The Church must combat euthanasia mentality, Pope says

Vatican City, Feb 17, 2017 / 04:02 pm (CNA/EWTN News).- Nur Essa, a Muslim Syrian woman whose family was brought to Rome from Lesbos by Pope Francis last April, said that the openness he has shown to those of different faiths has deeply impressed her.

“For me, I was surprised,” she told CNA. “(He is) very open to all of the cultures, all of the religions, and he sets an example for all the religious people in the world, because he uses religion to serve the human being.”

Essa, 31, has met the Pope on several occasions, most recently during the Pope’s visit Feb. 17th to Roma Tre University, a public research university in Rome where she currently studies.

She was one of four students of the university to ask the Pope a question, which he answered during his visit.

Essa’s question was about the integration of immigrants in Italy: what they must do to integrate into their host country, but also what the rights of the immigrant are.

Before this, Essa and her husband and their little boy met Pope Francis when he brought them to Rome April 16th, 2016, along with two other Syrian refugee families who had been staying in a camp on the Island of Lesbos. She said that the Pope greeted them and blessed her son.

Essa also had an opportunity to speak with him at length when they were invited to be guests at a lunch Aug. 11th at the Vatican, which Essa said was an “honor.”

“He’s very, very modest, a very simple man, a very real human being,” she said.
 
Essa has both an undergraduate degree and a master’s in microbiology, and is studying biology at Roma Tre.

She said that she and her husband are both from the city of Damascus in Syria and chose to flee the country because her husband had been asked to join the military service there.

They went from Damascus to Turkey, and then from Turkey to Greece, where they stayed in a refugee camp for one month before they were fortunate enough to be chosen as one of the families the Pope brought back to Rome.

Pope Francis visited Roma Tre University at the request of the Dean of the university, who wanted to invite a public figure for the university’s 25th anniversary.

According to Fr. John D’Orazio, who is a Catholic chaplain assigned to the university by the Diocese of Rome, the last pope to make a formal visit was St. John Paul II for the university’s 10th anniversary in 2002.

The chaplaincy just finished constructing its first Catholic chapel for students nearby to the university, something they’ve been wanting to do for a long time, Fr. D’Orazio said.

He said that although students don’t live on campus, they still try “to create opportunities for students to meet together” and to reflect on their Catholic faith and “what it means for them in their own studies and in being citizens in today’s world and in society.”

It’s a very diverse campus, he said, with students of no faith or of different religions, including Muslim students. “I think it’s very interesting and beautiful to be a chaplain inside of a state university,” he said, “because it means creating dialogue, creating collaboration.”

“It’s almost like mission work, because you’re working in a place where there are all kinds of different people, different backgrounds, different points of view. So it’s a good place to create bridges,” he said.

“Pope Francis talks a lot about creating bridges and not walls. And I think that also the chaplaincy in a state university is all about creating bridges of dialogue and collaboration.”

[…]

Vatican City, Dec 29, 2020 / 11:05 am (CNA).- Msgr. Hugh O’Flaherty, an Irish priest who hid Italian Jews from the Nazis and went on to baptize the former head of the Gestapo in Rome, is world renowned for the heroism he displayed during and after World War II.

They called him the “Scarlet Pimpernel of the Vatican.”

Many of his exploits were portrayed in the 1983 movie “The Scarlet and the Black.” But more details could soon be revealed to the public, as the Vatican archives from the pontificate of Pius XII (1939 – 1958) were opened to historians earlier this year, and mention of O’Flaherty’s work is sure to draw the interest of scholars.

Born in County Cork in 1898, O’Flaherty grew up in Killarney playing golf on the course where his father worked as a steward before discerning his vocation to the priesthood.

As a seminarian, O’Flaherty studied theology in Rome at the Urban College of the Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith, and went on to earn doctorates in both canon law and philosophy in Rome.

He was ordained to the priesthood in 1925, and became a Vatican diplomat during which time he served in posts in Haiti, Egypt, and Czechoslovakia.

During World War II, O’Flaherty lived in the German College inside Vatican City State, and worked at the Congregation of the Doctrine of Faith, then known at the Holy Office. 

The Holy See assigned O’Flaherty the task of visiting the Italian prisoner of war camps, where he brought books, cigarettes, chocolate, and hope to the English-speaking Allied prisoners, according to the Hugh O’Flaherty Memorial Society. After these visits, the priest used Vatican Radio to contact the prisoners’ relatives.

When the Nazis occupied Rome for nine months following the fall of Mussolini, O’Flaherty created what came to be known as the “Rome Escape Line”  — a network of priests, diplomats, and expatriates in Rome who helped to hide more than 6,000 escaped Allied POWs and Jews in convents, monasteries, and residences.

Secret meetings among members of the Rome Escape Line to exchange documents and information on safe houses took place inside of St. Peter’s Basilica at the foot of Michaelangelo’s Pieta or near the Altar of the Chair, according to Vatican News.

The Museum of the Liberation of Rome is today located in the building that formerly served as  the headquarters of the German SS under Kappler, near the Basilica St. John Lateran.

After the liberation in Rome in 1944, the head of the German SS Herbert Kappler was sentenced in 1948 to life imprisoned in solitary confinement in Italy. O’Flaherty went to the prison to visit Kappler, who had previously threatened to torture and kill the Irish priest, every month for ten years.

In 1959, O’Flaherty baptised Kappler and received the converted war criminal into the Catholic Church.

The Vatican honored O’Flaherty in 2016 with a plaque on the wall of the Teutonic Cemetery inside Vatican City. The cemetery sits above the former site of Nero’s circus, where early Christians were martyred in ancient Rome.

O’Flaherty’s Vatican plaque reads: “Monsignor Hugh O’Flaherty, born in Ireland 28.2.1898. Founder of the Rome Escape Line. Tireless defender of the weak and oppressed. Resident at this College 1938-1960 from where he saved over 6000 lives from the National Socialists. Died 30.10.1963. Buried in Cahersiveen, County Kerry, Ireland.”

This article was originally published on CNA March 17, 2020.

[…]

Vatican City, Mar 16, 2017 / 11:07 am (CNA/EWTN News).- With the 6th anniversary of the start of the Syrian war as backdrop this week, Pope Francis met Thursday morning with the President of Lebanon, Michel Aoun.

Their discussion centered on the large… […]