Year: 2018

Washington D.C., Jan 3, 2018 / 04:30 pm (CNA/EWTN News).- The Federal Emergency Management Agency announced Tuesday that houses of worship will now be eligible to receive federal disaster relief funds, after outcry from religious leaders in the wake of Hurricane Harvey.

Previously, these FEMA funds were limited to private nonprofits that were not affiliated with a religion, such as museums, libraries, community centers, and homeless shelters.

“Effective for any major disaster declared on or after August 23, 2017, private nonprofit organizations operating a house of worship are now eligible under the FEMA Public Assistance Program,” the agency’s administrator wrote to Texas Gov. Greg Abbott Jan. 2.

Abbott and Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton announced Wednesday that FEMA had granted their request to permit houses of worship to gain access to these disaster relief funds.

Abbott and Paxton had sent President Donald Trump a letter in September arguing that houses of worship were no different than other nonprofits, and had even assisted FEMA with their recovery efforts. Yet due to past FEMA policy, these organizations were barred from funds.

Three Texas churches that were damaged during Hurricane Harvey had filed suit saying that they were being discriminated against for their religious beliefs as their requests for aid had been denied by FEMA.

Now, FEMA will permit houses of worship damaged during the hurricane to retroactively apply for aid, and any other church damaged in a storm in the future will also be eligible for these funds.

Abbott praised FEMA for changing this policy, and also thanked various religious organizations for playing a “vital role” in the area’s ongoing recovery since Harvey made landfall in late August.

“Churches and other houses of worship continue to play a vital role in the ongoing recovery effort, and their ability to receive the same assistance available to other nonprofits should never have been in doubt. I thank FEMA and the Administration for their commitment to helping Texans and the churches that have helped their communities throughout the recovery and rebuilding process,” said Abbott in a statement.

Catholic and Jewish leaders penned an opinion piece in USA Today in September encouraging legislation which would end discrimination against religious organizations in disaster aid.

Echoing Abbott’s praise was Knights of Columbus CEO Carl Anderson, who said the Knights were grateful FEMA had agreed to assist churches, and that the damage caused by these particular storms had necessitated government help.

“Having stepped into the breach to help meet the great needs of the affected communities, we welcome the significance of FEMA’s decision.The destruction due to the flooding and hurricanes is of such a magnitude that the government must help in the response.”

The Knights of Columbus raised $3.8 million for disaster assistance in the immediate aftermath of the 2017 hurricane season. In addition to relief efforts in Texas, the Knights of Columbus donated $100,000 to the Archdiocese of San Juan to assist with rebuilding efforts in Puerto Rico following Hurricane Maria.

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Denver, Colo., Jan 3, 2018 / 03:22 pm (CNA).- A Facebook-based Catholic fundraising campaign suffered “critical” delays in the key donation period between Thanksgiving and Christmas, and Facebook’s new scrutiny of ads aimed at religio… […]

Chicago, Ill., Jan 3, 2018 / 01:21 pm (CNA/EWTN News).- Speaking to some 8,000 people at a Catholic leadership conference, Bishop Robert Barron said on Tuesday that trust in the risen Christ should give us the courage to preach the truth boldly.

“Through the Holy Spirit, the ascended, risen Christ commands his mystical Body the Church to do what he did, and to say what he said. That’s it…that’s the task of the Church to the present day.”

Barron, the auxiliary bishop of Los Angeles, is also the founder of Word on Fire Catholic Ministries and host of the award-winning “Catholicism” documentary.  

He delivered one of the opening keynotes at this year’s Student Leadership Summit in Chicago. Known as SLS, the summit is hosted by the Fellowship of Catholic University Students (FOCUS) every other year. It aims to train student leaders and other ministers with tools for evangelization and missionary work, largely on college campuses.

This year’s SLS drew more than 8,000 participants, more than double the attendance of the last summit, hosted in 2016 in Dallas with approximately 3,400 participants.

In his talk, Bishop Barron focused on the Acts of the Apostles, a Biblical book that he said “sets the agenda for us” in the work of evangelization.

He noted that this book begins with an account of Jesus’ ascension, comparing Christ’s glorified position in heaven to that of a general who commands his army at a vantage point from above.

“It tells us very clearly who’s in charge, and what I mean by that is, the ascended Christ who now commands his Church.”

Moving on from the Ascension to the account of Pentecost, Barron said that the descent of the Holy Spirit compels us to spread the Word of God. The Holy Spirit comes to earth to guide the Church, he said, led by the ascended Christ from heaven.

“In a myriad ways, according to your particular missions, bring something of heaven to earth, doing as Jesus did,” the bishop exhorted attendants.

In bringing the message of heaven to earth, Catholics should be careful not to water down the Gospel or fall for bland and uninspiring half-truths, he said.

He recalled an encounter that he had with Biblical scholar Scott Hahn, who remarked that “there is no historical basis for the for the claim that St. Francis said, ‘Preach always, and when necessary, use words.’”

While indeed “our whole life should be a kind of preaching,” Barron said, the statement attributed to St. Francis can become a problem when it is “used as a justification for a kind of pastoral reductionism,” for example, the idea that “what it all really comes down to is taking care of the poor.”

While caring for the poor is important, Barron said, this work “in and of itself can never be evangelically sufficient.”

“This is not the time for anti-intellectualism in our Church! We have lots of young people, you know them, they’re your friends and colleagues, who are leaving the Church for intellectual reasons,” Barron said.

He called for a kind of “bold speech” needed to proclaim the Gospel, pointing to the preaching in the early Church, which challenged the widely held belief at the time that “Casear is Lord.”

“The bold speech of the Church is that not ‘Caesar,’ or any of his colleagues or predecessors or successors, but rather Jesus is Lord, Jesus is the king. And he is also Christos, anointed.”

The Roman empire at the time, Barron said, was rather liberal with regards to new religions, yet still rejected the early Christians because they identified Jesus – and not Caesar – as the only Lord.

“If he is Lord, everything in your life belongs to him. Your personal life, yes. Your body, yes. Your friendships, yes. Your political life, yes. Your entertainment, yes. All of it.”

When Christianity becomes reduced to a mere message that can be gained from the dominant culture, Bishop Barron said, it moves from the faith of early persecuted Christians to one which is rewarded lavishly by others.

“That’s what happens to a weakened, attenuated Christianity,” he said.

“In the Acts of the Apostles we hear that when those first disciples spoke, people were cut to the heart. Still true, still true to this day. Bland spiritual teachings, saying what everybody else says, that won’t cut anyone to the heart, but trust me, declaring the lordship of Jesus, that’ll cut them to the heart.”

Bishop Barron highlighted Jesus’ role in light of the Old Testament, saying that only as a fulfillment of laws and the prophets does Jesus make sense. He pointed to St. Stephen’s speech to the Sanhedrin before his martyrdom, in which the saint summarized the entire Old Testament and then described Jesus’ ministry.

When Jesus is cut off from his roots in Israel, he becomes just a philosopher or wise figure, a “flattened out, uninspiring Jesus,” the bishop warned.

In contrast, he said, “when you present Jesus as the fulfillment of the great story of Israel, Jesus as the fulfillment of the temple that was meant to bring humanity and divinity together, when you preach him as the fulfillment of the law and the covenant and the Torah, when you preach him as the culmination of all the proclamation of the prophets, people will be cut to the heart.”

Bishop Barron related a story he commonly tells of a little girl he met while working in Chicago who presented to him a detailed account of George Lucas’ “Star Wars” movies. He said that kids’ aptitude to memorize such complex plotlines and character names dispels the notion that they cannot understand the Bible.

“This great, rollicking, complex, rich story that we have, full of weird names, yeah, but no weirder than Obi-Wan Kenobi, right? The kids have no trouble with that. Don’t tell me they can’t understand the Bible. And therefore don’t tell me that they can’t appreciate Jesus as the culmination of that great story.”

The bishop ended his talk by encouraging conference attendees in prayer and asking them to help “remind the world whom they are to worship.”

“Everybody worships somebody or something,” he said. “Everyone’s got a king, right? Our job is to stand up boldly and say, ‘No, Christ is your king. Everything in your life belongs to him’.”

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El Paso, Texas, Jan 3, 2018 / 12:00 pm (CNA/EWTN News).- The Bishop of El Paso is urging the Trump administration to extend a temporary residency program for Salvadoran migrants for the sake of keeping families together, as a deadline looms for the Dep… […]

Manassas, Virginia, Jan 2, 2018 / 07:00 pm (CNA/EWTN News).- Three years ago, a medical office in Manassas, Virginia was one of the area’s largest abortion clinics. Today, it is a free medical clinic for the poor, dedicated to the Blessed Virgin … […]