Atlanta, Ga., Mar 26, 2019 / 12:09 am (CNA).- The Georgia Senate has approved a bill that would ban abortions after an unborn baby’s heartbeat can be detected, about six weeks into pregnancy.
The state Senate passed House Bill 481 on Friday. It … […]
The Christian Joy of Coming Together In the last months before his conversion, Saint Augustine heard the story of Gaius Victorinus, the pagan neo-Platonist philosopher who was himself converted to Christianity in his old age. […]
Chengdu, China, Mar 25, 2019 / 06:01 pm (CNA).- Wang Yi and more than 100 members of his congregation were detained in China’s Sichuan province in early December. Some were released the next day, but then put under house arrest. Wang, his wife, and nearly 10 others remain in detention, charged with inciting subversion.
Wang is pastor of Early Rain Covenant Church in Chengdu, which has now been closed. Some members of the ecclesial community are in hiding, some have been effectively exiled from the Sichuanese capital, and others are under surveillance. In all, more than 300 members of the community have been arrested, according to the church.
The building rented by Early Rain Covenant Church has new tenants, and police turn away those looking for the church.
The community posted on its Facebook page March 20 that one of its members was last seen two days earlier at a train station “being escorted by multiple plainclothes police officers. His head was shaved and he was handcuffed. We do not know where he was being taken.” The statement added that several members “have been forcefully evicted from their homes.”
Wang has been an outspoken opponent of the Chinese government’s effort to ‘Sinicize’ religion.
Religious freedom is officially guaranteed by the Chinese constitution, but religious groups must register with the government, and are overseen by the Chinese Communist Party. The Sinizication of religion has been pushed by President Xi Jinping, who took power in 2013 and who has strengthened government oversight of religious activities.
Earlier this year Early Rain Covenant Church posted a May 2017 sermon by Wang, called “When to Resist, When to Submit”.
He gave the example of the police coming to the church and offering two options: that the pastor attend religious instruction at the Religious Affairs Bureau once a month and that the list of candidates for elders and pastors be reported, or the church’s property will be confiscated and the leaders arrested.
Wang held in his sermon that “in matters involving the body, God wants us to wholly submit, to give up these things, to bear the losses. But the Lord has not given them [i.e., governments] the keys of the kingdom of heaven.”
“Over the past 2000 years of church history and Chinese church history, the church has always been faced with this struggle and this choice … what should we do? Which option should the church choose?”
“What the gospel gives us is freedom of the soul and submission of the body,” Wang stated, arguing against seemingly small compromises with the government.
“How do we demonstrate that we are a group of people who trust Jesus, who follow Jesus to the cross? How do we demonstrate that Christians are are goup of people whose souls are free? That we are no longer a people who are slaves through fear of death?” he asked. “It is through bodily submission, through bodily suffering, that we demonstrate the freedom of our souls.”
It is against the backdrop of the Sinicization of religion that the Holy See has been in negotiations with China’s government in recent years.
In September 2018 the Holy See and Beijing reached an agreement meant to normalize the situation of China’s Catholics and unify the underground Church and the Chinese Patriotic Catholic Association.
The Church in mainland China has been divided for some 60 years between the underground Church, which is persecuted and whose episcopal appointments are frequently not acknowledged by Chinese authorities, and the CPCA, a government-sanctioned organization.
The agreement has been roundly criticized by human rights groups and some Church leaders, including Cardinal Joseph Zen Ze-kiun, Bishop Emeritus of Hong Kong.
In December, two bishops of the underground Catholic Church agreed to step aside in favor of bishops of the CPCA, in the wake of the September agreement.
And the month prior, four priests from the underground Church in Hebei province who refused to join the CPCA were taken into police custody for indoctrination.
Even now, in 2019, the First Vatican Council (1869-70) haunts us still. It has, in many ways, paralyzed Catholics and kept them from thinking more radically about what is needed in this dark hour. It […]
Nairobi, Kenya, Mar 25, 2019 / 05:00 pm (CNA).- What happens when you give a Franciscan $1 million?
He gives it away.
At least that’s what Brother Peter Tabichi, OFM, plans to do with the $1 million prize he won March 23, which came alongside t… […]
London, England, Mar 25, 2019 / 01:33 pm (CNA).- The British Home Office has agreed to reconsider the asylum claim of an Iranian Christian, after it was shown on Twitter that the department had denied […]
Detroit, Mich., Mar 25, 2019 / 04:07 pm (CNA).- Maybe it was the classic sunglasses, the skinny jeans or the flocculent mustache. Maybe it was the vintage-style religious art, the men in embellished uniforms, or what looks like incense rising from the streets.
Whatever it was, a photo of a religious procession with a circa-1940’s aesthetic recently fascinated Catholics, who shared it on social media and other places around the internet.
Except the photo of a St. Joseph’s procession on the streets of Detroit wasn’t taken in 1945. It was taken last week.
“I guess what really makes it ‘epic’ in today’s terms is the steam from the city that…looks like holy incense,” said Canon Michael Stein, ICRSS, rector of St. Joseph’s Oratory in Detroit, which sponsored the procession.
“We dubbed it ‘city incense,’” he said of steam that can be seen rising up from the street in the already-iconic photo.
Canon Stein is a member of the Institute of Christ the King Sovereign Priest, a Roman Catholic society of apostolic life with an emphasis on the traditional Latin Mass. The Institute was invited to St. Joseph’s Church in Detroit in 2016 to revive what was then a struggling Church community.
(What is a “canon,” you ask? “In layman’s terms, if you take a monk on the one hand, and a diocesan priest on the other, and smoosh them together, you get a canon,” Canon Stein said.)
“When there was every material reason to shut it down (not enough funds, not enough faithful, a crumbling building), we’re very grateful that Archbishop Vigneron had a much grander vision (for the parish),” Stein told CNA.
“He created a win-win situation by unmerging St. Joseph’s (from a cluster of three parishes), making it its own parish within the archdiocese, and then inviting the Institute of Christ the King to come live here and breathe daily parish life back into it from scratch, and that’s exactly what we’ve done for the past two years,” he said.
One very visible sign of that new life in the parish is the beautiful St. Joseph’s procession, which the Institute has organized since 2017.
The appeal of the photo, and of the procession (which this year included 500 people), goes deeper than aesthetics, Stein said.
“I think it’s safe to say there’s a profound theological and spiritual reason why that photo resonates so much with our hearts,” he said.
“We are the religion of the Incarnation. God became man, the invisible God became visible, he sanctified the material world and elevated these visible, tangible signs to communicate invisible graces and to convey eternal truths.”
“This is my parish; this is what we do,” said Daniel Egan told The Detroit Catholic about the procession.
“This is a perennial St. Joseph Day tradition. St. Joseph Parish has been here for almost 150 years, so this isn’t new to this area. Maybe it fell out of practice for the last 30, 40 years, but we are showing we are Catholic, as we are called to,” he said.
“As Catholics, we’re told to live our faith in season and out of season, in the public square and in private, and that includes the city streets. If we’re not Catholic out there, we are truly failing to be authentically Christian.”
The photo of the procession includes the Knights of St. John in full uniform (a Catholic charitable organization with a very long history), as well as parish vicar Canon Adrian Sequeira, ICRSS, leading the procession in full choir habit, which is used when the order chants the Liturgy of the Hours together. The spots of blue throughout the photo symbolize the order’s total consecration to the Blessed Virgin Mary, Stein said.
St. Joseph speaks to the hearts of today as a gentle and loving man and father and worker, Stein told CNA.
Part of the homily from the feast day, he said, explained that God sends saints for the times – either holy people of the time who are witnessing to the Gospel, or saints of old who are re-presented and raised up as intercessors for the times.
“It only takes a quick glance around the world to see a fatherless society, and to see either a slothful or workaholic society, or a lack of an appropriate understanding of manliness,” Stein said.
“It’s neither brute nor effeminate, it’s faithful, it’s steadfast, it’s courageous and gentle. And we find all those things in St. Joseph, so I think that’s another part of the power of that picture.”
The procession, which traveled for less than a mile, stopped rush-hour traffic in the city, with the collaboration of Detroit police. It travelled to the Eastern Market, an iconic makers market in Detroit that has remained in the city since the 1800s, where workers can sell their wares and fathers can support their families – two things of which St. Joseph is the patron, Stein noted.
“So all the workers got to see their patron processing through the streets, whether they knew it or not,” he said.
The procession was part of numerous events celebrating St. Joseph that took place in both St. Joseph’s parish and throughout the archdiocese. In addition to the procession, St. Joseph’s parish had three Masses, an Italian dinner, and a running litany of other activities and devotions throughout the day.
Other Detroit parishes had St. Joseph’s Masses and dinners, including San Francesco Parish, which held a Mass, Italian dinner and St. Joseph’s play, and Holy Family Parish, which held an Italian-language Mass.
Beyond being a photogenic opportunity, Stein noted, the procession and all of the festivities on the feast of St. Joseph are the fruit of a lively spiritual and liturgical life.
“It shows that we’re alive,” Stein said. “These things are the fruit of a daily sacramental life, these things are the fruit of a reverent liturgy, and the fruit of a solid catechesis. They’re the fruit of our young adults being committed…Detroit as a city is coming back, and a lot of millennials are staying after college to get their first career jobs here.”
To fill the needs of an increasing number of young people, St. Joseph’s offers teenage catechesis and young adult groups, Stein said. The parish also has daily Mass and confession, a schola choir, and active volunteer groups, among other ministries. Within just two years, it’s become a hub for millennials in the Archdiocese, he noted.
“We are predominantly young,” Stein said, and young people are hungry for an incarnational faith.
“We are body and soul, all these spiritual truths are meant to be communicated through our senses. We get to see our faith, hear our faith, taste our faith, etc., and that just appeals to us so much,” he said.
“Truth needs to shine in beauty…we’re not angels, we’re not just pure intelligences, we need to see, touch, hear; and that’s something the traditional liturgy has always done. That’s something that a reverent Mass or procession can do, these visible signs that the Church has used throughout her history to excite devotion and promote devotion.”
Santiago, Chile, Mar 25, 2019 / 04:01 pm (CNA).- Cardinal Ricardo Ezzati Andrello, whose resignation as Archbishop of Santiago was accepted Saturday, said he is leaving office “very grateful” and with his “head held high” regarding the way the archdiocese dealt with cases of sexual abuse and cover-up.
Ezzati, 77, has faced accusations that he was involved in covering up the crimes of several abusive priests. His resignation was accepted March 23.
The current crisis of the Church in Chile is a consequence of the uncovering of a great number of cases of sexual abuse and the abuse of authority and conscience as well as cover-up by members of the clergy.
In that context Ezzati is facing the civil justice system, accused of allegedly covering up sexual abuse by the former chancellor of the Archdiocese of Santiago, Fr. Oscar Muñoz Toledo.
At a press conference Ezzati said that the crisis in the Church in Chile “without a doubt has been the greatest sorrow of this time.”
But he stated that “every complaint has been addressed and consequently we will have to wait for what the justice system will say about this. It’s not enough for them to say that someone has covered up, it has to be proven, and I hold my head high, confident that that will not be shown.”
He also said that the archdiocese has cooperated with the civil justice system, “has had open doors,” and “the prosecutor has requisitioned the documents he has wanted” in the different raids carried out in the context of the investigations.
Regarding the accusations against him, the cardinal explained that “all the complaints that have come to the OPADE (Pastoral Office for Complaints) have been investigated or are being investigated.”
Asked about the petition to dismiss the case requested by his defense lawyer, in the case of the former chancellor, Ezzati said that he has asked the prosecutor’s office to deliver the necessary documents but “we haven’t gotten them and we still don’t have them.”
“For now I am availing myself of my right to remain silent which Chilean legislation offers me. I will speak at the appropriate time. My lawyer knows the day and the hour to speak,” he said.
When Ezzati’s resignation was accepted, Pope Francis also appointed Bishop Celestino Aós Braco of Copiapó as apostolic administrator Santiago.
Ezzati thanked Pope Francis for his gesture, “which naturally conforms to a criterion of canon law.”
“The Holy Father Francis, with kindness, fraternity, with a great sense of closeness to the Church of Santiago, has decided to appoint an apostolic administrator. I am happy with the action of the Holy Father,” the cardinal said.
“I have profound respect and love for Bishop Aós. I believe he will carry out a very important task and I ask everyone that in this difficult time, I ask at least all Catholics that they go on and support the new apostolic administrator and the Church of Santiago with their prayers and closeness,” Cardinal Ezzati concluded.
This article was originally published by our sister agency, ACI Prensa. It has been translated and adapted by CNA.
Lansing, Mich., Mar 25, 2019 / 03:01 pm (CNA).- Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel has barred state funds from adoption agencies that won’t place children with same-sex couples, after reaching a settlement with the ACLU and same-sex couples who approached a Catholic agency and another Christian agency.
The settlement is despite a state law protecting the religious freedom and funding of adoption agencies.
“This settlement does nothing to protect the thousands of children in foster care looking for loving homes,” the Michigan Catholic Conference objected in a March 22 Facebook post. These children are “the very people our state is charged with protecting.”
It is “highly unlikely” the settlement is “the last chapter of the story,” the conference added in a March 22 Twitter post.
The settlement means the state must enforce non-discrimination provisions in contracts. Agencies may not turn away otherwise qualified LGBT individuals and must provide orientation or training, process applications, and perform a home study, the Associated Press said.
As of February, Catholic Charities and Bethany Christian Services had helped oversee 1,600 of the state’s 13,000 foster care and adoption cases, state spokesman Bob Wheaton said, the AP reports. Neither agency places children with same-sex couples.
The State of Michigan contracts with 59 private adoption and foster care agencies. Twenty are affiliated with religious organizations, though state officials were not able to say how many follow similar policies, the Detroit Free Press reports.
Lori Windham, senior counsel at the religious freedom legal group Becket, said the attorney general and the ACLU are “trying to stop the state from working with faith-based adoption agencies.”
“The result of that will be tragic. Thousands of children will be kept from finding the loving homes they deserve,” Windham said March 22. “This settlement violates the state law protecting religious adoption agencies. This harms children and families waiting for forever homes and limits access for couples who chose to partner with those agencies.”
Becket is representing the Catholic adoption agency affected by the case.
The ACLU filed the lawsuit in 2017 on behalf of two same-sex couples and a woman who was in foster care in her teens after the previous attorney general, Bill Schuette, declined to speak to the legal group.
The couples had approached St. Vincent Catholic Charities and Bethany Christian Services to adopt children referred to the agencies through the Michigan Department of Health and Human Services.
Nessel justified the settlement on Friday.
“Discrimination in the provision of foster care case management and adoption services is illegal, no matter the rationale,” said Nessel. “Limiting the opportunity for a child to be adopted or fostered by a loving home not only goes against the state’s goal of finding a home for every child, it is a direct violation of the contract every child-placing agency enters into with the state.”
Nessel is the first self-identified lesbian elected to statewide office in Michigan and made LGBT advocacy a major part of her campaign, the Detroit Free Press said. She represented a same-sex couple in a case that led to the 2015 U.S. Supreme Court decision mandating legal recognition of same-sex unions as civil marriages.
The ACLU characterized the settlement as a victory for the 12,000 children in Michigan foster care.
“Our children need every family that is willing and able to provide them with a loving home,” said Leslie Cooper, deputy director of the ACLU LGBT & HIV Project. She said agencies that choose to accept taxpayer dollars “must put the needs of the children first.”
A 2015 law, passed with the backing of the Michigan Catholic Conference, prevents state-funded adoption and foster agencies from being forced to place children in violation of their beliefs. The law protects them from civil action and from threats to their public funding, while requiring agencies that decline to place children with same-sex couples to refer the couples to other providers.
When the law was passed, about 25 percent of Michigan’s adoption and foster agencies were faith-based.
Senate Majority Leader Mike Shirkey, a Republican, criticized the settlement and said faith-based adoption agencies will have to close because of a lack of taxpayer-funded support.
“Dana Nessel has shown us that she cares little for the Constitution and even less for the vulnerable population of children in need of forever homes,” Shirkey charged. “Nessel’s actions make it clear that she sought the office of attorney general to further her own personal political agenda.”
State Rep. James Lower, R-Cedar Lake, wasn’t in the legislature when its 2015 bill passed but said he would have backed it, the Detroit Free Press said.
For Lower, the law made sense because “the situation puts these agencies in a tough situation because they have been able to refer couples to another agency that is willing to work with same-sex couples.”
“But now, they’ll have to choose to either not to help the kids or violate their religious beliefs,” he added.
In 2017, the Michigan Catholic Conference described the lawsuit as “mean-spirited, divisive and intolerant,” and “yet another egregious attack on religious faith in public life.” The 2015 law was needed to “promote diversity in child placement” and to maintain a public-private partnership to stabilize adoption and foster care, the conference said.
A 2017 court filing from St. Vincent Catholic Charities said it recruited more new families than seven of eight adoption agencies in the capital region. It would be unable to continue its programs without the contract.
In 2018 Becket said St. Vincent Catholic Charities found more new foster families than almost 90 percent of other agencies within its service district, with particular success in finding homes for hard-to-place children such as those with special needs, larger sibling groups, or older children.
A 2003 document from the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith considered the proposed legal recognition of same-sex unions rejected the placement of children with same-sex couples. That document cited the need for a child to grow up with both a mother and a father and said placing a child with a same-sex couple would “place them in an environment that is not conducive to their full human development,” something that is “gravely immoral” and in violation of the child’s best interest.
Laws barring discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation or barring state funding from adoption agencies considered discriminatory have shut down Catholic adoption agencies in Boston, San Francisco, the District of Columbia, and Illinois, among others.
While religious freedom was long an assumption of American political and legal life, recent decades have produced an increased push against religious freedom protections. The proposed federal Equality Act explicitly bars appeals to the Religious Freedom Restoration Act as a defense in cases of alleged discrimination.
CNA investigations have found close to $10 million in grants earmarked to restricting religious freedom in cases impacting LGBT causes and “reproductive rights.” The New York-based Arcus Foundation and the Massachusetts-based Proteus Fund’s Rights, Faith & Democracy Collaborative play leading roles, and both were leaders in pushing for the legal recognition of same-sex marriage.
The national ACLU and some state affiliates are among this funding network’s grantees.
While Christian teaching has rejected same-sex sexual behavior as sinful since the origins of Christianity, in recent decades some American Christian denominations and American jurisprudence as a whole have come to categorize such views as erroneous, discriminatory, and opposed to equality. Sometimes these changes followed significant organizing and lobbying by LGBT advocates.
San Francisco, Calif., Mar 25, 2019 / 02:00 pm (CNA).- A group of five Catholic hospitals in California is being sued by a woman who identifies as a transgender man after one of its locations, St. Joseph Hospital, Eureka, refused to perform a hysterect… […]
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