VOLUME 2, ISSUE 12  •  SEPTEMBER 17, 2016

Table of Contents

Copyright Notice

VATICAN NEWS

Pope blesses picture of Mother Angelica for EWTN Germany

It’s Jesus who radically sets us free, Pope Francis says

Pope Francis: No sinner is ever beyond the love of God

How Pope Francis’ ‘new joy’ surprised Benedict XVI

Want authenticity? Turn off your cell phone, Pope Francis says

What Pope Francis said about Communion for the divorced-and-remarried

Pope Francis: Killing in the name of God is ‘satanic’

Trust in Jesus, not in things that don’t matter, Pope says

Pope Francis calls murdered French priest blessed

Pope’s anti-abuse commission helps train new Catholic bishops

Pope Francis: Humans are different from the rest of creation

For Eastern Catholics, Pope makes changes to Latin Church’s law

Pope visits neonatal unit, hospice to highlight respect for life

Cooperating in abortion is always an impediment to ordination, Pope affirms

Bring people Christ’s mercy, Pope Francis tells new bishops

Rome’s exorcist, Father Gabriel Amorth, dies at age 91

WORLD NEWS

How the response to 9/11 affected Christians in the Middle East

Woman charged in foiled attack on Notre Dame cathedral

In Hungary, anti-Christian persecution prompts government action

Why Japan won’t release the names of its knife attack victims

Cardinal Schönborn warns of ‘Islamic conquest’ of Europe

Use ‘moral authority’ to push for change in Vietnam, advocates tell the U.S.

These converts met the Church through EWTN in the Middle East

Christians in Nigeria are essentially ‘target practice’ – Here’s one bishop’s response

U.S. NEWS

The heart of Padre Pio is coming to Boston. Yes, really

The brutal, powerful 9/11 stories of Catholic priests

Tim Kaine claims Catholic Church could change on gay marriage

U.S. Bishops to government: End legal standoff with the Little Sisters

The next U.S. president must aid persecuted Christians – Knights’ head

Catholic marriage won’t change, bishop says after Tim Kaine comments

Catholic school says it can’t meet demands of transgendered student

Catholics for Choice ‘woefully’ misrepresent Church teaching

Archbishop Lori slams ‘reckless’ comments by civil rights chair

Why Archbishop Chaput thinks the U.S. presidential candidates are ‘very bad news’

St. Thomas More’s hats – and other relics – coming soon to D.C.

New Catholic university launches Sacred Art master’s

Portion of road renamed to honor Mother Angelica

FEATURES

This couple spent their honeymoon helping Mother Teresa’s nuns

Virtual reality film lets users experience the life of Christ

The fake Catholic college girl who duped Twitter

The dark night of the soul and ‘The Dark Night’

The nativity show from the creators of the Muppets

Are we less free than a 1950s housewife? A look at contraception

Double review: ‘Bridget Jones’s Baby’ and ‘Snowden’

SCRIPTURE READINGS

Sunday • September 18, 2016

Monday • September 19, 2016

Tuesday • September 20, 2016

Wednesday • September 21, 2016

Thursday • September 22, 2016

Friday • September 23, 2016

Saturday • September 24, 2016

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Volume 2, Issue 12 • September 17, 2016

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VATICAN NEWS

Pope blesses picture of Mother Angelica for EWTN Germany

by CNA/EWTN News • September 9, 2016

Pope Francis greets EWTN Germany chief Martin Rothweiler at the General Audience in St. Peter’s Square on Sept. 7, 2016. (L’Osservatore Romano)

Vatican City — During the general audience on Wednesday, Pope Francis blessed a framed picture of Mother Angelica, the foundress of EWTN.

“She’s up there (in heaven) because she was a great woman,” the Holy Father said Sept. 7 to the EWTN employees who will now take the picture to their new offices to be opened in Cologne.

The director of EWTN in Germany, Martin Rothweiler, commenting on the meeting with the Pope, said that he blessed the picture with “great cordiality and sympathetic feeling.”

This is not the first time the Holy Father has referred to Mother Angelica.

In February he sent her a blessing while traveling to Mexico; in March he blessed another picture of the religious, and in July he commented that she was “a holy woman” in a meeting with an American priest who currently lives in Rome.

The beloved and well remembered religious died March 27 at 92 years of age.

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VATICAN NEWS

It’s Jesus who radically sets us free, Pope Francis says

by Hannah Brockhaus (CNA/EWTN News) • September 10, 2016

Pope Francis gives confirmation to Giuseppe Chiolo at the Vatican on Sept. 10, 2016. (L’Osservatore Romano)

Vatican City — Christ took on our sins so that we might have true freedom, Pope Francis said Saturday during a special audience in St. Peter’s Square, where he gave confirmation to a young man in a wheelchair.

“The word ‘redemption’ is little used, yet it is important because it indicates the most radical liberation that God could perform for us, for all of humanity and the entire creation,” Francis said.

Often, the Pope said, we deny that our sins have any power over us, when in reality they are another type of slavery.

“By becoming one of us, the Lord Jesus not only takes on our human condition, but he raises us to the possibility of being children of God,” Pope Francis said. “By his death and resurrection, Jesus Christ, the Lamb without blemish, has conquered death and sin to free us from their domain.”

The Sept. 10 gathering at the Vatican was the latest in a series of special audiences for the Jubilee Year of Mercy, which are being held throughout the year in addition to the weekly general audiences on Wednesdays.

In addition to the audience, on his way to St. Peter’s square Saturday, Pope Francis stopped to greet and confirm as Catholic Giuseppe Chiolo, a young man in a wheelchair, L’Osservatore Romano reported.

Our unwillingness to open ourselves to salvation keeps us from receiving the true freedom provided by God’s forgiveness, Pope Francis preached.

“We need God to deliver us from all forms of indifference, selfishness and self-sufficiency,” he continued.

Francis noted that life is often difficult and filled with suffering, however, we are invited to turn our gaze on the crucified Jesus, “who suffers for us and with us, as certain proof that God does not abandon us.”

Even in persecution and distress, or in the pain of daily life, God’s merciful hand lifts us up to him and gives us a new life, he said.

“God’s love is boundless: we discover new signs indicating his attention towards us and especially its willingness to reach and go before us.”

“Beautiful are these three words: forgiveness, love and joy. All that He has taken has also been redeemed, liberated and saved,” the Pope continued.

“Our whole life, though marked by the fragility of sin, is placed under the gaze of God who loves us,” he said. “The more we are in need, the more his gaze on us is full of mercy.”

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VATICAN NEWS

Pope Francis: No sinner is ever beyond the love of God

by Hannah Brockhaus (CNA/EWTN News) • September 11, 2016

Pope Francis delivers the Angelus address on June 15, 2015. (L’Osservatore Romano)

Vatican City — On Sunday Pope Francis said that God shows us, through parables, the merciful love of the Father, who rejoices over for every sinful person who returns to him.

“The message of the Gospel today gives us great hope and we can summarize it thus: there is no sin into which we have fallen, from which, by the grace of God, we can not rise again; there is not an irretrievable individual, because God never ceases to want our good,” he said, “even when we sin!”

In his Sept. 11 message for the Angelus, Pope Francis talked about the three parables in the day’s Gospel, which was from Luke 15.

Christ tells three parables – the shepherd who leaves his 99 sheep to find the lost one, the woman who searches for her lost coin, and the parable of the prodigal son – in answer to the scribes and Pharisees who criticize him, saying, “this man welcomes sinners and eats with them.”

Each of the parables reveal the heart of God, the Pope said, explaining how each parable uses the words, “rejoice together, to party.”

“The pastor called friends and neighbors and says to them, ‘Rejoice with me, for I have found my sheep that was lost’ (v. 6); the woman calls together her friends and neighbors saying, ‘Rejoice with me, for I have found the coin that I lost’ (v. 9); the father says to his son: ‘It was fitting to celebrate and be glad, for this your brother was dead and is alive again; he was lost and is found’ (v. 32),” Francis explained.

“With these three stories, Jesus would have us understand that God the Father is the first to have a welcoming attitude toward sinners.”

Pope Francis said that what is most striking about the parable of the prodigal son is not the sad story of a young man who left his father and fell into sin, but his decision to “arise” and go to his father.

“The way back home is the way of hope and new life. God awaits to forgive us out on the road, waiting for us patiently, he sees us when we are still far away, he runs towards us, embraces us, forgives us. So is God! So is our Father! And his pardon erases the past and regenerates us in love,” the Pope said.

“When we sinners convert,” he continued, “we do not find God waiting for us with reproaches and hardness, because God saves, he gathers us home with joy and partying.”

The joy of God fits in with the Church’s celebration of the Jubilee Year of Mercy, Pope Francis said. It is the “same term ‘jubilee!’ That is, jubilation!”

After the Angelus, Pope Francis asked for special prayers for Gabon, a country in central Africa which has been experiencing increased violence and riots after the results of a narrow Aug. 31 presidential election were challenged.

“I entrust to the Lord the victims of the clashes and their families. I join the bishops of the first African country to invite the parties to reject all violence and to always aim for the common good. I encourage everyone, particularly Catholics, to be builders of peace within the law, in dialogue and fraternity,” Francis said.

The Pope also talked about Ladislao Bukowinski, a 20th century Catholic priest who was beatified Sunday in Karaganda, Kazakhstan.

“Persecuted for his faith,” Pope Francis said, Blessed Ladislao Bukowinski “always showed great love for the weakest and neediest and his testimony appears as a distillation of the spiritual and corporal works of mercy.”

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VATICAN NEWS

How Pope Francis’ ‘new joy’ surprised Benedict XVI

by CNA/EWTN News • September 12, 2016

Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI in 2010. (L’Osservatore Romano)

Munich, Germany — Pope emeritus Benedict XVI has said he is satisfied with the papacy of Pope Francis and sees “no contradictions” between their pontificates.

“Yes, there is suddenly a new freshness in the Church, a new joy, a new charisma that addresses the people, which is something beautiful. Many are thankful that the new Pope now approaches them in a new style. The Pope is the Pope, it doesn’t matter who it is,” Benedict said in his newly published collection of interviews.

The collection, published as Last Testament, consists of his interviews with journalist Peter Seewald. Seewald had previously interviewed him for Salt of the Earth, God and the World, and Light of the World.

Archbishop George Ganswein, Prefect of the Papal Household and personal secretary of Benedict XVI, took part in the latest book’s Sept. 12 launch with Seewald in Munich. Archbishop Ganswein’s remarks excerpted and interpreted the former Pope’s words to Seewald.

In Benedict XVI’s own words, he sees “no breach anywhere” between his pontificate and that of his successor.

“New accents yes, but no contradictions,” he told Seewald. “He is a man of practical reform. And that is the courage with which he addresses problems and searches for solutions.”

Benedict praised Francis’ “direct affection for the people.”

“That is very important. He is definitely a man of reflection. And a thoughtful person, but at the same time someone who is used to always being with people,” the emeritus Pope said. “And perhaps I was actually not with the people enough.”

For Benedict, Francis’ election was a “big surprise.” He saw that the new Pope “spoke on one side with God and on the other side with the people. I was really glad to see that. And happy.”

He said he had previously not experienced the warmth and “very personal affection” of Archbishop Bergoglio.

“That was a surprise for me!” Benedict recollected.

Archbishop Ganswein said the book provides expanded understanding and even correct the record about Benedict XVI in several ways. It explores the reasons, motives and exact circumstances of the Pope’s “puzzling resignation” and it discuss his relationship with Pope Francis.

It discusses Benedict’s personal views on the different crises and so-called scandals of his papacy.

Benedict admits he did not properly assess the political meaning of his 2006 Regensburg speech on the nature of faith and reason in Christianity and Islam. Media controversy focused on his citation of a Byzantine emperor who criticized Islam’s Prophet Muhammad.

Archbishop Ganswein said the interviews also show “the profoundly human dimension” of the man born Joseph Ratzinger.

“To him, power never meant anything, and he described the ‘happiest time’ of his life as those twelve months or so after his ordination on June 29, 1951 when he worked for a year as a young parochial vicar at Sacred Blood Parish in Munich,” Archbishop Ganswein said at the book launch.

In the new interviews, Archbishop Ganswein finds “a very distinct and new intimacy,” such as on topics like how Benedict’s mother was born before her parents married.

There is even a bit of mirth.

“He never laughed so much in his other interview books. And never cried,” the archbishop said.

“Despite his superior and awakened intelligence and formation, he does not resemble, even from afar, a power-loving person who would love to be bigger than he really is or a scary high-inquisitor at all like he is often distortedly misrepresented by his “non-friends,” said Archbishop Ganswein.

For Benedict XVI, his almost unprecedented resignation was a chance “to disengage from the large crowds of people and adjourn into this greater intimacy.” It was “another way to remain faithful to my ministry.”

Asked if he regrets his resignation, Benedict XVI told Seewald “No. No, no. I see that it was right every day.”

The doctor had told him that he was no longer allowed to fly across the Atlantic, Archbishop Ganswein recounted. The next World Youth Day had been moved to 2013 instead of 2014 due to the World Cup. Otherwise, Benedict XVI would have tried to endure until 2014.

“But I knew: I can’t do it anymore,” Benedict said.

Benedict XVI rejected as “total nonsense” conspiracy theories that he resigned due to extortion or conspiracy. There was no practical pressure.

“You may never yield to coercion. You may not flee in the moment of the storm, but must withstand,” he said. “You can only step back if nobody is calling for it. And nobody demanded it in my day. Nobody. It was clear to me that I had to do it and that this was the right moment. It was a complete surprise for everyone.”

Archbishop Ganswein finds “an astounding amount of self-criticism, flavored with self-irony” in Benedict’s interviews with Seewald

Benedict still delights in the reforms of the Second Vatican Council, during which he was a theological consultant. But he also sees problems with that epochal event.

“We thought then overly theological and did not consider what public image these things would have,” he said. There were also “many destructions and delusions.”

Benedict saw himself as a progressive at the time, when others would denigrate him with claims he was a freemason, or incapable, or heretical.

The former Pope says he is frequently astonished by his “naïveté” and the “brazenness” with which he spoke at the time.

At the same time he now describes himself as a “true fan of John XXIII” and the “total unconventionality” of the canonized Pope who called the Second Vatican Council in the 1960s.

The former Pope Benedict now writes Sunday homilies for four to nine people.

“I am really more of a professor – someone who ponders and considers intellectual things. I wanted to be a real professor for life.”

Such is the life now of Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI.

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VATICAN NEWS

Want authenticity? Turn off your cell phone, Pope Francis says

by CNA/EWTN News • September 13, 2016

Pope Francis says Mass at the chapel of Santa Marta house in the Vatican on Jan. 12, 2016. (L’Osservatore Romano)

Vatican City — Don’t let indifference stop you from an authentic encounter with another person, Pope Francis said Tuesday.

“In our families, at the dinner table, how many times while eating, do people watch the TV or write messages on their cell phones. Each one is indifferent to that encounter. Even within the heart of society, which is the family, there is no encounter,” he lamented in his Sept. 13 homily at the chapel of the Santa Marta residence in the Vatican.

He said that this situation of indifference should move us “to strive for this culture of encounter, just as simply as Jesus did so.”

“Not just see, but look. Not just hear, but listen. Not just meet and pass by, but stop,” Pope Francis said. In the face of tragedy, one should not just say, “What a shame, poor people.” Rather, we should “allow ourselves to be moved by pity.”

“And then draw near, touch and say in the language that comes to each one of us in that moment, the language of the heart: ‘Do not weep,’ and donate at the very least a drop of life,” the Roman Pontiff advised.

He reflected on the gospel story of Christ’s bringing back to life the only son of a widow, and discussed meetings between two people where each of them is thinking of themselves without perceiving or listening to the other.

“An encounter is something different,” he said, describing the gospel story as “an encounter that makes us reflect on our way of interacting with each other.”

The “joyful crowd” following Christ met the group of people weeping and accompanying the widow.

Christ was “moved with pity” when he encountered the widow. This is a pity different from those who simply pass by something sad on the streets. Instead, he approached her son and performed the miracle.

The Pope reflected on how people can grow accustomed to indifference when we see disasters or small things. We say, “What a shame, poor people, look how they are suffering,” and then we carry on.

“We are accustomed to a culture of indifference and we must strive and ask for the grace to create a culture of encounter, of a fruitful encounter, of an encounter that restores to each person his or her own dignity as a child of God, the dignity of a living person,” he said.

Pope Francis stressed the need to perceive an encounter by stopping, looking, touching, and speaking. Otherwise “I cannot help to build a culture of encounter.”

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VATICAN NEWS

What Pope Francis said about Communion for the divorced-and-remarried

by CNA/EWTN News • September 13, 2016

Pope Francis at the General Audience in St. Peter’s Square on Sept. 7, 2016. (Daniel Ibanez/CNA)

Vatican City — Pope Francis has written a private message approving the Buenos Aires bishops’ response to the divorced-and-remarried inspired by his apostolic exhortation on the family.

The pastoral response said ministry to the divorced-and-remarried must never create confusion about Church teaching and the indissolubility of marriage, but may also allow access to the sacraments under specific limits. These may include specific situations when a penitent in an irregular union is under attenuated culpability, as when leaving such a union could cause harm to his children.

The bishops of the Buenos Aires region had written basic criteria for their priests about the Pope’s post-synodal exhortation Amoris laetitia, which was released April 8 following two synods on the family.

The Pope discussed these criteria in a Sept. 5 letter addressed to Bishop Sergio Alfredo Fenoy of San Miguel, a delegate of the Argentina bishops’ Buenos Aires Region.

“The text is very good and makes fully explicit the meaning of the eighth chapter of Amoris laetitia,” Pope Francis said. “There are no other interpretations. And I am sure it will do a lot of good. May the Lord reward you for this effort of pastoral charity.”

He said pastoral charity “moves us to reach out to those who have drifted away, and once we have met them, to begin a path of welcoming, accompaniment, discernment and integration into the ecclesial community.”

The Buenos Aires document, also dated Sept. 5, aimed to offer “minimal criteria” on the discernment of the possible access to the sacraments by penitents who are divorced and in a new union. Every bishop may clarify, complete, or establish limits on these criteria in his own diocese, the document said.

This advice must not be understood as “unrestricted access” to the sacraments or as if “just any situation would justify it,” the document said.

“What is proposed is a discernment which adequately distinguishes each case,” it said.

It emphasized a process of discernment for a penitent accompanied by a pastor. The pastor must emphasize the fundamental proclamation of Christ. This path calls for the priest to show pastoral charity in welcoming the penitent, listening carefully to him, and accepting the penitent’s “upright intention and good purpose to place his entire life in the light of the Gospel and to practice charity.”

“This path does not necessarily end in the sacraments, but rather it can guide one to other ways of joining more in the life of the Church,” it said. This include a greater presence in the community, participation in prayer groups, and commitment to various ecclesial services for those who have divorced-and-remarried.

“When the concrete circumstances of a couple make it feasible, especially when both are Christians with a faith commitment, it is possible to propose that they try to live in continence,” the document said.

“In other more complex circumstances, and when a decree of nullity cannot be obtained, the mentioned option may not in fact be feasible. Nevertheless, a path of discernment is equally possible.”

The Buenos Aires document did suggest that penitents in a limited number of circumstances, after careful discernment, could access the sacraments.

“If one comes to recognize that in a specific case, there are limitations that attenuate responsibility and culpability, particularly when a person believes that he would fall into a subsequent fault of harming the children of the new union, Amoris laetitia opens up the possibility of access to the sacraments of Reconciliation and Eucharist. These sacraments in turn dispose the person to continue to mature and grow with the power of grace.”

Adequate discernment of each case deserves “special care” in examples such as a new union that arose from a recent divorce or the situation of someone who has consistently failed in his family obligations.

The document also warned of situations where a person justifies or flaunts one’s situation “as if it were part of the Christian ideal.”

“In these more difficult cases, we pastors must accompany with patience, trying to find some way of reinstatement,” the Buenos Aires document said.

The document stressed the importance of the examination of conscience as well as the need to avoid confusion about Church teaching.

In some cases it may be appropriate that access to the sacraments takes place in “a discreet manner” when conflicting situations can be foreseen.

“But at the same time the person should not stop accompanying the community so that he or she grows in a spirit of understanding and of welcome, without this involvement creating confusion regarding the teaching of the Church about the indissolubility of marriage.”

Pope Francis’ Sept. 5 letter to the Buenos Aires bishops reflected on the difficulties of discernment.

“We know this is tiring, it is a matter of a ‘person to person’ pastoral ministry, not satisfied with programmatic, organizational or legal mediations, however necessary. Simply: to welcome, accompany, discern, integrate. Of these four pastoral attitudes the least cultivated and practiced is discernment; and I consider formation in discernment, personal and communitarian, in our seminaries and rectories to be urgent,” he said.

He added that the apostolic exhortation was “the fruit of the work and prayer of the entire Church, with the mediation of the two synods and the Pope.”

The eighth chapter of Amoris laetitia had prompted much discussion and apparently conflicting views.

In a May 4 speech, Cardinal Gerhard Müller, prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, countered arguments that the apostolic exhortation eliminated Church discipline on marriage and allowed in some cases the divorced-and-remarried to receive the Eucharist “without the need to change their way of life.”

He placed the exhortation in the context of the writings of previous Popes.

“This is a matter of a consolidated magisterial teaching, supported by scripture and founded on a doctrinal reason: the salvific harmony of the sacrament, the heart of the ‘culture of the bond’ that the Church lives.”

If Pope Francis’ exhortation “had wanted to eliminate such a deeply rooted and significant discipline, it would have said so clearly and presented supporting reasons,” Cardinal Müller said.

He countered claims that the exhortation’s footnote 351 offered the sacraments to those living in an objective situation of sin.

“The basic principle is that no one can truly desire a sacrament, that of the Eucharist, without also desiring to live in accord with the other sacraments, including that of marriage,” the cardinal added. “One who lives in contrast with the marriage bond is opposed to the visible sign of the sacrament of marriage; in that which touches his bodily existence, even if he should be subjectively not culpable, he makes himself an ‘anti-sign’ of indissolubility.”

Pope Francis had previously discussed this section of Amoris laetitia in an April 16 in-flight interview with reporters on his plane returning from the Greek island of Lesbos.

The Pope responded to a reporter’s question about whether there are new, concrete possibilities for divorced-and-remarried persons to access the sacraments. The Pope said that there are “many” such possibilities.

The Pope said he had been bothered and saddened by media coverage’s great focus on Communion for the divorced-and-remarried. He pointed to other problems like the “family crisis” and the falling birth rate in Europe. He cited Benedict XVI’s February 2013 statements about a “council of the media” whose coverage distorted the Second Vatican Council.

“Do you not realize that the youth don’t want to marry?” Pope Francis asked. “Don’t you realize that the lack of work or the little work (available) means that a mother has to get two jobs and the children grow up alone? These are the big problems.”

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VATICAN NEWS

Pope Francis: Killing in the name of God is ‘satanic’

by Hannah Brockhaus (CNA/EWTN News) • September 14, 2016

Pope Francis celebrates Mass in memory of Fr. Jacques Hamel on Sept. 14, 2016. (L’Osservatore Romano)

Vatican City — Referencing the recent murder of French priest Fr. Jacques Hamel, Pope Francis said the persecution of Christians happening today, under any form, is a work of Satan.

“This cruelty that asks for apostasy, let’s say the word, is satanic,” the Pope said in a homily Sept. 14.

“Today in the church there are more Christian martyrs than in the first times. Today there are Christians who are assassinated, tortured, jailed, their throats are cut because they don’t deny Jesus Christ,” Francis stated.

Pope Francis’ comments were made during an early morning Mass celebrated in memory of Fr. Jacques Hamel at Casa Santa Marta Wednesday.

Fr. Hamel, 85, was killed July 26 in Saint-Étienne-du-Rouvray, a suburb of Rouen, while saying Mass. The assailants, who were armed with knives, declared their allegiance to the Islamic State, and were later shot dead by police.

“To the first Christians, apostasy was proposed – that is, say that our god is the true one, not yours. Make a sacrifice to our god, or our gods. And when they didn’t do this, when they refused apostasy, they were killed. This is repeated today,” the Pope said.

“How much we would like that all of the religions would say that killing in the name of God is satanic.”

Pope Francis called Fr. Hamel one of the newest martyrs in what is a new wave of Christian persecution happening around the world, saying that the priest accepted his own martyrdom with Christ “on the cross.”

On the Feast of the Exaltation of the Cross, celebrated by the Church on Sept. 14 every year, Pope Francis talked about how Christ gave himself on the cross as a martyr for the salvation of humanity.

“Jesus Christ was the first martyr, the first that gave his life for us. And from this mystery of Christ comes all the history of Christian martyrdom,” he said.

Even in the difficult moment of his death, Fr. Hamel, Francis said, saw who his assassin was and he said clearly, “‘Be gone, Satan!’”

Like the first Christian martyrs, Fr. Hamel “gave his life for us and he gave his life for not denying Christ. He gave it in the very sacrifice of Jesus on the altar,” the Pope said.

Among those present at the Sept. 14 Mass were the Archbishop of Rouen Dominique Lebrun, the sister of Fr. Hamel, and other pilgrims from Rouen. Several Cardinals, including French Cardinal Jean-Louis Pierre Tauran, president of the Pontifical Council for Interreligious Dialogue, were also present.

The altar held a photograph of Fr. Hamel and a bouquet of pink roses.

“He was a good, meek man, (a man) of fraternity who always sought to make peace. He was assassinated as if he were a criminal,” Pope Francis continued.

Fr. Hamel’s example helps all of us “to go forward without fear,” he said.

“May he from Heaven – and we should pray to him, eh, he’s a martyr!” the Pope said, “we have to pray to him that he give us the meekness, fraternity, peace, and also the courage to say the truth: To kill in the name of God is Satanic.”

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VATICAN NEWS

Trust in Jesus, not in things that don’t matter, Pope says

by Hannah Brockhaus (CNA/EWTN News) • September 14, 2016

Pope Francis at the General Audience in St. Peter’s Square on Sept. 14, 2016. (Alexey Gotovskyi/CNA)

Vatican City — Rather than trusting in ultimately unimportant things, place your hope in Jesus and you will not grow weary on the path of discipleship, Pope Francis said Wednesday.

“Sometimes our fatigue is caused by having placed trust in things that are not essential, because we have moved away from what really counts in life,” the Pope told pilgrims at his general audience in St. Peter’s square.

“The Lord teaches us not to be afraid to follow him, because the hope that we place in him will not be disappointed.”

In the Sept. 14 gathering, Pope Francis reflected on the passage in the Gospel of Matthew in which Jesus says, “Come to me, all you who labor and are burdened, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am meek and humble of heart; and you will find rest for yourselves. For my yoke is easy, and my burden light.”

“The invitation is in the imperative form: ‘come to me,’ ‘take my yoke,’ ‘learn from me,’” Francis said.

“Dear brothers and sisters, for us there are moments of fatigue and disappointment. Then let us remember these words of the Lord, who gives us so much consolation and helps us to understand if we are putting our powers at the service of good,” he said.

By accepting the “yoke of Jesus,” disciples enter into communion with him and participate in the mysteries of the cross and salvation, the Pope said.

Speaking of the many Holy Doors designated around the world for this year’s Jubilee of Mercy, Pope Francis asked why it is that so many pilgrims cross over the threshold of these “Doors of Mercy.” The reason is “to find Jesus, to find the friendship of Jesus, only to find the rest that Jesus gives,” he said.

We are called to learn from Jesus “what it means to live in mercy, to be instruments of mercy,” the Pope explained. “A life of mercy is to feel in need of the mercy of Jesus, and when we feel in need of forgiveness, of consolation, we learn to be merciful to others.”

We do not have a God who does not understand us, the Pope said. Jesus has carried all of our sorrows, all of our sins on his shoulders, giving us a chance at eternal life.

“He addresses the humble, the small, the poor, the needy because he himself has become small and humble. It includes the poor and the suffering because he himself is poor and tried by pain. Jesus to save humanity has not walked an easy road; on the contrary, his path was painful and difficult,” Pope Francis noted.

“This path expresses the conversion of every disciple who endeavors to follow Jesus. And the conversion is always to discover God’s mercy. It is infinite and inexhaustible: great is the mercy of the Lord!” the Pope exclaimed.

When we keep our eyes fixed on the Son of God, as we should, it helps us to understand just how much further on the path we need to go, “but at the same time it gives us the joy of knowing that we are walking with him and we are never alone,” Francis said.

“Courage, then, courage! Let us not take away the joy of being disciples of the Lord.”

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VATICAN NEWS

Pope Francis calls murdered French priest blessed

by Hannah Brockhaus (CNA/EWTN News) • September 14, 2016

Pope Francis poses with Archbishop Dominique Lebrun and other pilgrims from Rouen at the General Audience in St. Peter’s Square on Sept. 14, 2016. (Alexey Gotovskyi/CNA)

Vatican City — On Wednesday Pope Francis said Fr. Jacques Hamel, who was killed by supporters of the Islamic State while saying Mass in July, “is blessed now,” according to Archbishop Dominique Lebrun of Rouen.

The Archdiocese plans, without a doubt, to open a process of beatification for Fr. Hamel, said Archbishop Lebrun, according to Religious Information Service.

Pope Francis’ comments were made after he said Mass Sept. 14 at the Vatican in memory of Fr. Hamel. Archbishop Lebrun, Fr. Hamel’s sister, and about 80 other pilgrims from Rouen were present.

Archbishop Lebrun, who was Fr. Hamel’s bishop, asked the Pope if he would sign a photograph of the murdered priest for them to take to the three religious sisters who witnessed Fr. Hamel’s murder, but were unable to travel to Rome for the Mass.

The archbishop was surprised when Pope Francis told him to put the photo on the altar before Mass, though. “This struck me,” he said.

“After he greeted everyone, he was signing the photo and told me: you can put this photo in the church because he (Fr. Hamel) is blessed now; and if someone tells you that you have no right, you tell them that the Pope has given you permission,” Archbishop Lebrun related at a press conference.

During the press conference, which also included Fr. Hamel’s sister and a laywoman and layman from the Archdiocese of Rouen, Archbishop Lebrun was asked about a statement Pope Francis made in his homily that to kill “in the name of God is satanic.”

“I think that the murderers have accepted the influence of the devil, Satan. The murderers. It is only this,” Archbishop Lebrun clarified.

When Fr. Hamel uttered the words “be gone, Satan” immediately before his death, he “had already received stab wounds, was already on the ground,” Archbishop Lebrun noted. “Fr. Jacques could not think that these young people could be at the root of this evil. They are not the source of this evil.”

Asked about the psychological impact the event has had on the French faithful, the Archbishop said “there is fear, definitely.”

“A week ago I had a meeting with the vicars of the diocese and they have all told me that they receive calls from people who still wonder if there is Mass, if you can go, if there is some risk.”

Now there are more people attending Mass, though. “That makes me think of the words of Jesus that John Paul II has often stressed: Do not be afraid.”

“I do not think Jesus said it is stupid to be afraid, or there is no reason to be afraid,” he said. “No, Jesus said: Have the courage to be afraid.”

The archbishop said the Pope’s words that morning on martyrdom have given them courage. “So yes, I would say that on a psychological level there is fear, but on a deeper level there is more courage.”

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VATICAN NEWS

Pope’s anti-abuse commission helps train new Catholic bishops

by CNA/EWTN News • September 14, 2016

Extraordinary Assembly of Synod of the Bishops on the Family, Oct. 2014. (Mazur/catholicnews.org.uk)

Vatican City — Members of the Pontifical Commission for the Protection of Minors have been invited to address the trainings for new Catholic bishops held at the Vatican.

Commission members would address the training sessions for new bishops held by the Congregation for the Evangelization of Peoples and another training for new bishops held by the Congregation for Bishops, the commission said in a Sept. 12 press release.

The anti-abuse commission will also address a meeting of the Congregation for the Clergy. Commission members have also been invited to address the Pontifical Ecclesiastical Academy and the Congregation for Consecrated Life.

In February 2016, Holy See spokesman Father Federico Lombardi criticized media reports he said falsely claimed the Vatican is telling new bishops they don’t have to report sex abuse.

The Pontifical Commission for the Protection of Minors met in Rome Sept. 5-11 for its plenary assembly and for working group meetings on guidelines, healing and care, education, formation, theology and spirituality, canonical and civil norms.

The meetings focused on updates for current projects and developing draft proposals for Pope Francis.

The commission plans to present to Pope Francis a template for guidelines to safeguard and protect children, adolescents and young adults.

“These initiatives are part of the Commission’s effort to be of service to the Holy Father by placing their expertise at the disposition of local churches and church leaders,” the commission said. “Commission members have also been invited to give talks and take part in various conferences and workshops on all five continents.”

The plenary assembly included members’ reports on the progress of education programs at the local level and at the Vatican. These programs aim to provide the commission’s help to local churches and church leaders.

Commission members have held talks and workshops in Australia’s Archdiocese of Melbourne, in the United States for Safe Environment and Victims’ Assistance Coordinators, and the Anglophone Safeguarding Conference held in Italy.

Other talks and workshops have been held in South Africa, in the Philippines, in Colombia and other parts of the world.

The commission’s recent meetings heard a suggestion from survivor of childhood sexual abuse by a priest who asked that there be a Day of Prayer for abuse victims.

Pope Francis has also asked national bishops’ conferences to choose an appropriate day to pray for survivors and victims of sex abuse.

“The Commission was happy to learn that many Bishops Conferences have already taken steps to enact the proposal,” the group said. “The Commission believes that prayer is one part of the healing process for survivors and the community of believers.”

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VATICAN NEWS

Pope Francis: Humans are different from the rest of creation

by Hannah Brockhaus (CNA/EWTN News) • September 15, 2016

Pope Francis at the General Audience in St. Peter’s Square on Sept. 7, 2016. (Daniel Ibanez/CNA)

Vatican City — Created in the image of God, human beings have a dignity they are in danger of degrading when they place material possessions above God in their hearts, Pope Francis said Thursday.

“Reflect on how we are created, formed in the image and likeness of the Creator, the difference with other creatures and with all creation is essential,” Pope Francis said during an audience with the Italian Biblical Association Sept. 15.

“This helps us to understand the dignity that we all have, men and women, dignity which has its roots in the same Creator.”

Pope Francis met with the Italian Biblical Association on the occasion of National Bible Week about their work, which has included discussing the relationship between man and woman as it is written in Scripture.

Pope Francis referenced St. Pope John Paul II’s general audience addresses on the “Theology of the Body,” given from 1979-1984, and his own catechesis from a general audience on April 15, 2015, commenting on the first account of creation.

“I had occasion to stress that ‘God, having created the universe and all living things, created the masterpiece that is the human being, made in his image,’” the Pope said.

“I have always been impressed that our dignity is precisely that of being children of God,” Francis continued. And that it “is manifested in the fact that he guides us like a father does with a son.”

God made us in the way of an artist, “shaping the mud from the earth … He created us not only with his words but with his hands and his breath, as if to say that the whole being of God is involved in giving life to the human being,” he said.

However, it is possible that this dignity can “degrade,” Francis noted. This is what happens when we embrace idolatry and allow material things, such as wealth, to take the place of God in our hearts.

So this raises a question, the Pope observed: “how can I share this dignity, so that it develops in a positive reciprocity? How can I make the other feel worthy?”

It is good to often ask ourselves: how do I accept my own dignity? How am I helping others to grow in their dignity? he said.

For, he concluded, “God gave us the dignity of being his children.”

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VATICAN NEWS

For Eastern Catholics, Pope makes changes to Latin Church’s law

by CNA/EWTN News • September 15, 2016

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

Vatican City — Pope Francis has issued new changes to canon law that modify Latin Church code with an eye towards clarifying ministry to Eastern Catholics.

The Pope cited concern for harmony between the different codes. The name of the Pope’s apostolic letter, “De Concordia inter Codices,” in fact means “Concerning harmony between laws.” It is dated May 31 and was released Sept. 15.

The changes concern topics like baptism, marriage, and change of ecclesiastical rite.

The Pope said the changes were motivated by the presence of many Eastern Catholics in predominantly Latin Catholic regions. This creates many pastoral and juridical questions, he said, according to Vatican News.

Eastern Catholics are obliged to observe their rite wherever they are. In these regions, there must be a correct balance between the protection of the rights of the Eastern Catholic minority and the historical canonical tradition of the Latin Catholic majority.

There are over twenty Eastern Catholic Churches in communion with Rome.

Bishop Juan Ignacio Arrieta, Secretary of the Pontifical Council for Legislative Texts, said the changes were motivated by a desire to “facilitate pastoral attention to the faithful,” especially Eastern Catholic diaspora living in areas with a Latin Catholic majority.

The bishop explained the changes in a Sept. 15 statement.

The changes affected eleven canons of the Latin Church legal code. No changes affected Eastern Catholic canon law.

The changes reaffirm that a baptized child belongs to the Church of the Catholic parent. They oblige parish records to indicate the Church to which the child belongs.

The changes address matters where Catholics canonically transfer to another Church within the Catholic Church. When there is no specific dispensation, such a person must now follow a formal act before competent authority, with the change recorded in the baptismal registers.

In the marriage of two Eastern Catholics, a priest’s blessing is required for validity. In the Latin Church, since 1967, deacons are also qualified witnesses to a marriage.

However, in cases of marriage between a Latin Catholic and an Eastern Catholic, the new code clarifies that only a priest may officiate.

Other changes involve the legitimate participation of Latin Catholic clergy in the celebration of the sacraments of Orthodox Christians. The Latin code now adopts the provisions of Eastern Catholic codes.

The change also imports from Eastern Catholic canon law the provision that the local hierarch may allow a Latin Catholic priest to bless the marriage of two Orthodox Christian faithful, under certain conditions.

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VATICAN NEWS

Pope visits neonatal unit, hospice to highlight respect for life

by CNA/EWTN News • September 16, 2016

Pope Francis visited the neonatology ward of San Giovanni in Rome on Sept. 16, 2016. (L’Osservatore Romano)

Vatican City — On Friday, Pope Francis visited a neonatal hospital unit and a hospice for the terminally ill, stressing the dignity of human life from conception to natural death.

The Sept. 16 visit is the latest in the Pope’s “Mercy Friday” initiatives, to spend time with various groups each month during the Jubilee of Mercy.

In previous trips, he has made surprise stops at places including an elderly home, a drug and alcohol rehab center, and a facility for retired priests.

In this month’s visit, Pope first visited the San Giovanni hospital, stopping at both the emergency room and the neonatal unit. Currently there are 12 babies with various conditions in the unit. Five of them – including one set of twins – are in very serious condition in the ICU.

A Vatican description of the event said that Pope Francis wore a hygienic mask and took other sanitary precautions, like all visitors to the unit, where the children’s immune systems are often weak.

He spoke to the babies in each incubator, and greeted their parents, offering words of comfort.

Pope Francis then visited the Villa Speranza Hospice, where 30 patients in the terminal stages of illness are housed. He greeted each patient one-by-one, as well as their families, in an emotional encounter.

Through the visit, “the Holy Father wanted to give a strong sign of the importance of life, from its first moment to its natural end,” the Vatican said in a statement.

“The acceptance of life and the guarantee of human dignity at all stages of development are lessons repeatedly stressed by Pope Francis,” the Vatican continued, adding that the Pope’s dual mercy visit is a “concrete and tangible sign” of how essential it is to give our attention “to those in the most vulnerable and precarious situations.”

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VATICAN NEWS

Cooperating in abortion is always an impediment to ordination, Pope affirms

by Hannah Brockhaus (CNA/EWTN News) • September 16, 2016

A Mass of priestly ordination in St. Peter’s Basilica. (Bohumil Petrik/CNA)

Vatican City — Pope Francis has confirmed that the impediments preventing one from being ordained – such as homicide, abortion, or attempted suicide – apply whether or not the man was Catholic at the time the act occurred.

As the law is written, a doubt existed that the “irregularities,” as they are called, applied only to those who were Catholic – and thus those who were under the law – at the time they were committed.

Pope Francis affirmed the definitive interpretation, that the law does apply to non-Catholics who have performed the acts, in a meeting with members of the Pontifical Council for Legislative Texts on May 31. The letter was made public by the Vatican Sept. 15.

The purpose of the law is to provide extra protection to the sanctity of the Sacrament of Holy Orders – in the episcopate, priesthood, and diaconate – Bishop Juan Ignacio Arrieta Ochoa de Chinchetru, secretary of the Pontifical Council for Legislative Texts, said in the Vatican newspaper, L’Osservatore Romano. He clarified that it is not a punishment for the irregularizing act, but merely an upholding of the dignity of Holy Orders.

Canon 1041 of the Code of Canon Law states that, among others, “any person who has committed voluntary homicide or procured a completed abortion and all those who positively cooperated in either” and “a person who has mutilated himself or another gravely and maliciously or who has attempted suicide” is “irregular for receiving (holy) orders.”

Bishop Arrieta told reporters Thursday that it is possible for a dispensation to be granted by special intervention of the bishop if the person is truly contrite, “but a warning sign remains.”

Precaution is required in order to “protect the dignity of the sacrament,” he said.

The definitive interpretation is substantiated by a reasoned, rather than overly formalistic reading of the law, Bishop Arrieta said in L’Osservatore Romano.

“A different interpretation” of the canon, he continued, “would lead to propose a discriminatory treatment by applying different rules depending on the condition of whether or not Catholic at the time of the facts.”

This would be “particularly paradoxical and unjust, because both Catholics and non-Catholics are equally bound to respect for his own life and that of others, as belonging to the natural order,” he said.

Pope Francis also issued changes this week to the Latin code of canon law, with an eye toward clarifying ministry to Eastern Catholics.

The Pope cited concern for harmony between the different codes. The name of the Pope’s apostolic letter, De concordia inter Codices, in fact means “Concerning harmony between laws.” It is dated May 31 and was released Sept. 15 and concerns topics such as baptism, marriage, and change of ecclesiastical rite.

The Pope said the changes were motivated by the presence of many Eastern Catholics in predominantly Latin Catholic regions.

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VATICAN NEWS

Bring people Christ’s mercy, Pope Francis tells new bishops

by Hannah Brockhaus (CNA/EWTN News) • September 16, 2016

Pope Francis greets bishops during the General Audience in St. Peter’s Square on April 20, 2016. (Daniel Ibanez/CNA)

Vatican City — Like the Good Samaritan in the parable, you have been called to show the mercy of God to the men and women God has placed in your path, Pope Francis said to a group of new bishops on Friday.

“Be bishops with a heart wounded by such a mercy and so tireless in the humble task of accompanying the man who ‘by chance’ God has put in your way,” the Pope encouraged.

The Roman Pontiff’s Sept. 16 audience was with the participants in an annual training course for bishops held in Rome organized by the Congregation of Bishops and the Congregation of Eastern Churches.

“Men have need of mercy,” the Pope said. The Good Samaritan is “interested in (the man’s) recovery and his future … mercy, which had broken his heart, needs to pour and pour.”

Just as Christ was close to his disciples, accompany your priests first “with patient care”, Pope Francis exhorted the new bishops. He added that priests should feel comfortable going to their bishop to ask questions or for explanations.

He also told the bishops to take special care of seminaries and seminarians, not focusing just on the number of vocations, but rather on the “quality of discipleship.”

“Do not deprive the seminarians of your firm and tender fatherhood,” he said.

The Holy Father also talked about the importance of introducing people to the sacraments, to the fullness of truth in the Church, and to mercy.

“The Mercy of God is the only reality that allows men to not get completely lost, even when unfortunately he tries to escape his appeal,” the Pope said. “Bishops, be able to launch your Churches in this abyss of love.”

Pope Francis told the bishops that they were caught “from the heart of God to guide his Holy People” and thus should not be afraid to live out their calling.

“Know that this time it is your name that the Father wanted to say,” he said. “Indeed, abandon the pretense of self-sufficiency to rely as little children on him who reveals his small kingdom.”

The bishops have been called to their vocation and position by God, Pope Francis said, and it is their job to attract people to the mercy of God and to help them discern the whisper of God amid the noise of the world.

“A god distant and indifferent you can ignore, but (you cannot) easily resist a God so near and moreover wounded for love,” the Pope continued. “Goodness, beauty, truth, love, good – here is what we can offer to this beggar, the world, although in half-broken bowls.”

Pope Francis also encouraged the bishops to accompany families, rejoicing in their generous love and encouraging the immense good they do in the world.

“Put before their eyes the true joy of love and grace with which God elevates the share of his Love. So many people need to rediscover it, others have never known (it), some (are) waiting it redeem it, not a few will bring him the weight of having irretrievably lost,” he said.

“Please keep them company in discernment and with empathy.”

The Pope reminded the bishops that above all, it is the work of God that they do in their ministries.

“It is comforting to keep in our hearts the memory of his voice that has called us, despite our shortcomings,” he said. “He gives peace, surrender to certainty that it will be him, not us, to bring to fulfillment what he himself started.”

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VATICAN NEWS

Rome’s exorcist, Father Gabriel Amorth, dies at age 91

by CNA/EWTN News • September 16, 2016

. Gabriel Amorth, who died Sept. 16, speaks to CNA in 2013. (Stephan Driscoll/CNA)

Vatican City — Father Gabriel Amorth, the exorcist of the Diocese of Rome who drew worldwide attention, died on Friday at the age of 91.

Leaders of the Society of St. Paul remembered him with “great affection and gratitude,” SIR News reports.

“Now he rests from his many battles with the devil,” Spanish theologian Father Jose Antonio Fortea told CNA Sept. 16.

The priest first met Father Amorth in 1995 during theological studies about exorcisms.

“His doors were open for me and for all priests. There were no mysteries or grandstanding. I could see his work and his simplicity,” Fr. Fortea said.

“His strong, vigorous voice spoke to millions of people about the action of the devil,” he continued. “He alone, one person, managed to revitalize the ministry in one country and then his influence reached everywhere in the Church. The means to achieve this was simply to tell what he had seen.”

Father Amorth was born in Modena in northern Italy on May 1, 1925. He entered the mother house of the Congregation of the Society of St. Paul in Alba in August 1947, five years after meeting its founder, Blessed James Alberione. He was ordained a priest on Jan. 24, 1951.

In 1985, Cardinal Ugo Poletti, the Vicar General of the Diocese of Rome, appointed him exorcist of the diocese. He performed an estimated 70,000 exorcisms, often repeating the rite on the same persons.

Father Amorth drew much publicity for his books explaining his work and his public statements on the demonic.

In an April 2015 Facebook post, he attributed the Islamic State group to demonic influence.

“ISIS is Satan. Things first happen in the spiritual realms, then they are made concrete on this earth,” he said. He added that evil is “disguised” in various political, cultural and religious ways, with one source of inspiration in the devil.

“As a Christian I fight the beast spiritually,” Fr. Amorth said. “Biblically speaking we are in the last days and the beast is working furiously.”

In May 2013, he told CNA that Pope Francis had performed an exorcism in St. Peter’s Square on a man said to be possessed, using a prayer of liberation instead of the ordinary rite.

Some of the priest’s statements did not go unchallenged. When his memoirs were released in 2010, he claimed that there are “members of Satanic sects” in the Vatican, including priests, monsignors and cardinals. Fr. Amorth said the Pope at the time, Benedict XVI, “does what he can” against such groups.

Fr. Fortea himself questioned the claim, saying some exorcists agreed with Fr. Amorth about the Vatican sects, while others did not.

Fr. Amorth held numerous positions in the Society of St. Paul, including aspirant director, high school teacher, delegate of the Italian province, and spiritual director of various lay institutes. He was also a journalist. For many years he directed the monthly “Mother of God” and worked with the group Famiglia Cristiana and Radio Maria.

He was the author of several books and founded the International Association of Exorcists.

On Sept. 8, 2015 the Prefect of Rome, Paola Basilone, in the presence of Italy’s defense minister Roberta Pinotti, awarded Fr. Amorth the Medal of Liberation for his important role in the partisan struggle in Italy during the Second World War.

The priest had been hospitalized for several weeks for lung complications.

Fr. Fortea last saw Fr. Amorth in 2012.

“His character had not changed. So close to ninety years and still doing exorcisms.”

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WORLD NEWS

How the response to 9/11 affected Christians in the Middle East

by Matt Hadro (CNA/EWTN News) • September 10, 2016

(Larry Bruce via Shutterstock)

Washington, D.C. — On the 15th anniversary of the World Trade Center terror attacks, we shouldn’t overlook how Middle Eastern Christians have suffered from the unintended consequences of U.S. post-9/11 foreign policy, says one expert.

“The U.S. Catholic bishops, in their statement after the Sept.11 attacks, made it clear that the response has to be a response that brings more peace for all, not just greater security for U.S. citizens,” said Maryann Cusimano Love, an international relations professor at the Catholic University of America.

U.S. Catholics must see themselves as part of “a global Church, and that as followers of Christ, the Prince of Peace, He came to bring peace for all, not for a narrow band,” she told CNA.

Sunday marks the 15th anniversary of the Sept. 11 terror attacks, when 19 men affiliated with the terror group Al-Qaeda hijacked four commercial flights and directed three of the airplanes straight into the two World Trade Center buildings in Manhattan and the Pentagon in Washington, D.C.

The fourth hijacked flight crashed near Somerset, Pa. and was reportedly headed for the U.S. Capitol building. Almost 3,000 perished in the attacks.

In response, the U.S. began the “War on Terror” shortly after with the invasion of Afghanistan to defeat the Taliban in 2001, and then the War in Iraq in March, 2003.

At the time of the Sept. 11 attacks that were motivated in part by religious extremism, the U.S. was not able to properly grapple with the role of religion in international affairs, Love explained. Since then it has struggled to engage with religious actors in the right way.

“The U.S. government was pretty much blind in being able to deal with religious actors or religious factors in foreign policy,” she said of the time of the attacks.

“Our foreign policy organizations were primarily built to fight the Cold War. And in a fight against ‘godless Communists’,” she added, “you really didn’t need to understand religion that much.”

After the attacks, U.S. foreign policy swung to the opposite extreme to viewing religious actors “only as a problem” and a “source of conflict,” she added.

Thus, “it’s really taken a long time,” she said, to help those crafting U.S. foreign policy “to understand that religious actors can be a positive force in international politics for peace, for prosperity, for development, and not only or merely a source of conflict.”

Middle Eastern Christians and other religious minorities have also suffered greatly from the unintended consequences of U.S. post-9/11 foreign policy, despite the ultimately-prophetic warnings from Catholic leaders, including Pope St. John Paul II, against the War in Iraq, Love explained.

“Christians in the Middle East are in a fight for their lives,” she said, and “in a large part the U.S. response to the Sept. 11 attacks certainly played a role in that.”

With the war beginning in 2003, attacks on Iraqi Christian communities increased and Christians left the country. While over 1.5 million Christians lived in Iraq in 2003, there are fewer than 500,000 now.

Also, militant groups like al-Qaeda in Iraq and the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria – which did not exist at the time of the U.S. invasion – came into Iraq, Love noted.

“One thing many Iraqi Christians will tell you, they had no love for Saddam Hussein, but they all point to that as a golden age, that their lives were so much better under that regime than they are now,” she said. “They said then we had one brutal dictator to worry about; now we have many. And the sources of instability are much larger, much wider. And they’re under threat from many more corridors.”

Moving forward, U.S. policy must take all religious actors – the good as well as the bad – into account, Love insisted.

“The U.S. foreign policy has always been created around governments, countries, states,” she said. “Yet that form is really recent. Most countries in the world today are between 25 and 50 years old.” And the services many countries boast of having – education and health care, for example – have been provided by religious actors for millennia.

And the positive stories of religious leaders must be highlighted, she said, in countries like Columbia, the Philippines, and Central African Republic where they are “risking their lives” to promote peace.

The U.S. must also remember that the universality of the Catholic faith, where members of every country and continent are Christian, as opposed to other faiths that are more geographically concentrated.

“That’s still the growing edge for U.S. foreign policy, to understand the depth and the breadth that religious actors bring to these issues and the positive contributions they can bring,” Love said.

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WORLD NEWS

Woman charged in foiled attack on Notre Dame cathedral

by CNA/EWTN News • September 12, 2016

Notre Dame cathedral in Paris, France. (Eugenio Vincanzo Pandolfi via Flickr CC BY-NC 2.0)

Paris, France — A woman was charged over the weekend by French authorities in connection with an alleged terrorist plot to attack Notre Dame cathedral with a car bomb.

Ornella G. was charged Saturday with “terrorist criminal association to commit crimes against people” and “attempted assassinations as an organized gang in connection with a terrorist enterprise,” the Paris prosecutor’s office announced, according to CNN.

French Prime Minister Manuel Valls, declared that France is facing a “maximum threat” after a car with explosive materials was found near Notre Dame cathedral last Thursday.

“We’ve seen it again these last few days, these last few hours and again while we are speaking. Every day, the intelligence services, the police, the gendarmerie (similar to the National Guard), every day, they are thwarting attacks, dismantling the Iraqi-Syrian networks.”

This past Wednesday Sept. 7, French police arrested six people for abandoning days prior a car in the vicinity of Notre Dame cathedral in Paris, with the emergency flashers on and inside various cooking gas cylinders, a blanket soaked in gasoline and an extinguished cigarette. They did not find any detonation devices.

Police officials reported the arrest of six women, four of which were later released. Of the two under arrest, one of them is connected to a man who had died on behalf of the Islamic State, and the other, Inès Madan, the 19-year-old owner of the car in which the explosive material was found, had sworn allegiance to the Islamic State.

“There are young girls radicalized just as much as the men, who also want the status of martyr, and so they want to take action.”

These arrests have been “a race against time” to prevent them from acting again, according to a recent statement by French Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve.

The multiple arrests on Sept. 7 are connected to three attacks: the foiled car bomb attack near Notre Dame cathedral, the murder of two police near Paris this past June, and the stabbing of the French priest, Father Jacques Hamel as he was celebrating Mass this past month of July.

In the last 10 months more than 200 people have died in France in different terrorist attacks. Attacks, which according to the Associated Press, mark a new phase in the efforts of the Islamic State to spread terror throughout Europe. Manuel Valls said authorities are monitoring nearly 15,000 people in France believed to be in the process of radicalization, sources at CNN report.

“Among the changes that have occurred in recent months, the dismantled jihadist cell was made up entirely of women completely imbued in the ideology of the Islamic State,” said François Molins, magistrate and prosecutor for the French Republic.

The group was directed by persons in Syria who turn these women into soldiers, Molins said. In recent months the number of teen age girls and young people recruited by the Islamic State in France has increased.

France has been under a state of emergency since November 2015, when the terrorist attacks at the Bataclan theater and multiple other locations throughout the Paris left over 100 dead and several hundred more wounded.

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WORLD NEWS

In Hungary, anti-Christian persecution prompts government action

by Andrea Gagliarducci (CNA/EWTN News) • September 13, 2016

(Colonoeljohnbritt via Flickr CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)

Budapest, Hungary — The Hungarian government has established a new office on the persecution of Christians to address both persecutions of Christians in the Middle East and the subtle forms of discrimination some Christians face in Europe.

Zoltan Balog, the Hungarian Minister for Human Capacities, explained the new office. His ministry oversees the newly established sub-secretariat on the persecution of Christians.

“Today, Christianity has become the most persecuted religion, where out of five people killed out of religious reasons, four of them are Christians,” Balog told CNA. “In 81 countries around the world Christians are persecuted and 200 million Christians live in areas where they are discriminated against. Millions of Christian lives are threatened by followers of radical religious ideologies.”

This is the reason why the Hungarian government considers the establishment of the specialized government office to be of the “utmost importance” to help persecuted Christians, to raise international awareness of their “untenable situation”, and to coordinate humanitarian actions.

The new office’s exact mission has not yet been established. It has primarily a humanitarian focus, but it will also examine the state of Christianity in Europe.

“Our interest not only lies in the Middle East but in forms of discrimination and persecution of Christians all over the world,” Balog said. “It is therefore to be expected that we will keep a vigilant eye on the more subtle forms of persecutions within European borders.”

A November 2014 report by the international pastoral charity Aid to the Church in Need found “worrying” and “worsening” religious freedom conditions in the United Kingdom, Germany, France, and the Netherlands. These threats mainly come from radical feminists and LGBT activists that aim to compel Christian participation in abortion or to silence Christians on matters of sexual morality. Some policies have affected Christians’ ability to raise their children in the faith, while there have also been rising attacks on Christian places of worship in some European countries.

The Hungarian government is the first country to establish a special government department on persecution of Christians. The new department has a 3 million euro budget. Overseeing the department is Tamás Török, who until recently was Hungary’s deputy ambassador to Italy.

The decision came after Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban along with Balog took part in the annual meeting for Catholic legislators in Frascati, Italy. The group was founded by Cardinal Christoph Schoenborn of Vienna in 2015.

Orban and Balog, who are respectively a Protestant layman and a Calvinist pastor, were the only non-Catholic members of the group, whom Pope Francis received in a private audience.

Balog said that he and Orban met with Christian leaders from the Middle East in Rome at the end of August.

Among the participants of the meeting were Syriac Patriarch Ignatius Joseph III Younan of Antioch, Maronite Patriarch Bechara Boutros Rai of Antioch, Melkite Archbishop Jean-Clément Jeanbart of Aleppo, Patriarch Ignatius Aphrem II of the Syriac Orthodox Church, and Bishop Anba Gabriel of the Coptic Orthodox Church.

“The primary topic of the meeting was the persecution of Christians, since Christians living the Middle Eastern region are the most vulnerable in the world,” Balog said. “Viktor Orbán declared at the meeting that Hungary will take action against the persecution of Christians and stands ready to support these communities whose very existence is threatened.”

“This is where we decided that there needs to be an efficiently operating deputy state secretariat with the government’s authorization to combat every form of Christian persecution.”

Balog said Hungary “hasn’t been idle” in speaking in international forums against contemporary persecutions of Christians. The country “to the best of its abilities” has helped Middle Eastern Christian communities morally and financially “so that they may persevere in their homelands.”

Balog listed some Hungarian government initiatives for persecuted Christians. There is the allocation of over 300,000 euros through the Hungarian Catholic Bishops’ Conference to support students in the Middle East and to construct schools in Erbil. The funding provided by the government helps fund the annual education of approximately 400 refugee children in the Middle East. The coverage, together with the Catholic Church, of the annual education costs for the children of almost 740 families belonging to Christian or other persecuted religious or ethnic minority living in the refugee camps in Jordan, northern Iraq, and Lebanon.

He added that the government “will do everything in our power to improve the circumstances of Christians living in the Middle Eastern region.”

“The establishment of this new government office, whose very nature is to deal with this matter, is another manifestation of our dedication to this issue.”

Balog also said that this new focus will help control the major immigration flows out of the Middle East into Europe.

“We feel that improving the situation in the troubled countries might make it possible for persecuted minorities to stay at home or close to home.”

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WORLD NEWS

Why Japan won’t release the names of its knife attack victims

by Mary Rezac (CNA/EWTN News) • September 13, 2016

Police crime tape closes the entrance of Tsukui Yamayuri En care home on July 27, 2016 in Sagamihara, Japan. (Ken Ishii/Getty Images)

Tokyo, Japan — In late July, the worst mass killing in Japan since World War II left 19 people dead and 26 people wounded.

The suspected killer, 26-year-old Satoshi Uematsu, carried out his attack against people with disabilities at a care center, where Uematsu had worked for four years. According to a Japanese news source, Uematsu had warned Parliament in February that he was planning such an attack, to get rid of disabled people “for the sake of Japan.”

In a way, the reaction to his attack showed that the country, and much of the world, would already like to pretend that the disabled do not exist.

Weeks after the incident, police in the Kanagawa Prefecture, where the attack took place, have not released the names of the victims, citing family members requests for privacy.

“Such nondisclosure is unusual,” Motoko Rich wrote in an article for the New York Times.

“In other rare instances of mass killings in Japan, like the stabbings of five elderly victims on Awaji Island, south of Kobe, last year, or a knifing attack in 2008 that left seven dead in the Akihabara neighborhood of Tokyo, the police identified the victims within days,” she wrote.

“Advocates for disabled people say withholding the names is consistent with a culture that considers them lesser beings. Keeping the victims hidden, even after their deaths, these advocates say, tacitly endorses the views of those – including the assailant – who say disabled people should be kept separate from the rest of society,” she added.

But the problem goes beyond Japan, said Lydia Brown, an author, speaker and advocate for the disabled, who also has autism.

“The … victims have been mostly ignored or quickly shuffled through the news cycle in all world media, both within and outside Japan,” Brown told CNA in e-mail comments.

“Ableism (discrimination in favor of the able-bodied) and related shame, stigma, and dehumanization of disabled people is widespread in East Asian cultures, but is also equally prevalent in Western and other societies as well.”

An example of this discrimination is the way Western media treats the stories of disabled people who are murdered by their family or caretakers, Brown said.

“… our own media narratives typically paint such incidents as ‘understandable’ due to the ‘stress’ or ‘burden’ of supporting a disabled person,” Brown said.

“Additionally, popular and news media too frequently glorify our suicides as brave and courageous, vilify us as deranged serial killers and threats to public safety, and justify violence committed against us as understandable. That needs to change.”

Recently, disability rights groups and advocates have been particularly outspoken about the dangers of legislation that would legalize assisted suicide, warning that such laws would further marginalize the disabled and terminally ill. They warn that there are not enough safeguards to protect already vulnerable populations from murder at the hands of family members or caregivers.

Brown said that people with disabilities throughout the world have also been fighting for years against discrimination and violence, which comes in the form of assuming disabled people cannot make decisions for themselves, as well as in the overuse of institutions to keep disabled people “contained.”

“Part of that violence is the widespread use of institutions – from psychiatric wards to segregated special education schools to developmental disability institutions to nursing homes – to contain and isolate disabled people from the rest of society, creating a perfect environment for abuse and violence to proliferate unchecked,” Brown said.

“We must fight for liberation of all our people – from all institutions and prisons.”

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WORLD NEWS

Cardinal Schönborn warns of ‘Islamic conquest’ of Europe

by CNA/EWTN News • September 14, 2016

Cardinal Schönborn. (Mazur/catholicnews.org.uk)

Vienna, Austria — Cardinal Christoph Schönborn has warned that Europe risks forfeiting its “Christian inheritance” and that an “Islamic conquest” could be in its future.

Speaking in the Cathedral of Vienna on Sunday, Sept. 11, the Archbishop of Vienna referenced the feast day that commemorates the decisive victory of a Christian coalition over the Ottoman Empire in the Battle of Vienna in 1683.

“On this day, 333 years ago, Vienna was saved,” he said. “Will there now be a third attempt at an Islamic conquest of Europe? Many Muslims think so and long for it and say: This Europe is at an end.”

“And I think that we should ask for Europe what Moses does in the reading of today and what God the Merciful does for the younger son: Lord, give us another chance! Do not forget that we are your people just like Moses reminds Him: They are your people, You led them out, You sanctified them, they are your people.”

On Sept. 11, 1683, Polish King John Sobieski III and Supreme Commander of the Christian Coalition Army, led 18,000 horsemen, with the famous “winged hussars,” against the enemy Turkish lines. In a battle that included what is considered the largest cavalry charge in history, Sobieski thoroughly defeated them. The victory of allied Polish, Austrian, Bavarian, Saxon, Venetian and other troops marked the historic end of the expansion of the Ottoman Empire into Europe.

Before going to war, the Polish king, a devout Catholic, had entrusted his kingdom to the Blessed Virgin, Our Lady of Czestochowa. Drawing on this legacy, in 1684 Pope Innocent XI introduced Feast of the Most Holy Name of the Blessed Virgin Mary for the date of Sept. 12. The feast was briefly struck from the calendar by liturgical reformer Monsignor Annibale Bugnini during Vatican II, but restored by Saint John Paul II in 2002.

Cardinal Schönborn, a confidante of Pope Francis, warned the congregation in the Cathedral of Vienna on Sunday, that Europe had “squandered and wasted” its Christian inheritance, just like the younger brother in the parable told by Christ.

“What will become of Europe?” asked the cardinal.

He closed his homily with a prayer:

“Lord, remember, it is your people. And if we have strayed and if we have squandered the inheritance, Lord, do not abandon us! Do not abandon this Europe, which has produced so many saints. Do not abandon us, because we have become lukewarm in our faith.

“… Have mercy on your inheritance, have mercy on your people, with Europe, which is about to forfeit your Christian inheritance! Have mercy on us and raise us up again, for the glory of your name and as a blessing to the world! Amen.”

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WORLD NEWS

Use ‘moral authority’ to push for change in Vietnam, advocates tell the U.S.

by Matt Hadro (CNA/EWTN News) • September 15, 2016

Hudson Institute conference on Religious Freedom in Vietnam. (YouTube)

Washington, D.C. — If the U.S. uses its moral authority’ to pressure Vietnam on human rights issues, the southeast Asian country will change for the better, religious freedom advocates maintained at a conference on Monday.

“Vietnam wants to be part of the world, and I’m sure it does. It needs to not treat religious liberty as the poor sister of the human rights family, or worse, as the eccentric uncle of the human rights family,” Kristina Arriaga, a commissioner on the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom, stated at a Sept. 12 event hosted by the Hudson Institute on religious freedom in Vietnam.

“Without religious freedom, no other right exists,” she added.

The freedom of citizens to practice their religion in Vietnam “varies,” the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom noted in its 2016 annual report, because while “the government has made dramatic openings with respect to religious freedom,” officials – at both the national and local levels – can also treat certain religious leaders and communities with hostility, as supposedly “threatening to the state.”

Grave violations of human rights are still committed, such as the government requiring religious groups to register with the state, imprisoning human rights activists, and cracking down on protests, as when this past spring 4,000 Catholics were reportedly beaten for protesting a toxic waste dump that caused an environmental disaster.

Unregistered religious groups are at greater risk of harassment and persecution by government officials, the commission added.

However, the state can also wield its authority by trying to control registered groups. As USCIRF chair Fr. Thomas Reese and Harvard Professor Mary Ann Glendon noted after their 2015 trip to Vietnam, “the government kept the clergy on a short leash and continues to play a direct role in approving candidates for bishops selected by the Vatican.”

“Government officials become nervous when a local pastor has more credibility and authority in his village than the local party and government officials,” they added.

Elliot Abrams, a former commissioner with USCIRF and current fellow with the Council on Foreign Relations, explained at the Hudson Institute event: “That is because the local pastor has moral authority and legitimacy, while the party and government officials do not. That is just what the regime fears.”

However, the U.S. has “moral authority” because religious freedom is enshrined in the First Amendment of its Constitution. Thus, it must use this authority to pressure Vietnam to improve its human rights record, both Abrams and Arriaga insisted.

They described President Obama’s recent trip to Vietnam as a missed opportunity. Obama completely lifted the arms embargo against the country, but advocates insisted that sufficient human rights concessions were not made in return.

“The question is whether the United States will use a closer relationship – that Vietnamese leaders want – to promote religious freedom, or will we forget about it and pursue what is meant to be a policy of realpolitik,” Abrams asked.

“Whose independence and strength are we enhancing?” he asked about the lifting of the embargo, implying that the U.S. was strengthening the regime, but not the Vietnamese people.

The U.S. has an obligation to highlight abuses when its dignitaries travel to countries where repression occurs, Arriaga insisted.

“The U.S. government needs to name those names when they are in the country,” she said, calling it “inexcusable” for a government official not to do so when traveling to a country like China or Cuba, where the government represses the freedom of religion.

Although the state in 2015 released certain political prisoners including Catholic bloggers and activists, there are still reportedly “between 100 and 150 prisoners of conscience” there, USCIRF noted in its report.

The U.S. must also re-designate Vietnam as a “country of particular concern,” Arriaga insisted. That State Department designation is for countries where the worst violations of religious freedom are taking place, either with government consent or without sufficient prevention by the state.

Vietnam was put on the CPC list in 2004, “the last time that Vietnam made real improvements” she said. However, the country was taken off the list in 2006.

“In fact, we know American pressure can work to relax the degree of repression, to reduce the amount of thuggish behavior,” Arriaga said, “but only if the United States government applies that pressure and makes it clear that improved relations depend on this.”

Another area of concern for Vietnam is its draft law on religion, expected to go into effect later this year.

In June, the Ambassador at-Large for International Religious Freedom David Saperstein testified before Congress that the current version of the law “will continue to require religious groups to undergo an onerous and arbitrary registration and recognition process to operate legally,” although authorities had shown “a willingness to receive domestic and international feedback on the draft law.”

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WORLD NEWS

These converts met the Church through EWTN in the Middle East

by CNA/EWTN News • September 15, 2016

Arne and Barbara Sahlstrom. (ShalomTV)

Stockholm, Sweden — Arne and Barbara Sahlstrom are a Swedish married couple, both brought up as Lutherans, though they were not practicing.

They began to be interested in the Catholic faith with the visit of Pope John Paul II to Sweden in 1989, and got fully into it through programs on EWTN while they were living in Dubai and they finally entered the Catholic Church. This is their story.

As told by José Miguel Cejas, author of the book Cálido Viento del norte (Warm Wind from the North), Barbara studied voice in various Swedish cities and in Uppsala she met Arne Sahlstrom whom she would later marry. Arne was studying French and English literature before starting a medical career and he was also from a Lutheran family, although he was not practicing.

Arne specialized in advanced surgical techniques and Barbara became a professor of voice and was part of the choir of the symphonic orchestra. In June 1989, John Paul II visited Sweden. At that time they were surprised by his personage.

Religión En Libertad (Religion in Freedom) tells this story of conversion and drawing near to the faith. Shortly after the pope’s visit to Sweden, Barbara’s mother came down with cancer. It was then that Barbara began to pray and found a Bible.

“As I had never read it I couldn’t tell the difference between the Old and New Testament. When I was a girl, from the ages of five to eight, I went to Sunday School every Sunday, where there were some ladies who read us the Bible.”

In July 2001, Arne was assigned to work in Saudi Arabia, a majority Muslim country. There, Barbara began to look on the Internet for religious programs. This is how she got to know the EWTN network, founded by Mother Angelica.

“Day after day I watched programs that talked about that Catholicism that my mother was so interested in, and I commented on them or watched them again with Arne,” Barbara said.

Discovering Catholicism was a big surprise for Barbara. “We had never heard the infinite mercy of God spoken about and the love of a God who is very close to us: the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit, the Trinity that lives in our souls. The God that had been presented to us until then was very distant. We also then learned about the doctrine of Purgatory.”

Later they decided to leave for Bahrain and Dubai. There they found Saint Francis Catholic Parish where Mass was celebrated on Friday, the Muslim day of worship, because the other days were work days.

In that place Father Eugene Mattioli helped the couple learn about Catholicism and delve into the history of the Church. “It was a pleasant journey. Everything attracted us. What we especially liked was the importance given in Catholicism to the relationship between reason and faith,” Barbara explained.

When Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger was elected Pope in 2005, Arne and Barbara especially rejoiced. “It was a real blessing. His theological knowledge, his way of expressing himself, his enormous humility, his simplicity, his knowledge of the liturgy and liturgical and sacred music, his wonderful books, etc. There we saw the hand of God.”

During 2005, Barbara and Arne deepened their knowledge of the faith and the liturgy, as well as song, till they finally decided to take the final step of entering into full communion with the Catholic Church.

Some of those who played a key role in helping Arne and Barbara to find their way were their bishop in Sweden, Anders Arborelius, and several Opus Dei priests.

After all the ground they covered to get to the Church, both said that God was drawing near to them through the art, music, painting, and architecture.

When they would visit some church “even though we understood almost nothing, we spent a long time contemplating the statues, where the Virgin looks at you smiling. Many times we sat down to pray in the midst of that quiet and that silence.”

“And when Arne’s parents died we lit candles. Later I spoke to Arne about this and he told me that the Holy Spirit was there with us even though we didn’t realize it,” they said.

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WORLD NEWS

Christians in Nigeria are essentially ‘target practice’ – Here’s one bishop’s response

by Adelaide Mena (CNA/EWTN News) • September 16, 2016

Bishop Matthew Hassan Kukah. (James Nicholls/Aid to the Church in Need)

Washington D.C. — For Bishop Matthew Kukah, persecution is not just the history of the Church. It’s a reality that he lives every day.

In the diocese of Sokoto, located in northern Nigeria, ministry includes not only the normal sacramental and pastoral concerns of any other diocese. It also includes regularly responding to violence and attacks against the small Christian minority living in the majority-Muslim area.

Christians living in northern Nigeria today wonder “why have they and their institutions become target practice,” Bishop Kukah told CNA.

Christian churches and businesses – as well as the people who frequent them – suffer both targeted violence at the hands of Islamist extremists and destruction stemming from frustrations with the government, economy and social order, he said. And after the attacks, Christian communities face a wall of bureaucratic challenges and lack of government support as they struggle to rebuild.

The bishop said that he would not characterize the situation as a constant state of fear, but rather one of uncertainty.

“(Y)ou live in a state that is less than you expect as a citizen,” he said. “You don’t know what to expect tomorrow.”

Bishop Kukah spoke to CNA during a trip to the United States earlier this year to alert U.S. officials and organizations about the plight faced by his people and other targets of Islamist fundamentalism. He made the trip as a guest of Aid to the Church in Need, a Catholic charity that focuses on helping persecuted Christians around the world.

A complex problem

“Christians suffer disproportionate violence from Muslim extremists for reasons that very often have nothing to do with the Christian community,” Bishop Kukah said.

In many cases, he elaborated, violence in the region is “unprovoked” by the Christian community, but instead occurs as a reaction to events such as unfair elections, economic misfortunes, or international events such as American military actions in Libya or Iraq.

In addition, both Christian and moderate Muslim communities face attacks from Boko Haram, an Islamist terrorist group based in the country. Since 2009, changing government relations and radicalization within Boko Haram have resulted in a dramatic increase in violent attacks against civilian targets, including the 2014 abduction of 276 schoolgirls from Chibook, Nigeria. In 2015, the Global Terrorism Index named Boko Haram the world’s deadliest terrorist organization, greater than ISIS.

Adding to the suffering of the community, Bishop Kukah said, is a lack of support from the government. While some targets of violence find government and societal aid in rebuilding and accessing services such as schools and hospitals, the state in northern Nigeria merely “looks on” as Christian churches and institutions struggle to rebuild.

“Our churches are being bombed with no compensation paid for the schools or other properties of the Church.”

Furthermore, non-Muslim institutions in general – including churches, schools and hospitals – are legally limited in northern Nigeria, the bishop said. Non-Muslims face restrictions purchasing land, constructing buildings, and seeking government funding for schools, along with a number of bureaucratic obstacles that do not exist for Muslim citizens living in the region.

And while heightened waves of violence have drawn some recent media attention, the roots of the conflict go back centuries, Bishop Kukah said. Conquest of the area by Muslim rulers, along with attitudes carried by British colonial leaders, have created the perception that Western education is opposed to Islam – a social divide which heightens the tension between Christian and Muslim neighbors today.

In addition, citizens are living in an area where there is “an almost total breakdown of trust,” he said: parents and children are separated, spouses or other family members may not have confirmation that their loved ones are even alive.

In this uncertainty, both the Christian and Muslim communities have separated even further, Bishop Kukah continued. “People were living side-by-side with one another, but now what you witness is a tale of two cities.”

“Christians have relocated themselves to where they feel safe. Muslims have done the same.”

Building blocks of peace

Amid the division and disharmony, Bishop Kukah still hopes that northern Nigeria can move towards unification, a process that will require “leaders to bring things back together.”

The first step in countering violence, he said, is educating the public to counter projections and prejudices, which he claimed “are based on fear” as well as misunderstanding.

Catholic schools play a unique role in achieving this aim. The bishop pointed to a recent testing of northern Nigerian state’s students, in which the top two students from the entire state were selected to meet the governor. Both students – one girl, one boy – came from the same Catholic school, one that does not receive any government support. What’s more, he continued, both students were Muslim.

The meeting with the students was an opportunity to celebrate their achievements, Bishop Kukah said, but also to discuss the challenges Catholic schools face in the state. “The governor responded by telling me, even if it meant him buying the land, he would pay for [new land for schools].”

In addition, the bishop said, international actors have a role to play in reducing violence throughout northern Nigeria.

“The government of America must take full responsibility for how it shapes leadership around the world,” he commented, adding that policies and conflicts around the world bear consequences for the people of northern Nigeria. “We are suffering the collateral damage,” he lamented.

The U.S. and other countries can also call attention to the persecution faced by Christians and other communities in Nigeria, he said, emphasizing that the opportunity to help those facing violence “is really a call to appreciation of our common humanity.”

But while international support is important, the solution to violence in Nigeria will ultimately come from within Nigeria, Bishop Kukah said.

“The primary responsibility of rebuilding our country rests with us,” he stressed, noting that change will take time and discussion with others in the community. He suggested engagement with the government to make concerns known, but also cautioned that government should focus on providing specific, practical solutions.

“When we talk about reconstruction, it is very important that the government of Nigeria appreciates the scope of the problem.”

Moving towards peace will require a collective effort, but to Bishop Kukah, it is one worth making.

“As we’re making progress, we’re also assuming responsibility,” he said.

This article was originally published May 5, 2016.

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U.S. NEWS

The heart of Padre Pio is coming to Boston. Yes, really

by Mary Rezac (CNA/EWTN News) • September 9, 2016

St. Pio of Pietrelcina. (Catholic News Agency)

Boston, MA — The Capuchin keepers of the relics of the late mystic Padre Pio are sending the saint’s heart to Boston for his feast day.

“I’m very excited to announce that the Capuchin Friars who run the Shrine of St. Padre Pio have offered to come to Boston with the heart of Padre Pio for his feast day this year,” Cardinal Sean O’Malley of Boston announced in a Sept. 2 post on his blog.

“This is the first time any major relic of Padre Pio has left Italy, and we are so pleased that they have offered to come to Boston for this historic visit. We know that many people throughout our country have a great devotion to Padre Pio, so the friars have made this possible especially for those who are not able to travel to San Giovanni Rotondo in Italy to venerate his relics and pray for his intercession,” he added.

The relic will be in the Boston area from Sept. 21 through his feast day, Sept. 23. It will be the only stop the relic will make during this trip.

St. Pio of Pietrelcina, colloquially known as “Padre Pio,” was a priest of the Order of the Friars Minor Capuchin, a stigmatist, and a mystic, who lived from 1887-1968. He was beatified in 1999, and canonized in 2002 by St. John Paul II, who often sought spiritual counsel from the mystic when he was alive.

Padre Pio was born in Pietrelcina, but served in San Giovanni Rotondo, Italy, from 1916 until his death in 1968.

His body, which has remained partially incorrupt years after his death, was sent to Rome in February as a special initiative for the Jubilee of Mercy.

Padre Pio was someone who spent his entire life in service of God’s mercy, Pope Francis said in February.

“We can say that Padre Pio was a servant of mercy. He did so full-time, practicing, at times in exhaustion, the apostolate of listening,” the Pope said.

Through his ministry in the confessional, where he would at times spend 10-15 hours a day, the saint was able to become “a caress of the living Father, who heals the wounds of sin and refreshes the heart with peace,” Pope Francis added.

Padre Pio’s body was also taken to his hometown of Pietrelcina for the first time since he left as a young priest.

It is said that while he was alive, Padre Pio never left San Giovanni Rotonto after being assigned there. When was asked if he would ever return to his childhood hometown of Pietrelcina, the saint said that he would return one day, but not until after his death.

According to a schedule released by the Archdiocese of Boston, the locations where the public may view his heart in Boston are as follows:

Wednesday, Sept. 21

9 a.m.-5 p.m. at Immaculate Conception, Lowell. Veneration will be held throughout the day with Mass at noon.

7 p.m.-midnight at St. Leonard’s Church, North End of Boston. Mass will be celebrated at 7 p.m., followed by veneration until midnight.

Thursday, Sept. 22

9 a.m.-5 p.m. at the Archdiocese of Boston Pastoral Center, Braintree. Veneration will be held throughout the day with Mass at noon.

7 p.m.-midnight at The Cathedral of the Holy Cross, Boston. Spanish Mass will be celebrated at 7 p.m., followed by veneration until midnight.

Friday, Sept. 23 (The Feast of St. Padre Pio)

9 a.m.-midnight at The Cathedral of the Holy Cross, Boston. Mass will be celebrated at 9 a.m., followed by veneration throughout the day. Cardinal O’Malley will also celebrate Mass at 7 p.m., followed by veneration until midnight.

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U.S. NEWS

The brutal, powerful 9/11 stories of Catholic priests

by Adelaide Mena (CNA/EWTN News) • September 11, 2016

Cross at Ground Zero. (Carlos Restrepo via Shutterstock)

New York City, N.Y. — On the clear, sunny morning of Sept. 11, 2011, Fr. Kevin Madigan heard an explosion overhead.

He grabbed oils for anointing and ran out the door of St. Peter’s parish in New York city and wandered towards the center of the commotion – the World Trade Center only a block away.

Fifty blocks uptown, Fr. Christopher Keenan, OFM watched with the world as the smoke rising from the twin towers darkened the television screen. Looking to help, he went to St. Vincent’s Hospital downtown to tend to those wounded in the attack – but the victims never came.

All the while, he wondering what had happened to a brother friar assigned as chaplain to the firefighters of New York City: Fr. Mychal Judge, OFM, named by some the “Saint of 9/11.”

Fifteen years ago on this day, hijackers flew planes into the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center in New York City, and the Pentagon in Arlington, Virginia. In a field in southern Pennsylvania, passengers retook the cockpit and crashed the plane before it could reach its intended target, presumed to be in Washington, D.C.

The consequences of the attacks have rippled throughout the United States as the attacks spurred a new global war on terror and irreversibly change the country’s outlook on terror, security, and international engagement.

For Frs. Madigan, Keenan and Judge, the day changed their own lives and ministries, as a pastor lost nearly his entire congregation, a friar put himself in harm’s way to take on a new position – an assignment he only received because another friar gave the ultimate sacrifice as the Twin Towers came down.

“This experience has seared our soul and our spirit and our life, and it has so seared our spirit and our life that it has penetrated our DNA,” Fr. Keenan told CNA.

“It has changed our lives and we will never be the same,” he said. “It was like losing a village.”

On Sept. 11, 2001, Fr. Kevin Madigan was assigned to St. Peter’s Church in the financial district of Lower Manhattan. The parish is the oldest Catholic Church in New York State “half a block literally from the corner of the World Trade Center,” Fr. Madigan explained to CNA.

“Prior to 9/11 it was a parish that basically serviced the people who came to the neighborhood who came to Mass or Confession, devotions and things like that.” The parish had a full and well-attended schedule of liturgies and prayers, with multiple Masses said in the morning and lunch hour. September 11th changed that.

“Immediately after 9/11 that community was no longer there, because it was like losing a village of 40,000 people next door.”

Fr. Madigan was leaving the sanctuary that morning, heading back to the rectory when overhead he heard the first plane hit the towers. Immediately he made his way towards the commotion, looking to minister to anyone who had been hurt by what had happened.

“I took the oils for anointing anyone who was dying – I didn’t know what was going on there,” he said. However, most of those fleeing the building did not need anointing or other sacrificial needs, Fr. Madigan recalled. “The first thing I did was get the oils to anoint anyone who was dying but most people either got out alive or were dead. There weren’t that many people who were in that in-between area.”

Then, there was another explosion from the other tower, and an object – the wheel of an airplane, in fact – went whizzing by Fr. Madigan’s head.

“After the second plane hit I went back to the office and made sure all the staff got out of there fast,” evacuating staff who were oblivious to the chaos outside due to a move the staff at St. Peter’s were preparing for.

Fr. Madigan was back on the street when firefighters began to wonder if the towers might fall.

Thinking the thought ridiculous, Fr. Keenan kept an eye on the subway entrance, which linked to an underground passage north of the towers. Then a cloud of dust made its way towards Fr. Madigan and another priest as they ducked into the subway station, emerging midst the thick smoke and dust several blocks away.

After the towers came down, Fr. Madigan made his way first to the hospital for an emergency health screening, then back to check on St. Peter’s, firefighters and other first responders made use of the sanctuary, temporarily laying to rest over 30 bodies recovered from the wreckage.

The death of Father Mychal

In September of 2011, Fr. Keenan was tasked with working for a community ministry program near the parish of St. Francis in midtown Manhattan. At St. Francis, he lived in community along with several other Franciscan Friars including an old friend he had known for years – Fr. Mychal Judge, chaplain for the Fire Department of New York City. The Friars were especially close with some of their neighbors – a firehouse across the street, who let the friars park their car at the firehouse.

While the plane did fly overhead, Fr. Keenan told CNA, he, “I think like everyone else, we found it while watching TV.” As the friars and brothers watched the events unfold on the television, they saw the second plane hit the South Tower, and Fr. Keenan went to St. Vincent’s Hospital – one of the closest medical facilities to the Word Trade Center. While he was waiting for victims to come and be in need of anointing or confession, Fr. Keenan and the other doctors, nurses and other responders who came to help “were all waiting for these people to get out who never came.” Victims were either largely able to walk away on their own, or they never made it to the hospital at all.

Instead, Fr. Keenan told CNA, “my responsibility was after people were treated to contact their family members to come and get them.”

As patients began to go home, Fr. Keenan continued to wonder about his brother friar, Fr. Judge, asking firefighters if they knew what had happened to the chaplain. He left the hospital in the early evening to go hear confessions, but stopped at the firehouse across the street to ask the firemen there if they Fr. Mychal Judge: “they told me his body was in the back of the firehouse.”

The mere fact that his body was intact and present at the firehouse that day was in itself a small miracle, Fr. Keenan said. “Mychal’s body that was brought out was one of the only bodies that was intact, recognizable and viewable,” he said, explaining that among those that die, “everyone was vaporized, pulverized and cremated” by the heat of the fire in the towers and the violence of the towers’ collapse. “He was one of the only ones able to be brought out and to be brought home.”

Fr. Mychal had gone along with Battalion 1 to answer what turned out to be a false alarm early in the morning of 9/11. Also with the battalion were two French filmmakers filming a documentary on the fire unit. When the towers were hit, the Battalion was one of the first to make it to the scene. In the film released by the brothers, Fr. Keenan said, “you can see his face and you can tell he knows what’s happening and his lips are moving and you can tell he’s praying his rosary.”

The group entered the lobby of the North Tower and were in the Mezzanine as the South Tower collapsed – spraying glass, debris and dust through the lobby.

“All the debris roared through the glass mezzanine like a roaring train and his body happened to be blown into the escalators,” Fr. Keenan recalled the filmmakers’ experience. In the impact, Fr. Judge had hit his head on a piece of debris, killing him almost instantly.

“All of a sudden they feel something at their feet and it was Mychal, but he was gone.”

Members of the fire department, police department and other first responders carried Fr. Judge’s body out of the wreckage, putting his body down first to run as the second tower collapsed, then again to temporarily rest it at St. Peter’s church, then again until it was claimed by the fire department, where Fr. Keenan saw his friend and prayed over his body.

Fr. Mychal Judge was later listed as Victim 0001 – the first death certificate processed on 9//11.

Despite the sudden and unexpected nature of the attacks and Fr. Mychal Judge’s death, Fr. Keenan told CNA that in the weeks before his friend’s death, Mychal had a sense his death was near.

“He just had a sense that the Lord Jesus was coming.” On several occasions, Fr. Mychal said to Fr. Keenan, “‘you know, Chrissy, the Lord will be coming for me,’” and other references to his death, he told CNA. “He had a sense that the Lord was coming for him.”

The grueling aftermath

“There was no playbook for how you deal with something in the wake of something like that,” Fr. Madigan said of the aftermath of 9/11. Personally, Fr. Madigan told CNA, he was well-prepared spiritually and mentally for the senseless nature of the attacks.

“I understand that innocent people get killed tragically all the time,” and noting that while the scale was larger and hit so close to home, “just life goes on.” For many others that he did minister to, however, “it did shake their foundations, their trust and belief in God.”

While the attacks changed the focus of his ministry as a parish priest at the time, the attacks also posed logistical challenges for ministry and aid: St. Peter’s usual see of the workers who worked in and around the World Trade Center vanished nearly over night: instead the whole area was cordoned off for rescue workers and recovery activities as the city began the long task of sorting and removing the debris and rubble.

In addition, a small chapel named St. Joseph’s Chapel, which was cared for and administered by St. Peter’s, was used by FEMA workers as a base for recovery activities and for workers’ use as a recreation site during the weeks after the attack. During that time, the sanctuary was damaged and several structures of the chapel, including the pulpit, chairs and interior were rendered unusable. According to Fr. Madigan, FEMA denies that it ever used the space.

Still, the priests at St. Peter’s saw it as their duty to minister to those that were there – whoever they were.

“The parish, the church building itself was open that whole time,” he said, saying that anyone who had clearance to be within the Ground Zero area was welcome at the church. In the weeks after the attacks, the parish acted as sanctuary, as recovery workers who were discovering body parts and other personal effects “would come in there just to sort of try to get away from that space.”

“Myself and one of the other priests would be out there each day just to be able to talk to anyone who wants to talk about what’s going on,” he said. “We’d celebrate Mass in a building nearby.”

Today, Fr. Madigan has been reassigned to another parish in uptown Manhattan, and St. Peter’s now has found a new congregation as new residents have moved into the neighborhoods surrounding the former World Trade Center site.

Within months after the attack, Fr. Keenan took on the role of his old friend, Fr. Mychal Judge, being installed as chaplain for the 14,000 first responders of the the FDNY.

Immediately, Fr. Keenan joined the firefighters in their task of looking for the remains – even the most minute fragments – of the more than 2,600 people killed at the World Trade Center. “The rest of the recovery process then was for nine months then trying to find the remains.”

For the firefighters in particular, there was a drive to find the remains of the 343 firefighters killed at the World Trade Center and help bring closure to the family members. “You always bring your brother home, you never leave them on the battlefield,” Fr. Keenan said.

The resulting amount of work, as well as the “intense” tradition among firefighters to attend all funerals for members killed in the line of duty meant that the job became all-consuming, with all one’s spare time spent at the World Trade Center site. Sometimes, Fr. Keenan said, he would attend as many as four, five, or six funerals or memorials a day – and many families held a second funeral if body parts were recovered from the site.

“Here are the guys, overtime, going to all the funerals, working spare time on the site looking for recovery, and taking care of the families who died in their own houses,” he said. “I was 24/7, 365 for 26 months.”

In addition, Fr. Keenan and the rest of the FDNY worked inside “this incredible toxic brew” of smoke and chemicals and fires that burned among the ruins at Ground Zero for months.

“I would be celebrating Mass at a 10:00 on a Sunday morning down there,” he recalled, “and just 30 feet from where I’m celebrating Mass at the cross, the cranes are lifting up the steel.”

While both buildings had contained over 200 floors of offices a piece, there was “not a trace of a computer, telephones, files, nothing. Everything was totally decimated.” Instead, all that was left was steel, dirt and the chemicals feeding the fires that shouldered underground in the footprint of the towers.

“The cranes are lifting up the steel and the air is feeding the fires underneath, and out of that is coming these incredible colors of yellow, black and green smoke, and we all worked in the recovery process.” The experience working the recovery at the World Trade Center site is one that Fr. Keenan considers a “gift” and an “honor.”

“It was an incredible experience really,” he said.

Fr. Keenan recounted a conversation the firefighters had with him a few days after he was commissioned. After pledging to “offer my life to protect the people and property of NY City,” the other firefighters told their new chaplain “we know you’re ours, don’t you forget that every one of us is yours,” promising to stand by their new shepherd. “I’m the most loved and cared for person in the world and who has it better than me?”

While the formal recovery process has ended, however, and a new tower, One World Trade Center stands just yards from the original site of Ground Zero, the effects of the experience – and the chemicals rescue workers came in contact with for months – still effect the firefighters.

“Just the day before yesterday we put 17 new names on the wall,” started Fr. Keenan, “who died this past year from of the effects of 9/11.” He explained that in the past fifteen years, thousands of rescuers and first responders – including Fr. Keenan himself, have developed different cancers and illnesses linked to their exposure at the World Trade Center site. In fact, at the time of the interview, Fr. Keenan had just returned from a screening for the more than 20 toxic chemicals the responders were exposed to. He warned that the “different cancers and the lung problems that are emerging are just the tip of the iceberg,” and worried that as time progressed other cancers and illnesses linked to the attack recovery would emerge.

The first responders are also dealing with the psychological fallout of the attacks among themselves, Fr. Keenan said, though many are dealing with it in their own way, and with one another.

Looking back, Fr. Keenan told CNA he still finds it difficult to express what the experience was like or to make sense of what it was like when he would go down into “the pit” to work alongside the firefighters and other first responders. “The only image I had as time went on and I asked ‘how do I make sense of this as a man of faith?’ is that it was like I was descending into hell and I was seeing the face of God on the people that were there.”

The same image that came to his mind to make sense of taking care of patients with AIDS in the 1990s came to Fr. Keenan in the wake of the attacks of 9/11, even though nothing can fully make sense of events like these, he said.

“I was like a midwife to people in their birthing process from life to death to new life,” he recalled. “All I can do is be present there, they have to do the work, I can be present there I can pray with them.”

”That’s how in faith I kind of sort of comprehended it.”

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Tim Kaine claims Catholic Church could change on gay marriage

by CNA/EWTN News • September 11, 2016

Tim Kaine. (U.S. Naval Institute via Flickr CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)

Washington D.C. — Democratic vice presidential candidate Tim Kaine, a Catholic who is currently the junior Virginia senator, said on Saturday that he thinks the Church will eventually drop its opposition to same-sex marriage.

“I think it’s going to change because my church also teaches me about a creator who, in the first chapter of Genesis, surveyed the entire world, including mankind, and said, ‘It is very good’,” Kaine said Sept. 10, according to the Associated Press.

His comments came during his keynote address at the national dinner for Human Rights Campaign, an influential LGBT advocacy group, in Washington, D.C.

Kaine cited Pope Francis’ “who am I to judge” comment, and then said: “I want to add: Who am I to challenge God for the beautiful diversity of the human family? I think we’re supposed to celebrate it, not challenge it.”

When Human Rights Campaign announced Kaine would be delivering the keynote at their national dinner, the group’s president stated that “As part of the most pro-equality presidential ticket in American history, Tim Kaine will help ensure another four years of unprecedented progress for LGBTQ equality in this country and around the world.”

Kaine is a parishioner at St. Elizabeth Catholic Church in the Diocese of Richmond, but he has drawn controversy for his public policy positions. While he has said he is “personally opposed” to abortion, he received a 100 percent rating in 2016 from the Planned Parenthood Action Fund, the political arm of the nation’s largest abortion provider, and a perfect rating in 2015 from NARAL Pro-Choice America.

More recently, it was reported that he privately told Hillary Clinton he would support overturning the Hyde Amendment, a 40 year-old policy that prevents federal dollars from directly funding most abortions.

Just before Pope Francis’ United States visit last September, Kaine voted against bringing a 20-week abortion ban to a vote on the Senate floor.

As Governor of Virginia, Kaine also personally opposed the death penalty, but his term saw 11 executions with only one commuted death sentence.

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U.S. Bishops to government: End legal standoff with the Little Sisters

by Matt Hadro (CNA/EWTN News) • September 12, 2016

Little Sisters of the Poor outside the Supreme Court of the United States after oral arguments for their case against the HHS mandate on April 14, 2016. (Becket Fund for Religious Liberty)

Washington D.C. — The United States government has an opportunity to end its legal battle with the Little Sisters of the Poor and the administration must “seize that opportunity,” legal experts are maintaining.

“In a nation dedicated to religious liberty, church-state conflict on this scale should be avoided whenever possible – and once started, ended as soon and as agreeably as possible,” legal counsel for the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops stated in Sept. 9 comments to the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.

They added that “it has now been spelled out with particular clarity how the Administration can achieve its stated policy goals without forcing those with sincerely held religious objections to assist.”

The health care law, passed in 2010, ordered that “preventative care” be covered in all health plans. In regulations released later on, the Department of Health and Human Services interpreted that to mandate coverage for contraceptives, sterilizations, and drugs that can cause early abortions.

Afterwards, the administration announced a process for non-profits to “opt-out” of the mandate, but many groups – including Catholic dioceses and the Little Sisters of the Poor – said the so-called accommodation still forced them to violate their religious beliefs against cooperating with contraceptive use. Over 300 plaintiffs have sued the administration over the mandate and its “accommodation.”

The case against the mandate of the Little Sisters and other petitioners like the Archdiocese of Washington and Bishop David Zubik of Pittsburgh was heard by the Supreme Court last year.

After hearing oral arguments in the case, the court requested supplemental briefs by both the petitioners and the administration that would outline possible alternative means of providing contraception coverage for employees of objecting non-profits while respecting the consciences of the nuns and other religious employers.

After receiving the briefs, the court in May sent the case back to the lower courts and said that both the nuns and the administration should find a solution.

“Following oral argument, the Court requested supplemental briefing from the parties addressing ‘whether contraceptive coverage could be provided to petitioners’ employees, through petitioners’ insurance companies, without any such notice from petitioners,” the court noted. “Both petitioners and the Government now confirm that such an option is feasible.”

However, Bishop Zubik of Pittsburgh, one of the plaintiffs in the case, said in August that the administration was being “extremely aggressive” and was “apparently trying to take over” his diocese’s health plans by forcing the third-party administrator of the plans to provide contraceptive coverage.

Now the administration is taking comments on whether an alternative solution can satisfy the Little Sisters and other petitioners “while still ensuring that the affected women seamlessly receive full and equal health coverage, including contraceptive coverage.”

Such a solution does exist, the USCCB comments affirmed. There is only one path to an agreement on the matter, and that is if the Little Sisters and other non-profits come up with the modifications to the mandate, they stated.

If insurers for the non-profits have to provide the contraception coverage, they continued, it must be provided as the plaintiffs had previously requested – “truly independent of petitioners and their plans” such as “through a separate policy, with a separate enrollment process, a separate insurance card, and a separate payment source, and offered to individuals through a separate communication.”

There are concrete ways to achieve this, the comments noted. For instance, employees seeking contraception coverage could have a separate plan for it under the same insurer, like they might have for dental or vision coverage. They could also purchase a health plan with contraception coverage on the state exchanges set up under the Affordable Care Act. The government could also create a separate plan to provide the coverage.

However, the bishops in no way endorse the use of contraceptives, which is against Church teaching, the comments insisted. Rather, they are pointing out that alternative methods exist for employees to have contraception coverage – which is the government’s goal – while not forcing religious groups to violate their beliefs.

“The intended effect of contraceptives is to take a perfectly healthy human reproductive system and render it temporarily or permanently infertile. As a matter of sound health care policy and practice, this is entirely backwards, as the goal of medicine, properly understood, is to cure or prevent health problems,” the comments explained.

“Contraceptives not only fail to cure or prevent health problems, they actually cause such problems. Indeed, today there is a virtual cottage industry of litigation against pharmaceutical manufacturers involving injuries resulting from contraceptive use,” they added, noting the HHS’s own research showing a heightened risk of cancer from the use of oral contraceptives.

“The petitioners have done their part by describing, in good faith and in great detail, a way to reach an amicable resolution. But the petitioners cannot change the regulations – only the Administration can do that. And so once again, we urge the Administration, in the strongest possible terms, to do its part to end this well, by choosing to pursue its policy goals in a way that fully respects – rather than knowingly disregards – the sincerely held and repeatedly stated religious objections of a substantial minority of our civil society.”

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The next U.S. president must aid persecuted Christians – Knights’ head

by Matt Hadro (CNA/EWTN News) • September 12, 2016

Carl Anderson, Supreme Knights of the Knights of Columbus, speaks with CNA on June 26, 2014. (Daniel Ibanez/CNA)

Washington D.C. — Christians can’t be second-class citizens if they are to remain in the Middle East, and the next United States administration will need to stand up for their rights, the head of the Knights of Columbus has said.

Speaking at the National Advocacy Convention 2016 for persecuted Middle Eastern Christians, Supreme Knight Carl Anderson of the Knights of Columbus insisted that for Christians in the Middle East, “the system of religious apartheid in the region must end.”

“Our tax dollars to the region must not be used to rebuild a discriminatory system that continues to impose second-class citizenship upon religious minorities,” he added, insisting that U.S. aid “should be contingent on the application of full rights of citizenship to every citizen of Iraq and other countries in the region.”

Anderson called for presidential candidates Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump to commit themselves to upholding those rights.

The 2016 National Advocacy Convention was held Sept. 7-9 in Washington, D.C. The group In Defense of Christians sponsored the event along with The Philos Project, the Institute for Global Engagement, and the National Armenian Conference of America.

On Thursday, religious leaders and advocates met with members of Congress to discuss the future of Christians in the Middle East.

That evening, the Solidarity Award was presented to three figures for their work in protecting persecuted Christians; Reps. Anna Eshoo (D-Calif.) and Jeff Fortenberry (R-Neb.) were honored for co-sponsoring a House resolution to state that genocide was taking place against Christians in Iraq and Syria.

Anderson was also recognized for his work. The Knights have raised over $11 million for Christians in the Middle East and have provided humanitarian aid for refugees driven from their homes by the Islamic State and who are not receiving aid sent through the Iraqi government. The Knights also helped push the U.S. to declare that Christians were victims of genocide in Islamic State-occupied territory.

Anderson, accepting the award, insisted that the Christians “are the ones who deserve an award” for having “lost everything except their faith.”

“These Christians persevere through an everyday heroism; and despite the tragic costs of that heroism, they continue to hope,” he added. “And their hope includes a faith in us.”

Thus, for the U.S. to honor their hope, they must support a solution for Christians in Iraq and Syria that will work for Christians in the long-term, he said.

One chief theme of the convention was how, after the U.S. declared that genocide was taking place against Christians, Yazidis, and Shia Muslims in areas controlled by the Islamic State, victims of genocide can be resettled in their own homes and protected in the future.

There must be two prongs to future U.S. policy in the region, Anderson maintained – ensuring that aid reaches genocide victims through successful channels, and that the aid is dependent upon Christians enjoying their rights as citizens.

Currently, the survivors are still facing genocide, albeit one of “attrition,” he said.

“Many of those who have lost everything now live as refugees who cannot find employment or housing or adequate medical care or clothing, or education for their children,” he said.

“But a genocide that some began by the sword cannot be allowed to succeed through indifference,” he continued. “The U.S. must make sure that aid reaches Christians displaced from their homes, many of who reportedly get no financial support from our government or from the United Nations.”

“The current aid channels have failed. We can no longer rely exclusively or even primarily upon government delivery systems in the region,” he said. Thus “new delivery channels and new partnerships with religious organizations” will have to be explored, he said, and genocide victims must be prioritized for receiving aid.

After the 2016 election in the U.S., the next administration will have to show a “new realism in our approach to issues of human rights in the region,” Anderson insisted, promoting rights based on the Universal Declaration of Human Rights rather than Sharia.

“When Islamic governments speak of human rights, they may be thinking of those rights as defined – or as confined – in the Sharia-based Cairo Declaration,” he said. “Realism demands that we not mislead ourselves or allow others to mislead us in this regard.”

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Catholic marriage won’t change, bishop says after Tim Kaine comments

by CNA/EWTN News • September 13, 2016

Tim Kaine. (U.S. Department of Education via Wikimedia CC 2.0)

Richmond, VA — Soon after Democratic vice-presidential candidate Tim Kaine suggested the Catholic Church would change on same-sex marriage, the Bishop of Richmond has said Catholic teaching on marriage is constant.

“More than a year after the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling on marriage, and despite recent statements from the campaign trail, the Catholic Church’s 2000-year-old teaching to the truth about what constitutes marriage remains unchanged and resolute,” Bishop Francis X. DiLorenzo of Richmond said Sept. 13.

“As Catholics, we believe all humans warrant dignity and deserve love and respect, and unjust discrimination is always wrong,” he said. “Our understanding of marriage, however, is a matter of justice and fidelity to our Creator’s original design.”

Bishop DiLorenzo’s statement does not mention Kaine. The former U.S. Senator is a parishioner at St. Elizabeth Catholic Church in the Diocese of Richmond.

“Marriage is the only institution uniting one man and one woman with each other and with any child who comes from their union,” said the bishop.

Kaine made his comments in a Sept. 10 keynote address at the national dinner for the influential LGBT advocacy group the Human Rights Campaign. He said his “full, complete, unconditional support for marriage equality” is at odds with “the current doctrine of the church that I still attend.”

“But I think that’s going to change, too,” he said.

He cited God’s declaration in the Book of Genesis that creation, including mankind, is “very good.”

He also cited Pope Francis’ “who am I to judge” comment, and then said: “I want to add: Who am I to challenge God for the beautiful diversity of the human family? I think we’re supposed to celebrate it, not challenge it.”

Bishop DiLorenzo’s statement suggested that same-sex marriage purposely deprives children of the right to be “nurtured and loved by a mother and a father.”

“We call on Catholics and all those concerned for preserving this sacred union to unite in prayer, to live and speak out with compassion and charity about the true nature of marriage – the heart of family life,” the bishop said.

Kaine has also been a staunch supporter of pro-abortion political causes. Though he says he is “personally opposed” to abortion, he received a 100 percent rating in 2016 from the Planned Parenthood Action Fund, the political arm of the United States’ largest abortion provider.

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Catholic school says it can’t meet demands of transgendered student

by CNA/EWTN News • September 14, 2016

(Dystopos via Flickr CC BY-NC 2.0)

Philadelphia, PA — A Catholic high school in New Jersey has denied a transgendered student admission after recognizing it would be unable to meet certain accommodations requested by the student and the student’s parents.

A 14-year-old originally registered as a female student, Madelyn Catrambone, was accepted to Camden Catholic High School in Cherry Hill, N.J. last February.

The school then received a request form Catrambone’s parents to change Madelyn’s registration to male, and to register the student as Mason.

After meeting with Catrambone’s parents and discussing their requested accommodations, school officials said in a statement that they decided to deny admission to the student, because the accommodations would be in violation of Catholic beliefs about gender.

Michael Walsh, director of communications for the Diocese of Camden, said in a statement that the diocese “fully supports” the school’s decision.

“Our administrators took great care to meet with the family and discuss their requests for accommodations. Adhering to its Catholic principles, the school concluded that it could not accommodate the family’s requests without compromising some of the basic tenets of our faith,” he added.

Father Joseph Capella, director of Catholic identity at the school, also said that the school is shaped by religious belief and must be run accordingly.

“Our bodies, and every aspect of our humanity, are a gift we have been asked to steward and protect. We are not the creators. We are the created,” he said, according to the Philadelphia Inquirer.

“We understand that not everyone will accept or agree with our beliefs, and some will choose another learning environment,” he added.

In the school’s statement following the incident, school officials said that their policies regarding gender identity reflect Pope Francis’ recent teachings in his encyclical, Amoris Laetitia.

“In Amoris Laetitia, Pope Francis has explained that accepting our bodies as gifts from God is vital for accepting the entire world as a gift from the Father, while ‘thinking that we enjoy absolute power over our own bodies turns, often subtly, into thinking that we enjoy absolute power over creation,’” they said.

“In addressing certain gender ideologies, Pope Francis concluded clearly that, ‘biological sex and the socio-cultural role of sex (gender) can be distinguished but not separated.’”

The school, therefore, could not meet the student’s and parent’s requested accommodations without being in violation of the faith. Catholic News Agency reached out to the Camden Diocese, which did not clarify what specific accommodations were requested.

“As a Catholic school, our principal mission is to form students in the Faith and we must always be true to the teachings of that Faith, even – indeed especially – when those teachings are challenged by the secular world,” the statement continues.

In their corresponding statement, the Diocese of Camden said that while the school strives to work closely with students and families in unique situations, as Pope Francis called for in Amoris Laetitia, in this case, the accommodations could not be made.

School officials reiterated the sentiment.

“We strive to be welcoming, respectful, and sensitive to each student’s unique needs, while always remaining true to the Church’s teachings,” they said.

“In this case, we could not do what the parents wished for their child and they chose to look for another school.”

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Catholics for Choice ‘woefully’ misrepresent Church teaching

by CNA/EWTN News • September 14, 2016

(Unsplash/Catholic News Agency)

Washington D.C. — After a dissenting Catholic group recently circulated an ad campaign promoting publicly funded abortions, bishops have fired back by reaffirming the Catholic Church’s teaching against abortion and reiterating the value of every human being.

“The recent full-page advertisement in the Star Tribune, paid for by a national group calling themselves ‘Catholics for Choice,’ woefully misrepresents the noble Catholic social justice tradition,” read a Sept. 12 statement from the Minnesota Catholic Conference.

“The ad itself makes no effort to ground its claims in any authoritative source of the Catholic faith, which is rooted in the life and teachings of Jesus Christ and is proclaimed by the Church,” the statement continued.

Catholics for Choice is a national, pro-abortion organization based in Washington, D.C. which advocates for Catholics who support abortion. Their recent advertisements have focused on promoting publicly funded abortions and have appeared in several papers across the United States, claiming that abortion is a “Catholic social justice value.”

Bishop Steven Lopes, Ordinary of the Personal Ordinariate of The Chair of St. Peter, also reacted to the ad Sept. 12.

“The biggest falsehood in these advertisements is the statement that ‘as a Catholic’ a person can respect and support a decision to kill an unborn person,” Bishop Lopes said.

“The insinuation that Catholic faith can lead a person to sanction something which is always and everywhere a moral evil is fraudulent, deceitful, and simply wrong.”

A statement from the ordinariate added that “as servants of the common good, it is imperative that Catholics work to protect the right to life of every human being, born and unborn. The Catholic Church calls each of Her members to oppose abortion, to support women and families whose circumstances may lead them to seek an abortion, and to defend the most vulnerable and defenseless members of the human family through prayer, education, public witness, and advocacy for life.”

The Minnesota bishops also found fault with the Catholics for Choice campaign, saying it is contrary to the foundation of Church teaching.

“The actual teachings of the Catholic faith embrace a consistent ethic of life from conception to natural death, and categorically condemn abortion as an act of violence against the most innocent and defenseless among us.”

The bishops also noted that the “ad fails to acknowledge this truth of our faith,” while neglecting to offer women and children real support and resources.

“If there is a desire to help a woman in need who is facing an unplanned pregnancy, the solution as a society is to provide her with the resources and support she needs to care for her child – not help her dispose of it.”

The bishops also underscored the fact that the Church’s teachings against abortion will remain unchanged, and quoted from the Catechism of the Catholic Church, which states that “since the first century, the Church has affirmed the moral evil of every procured abortion.”

They also pointed to the example of Pope Francis, who “has repeatedly condemned such a mentality as part of the throwaway culture that attacks the dignity of the weak and vulnerable because they seem inconvenient and make a claim upon our care and resources.”

The Minnesota bishops highlighted some local services, such as Abria Pregnancy Resources, TLC Options for Women, and the Philomena House, which offers support to pregnant women who are looking for help.

“In response to this misleading ad, Minnesota Catholics are encouraged to support one of the many pregnancy resource services in our state, which do incredible work to care for both mothers and children in a manner consistent with true social justice,” the bishops said.

“The Minnesota Catholic Conference asks that you help spread the word about this misleading ad campaign and the truth of Catholic teaching by forwarding to your friends, and by sharing the MCC statement on your social media accounts.”

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Archbishop Lori slams ‘reckless’ comments by civil rights chair

by Matt Hadro (CNA/EWTN News) • September 14, 2016

Archbishop William Lori. (Patrick Novecosky/Legatus)

Washington D.C. — After the chair of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights called current appeals to religious freedom “hypocrisy,” one archbishop rebuked his statement as “reckless” and ignorant.

“These statements painting those who support religious freedom with the broad brush of bigotry are reckless and reveal a profound disregard for the religious foundations of his own work,” Archbishop William Lori of Baltimore said.

Archbishop Lori chairs the U.S. bishops’ Ad Hoc Committee on Religious Liberty and made his comments Tuesday in reaction to a recent statement by the chair of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights Martin R. Castro.

The commission had released its report “Peaceful Coexistence: reconciling non-discrimination principles with religious liberties” last week. The report was in the works for three years, exploring the conflicts between anti-discrimination laws and religious exemptions from those laws.

One example of that conflict might be Christian owners of a bakery who decline to bake a cake for a same-sex wedding, despite a state’s anti-discrimination laws. Or it could be a parochial school choosing to make employment decisions based on a person’s religious beliefs and conduct.

Or, in a high-profile case, a religious order like the Little Sisters of the Poor might refuse out of conscience to have contraceptives covered in the health plans of their employees, and thus be accused of discriminating against those employees.

Regarding these conflicts, Chairman Castro, a Democrat and Obama appointee, issued a particularly strong statement against many appeals to religious freedom today.

“The phrases ‘religious liberty’ and ‘religious freedom’ will stand for nothing except hypocrisy so long as they remain code words for discrimination, intolerance, racism, sexism, homophobia, Islamophobia or any form of intolerance,” he said.

He added that “today, as in past, religion is being used as both a weapon and a shield by those seeking to deny others equality. In our nation’s past religion has been used to justify slavery and later, Jim Crow laws.”

Archbishop Lori called Castro’s comparison of today’s religious leaders with yesterday’s segregationists “shocking.”

“He makes the shocking suggestion that Catholic, evangelical, orthodox Jewish, Mormon, and Muslim communities are comparable to fringe segregationists from the civil rights era,” the archbishop said.

Faith leaders have a proud tradition of supporting the cause of civil rights in the U.S., Archbishop Lori insisted. “Can we imagine the civil rights movement without Rev. Martin Luther King, Fr. Theodore Hesburgh, and Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel?” he asked.

That tradition continues today, he added.

“Today, Catholic priests, religious and laity can be found walking the neighborhood streets of our most struggling communities in places abandoned by a ‘throwaway culture’ that has too often determined that quick profits matter more than communities,” he said.

“We are there offering education, health care, social services, and hope, working to serve as the ‘field hospital’ Pope Francis has called us to be.”

“Rest assured, if people of faith continue to be marginalized, it is the poor and vulnerable, not the Chairman and his friends, who will suffer,” Archbishop Lori maintained.

“Peaceful Coexistence,” released last week, sided with anti-discrimination protections when they are in a perceived conflict with religious freedom exemptions, and asks that religious exemptions be as narrow as possible.

“Civil rights protections ensuring nondiscrimination, as embodied in the Constitution, laws, and policies, are of preeminent importance in American jurisprudence,” the report stated.

Meanwhile, “religious exemptions to the protections of civil rights based upon classifications such as race, color, national origin, sex, disability status, sexual orientation, and gender identity, when they are permissible, significantly infringe upon these civil rights,” it added.

Furthermore, the report recommended that the Religious Freedom Restoration Act be amended, which could mean a massive shift in religious freedom jurisprudence.

The act was passed in 1993 – with a 97-3 vote in the U.S. Senate – after the Supreme Court ruled in Employment Division v. Smith that a person’s religiously motivated actions were not protected when they conflicted with existing law.

Thus, RFRA created a process to determine whether a religiously-motivated action could be exempt from federal law. The law must not “substantially burden a person’s exercise of religion” unless the government can “demonstrate” that it is “in furtherance of a compelling governmental interest” and “is the least restrictive means” of doing so.

The Supreme Court in 2014 ruled that Hobby Lobby, a closely-held for-profit corporation run by the Green family, was protected under the law.

In response last week, the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights insisted that only “individuals and religious institutions” and not businesses could be protected under the law, “and only to the extent that they do not unduly burden civil liberties and civil rights protections against status-based discrimination.”

States should follow suit with their own RFRA-type laws, the report added.

Two commissioners dissented from the majority ruling. One, Gail Heriot, said that “the Commission majority takes a complex subject and tries to make it simple – far too simple. Not many legal or constitutional issues come down to good guys vs. bad guys.”

She issued a sharp rebuke of Chairman Castro’s statement on the “hypocrisy” of religious freedom being supposedly used to discriminate against others.

“In some ways, I envy anyone who can dismiss those who disagree with him as mere hypocrites,” Heriot said of Castro.

“Does Chairman Castro really believe that the Little Sisters of the Poor, whose case is currently before the Supreme Court, are just a bunch of hypocrites? Does he believe that they are making up their concern over being compelled to finance their employees’ contraception? Does he think they really just want to save money?”

The chair also “inexplicably associates statutes like the RFRA with ‘Christian supremacy,’” she continued.

However, “RFRA protects people of all faiths. Indeed, it is the adherents to less common religions – Muslims, Buddhists, Sikhs, Hindus, and Bahá’ís – that usually derive the most protection from RFRA and RFRA-style laws. Their political clout may be otherwise too weak to influence legislation.”

Religious charities should be exempt from non-discrimination laws because they are not even discriminating, Archbishop Lori said.

“We do not seek to impose our morality on anyone, but neither can we sacrifice it in our own lives and work,” he said. “The vast majority of those who speak up for religious liberty are merely asking for the freedom to serve others as our faith asks of us. We ask that the work of our institutions be carried out by people who believe in our mission and respect a Christian witness.”

Ultimately, the future of a pluralistic society is at stake, Archbishop Lori warned.

“In a pluralistic society, there will be institutions with views at odds with popular opinion,” he said. “The Chairman’s statement suggests that the USCCR does not see the United States as a pluralistic society. We respect those who disagree with what we teach. Can they respect us?”

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Why Archbishop Chaput thinks the U.S. presidential candidates are ‘very bad news’

by CNA/EWTN News • September 15, 2016

Donald Trump and Hilary Clinton. (Addie Mena/CNA and Joseph Sohm via Shutterstock)

South Bend, IN — The 2016 presidential elections are particularly bad in the eyes of Archbishop Charles J. Chaput of Philadelphia. He says they show the failures of American society and the need for Christians to be a different people.

In the 50 years he has voted, the archbishop said, “the major parties have never, at the same time, offered two such deeply flawed presidential candidates. The 1972 Nixon/McGovern race comes close. But 2016 wins the crown.”

“Only God knows the human heart, so I presume that both major candidates for the White House this year intend well and have a reasonable level of personal decency behind their public images. But I also believe that each candidate is very bad news for our country, though in different ways,” he said at the University of Notre Dame on Thursday.

“One candidate, in the view of a lot of people, is a belligerent demagogue with an impulse control problem. And the other, also in the view of a lot of people, is a criminal liar, uniquely rich in stale ideas and bad priorities.”

In the archbishop’s view, the 2016 presidential campaigns represent a new form of politics different from ordinary corruption and other bad behavior that “doesn’t shake the foundations of the republic.”

Delivering the University of Notre Dame’s Tocqueville Lecture Sept. 15, Archbishop Chaput gave a lengthy reflection on the 2016 election, the state of American morals, and Catholic identity in a changing world.

Despite the flaws of the major party presidential candidates, he warned that Christians don’t have the “luxury of cynicism.” There are still too many honest politicians who serve the country and there are good candidates for other public offices. If Christians leave the public square, other people with worse intentions will fill it.

“The surest way to make the country suffer is to not contest them in public debate and in the voting booth,” the archbishop said.

Christian life is essentially about hope and joy, not despair.

“The choices we make and the actions we take do make a difference,” Archbishop Chaput said. “The political vocation matters because, done well, it can ennoble the society it serves.”

Although Christians’ home is the City of God, in St. Augustine’s words, they have the duty “to leave the world better than we found it,” and politics is an imperfect way to do that.

“We’ve reached a moment when our political thinking and vocabulary as a nation seem exhausted,” he said. “The real effect that we as individuals have on the government and political class that claim to represent us – the big mechanical Golem we call Washington – is so slight that it breeds indifference and anger.”

Christians’ response must be more than merely wringing hands or making a search for better candidates, policies, and public relations. Renewing a society “demands that we be different people.”

Archbishop Chaput noted the “huge spike” during his priesthood of hearing penitents confess sins of promiscuity, infidelity, sexual violence, sexual confusion, and pornography use.

“Listening to people’s sexual sins in the Sacrament of Penance is hardly new news. But the scope, the novelty, the violence and the compulsiveness of the sins are,” he said.

“The truth about our sexuality is that infidelity, promiscuity, sexual confusion and mass pornography create human wreckage,” he continued. This wreckage has been compounded by tens of millions of people over five decades, and “media nonsense” about the effects of sexual immorality and divorce.

“What you get is what we have now: a dysfunctional culture of frustrated and wounded people increasingly incapable of permanent commitments, self-sacrifice and sustained intimacy, and unwilling to face the reality of their own problems,” the archbishop lamented.

“This has political consequences. People unwilling to rule their appetites will inevitably be ruled by them – and eventually, they’ll be ruled by someone else,” he said. “People too weak to sustain faithful relationships are also too weak to be free. Sooner or later they surrender themselves to a state that compensates for their narcissism and immaturity with its own forms of social control.”

People who are unwilling to have children and raise them with love, virtue, and moral character are “writing themselves out of the human story,” he added.

Government has a role to play in easing problems like unemployment, low pay, crime, poor housing, chronic illness and bad schools, but not if government works “from a crippled idea of who man is, what marriage is, and what a family is.”

He warned against a government that “deliberately shapes its policies to interfere with and control the mediating institutions in civil society that already serve the public well.”

According to the archbishop, the decline of marriage, family, and traditional religion also have consequences for the country. Fewer than 30 percent of U.S. millennials think that it’s vital to live in a democracy, while undemocratic feelings have especially risen among the wealthy.

This didn’t happen by accident.

“We behaved ourselves into this mess by living a collection of lies,” Archbishop Chaput charged.

Given that the truth makes us free, “no issue has made us more dishonest and less free as believers and as a nation than abortion.”

“Abortion poisons everything. There can never be anything ‘progressive’ in killing an unborn child, or standing aside tolerantly while others do it.”

“In every abortion, an innocent life always dies,” the archbishop said. Trying to imply other important issues have the same moral weight is “a debasement of Christian thought.”

Archbishop Chaput also criticized Notre Dame’s granting of its Laetare Medal to Vice President Joe Biden.

“For the nation’s leading Catholic university to honor a Catholic public official who supports abortion rights and then goes on to conduct a same-sex civil marriage ceremony just weeks later, is – to put it kindly – a contradiction of Notre Dame’s identity,” he said.

“It’s a baffling error of judgment. What matters isn’t the vice president’s personal decency or the university’s admirable intentions. The problem, and it’s a serious problem, is one of public witness and the damage it causes both to the faithful and to the uninformed.”

At the same time, he hoped Notre Dame never stops examining the fundamental purpose of its mission and never tries to be merely a Catholic version of prestigious American universities.

The Church, too, is affected when families are strong or weak. Although the Church is free based on her fidelity to God, her practical liberty, credibility, and effectiveness depend on believers.

“What the Church needs now is a university that radiates the glory of God in age that no longer knows what it means to be human,” he told his audience at the University of Notre Dame.

“Life is a gift, not an accident,” he continued. “And the point of a life is to become the kind of fully human person who knows and loves God above everything else, and reflects that love to others.”

He drew on the words of French Catholic convert Leon Bloy: “In the end – the only thing that matters is to be a saint.”

“That’s the ultimate task of a place like Notre Dame,” Archbishop Chaput continued. “It’s not to help you get into a great law school, or to go to a great medical school, or to find a great job on Wall Street, as good as those things clearly are. It’s to help you get into heaven – which is not some imaginary fairyland, but an eternity of life in the presence of a loving God. If you don’t believe that, you’re in the wrong place.”

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St. Thomas More’s hats – and other relics – coming soon to D.C.

by Matt Hadro (CNA/EWTN News) • September 15, 2016

St. Thomas More. (Public domain)

Washington D.C. — Centuries-old relics and artifacts of St. Thomas More will be coming to the U.S. for the first time in an exhibit that curators hope will evangelize today’s faithful.

The exhibit “celebrates a powerful and eloquent example of Christian discipleship,” said Carl Anderson, Supreme Knight of the Knights of Columbus, which co-sponsored the exhibit.

“In an era when many people look to secular authorities for inspiration and guidance on what is right and just, Thomas More’s example underscores the necessity of living our lives according to the dictates of a well-formed conscience,” he continued.

“God’s Servant First: The Life and Legacy of Thomas More” will be open to the public at the St. John Paul II National Shrine in Washington, D.C. from Sept. 16, 2016 through March 31, 2017.

The title is taken from what are believed to be St. Thomas More’s last words before he was beheaded: “I die the King’s good servant, and God’s first.” More was the Lord High Chancellor of England under the reign of King Henry VIII from 1529-32, second only to the king in the realm. He was also regarded as one of the chief Catholic intellectuals in Europe at the time.

Henry had previously married his dead brother’s wife Catherine of Aragon with a papal dispensation, but after 16 years of marriage and no male heir, he wanted an annulment. This was denied him by Pope Clement VII, but Henry secretly married his mistress, Anne Boleyn, in 1532 and worked to have the marriage lawfully recognized by the clergy and bishops.

More resigned his office because he would not consent to Henry’s actions. When Henry later requested that More take an oath affirming his divorce and re-marriage to Ann and the legitimacy of their child together, More refused. He was imprisoned in the Tower of London and later beheaded by Henry in 1535. He is recognized by the Church as a martyr.

The exhibit tells of More’s life, witness, and his influence on major figures in the beginning of the Catholic Church in the U.S.

It took nine months to assemble, and features a display of relics, artifacts, and sacred art and objects from the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, most of which have not yet been seen in the U.S. A relic containing pieces of St. Thomas More’s jawbone and tooth will be on display for veneration.

The exhibit includes personal items of More, like two hats that he wore, copies of his works, a gold crucifix that he kept on his person, and a brick from his house.

Other items from his lifetime that are in the display include a chasuble sewn by Katherine of Aragon, a prayer scroll and a copy of the Divine Office from the period, a ring of St. John Fisher, and the skull of Cardinal John Morton, More’s patron and councilor to King Henry VII.

“These things bring us very close to the human beings at the heart of this story,” Janet Graffius, curator of collections at Stonyhurst College which supplied most of the items in the exhibit, said at the introductory press conference. The Christian Heritage Centre at Stonyhurst joined the Knights of Columbus in forming and sponsoring the exhibit.

“Thomas More’s house was the center of scholarship and also the center of his love for his family. It was a place renowned throughout Europe for being hospitable and merry,” Graffius continued, “and just the peace, the physical peace of that house allows us to perhaps feel some of the echoes of that happiness and scholarship.”

The exhibit will also spiritually connect today’s generation with More’s generation, Graffius explained. “It connects them to a time when people in the past are facing the same problems that people are facing nowadays,” she said.

At the end of the exhibit is a section on Archbishop John Carroll, the first Catholic bishop in the United States, and his cousin Charles Carroll, the only Catholic signer of the Declaration of Independence. The Carrolls both attended the Jesuit College of St. Omer in France in the 1740s, the predecessor of Stonyhurst.

“Both John and Charles Carroll were heavily influenced by the example of Thomas More during their years as students,” Patrick Kelly, executive director of the St. John Paul II shrine, noted. “At St. Omer’s, the legacy of Thomas More was greatly revered, and the students would remove their hats out of respect as his name was read aloud during their daily martyrology,” he added.

The Carrolls saw religious freedom as “foundational” to the United States, he said, and this was the patrimony they inherited from St. Thomas More.

There is a reason why the exhibit is housed at the St. John Paul II shrine in Washington, D.C., Supreme Knight Carl Anderson explained. John Paul II declared More the patron saint of politicians and statesmen in 2000, and Washington is the U.S. capital city.

“At the time, St. John Paul II also said that Thomas More demonstrated in a singular way the value of a moral conscience, which is the witness of God Himself,” Kelly explained. “A shrine dedicated to John Paul II is a fitting place for this exhibit.”

“John Paul II himself had experienced government attempts to suppress the Catholic faith in his own country of Poland,” Kelly continued. “And throughout his life, he spoke frequently and fervently of the inherent right of persons in faith communities to live their faith fully in the public square.”

Anderson also admitted that More’s witness to religious freedom is especially important today.

“When Pope Francis came to the United States last year, he indicated that religious liberty, rights was conscience was a very important component of the American tradition,” Anderson said. “So we think that this is a way of carrying forward a bit of the concern that Pope Francis had when he visited the United States.”

Kelly hoped that the exhibit will teach the faithful about More’s witness to conscience and his integrity.

More laid a “brilliant example for a new generation” about the “unity of faith and action,” Kelly said. He also had a “very well-formed conscience,” a lack of which has created a “crisis that we face today.”

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U.S. NEWS

New Catholic university launches Sacred Art master’s

by CNA/EWTN News • September 16, 2016

(St. Petersburg Theological Academy via Flickr CC BY-ND 2.0)

Denver, CO — A new Catholic university has announced the launch of their Masters of Sacred Art degree program, which is available online.

The program will include the study of theology, philosophy, architecture, film, music and art, and is available through Pontifex University, a Catholic University established in 2015 by the Solidarity Association of the Christian Faithful.

“The goal of Pontifex is to guide students along the path, the Way of Beauty, which leads to the supernatural transformation in Christ, so equipping one to serve Him,” David Clayton, provost of Pontifex, said in an announcement.

“The Masters of Sacred Art (MSA) offers the same formation that enabled the great Catholic artists of the past to create works of radiant beauty that are at once noble, elevating and accessible to the many, drawing all to God,” he said.

The two-year program is an online course, with occasional regional workshops in the United States, Italy or the Holy Land, and includes special access to the Vatican museum and the restoration workshops as well as an optional graduation Mass in the Vatican. Residential programs are available in the U.S., Italy and the Holy Land.

The program seeks to provide training and formation for artists, priests, religious, laity or “anyone looking to create beauty as a sign of hope in today’s world.”

The idea for the program has been forming for about 20 years, ever since Clayton, at the time a recent convert to Catholicism, decided to become an artist but could not find any training programs in which to pursue sacred art.

The result of his years of research on the subject culminated in both a book, “Way of Beauty,” published in 2015 by Angelico Press, and the MSA program with Pontifex, he said.

“I am thrilled now to see this being offered to the next generation …” Clayton said.

The program includes classes on Scripture, architectural design, Gregorian chant and many other subjects, taught by “expert faculty including highly respected Catholic artists,” although Pontifex also holds that the “ultimate Educator is God Himself.”

According to the announcement, Pontifex prepares students to pass the test laid down for artists by Pope Benedict XVI in his book “A New Song for the Lord”, in which he wrote: “It is precisely the test of true creativity that the artist steps out of the esoteric circle and knows how to form his or her intuition in such a way that the others — the many — may perceive what the artist has perceived.”

“Pontifex University’s MSA is the new catalyst that shows how to bring these elements together in harmony with one’s personal vocation, whatever it may be, for the glory of God and joy of mankind.”

More information about the program and registration can be found at pontifex.university

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U.S. NEWS

Portion of road renamed to honor Mother Angelica

by CNA/EWTN News • September 16, 2016

Michael Warsaw unveils the sign for Mother Angelica Way on Sept. 16, 2016. (Marisela Hasbun, EWTN)

Irondale, AL — A portion of Old Leeds Road in Irondale, Alabama, which is home to the EWTN Global Catholic Network, is being officially renamed to honor Mother Angelica, the foundress of the Catholic media network.

In a ceremony on Friday morning, EWTN Chairman and CEO Michael Warsaw, as well as Irondale Mayor Tommy Joe Alexander, officially dedicated a portion of the road, renaming it “Mother Angelica Way.”

The ceremony, which took place across the street from EWTN’s exit onto the road, was attended by local leaders and community members as well as visitors and EWTN employees. “This is a great honor to Mother Angelica,” Warsaw said.

“We want to thank Mayor Alexander, the Irondale City Council, City Clerk James D. Stewart, and Irondale Chamber of Commerce Executive Director Tellis Shoemaker for paying tribute to her in this way. EWTN has been pleased to make Irondale our home for over 35 years – and, with God’s grace, we intend to enjoy another 35 years in our city.”

EWTN’s founder, Mother Mary Angelica of the Annunciation, passed away on Easter Sunday this year at the age of 92. She founded EWTN out of a garage in Alabama in 1981, and it has since become the largest religious media network in the world. Her work touched the lives of many people across the world.

The dedication took place right before the EWTN family celebration in Birmingham, Ala. on Saturday and Sunday, a free event open to the public which will focus on the life of Mother Angelica.

“This year’s EWTN Family Celebration is our first since the death of Mother Angelica and provides us with an opportunity to celebrate and reflect on the extraordinary life of Mother and what she meant to her EWTN family and to the world,” Warsaw said in a previous statement about the event.

The event will include talks from various EWTN personalities, and serves as a chance to remember the legacy of the foundress, Warsaw said.

“We will share our memories, and answer audience questions about the nun whose faithfulness to God left a legacy of which all of us can be proud.”

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FEATURES

This couple spent their honeymoon helping Mother Teresa’s nuns

by CNA/EWTN News • September 10, 2016

Lourdes and Chema in Rome with one of their four children. (Catholic News Agency)

Rome, Italy — Among the thousands of people who came to Rome to participate in the canonization of Mother Teresa of Calcutta, were Lourdes and Chema: two Spaniards who have always been close to the saint and the Missionaries of Charity, whom they dedicated their honeymoon to help serve.

“We spent four summers helping the Missionaries of Charity. The first summer we went to a home for the mentally ill in Romania. Chema was in one house and I was in the other,” Lourdes told CNA.

“We lived their daily life with the sisters, their life of prayer and their outside work in the homes. Every Saturday for example they went to a psychiatrist to get help for the patients,” she recalled.

“The next year we went to Ethiopia to a home they have in the capital with a thousand sick and dying people where they had different sections: adults, children, women.”

“We went to participate in their spirituality and also to help those children with a childhood development program they taught us prior in Madrid” and “the truth is it was a very special summer,” the young mother of four emphasized, who was in Rome with her eldest son who is four.

“Every day we had Mass early in the morning and then each person went to their place of work, then we gave them (the children) their food until it was time for then to take their nap and then we went to lunch ourselves. Then we gave them their therapy again, played with them and we went to the exposition of the Blessed Sacrament they had every day,” Chema said.

Lourdes could not keep from smiling remembering that “it was very funny because at nine in the evening the sisters let out several watch dogs for security and we all had to be in our place.”

“Daily life was very hard, but the first year has the greatest impact on you. In Romania we helped with seriously ill adults, and in Ethiopia with the children, which was easier. We saw terrible illnesses and a lot of suffering.”

Chema noted that “the missionaries always had a smile on their faces, they never complained and they were constantly working. We never saw them idle. They were very affectionate with us.”

But perhaps what most stands out in their story is that the devoted several days of their honeymoon after getting hitched to help the Missionaries of Charity instead of continuing to travel. “We got married in 2009, that summer we were also in Ethiopia, we decided to also spend our honeymoon helping the Missionaries of Charity and we spent five days together with them of the fifteen we traveled. They were very grateful because we also brought them a very nice donation from the school where I work in Madrid.”

Chema said that “what gets a lot of people’s attention is that we spent five days of our honeymoon doing that because that’s not normal.” “We did it as an expression of gratitude and because we knew that when had children it would be really hard to go back there. We had spent several very wonderful summers such that we wanted to do it again,” Lourdes said, at which she was moved to tears.

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FEATURES

Virtual reality film lets users experience the life of Christ

by Hannah Brockhaus (CNA/EWTN News) • September 13, 2016

(Jovan vitanovski via Shutterstock)

Rome, Italy — If you have ever wondered what it would be like to have been there when Jesus preached the Sermon on the Mount, or to have stood next to the Blessed Virgin Mary at the foot of the cross, then a new feature-film length virtual reality of the life of Christ may give you the chance.

“Jesus VR – The Story of Christ,” is a 90-minute long visual and auditory experience – a lot like watching a movie – except that the viewer feels like he or she is there, including being able to look 360 degrees around and 180 degrees up and down.

The film’s tag line: “Closer than you’ve ever been.”

Mostly developed for video games so far, Virtual Reality (VR) is a relatively new computer technology which (usually) uses software-generated images and sounds to give the user the experience of feeling like he or she is actually “inside” the game.

What makes Jesus VR the first media of its kind, is that it uses interactive live-action film to portray the story of Jesus – from his birth in Bethlehem to his Ascension, stated Paul Lauer, president of Motive Entertainment, which is working on the marketing and distribution of the movie.

In a traditional movie-watching experience, the film’s editors control what part of a scene the viewer sees at any moment, but in Jesus VR, “you become the editor,” Lauer told CNA.

Motive Entertainment, which aims to connect the faith community and Hollywood, and has worked on films such as the latest adaptation of Ben-Hur (2016) and The Passion of the Christ (2004), was really excited to work on the project, Lauer said, particularly because “it wasn’t just another movie.”

Ever since The Passion was made, there has been a “Renaissance of faith-based movies,” Lauer explained. He hopes this will be a tool for evangelization, and is marketing the new media toward churches, youth groups and more.

“Jesus VR is a new medium to convey the message,” Lauer said. The message being the Gospel. According to Lauer, Jesus VR utilizes what is “cutting edge technology” to go “where the young people are.”

Demo-ed at the Venice Film Festival Aug. 31-Sept. 10, 2016, Jesus VR was filmed in Matera, Italy, a location frequently used for Biblically-themed films because of its likeness to Jerusalem.

The technology doesn’t require as much fancy equipment as one might imagine. In fact, you only really need two things, Lauer said: a smartphone and the special goggles the viewer wears. The goggles come in several different models and with different price tags, some costing more than $100.

They knew this would be cost-prohibitive for many, especially church and youth groups, which is why Motive Entertainment also developed a mass market version made out of cardboard, which can even be personalized with the name of the church.

To view Jesus VR, you pay to download it to your smartphone and then either play the audio through headphones or a speaker. There is an option to watch it all in one sitting or, if desired, to select by scene.

The project has strong credits, including director David Hansen and executive producer Enzo Sisti, a native of Rome, Italy, who was executive producer of The Passion of the Christ.

This wouldn’t be appropriate to use at a Catholic Mass, of course, Lauer noted, but for other Christian churches which do sometimes use screens at their services and during their preaching, Lauer sees Jesus VR as something that “should aid the pastor,” not replace them.

The media is very detailed, aiming to be true to how it really would have been, Lauer said. At the Sermon on the Mount for example, “there was still normal life … kids hungry and crying – real life was happening.”

In a scene which depicts Jesus telling the parable of the Good Samaritan, there are details which you’ll only see if you look around or behind you, such as some people watching nearby who end up walking away.

Because we’re so busy, it can be easy to “miss Jesus manifesting in our lives,” Lauer said. They’ve worked even these little details into the film because it “makes for great reflection, for great teaching.”

Jesus VR is scheduled to be released in time for Christmas on the main virtual reality platforms, including Google Cardboard, Samsung Gear, Oculurs Rift, Playstation VR and HTC Vive.

“What’s most exciting for me is we’re taking a message of antiquity that’s being delivered in the most modern technology,” Lauer said. “It’s a message of yesterday, today – but actually, it’s a message of today too.”

For Lauer, Jesus Virtual Reality is another way of living out St. Pope John Paul II’s call for the “New Evangelization.” As Lauer pointed out, “It can’t get more new than Virtual Reality.”

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FEATURES

The fake Catholic college girl who duped Twitter

by Mary Rezac (CNA/EWTN News) • September 14, 2016

(LOFTFLOW via Shutterstock)

Denver, CO — Catholic Twitter has been catfished.

To define some terms, Catholic Twitter is a subculture where (mostly young) and hipster-lifestyle-inclined Catholics follow each other, share ideas, and tweet about faith, life and everything in between.

For some, it can serve as a faith community in an otherwise very secular world. Strong friendships, and even relationships, forged in the Catholic Twitter forum are not uncommon.

Catfishing, then, is an internet-ism that refers to someone pretending to be someone they’re not on social media sites, such as Facebook.

Today, Catholic Twitter found out that one of their own had been catfishing.

The popular account @ThisCatholicGirl, which had amassed thousands of followers (a feat on Catholic Twitter) was outed as a fake this week in a blog post by Chase Padusniak, a graduate student in English at Princeton University who writes for Patheos and Catholic Vote.

The account, which has since been deleted, catered to “both to angsty Catholic twenty-somethings and 17-year-old girls with Disney fantasies,” easily mixed a traditional faith with slightly left-leaning politics, and featured pictures of exotic travels and the beautiful girl (supposedly) behind the account, making her a well-liked Catholic Twitter-er.

Over the course of about six months, Padusniak formed a friendship with This Catholic Girl. They chatted about “really banal” things when they were bored, and would occasionally check in with each other.

After a while, things got more serious. Occasional check-ins became daily texts and snapchats. Both students, the two started dating in March, figuring a post-school-year meet-up would soon be feasible.

Even as she put off the in-person meeting, everything about Elspeth “El” Howard - the presumed single Catholic 20-something college student behind the successful account - seemed real.

“She had pictures, a Millennial sense of humor, constant and varied activity, several social media sites, including a Facebook, a Twitter, a Tumblr, an Instagram, an Academia.edu, and a blog,” he wrote.

“El would send me snapchats of her face, videos of her voice talking to her niece and nephew, and talk to me on the phone almost every night for hours at a time. Her schedule always made sense. She’d visit the Southwest and upload pictures of New Mexico; she’d be off to San Francisco and pop up in shots near the Golden Gate Bridge. (S)he did the Camino, a major Catholic pilgrimage, and came back with picture after picture from along the Way.”

Her reasons for cancelling their meetings also seemed believable. When her grandmother died, she posted pictures asking for prayers. Then her parents separated, followed by her sister and her sister’s husband.

But eventually, the cancellations became suspicious, and a friend convinced Padusniak to ask El for a photo of herself with a piece of paper with Chase’s name on it - a standard safeguard against catfishing.

From there, things unraveled, and it became clear that she was not the young, single college-aged Catholic she had been purporting to be, but a 30-year-old married woman, with social media accounts for her real person as well Elspeth Howard. She had been hiding behind photos swiped from the internet, a program that could upload photos to Snapchat, and photoshopped pictures, to name a few things.

The reaction on Catholic Twitter was a mixture of shock, anger and disappointment - amidst a strong call to prayer and forgiveness for the real person behind the account, and advice to take the incident as a warning.

In e-mail comments to CNA, Padusniak said he wrote the piece not to shame the woman behind @ThisCatholicGirl, but he said he felt it was the right thing to do to let her followers know about her true identity.

“I felt I had a responsibility to let people know so they could heal, forgive, and pray for this person, who is clearly deeply in need of our love.”

Padusniak said he has appreciated that the reaction to his piece has been mostly heartfelt, with people offering him kind words and prayers.

Some reactions, though, have been more angry, negative or sarcastic. It’s understandable, Padusniak said, because many people were hurt by this woman’s deception, but ultimately he said that the woman behind @ThisCatholicGirl is the one who is most in need of prayers, love and forgiveness at this time.

“She hurt a lot of people and that’s horrible, but she’s not an evil person; she’s hurt, broken, stuck in darkness,” he said.

Padusniak said that while he does feel hurt about being lied to, he doesn’t otherwise feel particularly violated by the situation, because the deception of @ThisCatholicGirl was so widespread and affected not just him but many others.

Another person on Catholic Twitter, who preferred to remain anonymous, relayed to Catholic News Agency that he had had a similarly confusing and deceitful experience with El after they had formed a relationship over the social media forum.

But it could have been so much worse, Padusniak said.

“This woman didn’t try to take money from me. We’re Catholic, so it wasn’t a sexual relationship. She turned to this in pain, maybe loneliness, and we’d do best to keep that in mind. Again, she has hurt many (her husband included), but the reality is that most people know less about this than I do; they don’t understand that this person hurt others not from some deep, malicious evil, but from sadness,” he added.

When asked if he could give his past self advice to protect himself from catfishing, Padusniak said he does wish he would have video chatted with El to confirm her identity, even though he is usually averse to video chatting.

“I would certainly tell my former self to video chat at least once - it’s an easy way to check, even if you aren’t a fan of the medium,” he said.

Looking back, the only other suspicious thing about El’s online presence was that there seemed to be very few if any photos of her uploaded by other people, and very few photos of her with other people.

“At minimum, it’s a good sign that someone is real if they appear with others, especially in others’ pictures,” he said.

Several times in his comments, Padusniak reiterated that while the incident hurt him and many others, the person who is most suffering the fallout of this incident is the woman behind the facade, who largely acted out of sadness and loneliness rather than out of true malice, he said. He asked that Catholic Twitter and all who hear about her story offer @ThisCatholicGirl prayers and forgiveness.

“She’s repenting, and that’s all we can ask. Who of us has not been in need of forgiveness? The only Christian response is love and forgiveness.”

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The dark night of the soul and ‘The Dark Night’

by Sr. Joan L. Roccasalvo, C.S.J. • September 14, 2016

Search the Internet, and you’ll find literature in abundance regarding the hackneyed phrase, dark night of the soul. Last week, the phrase surfaced again with the canonization of Mother Teresa of Calcutta, founder of the Missionaries of Charity.

The Dark Night of the Soul and The Dark Night: Some Distinctions

In the lexicon of popular phrases, the dark night of the soul should be distinguished from the dark night as developed by St. John of the Cross in his treatise, The Dark Night.

Worries and annoyances that weigh us down each day are part of the human condition. No more, no less. Rarely are they considered the dark night of the soul. To accept and face hardship as part of the human condition is a sign of maturity.

It may surprise even spiritual directors to read that John does not use the phrase, the dark night of the soul, nor does it appear in his poem or treatise.

The Dark Night has a precise and rich context. Its focus lies on God’s innovating activity upon the soul destined for transformation. The soul remains in spiritual darkness, passive yet docile and responsive to the divine touch.

By contrast, the dark night of the soul focuses on the individual self and one’s particular trial — any trial — that causes sadness, agitation, turmoil, or distress in one’s life. It has a one-dimensional perspective — the self.

Moses and the Divine Darkness

In the Book of Exodus 20, Moses approaches the dark cloud where God dwells. This is a metaphor for his journey into the dark of night where it is impossible to see. Darkness is a symbol for the encounter with God who is incomprehensible. Here Moses encounters God in the darkness only to be enlightened by that very same darkness.

Put another way: Moses’ eternal progress is the movement from human light to divine darkness. The vision of Moses begins in the light. But as he becomes more perfect, he is led by God into the darkness where he is enlightened.

Thus the life of prayer and contemplation is represented paradoxically as a journey from light to darkness. It is only through this maze of darkness that the soul can reach God who is beyond all intellectual comprehension. To remain in one’s own light is to die. To walk through the darkness where God dwells is to live in the light.

St. Gregory of Nyssa (d 394), one of the Eastern Church Fathers, used Moses to exemplify and develop a symbolism of darkness. His Life of Moses is considered the crowning work of his mysticism. Gregory was followed by Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagate (d 5th-6th c) who became the major resource for the study of the divine darkness.

The Dark Night Proper

The Dark Night, the title of a poem and treatise on prayer, was written between 1578-85 by St. John of the Cross, the great Spanish Carmelite saint, mystic and poet (d 1591). It complements his treatise, The Ascent of Mt. Carmel, in which the soul learns to love God by pulling up and rooting out his or her vices. Whereas vices puff up the ego, the love of God scours the ego clean.

The Dark Night is a metaphor describing the mystical union between the soul and God in prayer. In this dark night, the soul is detached from all that is not God, undergoes privation of light but remains on the road to darkness because it will lead to the light. Thus John builds his systematic exposition of the spiritual life upon this metaphor.

The dark night comes not at the beginning of one’s journey to God. It usually happens when souls have entered the unitive way, that is, when their wills and hearts are united in perfect harmony with God’s.

History has proved that God consistently sends trial to the souls who seek perfection, but lay persons and consecrated men and women experience different dark nights suited to their different vocations. The biographies of saints as well as the masters of the spiritual life are in agreement.

In The Graces of Interior Prayer, Fr. A. Poulain, S.J. tells us who he likely ones are to receive these trials. “And as persons who are leading a purely contemplative life are not obliged to undergo the arduous labors the active life entails, God sends them interior crosses by way of compensation. And then they feel these crosses more keenly, being more thrown back upon themselves” (400).

It appears that Mother Teresa is an exception to this rule. Her life serving the poorest of the poor was not just active. It was arduous. The work day of the sisters is usually between ten and twelve hours of manual labor. Yet the Rule of the Missionaries of Charity requires them to spend at least two hours in prayer and contemplation every day in addition to other exercises — the Office, Examen, and spiritual reading. Formed and guided by the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius, these sisters are true active contemplatives.

The Dark Night and Passive Purification

The Dark Night is essentially an experience of infused contemplation. One cannot ask for it; one ought not ask for it. In The Dark Night, the purification is accomplished by God and not by the will of the individual who could never accomplish this task. John describes this metaphor: A mother weans her child away from the sweetness and consolation of being nourished at the breast, and of having her child experience its own independence away from the mother. This purification is accomplished by the mother and not by the child. Passive purification.

The dark night first affects and purifies the individual’s spiritual senses. These are: spiritual pride and avarice, spiritual lust and anger, spiritual gluttony, envy, and sloth. Persons succumb to spiritual gluttony, for example, when they seek sweetness, delight, and satisfaction in prayer, striving more to savor the sweet experiences rather than the desire to please God. Spiritual sloth delights in spiritual gratification, but when the soul is told to do something unpleasant, it remains lax.

The first and chief benefit of this dark night of contemplation is the knowledge of self and of one’s misery and lowliness but also of God’s grandeur and majesty. The second is the purification of the spiritual faculties: the intellect, the will, and the memory. John compares this experience to a fire consuming a log. In both books, the soul does little more than dispose itself for the divine action.

Here are the first two stanzas of the poem anticipating the explanation of Books One and Two:

One dark night,

Fired with love’s urgent longings

— ah, the sheer grace! —

I went out unseen,

My house being now all stilled.

In darkness, and secure,

By the secret ladder, disguised,

— ah, the sheer grace! —

In darkness and concealment,

My house being now all stilled.

Mother Teresa’s Dark Night

We can never know what activity takes place inside another person. Yet, we know that dryness, aridity, and restlessness in prayer afflicted Mother Teresa as well as doubt in the existence of God. She remained a woman of joy, faithful to her religious vocation as a missionary. Read some of her reflections, marked by darkness:

“In my soul, I feel just that terrible pain of loss of God not wanting me — of God not being God — of God not existing.”

“I find no words to express the depths of the darkness. If you only knew what darkness I am plunged into.”

”In the darkness … Lord, my God, who am I that you should forsake me? The child of your love — and now become as the most hated one. The one — you have thrown away as unwanted — unloved. I call, I cling, I want, and there is no one to answer … Where I try to raise my thoughts to heaven, there is such convicting emptiness that those very thoughts return like sharp knives and hurt my very soul. Love — the word — it brings nothing. I am told God lives in me, and yet the reality of darkness and coldness and emptiness is so great that nothing touches my soul.”

The self-offering of St. Ignatius sums up Book Two and the total offering of Mother Teresa, now St. Teresa of Calcutta:

“Take, Lord,

into your possession

my complete freedom of action:

my memory, my understanding, my entire will;

all that I have, all that I own.

It is your gift to me.

I now return it to you to be used simply as you wish.

Give me your love and your grace.

It is all I need.”

Sr. Joan L. Roccasalvo, a member of the Congregation of St. Joseph, Brentwood, NY, holds degrees in philosophy (Ph.L.), musicology (Ph.D.), theology (M.A.), and liturgical studies (Ph.D.). She has taught at all levels of Catholic education and writes with a particular focus on a theology of beauty and the sacred arts. Her e-mail address is jroccasalvo@optonline.net.

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The nativity show from the creators of the Muppets

by Mary Rezac (CNA/EWTN News) • September 15, 2016

Scene from the CBS Christmas Nativity special. (YouTube)

Denver, CO — Most people know Jim Henson as the man who brought the world the beloved comedic puppet characters known as the Muppets: Kermit the Frog, his on-again, off-again diva girlfriend Miss Piggy, Fozzie Bear, and Big Bird, to name just a few.

But most people aren’t familiar with Jim’s wife Jane, the co-creator of the Muppets – and a Catholic.

For years, Jane worked side by side with Jim, creating and performing their various shows since their teenage years. As the Muppet project grew into T.V. shows and movies - The Muppet Show, The Muppet Movie, Sesame Street – the characters became household names across America.

“People don’t know Jane Henson,” said Sean Keohane, a puppeteer who worked with Jane on her later puppet nativity show.

“Everybody knows Jim Henson, but they don’t know that he was married and there were two people back there in the beginning – it was those two for 20, 25 years.”

When the Henson family started growing in the 1970s, Jane retired from puppet - er - Muppeteering to raise the Henson’s five children.

After her children had grown and her husband died, Jane still had an unfulfilled dream – she wanted to create a puppet show that conveyed the Gospel message: “For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son.”

“Since she was a little kid, she had loved nativity scenes, the little creche figures under the Christmas tree,” said Sean Keohane, who worked with Jane as a writer, director and puppeteer for her nativity show.

“She said ok, this is the show that I want to create, this is on my bucket list, I want to do the nativity story with puppets, so she combined those things she loved,” he told CNA.

Keohane himself had loved the Muppets as a child and grew up to become a puppeteer with Disney. After he left, he started created his own puppet shows for adults, when Jane Henson and her daughter Heather attended one of his shows, about 15 years ago.

It was then that Jane started recruiting Keohane to create the nativity show with her – he was the only other puppeteering Catholic she knew who was writing puppet shows. He would write, and she would work with the Henson puppet shop to create the characters.

“Jane had said to me I don’t want the script to sound like … a New York guy from the Bronx wrote it, I want it to sound like the Bible,” he said.

She also didn’t want the characters to look like traditional Muppets, but rather like the nativity figures brought to life.

They based the play on the styles of liturgical drama performed in the Middle Ages in Europe during the Easter season, which were sometimes performed as puppet shows – though they were eventually kicked out of the Churches themselves and onto the steps or the town squares to be performed.

“That’s the tradition we’re going back to,” Keohane said. “One hundred years ago, you would go to little Italy in New York City and you’d go to a marionette theater and it was the Feast of the Assumption, and the Virgin Mary would be a marionette that would be taken up on a cloud into heaven by the puppet strings.”

(The word ‘marionette’ actually comes from this tradition, and translates as ‘little little Mary’.)

At first, Jane didn’t have grand visions for the scope of her play. She lived next to a convent in Connecticut, and she just wanted to perform the show with Keohane for the sisters, and maybe a few families.

But the show grew, and in 2009, the show had its first major debut at St. James Cathedral in Orlando, Florida, where Keohane lived. From there, they toured around churches and schools in the area – some Catholic, and some not.

A few years later, on April 2, 2013, Jane died from cancer. Shortly thereafter, her nativity show was picked up by CBS for a Christmas Eve special.

After adding more puppets and adjusting the set for television, the show made its T.V. premier live from St. Paul the Apostle Catholic Church in New York, with Regis Philbin narrating the show in between concert music.

When the show ended, the Henson Foundation approved the show for additional tours. Last Christmas, Keohane brought the show to the Cathedral of St. Andrew in Grand Rapids, Michigan, and he’s hoping to create a more extended tour for Christmases in years to come.

“I think this is an amazing opportunity – you have a Henson, someone from this very talented family who’s Catholic, who created this show about: ‘God so loved the world that he gave it his only Son,’” Keohane said.

“She said ok, I’m lucky in my life, I have these talents, my family’s had success, how do we give back and how do we use that? How do we give back to God and how do we share that story with people in a world that’s kind of messy? This is a good message to remind the world of,” he added.

Besides the beauty of the message of the Gospel in the play, the show is also worth seeing because of the artistry of Jane Henson, Keohane said.

“She was this artist who created this thing, and hardly anybody knows about it,” he said. “Everybody knows the Muppets, but hardly anybody knows that this was an important thing to her, so I’d like to get it out there for people to see.”

It’s also a show that appeals to people of all faiths, or no faith, because of its artisty, Keohane said. After almost every performance, he would have agnostic or atheist people approach him and ask how they could help with the show.

“I would have a lot of people who would tell me they were ex-Catholics or they were agnostic or atheist, and the next thing they would say is: ‘And you know what? You should have Mary sing the Magnificat. And here’s a beautiful version of it.’ And it happened every time.”

As a passion project that Jane never expected to be performed in churches, much less in cathedrals and on TV, the success of the show has been humbling and inspiring for Keohane.

“But it’s ended up in cathedrals, and that’s because people see it and they say wow, this is a beautiful piece,” Keohane said.

“It was a for Jane and the rest of us to use our talents to tell this story, and it was a great honor for her to ask me to do it. And in my career it’s one of the things I’m most proud of having worked on.”

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Are we less free than a 1950s housewife? A look at contraception

by Ann Schneible (CNA/EWTN News) • September 16, 2016

(Diepuppenstubensammlerin via Flickr CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)

Rome, Italy — What started as a means to liberate women seems to have taken an ironic twist.

The past century has witnessed the widespread normalization of artificial contraception, with its promise of empowering women and teenage girls to gain freedom over their bodies and fertility, along with a level of sexual liberation equal to that of men.

This freedom has emerged from what is seen as a longstanding culture of misogyny – exemplified by the so-called “1950s housewife” – where women were expected to marry young and dedicate their lives solely to homemaking, placing the comfort and desires of their husbands before their own interests.

Thanks to contraception, its proponents say, women no longer need to be controlled by a society ruled by the expectation to marry and have a family rather than have a career. In other words, with contraception, women can finally achieve their true potential and earn the respect they deserve.

Yet, little more a decade into the 21st century, the sexual exploitation of women and girls is at an all-time high, and the dream of woman’s liberation – as promised by contraception – seems to be falling far short of the reality.

Provocatively-clad women are regularly used in advertising campaigns to sell everything from car insurance to sandwiches. Studies reveal an alarming percentage of young teenage girls being forced or coerced into sexual activity with their boyfriends, with similar trends colloquially seen among adult women. Victims of “rape-culture” at universities are speaking out in increasing numbers about widespread sexual violations on their campuses.

Then there’s the pornography industry, which has so normalized depictions of degrading and aggressive sexual acts toward women that mainstream films and television shows are following suit for the sake of entertainment.

All of this begs the question: Did the 1950s housewife in fact have it better than women of the 21st century when it comes to sexual freedom and respect? And, could contraception be at least in part to blame for the current climate?

One expert who believes that contraception is actually damaging to woman’s freedom in society is Fiorella Nash, a Catholic novelist and researcher for the London-based pro-life group, Society for the Protection of Unborn Children (SPUC).

Instead of liberating women, a culture which readily encourages the use of contraception in fact “undermines female autonomy,” Nash told CNA in an interview last year in London.

“We’ve sort of created a situation where, in order for women to be equal to men, they have to make their bodies a little bit more like men.”

Ironically, this discrepancy between contraception’s promise of freedom and the tendency to make women more susceptible to coercion begins with their fertility. Nash cited the example of the “Pill” which is widely prescribed to treat a host of conditions, from painful periods to acne, while the core causes of these ailments are routinely neglected.

“It suggests that women can’t look after their own fertility,” Nash said. Consequently, many women are uneducated when it comes to their own bodies.

“Fertility is very essential to women’s lives, and it ought to be something that we work with, rather than (something we’re) constantly trying to manipulate,” she explained.

“There is something very patronizing to me about the fact that we circumvent knowledge by giving an artificial way out, almost as if women need a cure for being female.”

Contraception is often touted for its role in opening the doors to greater sexual freedom. However, rather than being a means of empowerment, Nash explains that contraception, in fact, makes women more vulnerable.

While it is not a new phenomena for men to be non-committal, or to abandon women they have gotten pregnant, Nash said, “the contraceptive culture has given men a license to do that.”

“Why should you stand by a woman if she gets pregnant? If she had only read the instructions on the package, she might not have gotten pregnant. And, there’s always abortion, so there’s a way out, isn’t there?”

“It’s almost allowed men to get out of their responsibilities, a lot more so than women,” she said.

Nash cited the reassurance men often give to their pregnant girlfriends – “I’ll support you whatever you decide” – which, she says, is simply the man passing on his responsibility.

“They’re really saying: ‘Actually, I can’t be bothered. I’m not going to make any kind of a comment here. I’m going to leave you to go through it. I’ll sort of make reassuring noises, before I disappear into the next adventure.’”

“The contraceptive culture has completely destroyed any respect for women,” which in turn has “left women a lot more vulnerable,” she said.

Going beyond relationships, the acceptance of contraception has wider implications in society as well, Nash suggests: for instance, its role in the breakdown of marriage, the increase of recreational sexual activity, the objectification of women – even violence.

“A book like 50 Shades of Grey would never have been produced in a culture that respects women,” she said. “The whole story behind it – if you can call it a story - is very reflective of a society that does glorify the abuse of women.”

This mentality translates into the so-called “rape-culture” at universities, Nash suggests. On the one hand, she did stress that it is important understand the context of the situation; for instance, taking into account the increased tendency to report assault cases, and a better overall understanding what constitutes a sexual offense, etc.

However: “If you create a culture where women are regarded as objects for sexual gratification, and where there’s always an assumption that that’s what girls want, the onus is always going to be on the women to explain that she’s not interested, rather than onus being on the man to ensure that the woman is consenting.”

Films, like the James Bond franchise, have contributed to the confusion with regard to boundaries and consent, Nash said: for instance, a scene which shows Bond walking into a woman’s shower and having sex with her, without her objecting.

This phenomena places “a huge burden on women,” she said, because it occurs within a culture where men “believe that they have a right to take what they want.”

“If we were really so emancipated, if women were so empowered, it really shouldn’t be happening as much.”

Along with cases of serious assault, women and girls, in turn, are often pressured into sex with their partners. Nash cited a recent study in the United States that revealed a high proportion of teenagers being forced or coerced into sex, often out of fear of losing their boyfriends, having to prove themselves, etc.

“It does raise the question about how much coercive sex, at least, is going on in society … because, they feel the need to keep hold of a boyfriend, because they feel the need to do the right thing by their husband, etc.”

In another example, Nash spoke of the UK TV personality Davina McCall, who reportedly said a wife must satisfy her husband in the bedroom “even if you’re absolutely exhausted.” If not, “he will go somewhere else.” Following the statement, many critics compared McCall to a “1950s housewife.”

“Actually,” Nash said, “that’s not a comment from the 1950s. That is the sexualized 21st century speaking.”

“There’s nothing that odd about her saying that within the context of a very sexualized society that says people have a right to sex, they have a right to sexual gratification, and therefore, frankly, women should just be expected to deliver it.”

“Is this really what emancipation was about? Is this really what the suffrage movement was fighting for a hundred years ago? How much progress have we really made?”

Although she acknowledges the extensive progress that has been made in the area of woman’s rights, Nash nonetheless holds that contraception and abortion have in many ways increased the challenges for women.

“Once you throw ‘choice’ – or, it’s really a false choice – contraception into the equation, then everything’s a woman’s fault.”

This article was originally published May 19, 2016.

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Double review: ‘Bridget Jones’s Baby’ and ‘Snowden’

by Carl Kozlowski • September 16, 2016

When Renee Zellweger burst into fame as Tom Cruise’s quirky, humble girlfriend in “Jerry McGuire” back in 1996, her impish look and shy girlish voice endeared her instantly to audiences worldwide. She managed to build a solid career quickly, even winning a Best Supporting Actress Oscar for “Cold Mountain,” but her biggest success came taking on the title role in the critically acclaimed 2001 film adaptation of the wildly popular best-selling novel, “Bridget Jones’s Diary.”

In it, she played a single woman who had given up all hope of love, but decided to improve herself over the course of a year while looking for love and recording all the results in her diary. She found herself the object of affection for two dashing men played by Colin Firth and Hugh Grant, giving hope to lovelorn people everywhere that they could still attract the perfect partner.

Its 2004 sequel, “Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason,” changed directors from the original’s Sharon McGuire and wasn’t nearly as popular – or good. The movie featured the same trio of stars, but as Bridget questioned whether she was really happy with her new relationship. And within a year or two, Zellweger started choosing a whole string of critically dismissed bombs, ultimately dropping off the film biz radar completely about five years ago.

But now both Zellweger and her most famous character, Bridget, are back with “Bridget Jones’s Baby.” It could have seemed like a pointless addition or a desperate cash grab, but instead the movie is thankfully the best and funniest in the bunch – no doubt due to the return of McGuire in the director’s chair. (This recommendation indeed comes with moral caveats I address later in the review.)

This time Bridget has to figure out which of two men - one from her past, and one new one - fathered her child. “Baby” starts out by finding Bridget alone and sad at age 43. Of course, she is comically portrayed in her sadness, and her best friend offers to take her to a wild rock music festival and encourages her to have sex with the first man she meets.

That man is Mark (Patrick Dempsey), a dashingly handsome American businessman who has invented a new phone app for dating. She falls into bed with him, then unwittingly leaves in the morning while he’s out bringing her breakfast.

She next goes to a funeral, where she runs into her old flame Mark Darcy (Colin Firth), who is sweet but stodgy and now has a wife. But when they re-meet at a party following a christening, he reveals that he’s separated from his wife and she seduces him.

Soon, Bridget is pregnant and realizes that she can’t tell who the father is since she had sex with the two men just days apart. Her doctor (Emma Thompson) advises her to tell both men about the baby, setting off a competition between the men to prove each is the better father (or rather, father-in-waiting) in the hopes of winning both her love and the child for an instant family.

“Baby” has a lot of foul language and sexual euphemisms used comedically, but Zellweger invests Jones with such sweetness that it’s hard to take as much offense with her as with almost any other character in a typical movie. That isn’t to excuse the immoral behavior, but the tone of the movie makes it easier to enjoy as Bridget goes through the life events that eventually do lead to positive, moral decisions.

The sex scenes are basically racy foreplay, stronger than in most comedies yet cutting away before going very long or graphic. The movie’s attitude towards casual sex is nonchalant initially, and the fact that she pairs up with the merely separated Darcy is questionable by any standard, Catholic or not.

One other troublesome aspect is a running gag of Bridget’s mother running for her parish council, first opposing gay rights but eventually fully embracing the issues and the people in over-the-top comedic fashion. While somewhat funny in spite of itself, these moments add nothing to the main plot and could have easily been left out.

In another scene, a lesbian couple is shown in a parenting discussion group, with the two potential fathers of Bridget’s baby mistakenly believed to be a gay couple with Bridget as a surrogate mother.

On the positive side, the movie never questions for a second that Bridget wants her unexpected pregnancy, and the pregnancy and babies are shown as being wonderful throughout to the point that it’s basically a pro-life message.

SPOILER ALERT: Also, when Bridget does figure out which of the two men she truly loves, she has a church wedding with him. END SPOILER.

Thus, this is a movie that sounds more morally questionable on paper than it actually plays onscreen. There is a place in storytelling that can show characters who are making mistakes with their lives as long as they work towards a more positive moral lifestyle, and this is one of those films – albeit just for adults.

It may seem like a cliché and an impossibility in modern times that one person can literally change the world, but Edward Snowden showed it can be done. The former CIA intelligence analyst shocked the world, and in particular the American government, in 2013 when he jetted out of the country with a massive trove of top-secret information about the National Security Agency (NSA) and its metadata collection programs that basically invaded the privacy of every American living on the grid.

Snowden was trying to flee to Ecuador, but famously got stranded in Russia when the U.S. government revoked his passport while he was amid a layover at a Russian airport. Three years later, he remains in limbo in Russia, a man without a country and a figure of international controversy and mystery.

The new movie “Snowden” reveals the whole story, or at least Snowden’s side of it, and arrives in theatres Friday as a movie that’s not only well-made and compelling, but downright important. Its depiction of just how far even our supposedly saintly government will go if watchdogs don’t stay alert is frightening, yet its portrait of a man who stood up and shook the most powerful leaders on the planet to the core is an indelibly brave one.

“Snowden” opens with Snowden (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) meeting documentary filmmaker Laura Pointras (Melissa Leo) and journalist Glenn Greenwald (Zachary Quinto) of the British newspaper The Guardian in a crowded Hong Kong mall. They quickly hide out in Snowden’s hotel room, where he starts the process of extensive video interviews revealing all he knows to the world.

The goal is to tape him quickly and get a story written by Greenwald and fellow journalist Ewan McAskill (Tom Wilkinson) in time to beat the CIA from catching them all first. The reason why they know the clock is ticking is that the Guardian’s editors had to follow legal protocols and make sure that the articles would not result in massive blowback from U.S. officials.

Once they found that the publication of the article couldn’t be stopped, the clock began ticking because it was a certainty that the CIA would be racing to capture Snowden and his cohorts as a show of force to the world. As Snowden and his team effect a complicated escape from Hong Kong for him, the movie jumps back and forth across multiple phases of his career, showing the shocking layers of knowledge he gained at each stage that led to his decision to bring the NSA’s nefarious efforts down.

Director Oliver Stone, who co-wrote the screenplay with Kieran Fitzgerald, has a long history of making movies (“Platoon,” “JFK,” “Wall Street” and “W.”) that tackle controversial political subjects and people. While he’s a multiple Oscar-winner, he has often allowed his movies to slip into bombast to make their points – yet here, he manages to keep the tone moving and humanly relatable throughout.

Snowden’s relationship with his girlfriend Lindsay Mills (Shailene Woodley) is a particularly stirring aspect of the film. A liberal Iraq war protester who had a vastly different worldview than diehard conservative Snowden, she slowly has an effect on waking him up to the idea that it was okay to question a president rather than blindly adhere to one. But the film draws great moments from the immense stress Snowden’s secretive life had on the couple.

Yet that very lesson gives the movie a fascinating kick, as the NSA programs started under George W. Bush’s administration only become worse under President Obama’s, despite his promises of vast reform and great change for the better. In fact, the movie is such a strong indictment of how badly Obama allowed the program to expand that it’s an amazing reminder of our First Amendment protections.

This fact, which makes the film seem to be conservative in nature, has no doubt impacted the general critical response it’s gotten from the nation’s critics. I know for a fact that the critics in Los Angeles are extremely liberal – it is a long story that I can share in another column. In the chatter after the critics’ screening I attended, in fact, some of them complained not about the film’s qualities but their annoyance that it presented the negative truth about Obama’s administration so directly.

This is a masterfully made film, regardless of how you view its politics.

The fact that this film was made by Oliver Stone, a man who is considered one of the strongest left-wingers in Hollywood, is a testament to just how dire our government’s abuse of power was and how brave Snowden is. Joseph Gordon-Levitt does a terrific job immersing himself into the role so fully that his entire speech patterns are fully transformed, and he manages to bring a powerful emotional undercurrent to the film even in spite of having to keep his deepest thoughts secret much of the time.

Morally, the movie does feature about 50 F words scattered across its 2 hour 20 minute running time. Most of these are bunched into specific tense situations – arguments over the policies, or a big fight between Edward and his girlfriend, and in context, they’re not nearly as offensive as when F words are paraded through raunchy comedies.

The one other element to be aware of is a fairly graphic sex scene that lasts about 30 seconds between Edward and his girlfriend, which shows a brief shot of her bare breasts from the side and her bare behind as well. While the scene could have been more implied, there is a very key aspect to it that is one of the film’s biggest and most important surprise revelations to the actual plot.

For viewers who can handle those aspects of the movie, it all adds up to a film that not only is a must for anyone who cares about the state of our nation, since this was a program that was abused by both parties. The movie’s message is clear: our nation will only remain great if we remain vigilant about those who control it.

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

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SUNDAY • SEPTEMBER 18, 2016

Twenty-fifth Sunday in Ordinary Time

First Reading (Am 8:4-7; NRSVCE)

Hear this, you that trample on the needy,

and bring to ruin the poor of the land,

saying, “When will the new moon be over

so that we may sell grain;

and the sabbath,

so that we may offer wheat for sale?

We will make the ephah small and the shekel great,

and practice deceit with false balances,

buying the poor for silver

and the needy for a pair of sandals,

and selling the sweepings of the wheat.”

The Lord has sworn by the pride of Jacob:

Surely I will never forget any of their deeds.

Second Reading (1 Tm 2:1-8; NRSVCE)

First of all, then, I urge that supplications, prayers, intercessions, and thanksgivings be made for everyone, for kings and all who are in high positions, so that we may lead a quiet and peaceable life in all godliness and dignity. This is right and is acceptable in the sight of God our Savior, who desires everyone to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth.

For there is one God;

there is also one mediator between God and humankind,

Christ Jesus, himself human,

who gave himself a ransom for all.

This was attested at the right time. For this I was appointed a herald and an apostle (I am telling the truth, I am not lying), a teacher of the Gentiles in faith and truth.

I desire, then, that in every place the men should pray, lifting up holy hands without anger or argument.

Gospel Reading (Lk 16:1-13; NRSVCE)

Jesus said to his disciples, “There was a rich man who had a manager, and charges were brought to him that this man was squandering his property. So he summoned him and said to him, ‘What is this that I hear about you? Give me an accounting of your management, because you cannot be my manager any longer.’ Then the manager said to himself, ‘What will I do, now that my master is taking the position away from me? I am not strong enough to dig, and I am ashamed to beg. I have decided what to do so that, when I am dismissed as manager, people may welcome me into their homes.’ So, summoning his master’s debtors one by one, he asked the first, ‘How much do you owe my master?’ He answered, ‘A hundred jugs of olive oil.’ He said to him, ‘Take your bill, sit down quickly, and make it fifty.’ Then he asked another, ‘And how much do you owe?’ He replied, ‘A hundred containers of wheat.’ He said to him, ‘Take your bill and make it eighty.’ And his master commended the dishonest manager because he had acted shrewdly; for the children of this age are more shrewd in dealing with their own generation than are the children of light. And I tell you, make friends for yourselves by means of dishonest wealth so that when it is gone, they may welcome you into the eternal homes.

“Whoever is faithful in a very little is faithful also in much; and whoever is dishonest in a very little is dishonest also in much. If then you have not been faithful with the dishonest wealth, who will entrust to you the true riches? And if you have not been faithful with what belongs to another, who will give you what is your own? No slave can serve two masters; for a slave will either hate the one and love the other, or be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and wealth.”

MONDAY • SEPTEMBER 19, 2016

Monday of the Twenty-fifth Week in Ordinary Time

First Reading (Prv 3:27-34; NRSVCE)

Do not withhold good from those to whom it is due,

when it is in your power to do it.

Do not say to your neighbor, “Go, and come again,

tomorrow I will give it”— when you have it with you.

Do not plan harm against your neighbor

who lives trustingly beside you.

Do not quarrel with anyone without cause,

when no harm has been done to you.

Do not envy the violent

and do not choose any of their ways;

for the perverse are an abomination to the Lord,

but the upright are in his confidence.

The Lord’s curse is on the house of the wicked,

but he blesses the abode of the righteous.

Toward the scorners he is scornful,

but to the humble he shows favor.

Gospel Reading (Lk 8:16-18; NRSVCE)

Jesus said to the crowd, “No one after lighting a lamp hides it under a jar, or puts it under a bed, but puts it on a lampstand, so that those who enter may see the light. 17 For nothing is hidden that will not be disclosed, nor is anything secret that will not become known and come to light. 18 Then pay attention to how you listen; for to those who have, more will be given; and from those who do not have, even what they seem to have will be taken away.”

TUESDAY • SEPTEMBER 20, 2016

Memorial of Saints Andrew Kim Tae-gon and Paul Chong Ha-sang

First Reading (Prv 21:1-6, 10-13; NRSVCE)

The king’s heart is a stream of water in the hand of the Lord;

he turns it wherever he will.

All deeds are right in the sight of the doer,

but the Lord weighs the heart.

To do righteousness and justice

is more acceptable to the Lord than sacrifice.

Haughty eyes and a proud heart —

the lamp of the wicked — are sin.

The plans of the diligent lead surely to abundance,

but everyone who is hasty comes only to want.

The getting of treasures by a lying tongue

is a fleeting vapor and a snare of death.

The souls of the wicked desire evil;

their neighbors find no mercy in their eyes.

When a scoffer is punished, the simple become wiser;

when the wise are instructed, they increase in knowledge.

The Righteous One observes the house of the wicked;

he casts the wicked down to ruin.

If you close your ear to the cry of the poor,

you will cry out and not be heard.

Gospel Reading (Lk 8:19-21; NRSVCE)

The mother of Jesus and his brothers came to him, but they could not reach him because of the crowd. And he was told, “Your mother and your brothers are standing outside, wanting to see you.” But he said to them, “My mother and my brothers are those who hear the word of God and do it.”

WEDNESDAY • SEPTEMBER 21, 2016

Feast of Saint Matthew

First Reading (Eph 4:1-7, 11-13; NRSVCE)

I therefore, the prisoner in the Lord, beg you to lead a life worthy of the calling to which you have been called, with all humility and gentleness, with patience, bearing with one another in love, making every effort to maintain the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace. There is one body and one Spirit, just as you were called to the one hope of your calling, one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all, who is above all and through all and in all.

But each of us was given grace according to the measure of Christ’s gift.

The gifts he gave were that some would be apostles, some prophets, some evangelists, some pastors and teachers, to equip the saints for the work of ministry, for building up the body of Christ, until all of us come to the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God, to maturity, to the measure of the full stature of Christ.

Gospel Reading (Mt 9:9-13; NRSVCE)

As Jesus was walking along, he saw a man called Matthew sitting at the tax booth; and he said to him, “Follow me.” And he got up and followed him.

And as he sat at dinner in the house, many tax collectors and sinners came and were sitting with him and his disciples. When the Pharisees saw this, they said to his disciples, “Why does your teacher eat with tax collectors and sinners?” But when he heard this, he said, “Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick. Go and learn what this means, ‘I desire mercy, not sacrifice.’ For I have come to call not the righteous but sinners.”

THURSDAY • SEPTEMBER 22, 2016

Thursday of the Twenty-fifth Week in Ordinary Time

First Reading (Eccl 1:2-11; NRSVCE)

Vanity of vanities, says the Teacher,

vanity of vanities! All is vanity.

What do people gain from all the toil

at which they toil under the sun?

A generation goes, and a generation comes,

but the earth remains forever.

The sun rises and the sun goes down,

and hurries to the place where it rises.

The wind blows to the south,

and goes around to the north;

round and round goes the wind,

and on its circuits the wind returns.

All streams run to the sea,

but the sea is not full;

to the place where the streams flow,

there they continue to flow.

All things are wearisome;

more than one can express;

the eye is not satisfied with seeing,

or the ear filled with hearing.

What has been is what will be,

and what has been done is what will be done;

there is nothing new under the sun.

Is there a thing of which it is said,

“See, this is new”?

It has already been,

in the ages before us.

The people of long ago are not remembered,

nor will there be any remembrance

of people yet to come

by those who come after them.

Gospel Reading (Lk 9:7-9; NRSVCE)

Now Herod the ruler heard about all that had taken place, and he was perplexed, because it was said by some that John had been raised from the dead, by some that Elijah had appeared, and by others that one of the ancient prophets had arisen. Herod said, “John I beheaded; but who is this about whom I hear such things?” And he tried to see him.

FRIDAY • SEPTEMBER 23, 2016

Memorial of Saint Pius of Pietrelcina

First Reading (Eccl 3:1-11; NRSVCE)

For everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven:

a time to be born, and a time to die;

a time to plant, and a time to pluck up what is planted;

a time to kill, and a time to heal;

a time to break down, and a time to build up;

a time to weep, and a time to laugh;

a time to mourn, and a time to dance;

a time to throw away stones, and a time to gather stones together;

a time to embrace, and a time to refrain from embracing;

a time to seek, and a time to lose;

a time to keep, and a time to throw away;

a time to tear, and a time to sew;

a time to keep silence, and a time to speak;

a time to love, and a time to hate;

a time for war, and a time for peace.

What gain have the workers from their toil? I have seen the business that God has given to everyone to be busy with. He has made everything suitable for its time; moreover he has put a sense of past and future into their minds, yet they cannot find out what God has done from the beginning to the end.

Gospel Reading (Lk 9:18-22; NRSVCE)

Once when Jesus was praying alone, with only the disciples near him, he asked them, “Who do the crowds say that I am?” They answered, “John the Baptist; but others, Elijah; and still others, that one of the ancient prophets has arisen.” He said to them, “But who do you say that I am?” Peter answered, “The Messiah of God.”

He sternly ordered and commanded them not to tell anyone, saying, “The Son of Man must undergo great suffering, and be rejected by the elders, chief priests, and scribes, and be killed, and on the third day be raised.”

SATURDAY • SEPTEMBER 24, 2016

Saturday of the Twenty-fifth Week in Ordinary Time

First Reading (Eccl 11:9 — 12:8; NRSVCE)

Rejoice, young man, while you are young, and let your heart cheer you in the days of your youth. Follow the inclination of your heart and the desire of your eyes, but know that for all these things God will bring you into judgment.

Banish anxiety from your mind, and put away pain from your body; for youth and the dawn of life are vanity.

Remember your creator in the days of your youth, before the days of trouble come, and the years draw near when you will say, “I have no pleasure in them”; before the sun and the light and the moon and the stars are darkened and the clouds return with the rain; in the day when the guards of the house tremble, and the strong men are bent, and the women who grind cease working because they are few, and those who look through the windows see dimly; when the doors on the street are shut, and the sound of the grinding is low, and one rises up at the sound of a bird, and all the daughters of song are brought low; when one is afraid of heights, and terrors are in the road; the almond tree blossoms, the grasshopper drags itself along and desire fails; because all must go to their eternal home, and the mourners will go about the streets; before the silver cord is snapped, and the golden bowl is broken, and the pitcher is broken at the fountain, and the wheel broken at the cistern, and the dust returns to the earth as it was, and the breath returns to God who gave it. Vanity of vanities, says the Teacher; all is vanity.

Gospel Reading (Lk 9:43b-45; NRSVCE)

While everyone was amazed at all that Jesus was doing, he said to his disciples, “Let these words sink into your ears: The Son of Man is going to be betrayed into human hands.” But they did not understand this saying; its meaning was concealed from them, so that they could not perceive it. And they were afraid to ask him about this saying.