Washington D.C., May 3, 2018 / 03:08 pm (CNA/EWTN News).- President Donald Trump on Thursday signed an executive order creating a White House Faith and Opportunity Initiative within the Executive Office of the President.
The executive order highlights… […]
Vatican City, May 3, 2018 / 01:58 pm (CNA/EWTN News).- After several German bishops appealed to the Vatican over an alleged proposal to allow non-Catholic spouses in mixed faith marriages to receive communion, the Church’s top authority on doctrine has sent the ball back, saying Pope Francis wants Germany’s bishops to come to an agreement among themselves.
Released after a 4-hour meeting between German bishops and the heads of certain curial offices, a Vatican communique said that Archbishop Luis Ladaria SJ, prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, told the bishops that the pope “appreciates the ecumenical commitment of the German bishops” and asked them “to find, in a spirit of ecumenical communion, a possibly unanimous decision.”
It is not clear whether a “possibly unanimous decision” asks the German bishops’ conference for a fully unanimous vote on the issue, or asks for a nearly unanimous decision, or whether the bishops are simply being asked to discuss the matter further to see if they can resolve the issue themselves before a central authority steps in.
The Vatican declined to comment on the meaning of the phrase.
Announced over the weekend, the May 3 meeting followed reports, later denied by the German bishops’ conference, that the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith had rejected a proposal by the conference to publish guidelines allowing the non-Catholic spouses of Catholics to receive the Eucharist in certain limited circumstances.
In February, Cardinal Reinhard Marx, president of the German bishops conference, announced that the conference would publish a pastoral handout explaining that Protestant spouses of Catholics “in individual cases” and “under certain conditions” could receive Holy Communion, provided they “affirm the Catholic faith in the Eucharist.”
Marx’s statement concerned a draft version of the guidelines, which was adopted “after intensive debate” during a Feb. 19-22 general assembly of the conference..
The Vatican’s communique noted that while more than three-quarters of the German bishops voted in favor of the guidelines, “a not indifferent number” of voters, including seven diocesan bishops, “did not feel capable, for various reasons, of giving their consent.”
The bishops, the Vatican said, then appealed to the Vatican for an answer as to whether the question of Holy Communion for Protestant spouses in interdenominational marriages can be decided at a local level by a national bishops’ conference, or if a decision from the universal Church was required in the matter.
Specifically, they wrote to the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, the Council for Promoting Christian Unity and the Council for Legislative Texts.
Signatories, who did not consult Cardinal Marx before writing the letter, included: Archbishop Ludwig Schick of Bamberg; Bishop Gregor Hanke of Eichstätt; Bishop Konrad Zdarsa of Augsburg; Bishop Stefan Oster of Passau; Bishop Rudolf Voderholzer of Regensburg; Bishop Wolfgang Ipolt of Görlitz and Cardinal Rainer Maria Woelki, archbishop of Cologne.
None of the signatories, apart from Cardinal Woelki, were present for the May 3 meeting, which was held at the Vatican and conducted in German.
Members of the German delegation also included: Cardinal Marx; Bishop Felix Genn of Munster; Bishop Karl-Heinz Wiesemann of Speyer and president of the Doctrinal Commission for the German bishops conference; Bishop Gerhard Feige of Magdeburg and president of the German bishops’ Commission for Ecumenism and Fr. Hans Langendörfer SJ, secretary of the German bishops conference.
On the Vatican side, the meeting was attended by: Archbishop Ladaria; Cardinal Kurt Koch, president of the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity; Msgr. Markus Graulich, undersecretary for the Pontifical Council for Legislative Texts and Fr. Herman Geissler, who serves as a kind of office manager for the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith.
During the meeting, several questions were discussed, centered around the relationship between faith and pastoral care.
Archbishop Ladaria will now inform Pope Francis about the discussion, which the Vatican said took place in a “cordial and fraternal atmosphere.”
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When we live in the space beyond good and evil, and when morality is construed as entirely the invention of personal freedom—then the will of […]
Vatican City, May 3, 2018 / 08:53 am (CNA/EWTN News).- In his prayer video for the month of May, Pope Francis said laypeople are on the “front lines” of the Church’s life and activities, and asked Catholics of all states and vocations to pray for the laity and their mission.
“Laypeople are on the front line of the life of the Church,” the pope said in the video, published May 3, urging the Church to be thankful for the laity “who take risks, who are not afraid and who offer reasons for hope to the poorest, to the excluded, to the marginalized.”
As Francis speaks in his native Spanish, the video shows lay people in different professional and familial states, including a doctor embracing a patient, a mother holding her child, a newlywed couple leaving a church and rescue workers bringing a boat of migrants ashore.
The video then shows scenes of families, scenes of people jumping up and down and hugging during a sports competition, people hiking and a couple working in a greenhouse.
“Let us pray together this month that the lay faithful may fulfill their specific mission, the mission that they received in Baptism, putting their creativity at the service of the challenges of today’s world,” he said, adding that “we need their testimony regarding the truth of the Gospel and their example of expressing their faith by practicing solidarity.”
An initiative of the Jesuit-run global prayer network Apostleship of Prayer, the pope’s prayer videos are filmed in collaboration with the Vatican Television Center and mark the first time the Roman Pontiff’s monthly prayer intentions have been featured on video.
The Apostleship of Prayer, which produces the monthly videos on the pope’s intentions, was founded by Jesuit seminarians in France in 1884 to encourage Christians to serve God and others through prayer, particularly for the needs of the Church.
Since the late 1800s, the organization has received a monthly, universal intention from the pope. In 1929, an additional missionary intention was added by the Holy Father, aimed at the faithful in particular.
However, as of last year, rather than including a missionary intention, Pope Francis opted to have only one prepared prayer intention – the universal intention featured in the prayer video – and will add a second intention for an urgent or immediate need should one arise.
In comments in a May 3 press release on the video, Fr. Frédéric Fornos, SJ, international director of the Pope’s Worldwide Prayer Network and the Eucharistic Youth Movement, noted that often people think priests are the only ones responsible for carrying forward the Church’s mission.
However, lay people “are the ones who are at the heart of the world, and the ones who have a key role in transforming society,” he said, adding that “it is in families, in classrooms, in offices, in factories, in the fields, in daily life, where we find the opportunity to be salt and light of God’s Kingdom, the flavor of the Gospel.”
Pope Francis himself has been a frequent critic of clericalism, saying that for many, the Church is reduced to just priests and the hierarchy, and encouraging lay Catholics to be more active in evangelizing. He has also made incorporating more space for laity within the ranks of the Curia a goal of his reform.
In an April 2016 letter to the Pontifical Commission for Latin America, Pope Francis called clericalism “one of the greatest distortions” facing the local Church on the continent.
“[We’d] do well to recall that the Church is not an elite [of] priests, of consecrated people, of bishops but all of us make up the faithful and Holy People of God,” he said, noting that everyone begins their life as a layperson.
Clericalism, he said, is the result of “a mistaken way of living out the ecclesiology proposed by the Second Vatican Council,” which “forgets that the visibility and the sacramentality of the Church belong to all the people of God and not just to an illuminated and elected few.”
He discouraged clergy from relying on trite phrases about their flock such as “it’s time for the laity.”
While well-intentioned, the phrase has little meaning when stacked against actions, he said, explaining that clergy should focus on encouraging the laity to be active, but “it is not the job of the pastor to tell the laypeople what they must do and say.”
“It is illogical and even impossible for us as pastors to believe that we have the monopoly on solutions for the numerous challenges thrown up by contemporary life.”
In an interview given to El Sembrador Nueva Evangelización – ESNE TV and Radio station the same year but published in 2017, Francis said he believes laity need to “come out of the caves.”
“Sometimes I think the best business we can do with many Christians, is to sell them mothballs so that they put them in their clothes and in their lives and aren’t eaten by moths,” he said, explaining that in order to fulfill their mission, lay Catholics “have to go out, they have to go and bring the message of Jesus” to others.
Similarly, in a speech to Bangladeshi bishops during his visit to the nation in December 2017, the pope told them to “show ever greater pastoral closeness to the lay faithful, and to “recognize and value the charisms of lay men and women, and encourage them to put their gifts at the service of the Church and of society as a whole.”
Kansas City, Mo., May 3, 2018 / 03:04 am (CNA/EWTN News).- A newly-released album by a chart-topping community of Benedictine nuns in rural Missouri is devoted to the hearts of Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, but is dedicated in a particular way to Saint Joseph’s paternity.
“St. Joseph has shown himself a father to us very poignantly in recent months, both spiritually and temporally, so this CD is our little votive to his paternal heart,” Mother Cecilia, prioress of the Benedictines of Mary, Queen of Apostles, told CNA.
The Hearts of Jesus, Mary & Joseph at Ephesus was released to coincide with the May 1 feast of St. Joseph the Worker. Funds from the sale of the album will support the construction of the expanding community’s priory church, which has $2 million remaining.
The album can be purchased from the nuns’ website at https://music.benedictinesofmary.org/ or at Amazon. Digital copies are available from iTunes.
Construction of the priory church.
Mother Cecilia reflected that “Devotion to the Pure Heart of St. Joseph seems to be burgeoning in popular piety as connected with the Two Hearts. While there have not yet been official approbations of its explicit revelations … there is nevertheless a strong case in favor of this general devotion especially in the addresses of out recent popes.”
“The heart being the symbol of love and of conformity to the Divine Will, and St. Joseph being the patron of the Universal Church, it seems an apt devotion especially in our times amidst a crisis of fatherhood.”
She added that the theme of the album was suggested by Cardinal Raymond Burke, prefect emeritus of the Apostolic Signatura, who was leading a retreat at the priory.
The cardinal “asked about a recording, to which I replied that we had thought of doing one in honor of the Sacred and Immaculate Hearts, but were torn since we had also promised one to St. Joseph,” Mother Cecilia recounted. “His Eminence turned to us and said simply, ‘You know what you should do is one to the Sacred Heart of Jesus, the Immaculate Heart of Mary, and the most Pure Heart of St. Joseph.’ The Sisters spontaneously broke into applause at the direct answer to the dilemma.”
The album includes 22 tracks, eight of which are original pieces.
One of the original compositions, “Hymn to the Three Hearts”, is by a guest composer, Lisa Nardi, who was introduced to the community’s music through her classical radio station, WQXR. The song includes lyrics written by the sisters at the priory.
“She was so taken by what she heard, that she reached out to us with a proposition to compose a piece for a future recording,” explained Mother Cecilia. “We happily took her up on her kind offer after hearing some of her other works, which were beautiful.”
The Sacred Heart of Jesus, being the oldest of the three devotions – revealed to St. Margaret Mary Alacoque in the 1670s – included on the album, has a great deal of music dedicated to it, the prioress said.
“We had a hard time narrowing down which songs to do. We included our originals, ‘For Love of Me’ and ‘The Heart of the Infant King.’ The lyrics of the former was actually a poem by St. Alphonsus, and the latter by one of our Sisters, who had just read the writings of Mother Louise Margaret de la Touche, author of The Sacred Heart and the Priesthood. We included a hymn by the great American champion of Gregorian chant, Dr. Theodore Marier, who wrote a very moving hymn to the Sacred Heart in his days at Manhattanville, and the well-known ‘Cor Dulce’ with propers of the Mass.”
Hymns to the Immaculate Heart of Mary “were a little more sparse,” she said. Among those chosen for inclusion on the album is “I Am Thine”, an original which has been sung at profession and investitures at the priory, “so it is very much beloved by our community.” The ‘Sub Tuum’ “was a challenging piece by Charpentier,” a French baroque composer. It is one of the community’s “first ventures” into music of that era, “but one we enjoyed very much.”
“We had an original, ‘The Blessed Heart,’ written 2006 in memory of a seventeen-year-old young lady who was to join us, but suffered a stroke shortly before her entrance at the age of seventeen,” Mother Cecilia added.
Mother Cecilia said the nuns “were a little dismayed by the generally narrow repertoire of Hymns to St. Joseph, especially songs that mentioned his heart, so sought to remedy the situation!”
The community has sung the “Hymn to St. Joseph” every Wednesday since 2007. And “Blessed Be St. Joseph” is an “entirely new piece,” the chorus of which was inspired by the invitatory for the feast of St. Joseph. The song’s verses “came from Fr. Olier’s prayer quoted by St. Peter Julian Eymard in his Month of St. Joseph,” Mother Cecilia explained. “Fr. Olier had a profound influence on St. Louis Marie de Montfort, and it was really a delight to set such beautiful words to new music.”
Life in the community is marked by obedience, stability, and “continually turning” towards God. They have Mass daily according to the extraordinary form, and chant the psalms eight times a day from the 1962 Monastic Office.
The nuns also support themselves by producing made-to-order vestments, as well as greeting cards.
Though the community practices limited enclosure, their music albums have brought them international renown and popularity – they have been Billboard’s Best-Selling Classical Traditional Artist several years in a row, and their albums have topped Billboard’s Top Traditional Classical Albums.
Sales of The Hearts of Jesus, Mary & Joseph at Ephesus will support construction of the priory church, which was begun in May 2017, and is due to be completed in September.
“In two short years, we have been blessed to raise $4 million dollars in funding, but we still have about $2 million left to go,” Mother Cecilia said. “We have great confidence that St. Joseph, to whom we entrusted the entire project, will see it through to the end, inspiring souls to assist us in raising this last amount.”
Washington D.C., May 2, 2018 / 07:00 pm (CNA).- A moral theologian has said that the US has an obligation to consider petitions from asylum seekers encamped along the US border with Mexico, while working to resolve the crises that triggered their claim… […]
Dolisie, Republic of the Congo, May 2, 2018 / 06:03 pm (CNA/EWTN News).- As poverty continues to grow in the Republic of the Congo, a local bishop is concerned that his priests do not have enough to eat.
The Republic of the Congo, also referred to as … […]
Hamilton, Canada, May 2, 2018 / 05:00 pm (CNA/EWTN News).- A Catholic school board in Ontario has suspended a policy prohibiting students from raising money for groups that support activities contrary to Catholic doctrine.
The Halton Catholic District… […]
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