Santa Clara, Calif., Sep 2, 2018 / 04:02 pm (CNA/EWTN News).- Catholic Charities of Santa Clara has partnered with the local county to launch a shared housing program, connecting renters with housing providers amid California’s high housing costs… […]
The reform will begin when the Church again unambiguously teaches the Gospel complete. […]
Vatican City, Sep 2, 2018 / 06:28 am (CNA/EWTN News).- Catholics should listen to the scripture readings at Mass with an open heart, so that the Word of God can take root in their lives and bear good fruit, Pope Francis said Sunday.
“Let’s do an examination of conscience to see how we welcome the Word of God. On Sunday we listen to it in the Mass. If we listen to it in a distracted or superficial way, it will not help us much,” the pope said Sept. 2.
“Instead, we must welcome the Word with open mind and heart, as a good ground, so that it is assimilated and bears fruit in concrete life.”
Speaking before the Angelus, Francis reflected on when Jesus said that the Word of God is like a grain of wheat: “it is a seed that must grow in concrete works. Thus the Word itself purifies our heart and our actions and our relationship with God and with others [and it] is freed from hypocrisy.”
In the day’s Gospel, Jesus addresses authenticity of obedience to the Word of God and hypocrisy, which he said, “is one of the strongest adjectives that Jesus uses in the Gospel.”
The Gospel passage opens with the scribes and Pharisees objecting to Jesus that his disciples do not follow the ritual precepts. But Jesus replies to them, saying, “This people honors me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me; in vain do they worship me, teaching as doctrines human precepts.”
With these words, Jesus is trying to “shake” the scribes and Pharisees from the mistake of neglecting God’s commandments in favor of observing human traditions. If his reaction seems severe, it is because something important is at stake, Francis said: “The truth of the relationship between man and God.”
The pope said the Lord invites each person today to “flee the danger of giving more importance to form than to substance.”
“He calls us to recognize, again and again, what is the true center of the experience of faith, that is, the love of God and love of neighbor, purifying it from the hypocrisy of legalism and ritualism,” he said.
By telling Christians to visit orphans and widows, the Lord is saying to practice charity beginning with the neediest, with the most fragile, Francis said.
“‘Do not let yourself be contaminated by this world’ does not mean isolating oneself and closing oneself to reality,” he continued. “No. Here too it should not be an external but interior attitude, of substance: it means to be vigilant so that our way of thinking and acting is not polluted by the worldly mentality, that is, by vanity, greed, pride.”
He concluded by asking for the intercession of the Blessed Virgin Mary to help people to always honor the Lord with their heart, “bearing witness to our love for him in concrete choices for the good of our brothers and sisters.”
After reciting the Angelus, the pope noted Saturday’s beatification of Bl. Anna Kolesárová, virgin and martyr, who was killed “for resisting those who wanted to violate her dignity and her chastity.”
Comparing her to St. Maria Goretti, he said the courageous girl “helps young Christians to remain steadfast in fidelity to the Gospel, even when it requires going against the current.”
Francis also renewed his prayers for Syria and asked those in leadership in the country to use “diplomacy, dialogue and negotiations,” to safeguard human lives.
Buenos Aires, Argentina, Sep 2, 2018 / 04:22 am (ACI Prensa).- A new crisis pregnancy center in Buenos Aires will welcome women facing difficult pregnancies, offering resources, counseling, and medical support.
The “Home of the Motherly Embrace” is being opened in response to a July proposal by a group of priests who work in the poorest areas of the cities. The goal is to meet the needs of pregnant women living in shanty towns without basic utilities such as electricity or running water.
Creators of the home hope to show the Church’s committed response to defend both the mother and the unborn child. They hope to open up additional homes in the future.
The Home of the Motherly Embrace is located in the former catechetical center of the Sacred Heart of Jesus parish and in the Don Orione Neighborhood. It will be open from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Monday through Friday and will be served by volunteers, who will welcome women in crisis pregnancies as well as those who have had an abortion.
Women will be offered food, healthcare, psychological support, legal aid, and counseling during their pregnancy and their babies’ first years, up to the start of early childhood education.
The home will also seek to facilitate access to government maternity policies and programs and if needed, the process of adoption through the legal system.
The plan for the crisis pregnancy center arose amid a legislative push to legalize on-demand abortion up to 14 weeks gestation, and through the ninth month of pregnancy on the grounds of rape, if doctors deem the mother’s life or health to be endangered, or if the baby receives a diagnosis of non-viability.
Although the bill was ultimately rejected by the nation’s senate, the fierce debate surrounding it divided Argentinian society and highlighted the need to offer additional resources to women facing difficult pregnancies.
An Aug. 27 Mass was celebrated to inaugurate the Home of the Motherly Embrace. Auxiliary Bishop Gustavo Carrara of Buenos Aires presided over the Mass. The homily was given by Fr. Hernán Martin, the pastor of Sacred Heart of Jesus parish, where the women’s center is located.
Fr. Martin stressed that in times of division, “we want to bring people together” to “contribute our grain of sand, and sow a seed of hope for the love we have for God and his plan.”
This article was originally published by our sister agency, ACI Prensa. It has been translated and adapted by CNA.
Newark, N.J., Sep 1, 2018 / 08:41 pm (CNA).- Cardinal Joseph Tobin told a journalist Friday that he heard rumors shortly after his 2017 arrival in the Archdiocese of Newark about the sexual misconduct of Archbishop Theodore McCarrick. He said he did no… […]
Washington D.C., Sep 1, 2018 / 06:44 pm (CNA).- The former nuncio to the US wrote Thursday his account of Pope Francis’ 2015 meeting with Kim Davis, a county clerk who had refused out of conscience to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples.
Davis, a clerk for Rowan County, Kentucky, served five days in jail for her refusal, in the wake of Obergefell v. Hodges.
The pope met Davis at the apostolic nunciature in Washington, D.C., Sept. 24, 2015, during his visit to the US.
Davis’ lawyer told multiple media outlets of the encounter. According to the Liberty Counsel, Davis said that “Pope Francis was kind, genuinely caring, and very personable. He even asked me to pray for him. Pope Francis thanked me for my courage and told me to ‘stay strong’.”
When first asked about the meeting, then-head of the Holy See press office, Fr Federico Lombardi, said: “I don’t deny that the meeting may have taken place but I don’t have comments to add.”
Several days later, Oct. 2, 2015, Fr. Lombardi said Pope Francis met with Davis alongside several dozen others who had been invited by the nunciature to greet him as he prepared to leave Washington for New York City.
Such brief greetings “occur on all papal visits and are due to the Pope’s characteristic kindness and availability,” he said, adding that the only specific audience granted by the Pope at the nunciature “was with one of his former students and his family.”
Fr. Lombardi stated that during Pope Francis’ meeting with Davis, the Pope “did not enter into the details” of her situation, and specified that the meeting with her “should not be considered a form of support of her position in all of its particular and complex aspects.”
Fr. Thomas Rosica, an English-language assistant to Holy See Press Office, told journalists Oct. 2, 2015 that Pope Francis had not been fully briefed on Davis’ situation, or the impact such a meeting would have.
Archbishop Vigano, who was apostolic nuncio to the US at the time of Francis’ visit to the country, issued his Aug. 30 statement in response to an Aug. 28 article in the New York Times.
In that article, the clerical sex abuse victim Juan Carlos Cruz recounted that in April, Francis told him: “I did not know who the woman [Davis] was and he [Msgr. Viganò] snuck her in to say hello to me — and of course they made a whole publicity out of it. And I was horrified and I fired that Nuncio.”
In his statement, published by LifeSiteNews Aug. 31, Archbishop Vigano stated that “Faced with the Pope’s reported statement, I feel obliged to recount the events as they really unfolded.”
The former nuncio said that on Sept. 23, 2015, he spoke with Pope Francis “to bring to his attention, and possible approval, a delicate and easily achievable initiative; that is, to meet personally and in a completely confidential way, out of the media spotlight, with Kim Davis.”
He says he gave the pope a brief memo summarizing Davis’ case, and that Francis “appeared in favor of such an initiative” but wanted Archbishop Vigano to speak with Cardinal Pietro Parolin about the political implications of such a meeting.
Archbishop Vigano said he went that evening, with two of his counselors, to the hotel where the Secretary of State was staying, and he was met by two of his deputies, Archbishop Angelo Becciu and Archbishop Paul Gallagher. Cardinal Parolin had already retired for the night.
“I gave them the same memo that I had given to the Pope, setting forth its content and explaining the reason for my visit, Archbishop Vigano wrote. “After considering the case, Archbishop Becciu was immediately in favor of the Pope receiving Davis privately before he left Washington for New York.”
He said Archbishop Gallagher was more cautious, but was reassured by a canonist of the nunciature that “there were no procedural obstacles,” and he then “gave an unconditionally favorable opinion that the Pope should receive Davis.”
According to Archbishop Vigano, the following morning he told the pope of the positive opinion of the officials from the Secretariat of State. “The Pope then gave his consent, and I organized to have Davis come to the Nunciature without anyone noticing, by having her sit in a separate room,” he said.
The former nuncio wrote that he told the L’Osservatore Romano photographer not to release photos of the meeting without his superior’s permission, and that his photos are kept in the paper’s photographic archive.
That afternoon, Archbishop Vigano recounted, Pope Francis “entered as planned into the sitting room where Davis and her husband were waiting for him. He embraced her affectionately, thanked her for her courage, and invited her to persevere. Davis was very moved and started crying. She was then taken back to her hotel in a car driven by a pontifical gendarme, accompanied by an American Monsignor and staff member of the Nunciature.”
The former nuncio said he was called by Cardinal Parolin in October 2015, after the news of the meeting had broke, who told him, “You must come immediately to Rome because the Pope is furious with you.”
Archbishop Vigano wrote that he met with the pope Oct. 9, 2015 for about an hour, during which he “did not mention even once the audience with Davis”, and praised the visit to the US and his reception there.
“As soon as my audience with the Pope was over, I immediately phoned Cardinal Parolin,” Archbishop Vigano wrote, “and said to him, ‘The Pope was so good with me. Not a word of reproach, only praise for the success of his visit to the USA.’ At which point Cardinal Parolin replied, ‘It’s not possible, because with me he was furious about you.’”
Archbishop Vigano wrote that regarding Cruz’ interview with the New York Times, “either Cruz or the Pope” lied about Francis’ understanding of his visit with Davis.
“What is certain is that the Pope knew very well who Davis was, and he and his close collaborators had approved the private audience,” the former nuncio stated. “Journalists can always check, by asking the prelates Becciu, Gallagher and Parolin, as well as the Pope himself.”
“It is clear, however, that Pope Francis wanted to conceal the private audience with the first American citizen condemned and imprisoned for conscientious objection.”
The Meg is a shark movie that delivers on exactly what it promises while finding a middle ground between ridiculous and serious. […]
Denver, Colo., Sep 1, 2018 / 06:04 am (CNA/EWTN News).- When sex abuse scandals first rocked the Catholic Church in the United States in 2002, Miriel Thomas Reneau was young, and felt “truly shocked to realize that men of God could inflict such terrible wounds on victims with impunity.”
This summer, as accusations of abuse against former cardinal Theodore McCarrick surfaced, a grand jury report from Pennsylvania detailed decades of clerical abuse, and the Pope has been accused of allegedly covering up abuse, Reneau, as well as many other lay Catholics, wanted to do to something.
“I wanted to express my solidarity with the victim-survivors of these abuses and do everything within my power to urge the leaders of the Church to act as courageous fathers in enacting meaningful and visible reform,” she told CNA.
That’s why Reneau, along with a friend who wished to remain anonymous, started The Siena Project, which encourages laity to write letters to their bishops “to enact meaningful reforms in light of recent revelations of grievous abuses in the Catholic Church.”
On its website, the Siena Project includes printable letter templates that can be sent to the apostolic nuncio to the United States, to Cardinal Daniel DiNardo of Galveston-Houston, president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, and a template letter that can be sent to one’s local ordinary.
Reneau told CNA that she had already written letters to her bishop and to Cardinal DiNardo when she felt inspired to build a website that would help other Catholics do the same.
Using St. Catherine of Siena as the namesake for the project was a no-brainer for Reneau, who has a strong devotion to the Dominican tertiary, even naming a daughter after her. Furthermore, St. Catherine met and corresponded with Gregory XI so persistently that she eventually convinced him to move back to Rome after 67 years of papal exile in France.
Her example “shows us that courageous and persistent correspondence with Church leaders can be a channel of renewal during times of crisis in the Church,” Reneau said.
The project also lists in their mission statement six points which they affirm, including that clergy publicly admit the sins of the Church, that they submit to outside investigations, that seminaries and places of formation be reformed, and that the Church works to extend statute of limitations laws so as to give victims more time to find justice in court. Those who affirm the mission statement in whole are encouraged to sign it.
However, “we care much less about acquiring signatures than we do about encouraging people to write to their bishops in their own voices and from their own convictions,” Reneau said.
“I didn’t really know what to expect when I launched the website, and the response has reassured me on the most important point: I am not alone in perceiving a need for profound and visible reforms within the Church that I love so much.”
A similar letter-writing initiative was organized by a group of Catholic women, who signed an open letter to Pope Francis demanding answers to the questions and accusations raised in a letter by former U.S. nuncio Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò.
As of Friday afternoon, the letter had more than 20,000 signatures.
Kendra Tierney is another lay Catholic who felt called to do something as the news of scandals in the Church kept coming this summer.
A mom who blogs at Catholic All Year, Tierney said the response to the scandals was something that frequently came up in a Facebook group of female Catholic bloggers to which she belongs.
Together with Bonnie Engstrom, who blogs at A Knotted Life, Tierney launched a social campaign encouraging prayer and fasting, which is how #SackClothandAshes began.
The women designed shareable graphics which describe the mission of the campaign, explain the purpose of prayer and fasting, and provide prayers of reparation. The campaign is set to last 40 days – it began Aug. 22, the feast of the Queenship of Mary, and will last through the month of September.
“We are Catholic, faithful to the Magisterium and disgusted by the abuse and cover-ups that have plagued the Roman Catholic Church. We are heartsick over the 1,000+ victims of abuse in the state of Pennsylvania and all the other boys and girls, men and women who have been sexually abused by priests and further victimized by the bishops who covered up these crimes,” one graphic for the #SackClothandAshes campaign states.
Tierney said she didn’t expect as big a response to the campaign as it has received.
“The response has been really heartwarming, because it felt like here was something real and concrete and based in Catholic doctrine and tradition that we could do,” she said.
Fasting in particular is a practice that has “sort of fallen by the wayside in Catholicism recently,” Tierney said, “yet this is a tool that makes us better and makes our Church better.”
Tierney said one of the most encouraging responses to the campaign she has received is from a woman who was sexually abused by a priest as a child. While the abuse happened many years ago, and the woman has since married and left the Church, she told Tierney that “it was the first time that she felt like the Catholic Church was supporting her and all that she had gone through.”
“There’s so many intentions for this (campaign), but that has to be one of the main ones, is showing the people who have survived this kind of abuse that we are aware of them and that we want to do what we can to support them,” Tierney said.
She noted that September is an especially appropriate time for a campaign that calls for fasting and reparation, as it contains the feasts of Our Lady of Sorrows and the Exaltation of the Cross, as well as the autumn ember days – the Wednesday, Friday, and Saturday after the third Sunday in September, which were, historically, days of fast and abstinence.
The sacrifices and prayers are “a daily reminder that I haven’t given up on this, I haven’t forgotten about it, it’s…40 days that I keep it in the forefront of my mind,” she added.
Author Leah Libresco is also inviting laity to use the Sept. 14 feast of Our Lady of Sorrows as an opportunity to call their bishops about their concerns.
In her Facebook event, Libresco said she will be asking her bishop “what (he) knew about McCarrick, what he did, and what he plans to do now. I’ll also ask for him to work for the release of documents that would confirm or refute Archbishop Viganò’s testimony.”
She encourages attendees of the event to use the letter templates from The Siena Project as a guide for what to say on the call, and also to pray the sorrowful mysteries of the rosary or the Chaplet of Seven Sorrows for the bishops and their staff ahead of time.
“Let them know when you call that you’re praying for them!” she noted.
Kevin Heider is a Catholic singer-songwriter who has responded to the scandal through song.
“The Body” is the result of thoughts that Heider started having as news of sexual accusations against McCarrick came out this summer, as well the thoughts he had surrounding his wife’s pregnancy and the birth of his son.
“As we snuggled and stared and held our son close for two days in the hospital, our minds were split between the joy of this new life and the shame and sorrow wrought by recent revelations of the extent of the suffering our church has brought to so many of the men, women, and children she was supposed to shelter — not abandon,” Heider wrote in a reflection which he shared on his Facebook page.
Heider told CNA that he had been reflecting on the Church.
His song opens with a meditation on the ugliness of sin among the members of the body of Christ, the Church.
As member of the body of Christ “we have to embrace the pain caused by our members and bear it and deal with the weight of it all,” he told CNA.
Music helps Heider process, and he said he hopes his song could help others who are struggling with the scandal in the Church to do the same. He said he hoped it might have a unifying effect, and could help his listeners move from anger to sadness.
“When people allow themselves to just be sad, they’re truly united in that sadness. There’s a beauty in that, I think, in the simple acknowledgment that we’re in this together.”
In his Facebook reflection, he closed with an apology to anyone who has been hurt by members of the Church.
“To every beautiful body one of her members has ever perversely desecrated: I do not have the words to tell you how sorry I am.”
Chris Stefanick, a Catholic speaker and evangelist with Real Life Catholic, told CNA that the pain of the abuse crisis “hits very close to home,” as he has had family members endure the devastation of abuse, with effects that can last for decades.
“So any form of institutionalized cover ups infuriates me on a very personal level. I know I’m not alone in that. I think that watching this kicks up a lot of personal pain for a lot of people…even if it wasn’t a member of the clergy who abused them,” he said.
He encouraged Catholics to do four things in the face of the abuse crisis: demand transparency, pray, hope, and remain faithful.
“Don’t ever let anyone inside or outside the Church tell you not to talk. Solid accusations must be dealt with until they’re resolved. Be an annoying voice if you need to be,” he said on the need for transparency.
At the same time, Catholics should not let the crisis “rob you of your focus on Jesus.”
“I’ll never let Judas drive me away from Christ,” he said.
“In every crisis in the Church God sends saints as the solution. This is a time of profound crisis. God is calling us to be saints. To rebuild his Church.”
Vatican City, Sep 1, 2018 / 04:10 am (CNA/EWTN News).- Contemplating the grandeur of the ocean is also an opportunity to reflect on the goodness of God the Creator, Pope Francis said in a message for a day of prayer for the care of creation.
“It… […]
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