London, England, Mar 14, 2018 / 04:07 pm (CNA/EWTN News).- Cheri Price was just 23 weeks pregnant when her daughter Hailie was prematurely born.
Hailie weighed a mere 1 pound 2 ounces on the day of her birth. Her skin had still not developed pigmentation, making her brain and veins visible through her skin.
For the first seven minutes for her life, Hailie could not breathe, but was eventually resuscitated. Days later, one of her lungs collapsed. It would be 18 days before her parents Cheri, 22, and Timothy Dillon, 32, could hold their daughter.
Hailie’s parents spent the next three months at the James Cook Hospital in Middlesbrough on England’s northeast coast.
“From birth, she was put in an incubator and we couldn’t touch her – but we could see all the veins of her brain through her red skin,” Price said, according to the Daily Record.
“We thought we would lose her at so many points,” Price continued.
Hailie’s parents eventually transferred her to a specialist hospital, where they were able to save her sight, although her retina was not properly developing.
However, Hailie defeated the odds and was brought home on June 19, only two days after her original due date, according to local media. She just celebrated her first birthday on Feb. 23 as a healthy child.
Hailie’s extraordinary case of survival could now call into question the NHS ruling on abortion before 24-weeks gestation, which was previously seen as the earliest a newborn could survive outside of the mother’s womb. Hailie was born one day before this abortion limit.
“I am so proud of her,” said Price. “What we’ve been through and what she has been through has been horrendous.”
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Turin, Italy, Apr 6, 2020 / 04:00 am (CNA).- Catholics around the world will be invited to pray virtually before the Turin Shroud on Holy Saturday as the world struggles to contain the coronavirus pandemic, Church officials have said.
The Shroud, which bears the image of a crucified man and has been venerated for centuries as Christ’s burial cloth, will be displayed via livestream at 5pm local time April 11.
Archbishop Cesare Nosiglia will preside over a liturgy from the chapel of Turin cathedral where the Shroud is kept in a climate-controlled vault. It will be broadcast live on television and social media.
The archbishop said he was responding to thousands of requests from people asking to venerate the Shroud amid a global crisis that has so far claimed nearly 70,000 lives.
“Thanks to television and social networks,” he said, “this time of contemplation will make available to everyone throughout the world the image of the sacred cloth, which reminds us of the Lord’s passion and death, but also opens our hearts to faith in His resurrection.”
He said he hoped that the ceremony would give strength to those suffering amid the pandemic.
“Yes, the love with which Jesus gave us his life and which we celebrate during Holy Week is stronger than any suffering, every illness, every contagion, every trial and discouragement,” he said. “Nothing and no one can ever separate us from this love, because it is faithful forever and unites us to him with an indissoluble bond.”
Turin is located in northwest Italy, not far from the epicenter of the coronavirus outbreak in the country, which has led to nearly 16,000 deaths and a nationwide lockdown since March 10.
Archbishop Nosiglia announced last year that the Shroud would be displayed in December 2020 when Turin hosts an annual meeting organized by the Taizé Community. This would be the fifth time that the Shroud has gone on public display since the year 2000.
The last time the Shroud was presented to the public was in 2015. Pope Francis prayed before the relic during a visit to Turin on June 21 that year. Afterwards, he described it as an icon of Christ’s love.
“The Shroud,” the pope said, “attracts people to the face and tortured body of Jesus and, at the same time, urges us on toward every person who is suffering and unjustly persecuted.”
Father David Waller will become the first bishop Ordinary of the Ordinariate. / Credit: Courtesy photo / Bishop’s Conference of England and Wales
National Catholic Register, Apr 29, 2024 / 18:45 pm (CNA).
The Vatican has announced a new leader of the ordinariate in Great Britain.
Father David Waller, 62, a parish priest and vicar general of the Ordinariate of Our Lady of Walsingham, will replace Monsignor Keith Newton, 72, who is retiring after serving over 13 years as the ordinary of the ecclesiastical structure for former Anglicans.
In a statement, Newton called the Vatican’s April 29 announcement “momentous” given that Waller, who is a celibate, will become the first bishop ordinary of the ordinariate.
As someone who was already married as an Anglican clergyman before entering the Church through the ordinariate, Newton was not allowed episcopal consecration.
Established by Pope Benedict XVI in 2011 through his 2009 apostolic constitution Anglicanorum Coetibus, the ordinariate is an ecclesiastical structure for Anglicans wishing to enter into full communion with the Catholic Church while retaining their distinctive Anglican patrimony.
With today’s announcement, the Ordinariate of Our Lady of Walsingham becomes the first of three in the world — the others being in the U.S./Canada and Australia — to have had an influence in choosing its leader.
In keeping with the Anglican emphasis on consultation and in accordance with the Anglicanorum Coetibus, members of the ordinariate’s governing council, made up of ordinariate priests, were able to choose Waller as one of three names they recommended to the Holy See.
Monsignor Keith Newton, 72, is retiring after serving over 13 years as the ordinary of the ecclesiastical structure for former Anglicans. Credit: Edward Pentin
Newton said he believed allowing this faculty, one that is usually left to the apostolic nuncio, “showed the Holy See’s confidence in the ordinariate in the U.K.”
A former Anglican vicar who served as a pastor, part-time hospital chaplain, and a member of the governing body of the Church of England, Waller was among the first Anglican clergy to be received into the Church following the establishment of the Ordinariate of Our Lady of Walsingham in 2011.
He was then ordained to the diaconate and the priesthood, has served in two parishes, and was elected chairman of the ordinariate’s governing council. For the past four years he has worked with Newton as vicar general.
In a statement, Waller said it was “both humbling and a great honor” to have been appointed ordinary. “The past 13 years have been a time of grace and blessing as small and vulnerable communities have grown in confidence, rejoicing to be a full yet distinct part of the Catholic Church,” he added.
Already well known to members of the ordinariate, he said he was looking forward to serving them in his new role, adding that experience over these past years has taught him “there is nothing to be feared in responding to the Lord and that Jesus does great things with us despite our inadequacies.”
Newton said in a statement that he was “delighted” with Waller’s appointment, adding that he has been “unwaveringly loyal” to the ordinariate and a “great support” to him as vicar general.
Waller has been “totally been involved in life of the ordinariate and understands it all, and is a good administrator,” Newton told the National Catholic Register, CNA’s sister news partner.
No coercion to step down
Newton stressed that he had chosen to retire while he is still active.
“I’ve not been forced out in any way, and nobody has told me to retire; it’s totally my own decision,” he said. “It’s a time to pass it on to new hands,” he continued, adding that he and his wife, Gill, “want to enjoy a bit of retirement together.”
Other prominent priests of the ordinariate also welcomed the news of Waller’s appointment. Father Ed Tomlinson, priest in charge of St. Anselm’s Ordinariate Parish Church in Pembury, Tunbridge Wells, told the Register he was “delighted the ordinariate will have a bishop” and that he wished “Father David the best.”
Father Benedict Kiely, an ordinariate priest of the same parish who also runs the charity Nasarean.org for persecuted Christians, said: “I will always remain grateful to Msgr. Keith for making the defense of persecuted Christians an important part of the ordinariate, and I’m sure Bishop David will continue that support.”
Newton said the date and place of Waller’s episcopal ordination have yet to be confirmed but that he expected it to take place “towards the end of June.”
This story was first published by the National Catholic Register, CNA’s sister news partner, and is reprinted here on CNA with permission.
Bishop Georg Bätzing / Photo credit: Synodaler Weg / Maximilian von Lachner
CNA Newsroom, Sep 27, 2022 / 12:33 pm (CNA).
The president of the German Bishops’ Conference, Bishop Georg Bätzing, said that the shortest definition of religion is “in… […]
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