaniment, hymn selection, leading the responsorial psalm at Mass and other pertinent topics. The instructors led music at Mass so that all could participate.

Wayne Ringer attended the conference from St. Mary Parish in Denton, where he is a member of a three-man schola cantorum led by Andrew Vinton. They just started three years ago, but he said attending the conference gave him great hope for the future.

“I could see from the enthusiastic participants in the clinic that a great movement (toward use of chant) is afoot in our diocese. It will still take time to mature, but the seeds have been planted.”

He called the clinic “an awesome opportunity for formation in the rich tradition of sacred music that the Church has asked us to implement in our parishes.”

“I think that many people do not realize,” he explained, “the emphasis that Vatican Council II and the subsequent popes have placed on returning Gregorian chant to ‘pride of place’ in the Mass.” He said he thought the clinic would be a “real force for years to come” toward achieving this goal for the diocese.

“I would encourage anyone in the music ministry to attend next year’s music clinic,” Ringer said, “to gain a deeper love for the Mass and for sacred music. One of the primary ways to evangelize is through beauty, and I think that everyone who participated in Saturday evening’s Mass was overwhelmed by the grace, dignity and solemnity of the liturgy.”

In fact, the night before the clinic began, artist and writer David Clayton delivered a free lecture at the Newman Center on “The Way of Beauty.” He explained how beauty can be the most basic form of evangelization, a detail Katie Dubas also took from the conference.

Dubas, who is director of youth ministry for the parishes of the Grant Deanery, also occasionally serves as a cantor. She said she learned a great deal about the different styles of music and how they are best suited for different occasions.

“I never thought about how some music is best for basic evangelization, some for private devotion and then the sacred music that was designed for the liturgy,” she said. “Gregorian chant has a rich history in the life of the Church and it was good to learn about the history and role it plays in the Church today.”

She got to see firsthand how chant can be brought to the present Church, when she attended a Sunday morning Mass at the Newman Center.

“I was surrounded by college students,” she said. “Most of the Mass used chant, and all of the students around me were joining in song, so that showed me that they have been taught about sacred music and are embracing it wholeheartedly,” she said.

“I do think young people today are open to learning about sacred music and how it was designed to help us have one united voice in response to Jesus’ invitation to be inserted into the mystery of the Trinity.”

This article originally appeared in the Southern Nebraska Register. Republished with permission.

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Reaping the Whirlwind: In the wake of the Obergefell opinion, is legalizing polygamy next?

by Deacon Keith Fournier • August 30, 2016

In June 2015, the United States Supreme Court issued their majority opinion in Obergefell v Hodges. Five lawyers manufactured out of whole cloth a faux “right” for two men or two women to do what they are incapable of doing; that is, to enter into a marriage. They claimed to have found such a new “right” in the 14th amendment to the United States Constitution, apparently next to the “right” to take the life of children in the womb through procured abortion for any reason throughout all nine months of a pregnancy.

In the wake of that horribly written, unconscionable, and unreasonable opinion of five lawyers, activists within the LGBTQI community have been enforcing it as an edict across the nation. They are also using it to suppress free speech, free association, and the free exercise of religion. A tsunami has been unleashed, as cultural revolutionaries uproot the moral foundations of the social order by removing the unique role which the marriage bound family has long served as the first cell of civil society.

These architects of a new cultural revolution are also hell-bent on compelling faithful Christians across the confessional spectrum to deny their deeply held religious conviction that marriage is solely possible between one and one woman. Failure to do so may soon bring punitive measures as the police power of the state is unleashed against those who refuse to bend the knee to a new Caesar. It is already bringing the soft persecution which accompanies such ideological pogroms once they are unleashed.

I have written about the quagmire the Obergefell opinion unleashed. The classical Christian position concerning the nature of marriage and the objective truth concerning sexual difference as a gift and a given, is not simply a religious position. Classical Christians insist there is a natural moral law which can be known by all men and women through the exercise of reason which confirm these truths.

Belief in such a natural law is woven throughout the founding documents of the American experiment in ordered liberty. That is because the founders stood on the shoulders of the giants of Christendom. It is also the source and support of every authentic human and civil rights movement. The natural law gives us the moral norms we need to build truly good societies – and to govern ourselves with equity. It must inform the civil and criminal law, or a nation soon devolves into tyranny and anarchy.

To confer by a governmental fiat the benefits conferred in the past only to stable married couples and families to homosexual or lesbian paramours is a radical social experiment which has now been foisted upon the West by social engineers. To use the police power of the state to punish those who disagree is not only unjust, it leads to a form of state sponsored oppression which is specifically anti-Christian. Faithful Christians cannot and will not ever deny the undeniable, that marriage is between one man and one woman, intended for life and open to life.

I write as a Catholic Christian. The Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith of the Catholic Church explained it well in 2003: “The Church’s teaching on marriage and on the complementarity of the sexes reiterates a truth that is evident to right reason and recognized as such by all the major cultures of the world. Marriage is not just any relationship between human beings. It was established by the Creator with its own nature, essential properties and purpose.”

The instruction from this Vatican watchdog over doctrine insists, “No ideology can erase from the human spirit the certainty that marriage exists solely between a man and a woman, who by mutual personal gift, proper and exclusive to themselves, tend toward the communion of their persons. In this way, they mutually perfect each other, in order to cooperate with God in the procreation and upbringing of new human lives.”

The hostility toward Christians in the West is increasing. Efforts to compel compliance with this social experiment are coming on multiple fronts. For example, Christians who seek to engage in the legal profession are now in the crosshairs of these social engineers. Mat Staver, the founder and chairmen of Liberty Counsel and I opined in 2015 that advisory opinions from state supreme courts could exclude Christians from serving on the judicial bench.

The American Bar Association just proposed an amendment to Rule 8.4 of its Rules of Professional Conduct which could have the effect of accusing Christian lawyers who refuse to deny the nature of marriage or to affirm that gender identity is fluid, of committing professional misconduct.

Government has long regulated marriage for the common good. Examples, such as the age of consent, demonstrate how proper regulation ensured the free and voluntary basis of the marriage bond. No civil institution, including the United States Supreme Court, has the authority to redefine marriage. However, those five lawyers sitting on the Supreme Court have done just that. I use the expression five lawyers in referring to the justices who wrote the Obergefell opinion not only to express my utter disdain for the opinion, but because Justice John Roberts used the phrase.

In an independent dissenting opinion he wrote, “But for those who believe in a government of laws, not of men, the majority’s approach is deeply disheartening. … Five lawyers have closed the debate and enacted their own vision of marriage as a matter of constitutional law.”. I have been a lawyer for thirty-six years and appeared as co-counsel at the Supreme Court several times on constitutional cases. I have never heard one of the justices refer to his or her colleagues as a “lawyer”. I believe it was his way of underscoring the fact that the majority opinion had no basis in the law and rejected any claim to legitimacy.

I suggest that in a post-Obergefell America, we are just beginning to reap the whirlwind.

I was among those who suggested that manufacturing a faux legal framework to give the status of a marriage to homosexual or lesbian partnerships would open up a Pandora’s box, making it impossible to exclude any set of relationships from claiming the same legal status. Further, I contended that it would only be a matter of time before activists would use the Obergefell opinion to lift any other restriction on marriage.

The Catholic Herald reports that Hamza Piccardo, a founder of the Union of Islamic Communities in Italy, recently insisted, “there is no reason for polygamy not to be legalized after the Italian government passed a law to recognize the union of same-sex civil unions.” There is an alliance being forged between some within the Islamic community and the new left, based solely in their joint desire to eviscerate the Jewish and Christian roots of the West.

Crux News reported that Piccardo further opined, “If it’s only a matter of civil rights, then polygamy is a civil right … Myself and millions of people don’t agree with homosexual unions, and yet it’s licit and we respect them. Those interested in them are a minority, as polygamists would be. Society as a whole can accept everyone.” In the wake of Obergefell, is polygamy next?

The Lord spoke to Israel through the Prophet Hosea concerning their rejection of His law. “For they sow the wind, and they shall reap the whirlwind.” (Hosea 8:7) In rejecting natural marriage, the Supreme Court of the United States certainly sowed the wind. A whirlwind is “a weather phenomenon in which a vortex of wind (a vertically oriented rotating column of air) forms due to instabilities and turbulence.” We are living in a whirlwind of instability and turbulence.

May God give us the grace and the courage to rise to the hour and defend marriage and the family and social order founded upon it in the days ahead.

Deacon Keith A. Fournier is Founder and Chairman of Common Good Foundation and Alliance. A member of the clergy, a Roman Catholic Deacon, he is also a constitutional/human rights lawyer and public policy advocate who served as the first and founding Executive Director of the American Center for Law and Justice in the nineteen nineties. He has long been active at the intersection of faith, values, and culture and currently serves as Special Counsel to Liberty Counsel. Deacon Fournier is also a Senior Contributing Writer for THE STREAM.

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Apologists, Catechists, Theologians: Wake Up!

by Bishop Robert Barron • August 30, 2016

After perusing the latest Pew Study on why young people are leaving the active practice of Christianity, I confess that I just sighed in exasperation. I don’t doubt for a moment the sincerity of those who responded to the survey, but the reasons they offer for abandoning Christianity are just so uncompelling. That is to say, any theologian, apologist, or evangelist worth his salt should be able easily to answer them. And this led me (hence the sigh) to the conclusion that “we have met the enemy and it is us.” For the past fifty years or so, Christian thinkers have largely abandoned the art of apologetics and have failed (here I offer a j’accuse to many in the Catholic universities) to resource the riches of the Catholic intellectual tradition in order to hold off critics of the faith. I don’t blame the avatars of secularism for actively attempting to debunk Christianity; that’s their job, after all. But I do blame teachers, catechists, evangelists, and academics within the Christian churches for not doing enough to keep our young people engaged. These studies consistently demonstrate that unless we believers seriously pick up our game intellectually, we’re going to keep losing our kids.

Let me look just briefly at some of the chief reasons offered for walking away from Christianity. Many evidently felt that modern science somehow undermines the claims of the faith. One respondent said: “rational thought makes religion go out the window,” and another complained of the “lack of any sort of scientific evidence of a creator.” Well, I’m sure it would come as an enormous surprise to St. Paul, St. Augustine, St. John Chrysostom, St. Jerome, St. Thomas Aquinas, St. Robert Bellarmine, Blessed John Henry Newman, G.K. Chesterton, C.S. Lewis, and Joseph Ratzinger — all among the most brilliant people Western culture has produced — that religion and reason are somehow incompatible. And to focus more precisely on the issue of “scientific evidence,” the sciences, ordered by their nature and method to an analysis of empirically verifiable objects and states of affairs within the universe, cannot even in principle address questions regarding God, who is not a being in the world, but rather the reason why the finite realm exists at all. There simply cannot be “scientific” evidence or argument that tells one way or the other in regard to God. Mind you, this is by no means to imply that there are no rational warrants for belief in God. Philosophers over the centuries, in fact, have articulated dozens of such demonstrations, which have, especially when considered together, enormous probative force. I have found, in my own evangelical work, that the argument from contingency gets quite a bit of traction with those who are wrestling with the issue of God’s existence. What these arguments have lacked, sad to say, are convinced and articulate defenders within the academy and in the ranks of teachers, catechists, and apologists.

One of the young people responded to the survey using the formula made famous by Karl Marx: “religion just seems to be the opiate of the people.” Marx’s adage, of course, is an adaptation of Ludwig Feuerbach’s observation that religion amounts to a projection of our idealized self-image. Sigmund Freud, in the early twentieth century, further adapted Feuerbach, arguing that religion is like a waking dream, a wish-fulfilling fantasy. This line of thinking has been massively adopted by the so-called “new atheists” of our time. I find it regularly on my internet forums. What all of this comes down to, ultimately, is a dismissive and patronizing psychologization of religious belief. But it is altogether vulnerable to a tu quoque (you do the same thing) counter-attack. I think it is eminently credible to say that atheism amounts to a wish-fulfilling fantasy, precisely in the measure that it allows for complete freedom and self-determination: if there is no God, no ultimate moral criterion, I can do and be whatever I want. In a word, the psychologizing cuts just as effectively in the opposite direction. Hence, the two charges more or less cancel one another out — and this should compel us to return to real argument at the objective level.

A third commonly-cited reason for abandoning the Christian churches is that, as one respondent put it, “Christians seem to behave so badly.” God knows that the clergy sex abuse scandals of the last 25 years have lent considerable support to this argument, already bolstered by the usual suspects of the Inquisition, the Crusades, the persecution of Galileo, witch-hunts, etc., etc. We could, of course, enter into an examination of each of these cases, but for our purposes I am willing to concede the whole argument: yes indeed, over the centuries, lots and lots of Christians have behaved wickedly. But why, one wonders, should this tell against the integrity and rectitude of Christian belief? Many, many Americans have done horrific things, often in the name of America. One thinks of slave owners, the enforcers of Jim Crow laws, the carpet bombers of Dresden and Tokyo, the perpetrators of the My-Lai Massacre, the guards at Abu Ghraib Prison, etc. Do these outrages ipso facto prove that American ideals are less than praiseworthy, or that the American system as such is corrupt? The question answers itself.

Relatedly, a number of young people said that they left the Christian churches because “religion is the greatest source of conflict in the world.” One hears this charge so often today — especially in the wake of September 11th — that we tend to take it as self-evident, when in point of fact, it is an invention of Enlightenment-era historiography. Voltaire, Diderot, Spinoza, and many others in the 17th and 18th centuries wanted to undermine religion, and they could find no better way to achieve this end than to score Christianity as the source of violence. Through numberless channels this view has seeped into the general consciousness, but it simply does not stand up to serious scrutiny. In their exhaustive survey of the wars of human history (The Encyclopedia of Wars), Charles Phillips and Alan Axelrod demonstrate that less than 7% of wars could be credibly blamed on religion, and even the most casual reflection bears this out.

In point of fact, the bloodiest wars in history, those of the twentieth century, which produced over 100 million dead, had practically nothing to do with religion. Indeed, a very persuasive case could be made that ideological secularism and modern nationalism are the sources of greatest bloodshed. And yet the prejudice, first fostered by the philosophes of the Enlightenment, oddly endures.

An earlier Pew Study showed that for every one person who joins the Catholic Church today, six are leaving, and that many of those who leave are the young. This most recent survey indicates that intellectual objections figure prominently when these drifters are asked why they abandoned their faith. My cri de coeur is that teachers, catechists, theologians, apologists, and evangelists might wake up to this crisis and do something about it.

Bishop Robert Barron is an auxiliary bishop 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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Mariano Rivera, Pentecostal Christians, and the Catholic Church

by Sr. Joan L. Roccasalvo, C.S.J. • August 31, 2016

Mariano Rivera is widely viewed as the most effective relief pitcher in modern baseball history. His one pitch – the cutter fast ball – mystifies batters in its final moments of delivery as the ball twists and turns at record speed. Then the umpire’s “strrr-ike one-two, strrrike-three” retires “Casey at the bat,” whoever Casey may be at the moment. When Mariano leaves the mound with a sure victory in the record books, his eyes turn heavenward.

Born and raised Catholic

It is a little-known fact that Mariano Rivera was born a Roman Catholic. The family did not practice their faith, however. In his booklet The Closer, there is no mention of his Catholic faith, but time and again he professes his personal relationship with Jesus Christ.

By the time he was twenty-one, Mariano was mixed up with a fast crowd, but his cousin and his future wife, Clara, steered him in the right direction. He began attending the Pentecostal church where he experienced a conversion to Jesus Christ. Shortly after his conversion, his parents followed him into the fold because they had seen a transformation in his behavior. His example was the occasion for their conversion. Mariano often counsels: ‘When you face adversity, you can overcome it if you trust and have faith. ‘You can do all things in him who strengthens you,’” (Phil 4:13).

Mariano and Clara have donated thousands of dollars to re-build Pentecostal churches in Panama, his home of origin, and to scholarship funds in New York. He takes charge of all the managerial decisions, while his wife pastors and preaches in her church in Rye, NY. Their three sons have been educated in Catholic schools: Iona Prep, Iona College, and Fairfield University. All of which leads to the question: Why do the Pentecostal churches attract converts among Hispanics like the Rivera family?

Reason 1: Simplicity

Traditionally, Hispanics are natural Catholics, but they are disposed to join the Pentecostal faith. Why? Because the Pentecostal message is simple, it has made inroads into the Hispanic community. Doctrines are reduced to a few generally-accepted Protestant standards, the central mantra always being that of personal relationship with Jesus Christ.

Response 1: A complex organism

In comparing the Church to a physical body, St. Paul describes it as a complex organism. Like the physical body, the Church is a hierarchically-organized and complex entity with every member performing its proper role – as in a full-bodied symphony orchestra.

The Catholic Church preaches what can be categorized as creed, code, cult, and personal prayer. Translated, it means that to be a practicing Catholic, one must believe in a hierarchy of dogmas and doctrines; in a moral code, including the Ten Commandments and canon law; the reception of the sacraments, especially Matrimony, the Eucharist, and Penance; and finally, personal prayer. The Catechism of the Catholic Church nicely presents these four aspects of belief, all intertwined, yet rich and complex – like a full-bodied symphony orchestra.

Reason 2: Direct experience of God

Pentecostals believe that a direct experience of Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit is possible without intermediaries. The preacher facilitates this desire, and then steps out of the way. Hispanics value the emotions to feel their faith. Theirs is not a cerebral attraction. Feeling a personal and close relationship with Jesus Christ – this is what draws Hispanics to Pentecostal Christianity.

Response 2: Experience of God – indirect and direct

Catholicism is a mediated religion. God’s grace comes to us indirectly and mediated through validly-ordained ministers who stand in the place of Christ. For Hispanics, the Eucharistic liturgy, in particular, has become a stumbling block. It mystifies them because the mediation of God’s all-present grace looks too human in the person of the priest.

It is a different matter with personal prayer which originated with Jesus and prayer to his Father. It has continued through the monastic tradition, begun in the early days of Christianity.

The Catholic answer to Pentecostal fervor is in the Church’s mystical tradition. Thomas Merton did much to further it in his monastery at Gethsemane.

One of the best-loved works of art in the Church is Bernini’s sculpture “St. Teresa in Ecstasy.” Bernini says in marble what we hope to realize in our own life of prayer. The sculpture is located in Rome in the Church of Santa Maria della Vittoria.

Sadly, the monastic or mystical tradition is not preached at Eucharistic liturgies. One wonders why it is not, for it is concerned with personal prayer and contemplation. People flock to monasteries to immerse themselves in a direct experience of God. Another way of experiencing direct communion with God can be found in making the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius, and other prayer experiences. Still, not every person can afford the luxury of making an extended retreat in a monastery.

There are many other ways to pray thus coming in contact with God. The Church urges daily prayer and the daily examen, in diverse venues, such as on the way to and from work, or at other moments during the day. Often, only moments, but jeweled moments, they are. They open up the individual to direct intimacy with God as he deals with each soul.

Emotional demonstration at the Eucharistic liturgy is not part of the Catholic experience. While it is true that Catholics can and do experience God in personal prayer, the liturgy is not the place to demonstrate emotion. The deep feeling of liturgical prayer is embedded in the quality of words, gestures, music, and ritual. When a Eucharistic liturgy is celebrated beautifully, it remains unrivalled as the full power of God’s grace overflowing from the service to the faithful.

Reason 3: Truth, beauty, and goodness

Doctrine can be preached either as dry facts or as beautiful and good truths. You can’t simply repeat truths, particularly those regarding moral conduct, without God’s unction and love, without the inner beauty and goodness of the truth, and expect to be persuasive in doing so.

Hispanics are particularly responsive to sweet homilies about God’s love and tender mercy. The strictures of morality are not intended to tie up Catholics in a bundle of moral knots; life is filled with enough stress. Most Catholics will tune out preaching about moral codes delivered in a vacuum. In fact, they reject this approach, especially those Catholics who are as educated theologically as the celebrant – or even more so.

Worshipers need to be inspired. They want to take home the uplifting thoughts and strains of the worship service to ponder throughout the week. They don’t want to return home in an angry frame of mind.

Response 3: Truth must be taught in its beauty and goodness

How often did Benedict XVI speak of presenting truths of faith in a beautiful way! The truth must be taught, of course, but it should be done as John Paul II wrote in his encyclical, “Splendor of Truth.” A beautiful truth has more power to persuade than one presented as cold, hard fact.

Pope Francis has admonished the clergy to avoid boring homilies. When preaching, the priest should find a way to draw modern moral lessons from scripture and from social media. His homily should appeal to the heart as well as to the mind. Let the approach of Jesus be the exemplar for homilists. Jesus kept his listeners enthralled. He had to send them home, or feed them while continuing to preach.

If a dogma is true, it must also be shown to be beautiful and good — and accessible. The dogma of the Blessed Trinity can be preached in a persuasive way from St. Paul’s famous phrase: “Don’t you know that you are temples of God, and that God lives within you” (1 Cor 3:16)? Here the first and greatest dogma of Christianity is no longer remote, hidden above and beyond the cosmos. The reality of the Trinity becomes a living truth, relevant, accessible at any moment of the day.

Preaching truth by halves shortchanges the faithful by delivering a weakened, diluted, and partial Catholicism. This is perhaps the reason most responsible for Catholics turning their backs on a Church that is in fact true, good, and beautiful.

Conclusion

We conclude by lauding Mariano Rivera’s dedication to his Christian vocation. Crowds accept his demonstrative way of expressing his faith because he lives out the truth of his convictions.

Had Mariano remained a non-practicing Catholic, he might not have done so much good. We are grateful for the Christianity he lives with his family and for the benefit of others.

Sr. Joan L. Roccasalvo, a member of the Congregation of St. Joseph, Brentwood, NY, holds degrees in philosophy (Ph.L.), musicology (Ph.D.), theology (M.A.), and liturgical studies (Ph.D.). She has taught at all levels of Catholic education and writes with a particular focus on a theology of beauty and the sacred arts. Her e-mail address is jroccasalvo@optonline.net.

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FEATURES

This journalist first told the world about Mother Teresa

by Kevin J. Jones (CNA/EWTN News) • September 1, 2016

Mother Teresa. (United Nations photograph via Flickr CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)

Denver, CO — The American reporter who first brought news of Mother Teresa’s work to an international audience still remembers the day in 1966 when he met the nun serving the poor in the slums of Calcutta.

“Certainly she totally deserves to be a saint. In my eyes, she was a saint her entire life,” retired Associated Press reporter Joe McGowan, Jr. told CNA. “She was so humble and yet so pleasant.”

McGowan, 85, was an AP reporter for 42 years who covered wars, revolutions, and earthquakes.

In 1966, he was an AP bureau chief with a huge territory – India, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Nepal, Ceylon, and the Maldives Islands.

Trying to dig up more stories, he was speaking with a newspaper editor in Calcutta about anything unusual or ignored.

“He finally said ‘Well, there’s that funny little nun who goes around collecting dying people.’ And I knew I had a story,” said McGowan.

The reporter took a bike taxi over to her home for the dying and spent two days with Mother Teresa.

She was dressed in the local sari, the homespun material common to average or poor Indian women.

“There was nothing pretentious about her at all,” McGowan said.

The nun would walk around Calcutta with a two-wheel cart with the help of two hired men.

“They went around picking up dying people,” the reporter recounted.

“In those days there were not enough [hospital] beds in places like Calcutta. So if you were declared terminally ill, your family had to come and take you home so that there was a bed for somebody else,” he said. “If nobody picked you up, they put you on the sidewalk to die.”

Since 1952, Mother Teresa and her Missionaries of Charity sisters had cared for the abandoned and the dying at their Home for the Dying Destitutes. The building, a former Hindu chapel, was divided into two parts, one for men and one for women.

Conditions were cramped.

“They slept on the floor on crude little mats. It was so crowded they couldn’t even get up and go to the bathroom,” McGowan recounted. “I tried to stay out of the way, these people were crammed in there so tight.”

“Under her outstanding care, some of those people recovered and got up and walked out,” he said.

McGowan said he was “extremely impressed” with her work.

“I think that showed in my writing about her.”

His Associated Press account from March 1966 was the first international news story about her.

McGowan said he didn’t know if he could even explain what motivated her.

“She always wanted to do the Lord’s work, I guess she would say.”

“I’m not Catholic, but obviously she is an amazing woman,” he continued. “She will be sainted in just a few more days. I just have the highest of respect for her, the work that she did, to work there in the slums of Calcutta.”

The Indian city was a rough place in the 1960s.

“Calcutta is a place all unto itself,” McGowan recollected. “I saw a couple of completely naked women walking the streets, their hair all disheveled. They would see a cigarette butt and they would reach over and pick it up and chew it and eat it. This was the kind of thing you saw in Calcutta in those days. How they are today, I don’t know.”

Another time he saw a group of students waiting and waiting for a streetcar, growing increasingly angry at the delay.

“They were so mad, when the street car arrived they set it on fire. That meant fewer streetcars for the next day.”

In a world like that, McGowan recalled, Mother Teresa was “very, very calm” and “very unpretentious.”

“She was doing all this work, but it was just her life. She wasn’t bragging about it.”

The people she helped reacted with great appreciation.

“Elsewhere they had not received any aid of any kind,” he said. “It was so unusual in an extremely overpopulated place like India for them to get this kind of attention.”

McGowan continued his reporting career and retired to Broomfield, Colo., a suburb of Denver. He told of his experiences and the people he met in his 2012 book From Fidel Castro to Mother Teresa.

“On the one hand, you had Fidel Castro. On the other hand, you had Mother Teresa: this small nun who was doing – I guess you would have to say – miraculous things for people at the bottom of the societal rung,” he said.

The journalist and the nun reunited when she visited Denver in May 1989. She passed him a written message.

“She gave me a card. In her handwriting, it says ‘Love others as Jesus loves you. God bless you. M. Teresa, M.C.’”

McGowan says it’s among his most treasured possessions.

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FEATURES

Mother Teresa’s canonization portrait – and what the artist thought of her

by Matt Hadro (CNA/EWTN News) • September 1, 2016

Mother Teresa by Chas Fagan. (Knights of Columbus)

Washington, D.C. — The canonization portrait of Bl. Mother Teresa, a copy of which will hang from St. Peter’s Basilica on Sunday, is meant to reflect her joy and her selflessness, said the artist.

“The credit lies more with the subject of the painting than with the painter,” artist Chas Fagan said in a press conference introducing the portrait.

“That picture will bring lots of people closer to God,” Sister Tanya, M.C., the superior at the Missionaries of Charity Gift of Peace house in Washington, D.C., said of the portrait. She knew Bl. Mother Teresa from having lived in the same building with her as a novice.

Bl. Mother Teresa, foundress of the Missionaries of Charity, will be canonized on Sunday, Sept. 4 in St. Peter’s Square. An enlarged copy of her portrait will hang from St. Peter’s Basilica, and the Knights of Columbus will have one million prayer cards with the portrait on them available for pilgrims in Rome.

Her official canonization portrait was unveiled Thursday at the Saint John Paul II National Shrine in Washington, D.C. It was “commissioned out of the love and high esteem that the Knights of Columbus has for Mother Teresa and the Missionaries of Charity,” Pat Kelly, executive director of the shrine, stated at the unveiling.

The Knights “worked with her for over two decades, beginning in the 1970’s,” he noted. “Since her death, the Knights of Columbus has honored Mother Teresa through its continuing support of the Missionaries of Charity.”

Fagan, who has painted portraits of all the U.S. presidents and whose work has appeared in the U.S. Capitol rotunda and National Cathedral, was commissioned by the Knights to paint Bl. Mother Teresa’s portrait after he had done previous work for them, including a statue of Pope St. John Paul II.

His “immediate answer was yes” when the Knights asked him to do the portrait, but he had “no idea” it would be the official one hanging in St. Peter’s. Fagan submitted initial sketches and the whole process “took at least a month” before he could even begin painting, which then took six weeks.

The “hook” for the painting, he said, was Mother Teresa’s quote that “joy is strength.” She was a “diminutive, yet somehow earth-shaking figure,” he added, and others who had met her told him that “somehow when she looked at you she was glowing, she was radiant.”

So he tried to make that come through in the picture. “If you want to make something glow, you have to surround it with darkness,” he said of the painting.

What also struck Fagan about Mother Teresa’s life was her “selflessness,” he said.

“There’s a theme that came about from a mentor I had as a boy in high school,” he said, where “if you just start helping someone else, whatever your problems are will start to disappear.”

Mother Teresa lived this out, he said. “And so learning of her life, and seeing how she lived it every single day, that’s just so humbling. And we can all aspire to it, but it’s a big leap,” he added.

Fagan was actually able to feel the saint’s presence in his studio while painting the portrait, he explained. “When you have a portrait in the studio, you kind of get to live with it,” he said, especially toward the end of the painting when it really starts to come to life and when the lights are dim, you can see them there.”

“And having to say goodbye is the worst,” he said. “In the end, Mother Theresa brought joy to my studio, to my home, and now I will miss her company.”

The picture is “superb,” Sister Tanya said. She noted the portrayal of Mother’s “penetrating eyes,” serenity, and her “focusing on the person that she’s looking at.”

“If someone looks at her, they would lift up their eyes to heaven, I would say, because she’s not focusing on herself,” Sister Tanya said. “The person who looks at her would be focusing on God.”

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SUNDAY • SEPTEMBER 4, 2016

Twenty-third Sunday in Ordinary Time

First Reading (Wis 9:13-18b; NRSVCE)

For who can learn the counsel of God?

Or who can discern what the Lord wills?

For the reasoning of mortals is worthless,

and our designs are likely to fail;

for a perishable body weighs down the soul,

and this earthy tent burdens the thoughtful mind.

We can hardly guess at what is on earth,

and what is at hand we find with labor;

but who has traced out what is in the heavens?

Who has learned your counsel,

unless you have given wisdom

and sent your holy spirit from on high?

And thus the paths of those on earth were set right.

Second Reading (Phmn 9-10, 12-17; NRSVCE)

I appeal to you on the basis of love — and I, Paul, do this as an old man, and now also as a prisoner of Christ Jesus. I am appealing to you for my child, Onesimus, whose father I have become during my imprisonment. I am sending him, that is, my own heart, back to you. I wanted to keep him with me, so that he might be of service to me in your place during my imprisonment for the gospel; but I preferred to do nothing without your consent, in order that your good deed might be voluntary and not something forced. Perhaps this is the reason he was separated from you for a while, so that you might have him back forever, no longer as a slave but more than a slave, a beloved brother — especially to me but how much more to you, both in the flesh and in the Lord.

So if you consider me your partner, welcome him as you would welcome me.

Gospel Reading (Lk 14:25-33; NRSVCE)

Large crowds were traveling with Jesus; and he turned and said to them, “Whoever comes to me and does not hate father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters, yes, and even life itself, cannot be my disciple. Whoever does not carry the cross and follow me cannot be my disciple. For which of you, intending to build a tower, does not first sit down and estimate the cost, to see whether he has enough to complete it? Otherwise, when he has laid a foundation and is not able to finish, all who see it will begin to ridicule him, saying, ‘This fellow began to build and was not able to finish.’ Or what king, going out to wage war against another king, will not sit down first and consider whether he is able with ten thousand to oppose the one who comes against him with twenty thousand? If he cannot, then, while the other is still far away, he sends a delegation and asks for the terms of peace. So therefore, none of you can become my disciple if you do not give up all your possessions.”

MONDAY • SEPTEMBER 5, 2016

Monday of the Twenty-third Week in Ordinary Time

First Reading (1 Cor 5:1-8; NRSVCE)

It is actually reported that there is sexual immorality among you, and of a kind that is not found even among pagans; for a man is living with his father’s wife. And you are arrogant! Should you not rather have mourned, so that he who has done this would have been removed from among you?

For though absent in body, I am present in spirit; and as if present I have already pronounced judgment in the name of the Lord Jesus on the man who has done such a thing. When you are assembled, and my spirit is present with the power of our Lord Jesus, you are to hand this man over to Satan for the destruction of the flesh, so that his spirit may be saved in the day of the Lord.

Your boasting is not a good thing. Do you not know that a little yeast leavens the whole batch of dough? Clean out the old yeast so that you may be a new batch, as you really are unleavened. For our paschal lamb, Christ, has been sacrificed. Therefore, let us celebrate the festival, not with the old yeast, the yeast of malice and evil, but with the unleavened bread of sincerity and truth.

Gospel Reading (Lk 6:6-11; NRSVCE)

On another sabbath Jesus entered the synagogue and taught, and there was a man there whose right hand was withered. The scribes and the Pharisees watched him to see whether he would cure on the sabbath, so that they might find an accusation against him. Even though he knew what they were thinking, he said to the man who had the withered hand, “Come and stand here.” He got up and stood there. Then Jesus said to them, “I ask you, is it lawful to do good or to do harm on the sabbath, to save life or to destroy it?” After looking around at all of them, he said to him, “Stretch out your hand.” He did so, and his hand was restored. But they were filled with fury and discussed with one another what they might do to Jesus.

TUESDAY • SEPTEMBER 6, 2016

Tuesday of the Twenty-third Week in Ordinary Time

First Reading (1 Cor 6:1-11; NRSVCE)

When any of you has a grievance against another, do you dare to take it to court before the unrighteous, instead of taking it before the saints? Do you not know that the saints will judge the world? And if the world is to be judged by you, are you incompetent to try trivial cases? Do you not know that we are to judge angels — to say nothing of ordinary matters? If you have ordinary cases, then, do you appoint as judges those who have no standing in the church? I say this to your shame. Can it be that there is no one among you wise enough to decide between one believer and another, but a believer goes to court against a believer — and before unbelievers at that?

In fact, to have lawsuits at all with one another is already a defeat for you. Why not rather be wronged? Why not rather be defrauded? But you yourselves wrong and defraud — and believers at that.

Do you not know that wrongdoers will not inherit the kingdom of God? Do not be deceived! Fornicators, idolaters, adulterers, male prostitutes, sodomites, thieves, the greedy, drunkards, revilers, robbers — none of these will inherit the kingdom of God. And this is what some of you used to be. But you were washed, you were sanctified, you were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and in the Spirit of our God.

Gospel Reading (Lk 6:12-19; NRSVCE)

During those days Jesus went out to the mountain to pray; and he spent the night in prayer to God. And when day came, he called his disciples and chose twelve of them, whom he also named apostles: Simon, whom he named Peter, and his brother Andrew, and James, and John, and Philip, and Bartholomew, and Matthew, and Thomas, and James son of Alphaeus, and Simon, who was called the Zealot, and Judas son of James, and Judas Iscariot, who became a traitor.

He came down with them and stood on a level place, with a great crowd of his disciples and a great multitude of people from all Judea, Jerusalem, and the coast of Tyre and Sidon. They had come to hear him and to be healed of their diseases; and those who were troubled with unclean spirits were cured. And all in the crowd were trying to touch him, for power came out from him and healed all of them.

WEDNESDAY • SEPTEMBER 7, 2016

Wednesday of the Twenty-third Week in Ordinary Time

First Reading (1 Cor 7:25-31; NRSVCE)

Now concerning virgins, I have no command of the Lord, but I give my opinion as one who by the Lord’s mercy is trustworthy. I think that, in view of the impending crisis, it is well for you to remain as you are. Are you bound to a wife? Do not seek to be free. Are you free from a wife? Do not seek a wife. But if you marry, you do not sin, and if a virgin marries, she does not sin. Yet those who marry will experience distress in this life, and I would spare you that. I mean, brothers and sisters, the appointed time has grown short; from now on, let even those who have wives be as though they had none, and those who mourn as though they were not mourning, and those who rejoice as though they were not rejoicing, and those who buy as though they had no possessions, and those who deal with the world as though they had no dealings with it. For the present form of this world is passing away.

Gospel Reading (Lk 6:20-26; NRSVCE)

Jesus looked up at his disciples and said:

“Blessed are you who are poor,

for yours is the kingdom of God.

“Blessed are you who are hungry now,

for you will be filled.

“Blessed are you who weep now,

for you will laugh.

“Blessed are you when people hate you, and when they exclude you, revile you, and defame you on account of the Son of Man. Rejoice in that day and leap for joy, for surely your reward is great in heaven; for that is what their ancestors did to the prophets.

“But woe to you who are rich,

for you have received your consolation.

“Woe to you who are full now,

for you will be hungry.

“Woe to you who are laughing now,

for you will mourn and weep.

“Woe to you when all speak well of you, for that is what their ancestors did to the false prophets.”

THURSDAY • SEPTEMBER 8, 2016

Feast of the Nativity of the Blessed Virgin Mary

First Reading (Mic 5:1-4a; NRSVCE)

But you, O Bethlehem of Ephrathah,

who are one of the little clans of Judah,

from you shall come forth for me

one who is to rule in Israel,

whose origin is from of old,

from ancient days.

Therefore he shall give them up until the time

when she who is in labor has brought forth;

then the rest of his kindred shall return

to the people of Israel.

And he shall stand and feed his flock in the strength of the Lord,

in the majesty of the name of the Lord his God.

And they shall live secure, for now he shall be great

to the ends of the earth;

and he shall be the one of peace.

Gospel Reading (Mt 1:1-16, 18-23; NRSVCE)

An account of the genealogy of Jesus the Messiah, the son of David, the son of Abraham.

Abraham was the father of Isaac, and Isaac the father of Jacob, and Jacob the father of Judah and his brothers, and Judah the father of Perez and Zerah by Tamar, and Perez the father of Hezron, and Hezron the father of Aram, and Aram the father of Aminadab, and Aminadab the father of Nahshon, and Nahshon the father of Salmon, and Salmon the father of Boaz by Rahab, and Boaz the father of Obed by Ruth, and Obed the father of Jesse, and Jesse the father of King David.

And David was the father of Solomon by the wife of Uriah, and Solomon the father of Rehoboam, and Rehoboam the father of Abijah, and Abijah the father of Asaph, and Asaph the father of Jehoshaphat, and Jehoshaphat the father of Joram, and Joram the father of Uzziah, and Uzziah the father of Jotham, and Jotham the father of Ahaz, and Ahaz the father of Hezekiah, and Hezekiah the father of Manasseh, and Manasseh the father of Amos, and Amos the father of Josiah, and Josiah the father of Jechoniah and his brothers, at the time of the deportation to Babylon.

And after the deportation to Babylon: Jechoniah was the father of Salathiel, and Salathiel the father of Zerubbabel, and Zerubbabel the father of Abiud, and Abiud the father of Eliakim, and Eliakim the father of Azor, and Azor the father of Zadok, and Zadok the father of Achim, and Achim the father of Eliud, and Eliud the father of Eleazar, and Eleazar the father of Matthan, and Matthan the father of Jacob, and Jacob the father of Joseph the husband of Mary, of whom Jesus was born, who is called the Messiah.

Now the birth of Jesus the Messiah took place in this way. When his mother Mary had been engaged to Joseph, but before they lived together, she was found to be with child from the Holy Spirit. Her husband Joseph, being a righteous man and unwilling to expose her to public disgrace, planned to dismiss her quietly. But just when he had resolved to do this, an angel of the Lord appeared to him in a dream and said, “Joseph, son of David, do not be afraid to take Mary as your wife, for the child conceived in her is from the Holy Spirit. She will bear a son, and you are to name him Jesus, for he will save his people from their sins.” All this took place to fulfill what had been spoken by the Lord through the prophet:

“Look, the virgin shall conceive and bear a son,

and they shall name him Emmanuel,”

which means, “God is with us.”

FRIDAY • SEPTEMBER 9, 2016

Memorial of Saint Peter Claver

First Reading (1 Cor 9:16-19, 22b-27; NRSVCE)

If I proclaim the gospel, this gives me no ground for boasting, for an obligation is laid on me, and woe to me if I do not proclaim the gospel! For if I do this of my own will, I have a reward; but if not of my own will, I am entrusted with a commission. What then is my reward? Just this: that in my proclamation I may make the gospel free of charge, so as not to make full use of my rights in the gospel.

For though I am free with respect to all, I have made myself a slave to all, so that I might win more of them. I have become all things to all people, that I might by all means save some. I do it all for the sake of the gospel, so that I may share in its blessings.

Do you not know that in a race the runners all compete, but only one receives the prize? Run in such a way that you may win it. Athletes exercise self-control in all things; they do it to receive a perishable wreath, but we an imperishable one. So I do not run aimlessly, nor do I box as though beating the air; but I punish my body and enslave it, so that after proclaiming to others I myself should not be disqualified.

Gospel Reading (Lk 6:39-42; NRSVCE)

Jesus told his disciples a parable: “Can a blind person guide a blind person? Will not both fall into a pit? A disciple is not above the teacher, but everyone who is fully qualified will be like the teacher. Why do you see the speck in your neighbor’s eye, but do not notice the log in your own eye? Or how can you say to your neighbor, ‘Friend, let me take out the speck in your eye,’ when you yourself do not see the log in your own eye? You hypocrite, first take the log out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to take the speck out of your neighbor’s eye.”

SATURDAY • SEPTEMBER 10, 2016

Saturday of the Twenty-third Week in Ordinary Time

First Reading (1 Cor 10:14-22; NRSVCE)

Therefore, my dear friends, flee from the worship of idols. I speak as to sensible people; judge for yourselves what I say. The cup of blessing that we bless, is it not a sharing in the blood of Christ? The bread that we break, is it not a sharing in the body of Christ? Because there is one bread, we who are many are one body, for we all partake of the one bread. Consider the people of Israel; are not those who eat the sacrifices partners in the altar? What do I imply then? That food sacrificed to idols is anything, or that an idol is anything? No, I imply that what pagans sacrifice, they sacrifice to demons and not to God. I do not want you to be partners with demons. You cannot drink the cup of the Lord and the cup of demons. You cannot partake of the table of the Lord and the table of demons. Or are we provoking the Lord to jealousy? Are we stronger than he?

Gospel Reading (Lk 6:43-49; NRSVCE)

Jesus said to his disciples, “No good tree bears bad fruit, nor again does a bad tree bear good fruit; for each tree is known by its own fruit. Figs are not gathered from thorns, nor are grapes picked from a bramble bush. The good person out of the good treasure of the heart produces good, and the evil person out of evil treasure produces evil; for it is out of the abundance of the heart that the mouth speaks.

“Why do you call me ‘Lord, Lord,’ and do not do what I tell you? I will show you what someone is like who comes to me, hears my words, and acts on them. That one is like a man building a house, who dug deeply and laid the foundation on rock; when a flood arose, the river burst against that house but could not shake it, because it had been well built. But the one who hears and does not act is like a man who built a house on the ground without a foundation. When the river burst against it, immediately it fell, and great was the ruin of that house.”