Why the devil hates Mary – especially during exorcisms

Vatican City, May 16, 2018 / 10:56 am (CNA/EWTN News).- When Marina “Nina” Vela learned that she had been selected from the community of homeless people on the streets of Denver to go on an annual pilgrimage to Rome, she did not believe the trip would actually happen.

The process was stressful, and she had some stuff to take care of. Not only did she need to get her documents in order – including a passport and finding a missing birth certificate – but she also needed to clear up some trouble with the law.

Vela, 23, is the 5th person selected to go on pilgrimage to Rome through Denver Homeless Ministries (DHM), an organization working to provide opportunities to serve the homeless as both “equals and friends.” They offer the pilgrimage as a way to encourage those who have made difficult steps to change their lives.

When fundraising started for the May 4-14 trip to Paris and Rome last fall, Vela was on probation for domestic violence. In order to go on the trip, she had to go to court to determine if she would have to serve jail time in order to waive the probation, allowing her to leave the country.

“I have a bad record,” Vela told CNA in an interview, explaining that in general, law enforcement “don’t like when you don’t do probation,” especially when the person has a history.

“If you’ve ever been in the system and you know anything about anything, they don’t like that.”

Vela was selected in autumn of 2017, just months before thet trip was scheduled; it was a gamble as to when a hearing could be scheduled and how close of a margin it would be between when she got out and and when she got on the plane.

However, when the day of her April hearing came, Vela said what happened in the courtroom was nothing short of miraculous.

Instead of sending her behind bars, the judge decided to drop the whole case against her and let her walk completely free, after hearing the testimony of Tanya Cangelosi, who has led homeless ministries for years and has organized the past five pilgrimages taking someone from the streets to Rome.

The judge, after hearing Cangelosi’s conviction that an opportunity like the pilgrimage would inspire real change, began talking about people who changed his own life. Before tossing the case, he said the people he tried to make proud set the direction of his life, and told Nina to never let Cangelosi down.

“It was unbelievable at first. I was totally blown away. I almost started crying,” Vela said, explaining that she had been prepared to go to jail, and was shocked by the judge’s decision. “They let me go. They never do that.”

In comments to CNA, Cangelosi said Vela was chosen for the pilgrimage by God’s providence. “The Lord picked her, whether you believe in him or not, he picked her 100 percent.”

“I knew on that level of the heart that she was supposed to go, so I had to do whatever it took,” she said, voicing her conviction that Nina’s life would change as a result of the pilgrimage.

Vela, she said, “didn’t need all of that garbage in her record holding onto her and pulling her down. I thought that if she got off of all this, it would free her. And it did.”

Vela was born in an apartment in Colorado and raised by her grandmother, who has Alzheimer’s. She started couchsurfing when she was a teenager, and eventually ended up on the streets, where she began experimenting with drugs and found herself in and out of jail.

Despite finding friends who valued her for who she was, Vela said she was consistently “oppressed” by men.

However, in a testimony she provided to fund-raise for the trip, Vela said she wanted to change her life and get off the streets. She said that she wanted to travel and eventually go to art school and start a family.

As an art lover, Vela told CNA that her favorite part about the trip to Rome was just walking through the streets and seeing the city.

“I think the city is so beautiful. I love how the ruins in the forum are combined with these old looking buildings. It’s nothing like the United States. And the people are so interesting. It’s a beautiful place.”

She was also a big fan of St. Peter’s Basilica and the Vatican Museums, especially the Sistine Chapel. “That church was beautiful, so beautiful,” she said, referring to St. Peter’s.

Vela and Cangelosi also had front row tickets to the May 9 general audience with Pope Francis, meaning they got to shake his hand after the event ended.

Although she is not a believer, Vela said the pope is “a really nice guy” and “really sweet.” He listened as she told him about her father, who considers himself spiritual but not religious, but who loves Pope Francis. Vela said she got a blessing and a rosary from the pope that she will give to her father.

This year the Denver Homeless Ministry pilgrimage was joined by Paul Spotts, who runs Catholic Young Adult Sports (CYAS), and 10 young adults from Colorado.

Cangelosi, who met Spotts through some of the CYAS events, said he approached her last fall saying he wanted to take a group to Rome, and that he wanted to invite a homeless person to travel with them. Cangelosi told CNA that she said yes because “I wanted Nina to experience being around people her age who are working and have graduated from college.”

“Hopefully that is something that will stick in her mind in the future,” she said, adding that having Vela with them was also “a life-changing experience” for the other young adults who came, since they had never really spent time with a homeless person before.

In her comments to CNA, Vela said that while the group dynamic was hard, she bonded with some of the people in the group, and felt respected.

Now working at a coffee roaster, and with housing lined up for the future, Vela said she doesn’t know what the future will hold, but is grateful to have had the opportunity to come to Rome.

[…]

Mexico City, Mexico, Oct 26, 2018 / 10:07 am (CNA).- Two Mexican legislators introduced this week proposals seeking to legalize abortion throughout the country.

Abortion is a crime in Mexico on the federal level, permitted only in cases of rape. In Mexico City, the country’s capital, the procedure was decriminalized in 2007, it can be performed for any reason during the first 12 weeks of a pregnancy.

The legislators are both members of Morena, the political party of the president-elect of Mexico, Andrés Manuel Lopez Obrador.

Congresswoman Lorena Villavicencio introduced a bill October 22 designed to recognize what she called “the right of self-determination of women over their body and their life.”

“We want abortion to be legal, safe, and free,” said the congresswoman.

Villavicencio said that “Mexico must stop criminalizing women who interrupt their pregnancy in the first 12 weeks, just as Mexico City has done.”

The lawmaker also stated that her bill “must not have to pass the moral or religious litmus test,” since “this is an issue of the exercise of freedoms, the decision about whether or not a woman wants to be a mother. And unfortunately, an issue of public health, because these restrictions have harvested the death of many women.”

Villavicencio introduced her bill just two days after nearly one million Mexicans turned out October 20 for demonstrations in more than 100 cities in defense of life, the family and fundamental freedoms.

The day after the her bill was introduced, the Mexican state of Sinaloa announced the final ratification on October 23 of a constitutional amendment establishing that: “Everyone has the right to have their life respected. The state protects the right to life from the moment an individual is conceived, enters under the protection of the law and is considered as born for all legal intents and purposes, until their natural death.”

López Obrador won the Mexican presidency July1 and his party, Morena, gained the majority in the Senate and the House of Representatives.  The legislators elected this year took office  September 1 whereas the president-elect will assume the office December 1

Porfirio Muñoz Ledo, who also is a member of the Morena party and president of the governing board  of the House of Representatives, proposed October 23 an amendment to Mexico’s constitution which would declare a right “to decide in a free, responsible and informed and safe manner whether to have children or not” as well as “to receive services to access the highest level of sexual and reproductive health.”

Muñoz Ledo acknowledged that a proposal directly in favor of abortion could “very easily be thrown out,” and so he was advised “to formulate it in a different way, that would mean the same thing.”

“A betrayal of the people”

For Rodrigo Iván Cortés, president of the National Front for the Family (FNF), which organized the massive October 20 demonstrations, the bills introduced by the Morena party legislators are “a very bad sign.”

Speaking to ACI Prensa, CNA’s Spanish language sister agency, “the talks held with the people on Lopez Obrador’s transition team seemed to indicate attention and sensitivity to these issues, however he apparently has not exercised his leadership” with Morena party members in the congress.

For Cortés there is “a stark contradiction, because the vast majority of those that are here (in the newly elected congress) didn’t win their elections on their own but won through the momentum generated by Lopez Obrador. And during the campaign Lopez Obrador never proposed any of these things. Neither abortion, euthanasia, marriage equality, drugs or gag laws.”

“And what we’re seeing is that those partisans  that are in the congress  are heading toward an outright betrayal of the people.”

The FNF president pointed out that “the big question is: Does Lopez Obrador want to honor his word, does he want to fulfill what he said many times during the campaign to not lie, steal from, or betray the people? Because if he fails to keep this (promise)  then we’re going to have to fear the worse for everything else.”

He warned that Lopez Obrador’s legislators  “are not attending to the people, they don’t have ears to hear the people, they don’t have the heart to attend to the real needs of the people. And what they’re bringing on is an agenda of radical ideologies which have nothing to do with the good of the Mexican population.”

“No party ought to promote murder”

Maria Lourdes Varela, the director for 40 Days for Life for Latin America stressed that “abortion goes against the population” and “no party ought to promote the murder of their children.”

“Abortion is not a human right, because there is no right to kill,” she told ACI Prensa.

Regarding the work being done by 40 Days for Life on the international level, Varela explained that “we are aware that this battle is too big” there are many economic resources and also the media, politicians, international organizations that directly promote that a woman is the enemy of her own child, and so she sees the child as a burden, and she comes to think that the solution to any of her problems would be to eliminate her own child.”

“As we recognize that our forces are limited, we are asking God to help us win this battle, that he would transform, that he would move the hearts of those women who are thinking of abortion, that they would see that the solution could be otherwise, that death never is going to put an end to any of her problems,” she said.

They also ask God to transform the hearts of the abortionists and those who promote its legalization.

Varela also encouraged everyone who can to join 40 Days for Life, “because we are all necessary.”

“It’s not a question of one or two people praying, but that the converted Catholic population would ask God’s favor so that He would reign once again and life would be respected.” she said.

This article was originally published by our sister agency, ACI Prensa. It has been translated and adapted by CNA.

[…]

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ACI Prensa Staff, May 15, 2024 / 17:34 pm (CNA).
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