Vatican watchers got their first real look at what might be in store for the Church’s central governing apparatus this weekend, when an article appeared in the new edition of Spain’s leading Catholic Vida Nueva […]
Vatican City, Apr 29, 2019 / 09:00 pm (CNA).- Peter’s Pence, a global charitable fund overseen by Pope Francis, will support migrants in limbo in Mexico, the charity has announced.
“Men and women, often with young children, flee pove… […]
Washington D.C., Apr 29, 2019 / 10:30 am (CNA).- The president of the U.S. Bishops’ Conference has condemned the shooting at a synagogue near San Diego on April 27, and offered prayers for those affected.
“I, along with my brother bishops, am greatly saddened and deeply concerned over the news that another house of worship has been subjected to violence,” said USCCB President Cardinal Daniel DiNardo of Galveston-Houston.
“Our country should be better than this,” DiNardo said in a statement released April 28.
“Our world should be beyond such acts of hatred and anti-Semitism. This attack joins an all too long list of attacks against innocent people, people of all faiths, who only want to gather and to pray,” he said.
Saturday’s shooting at Chabad of Poway Synagogue in Poway, California, killed one and injured three others. The shooter has been arrested and charged with murder. This is the second deadly shooting at a synagogue in six months. The shooter, John Earnest, wrote and published an anti-Semitic manifesto prior to the attack.
Earnest has also claimed responsibility for a March arson attack on a mosque in Escondido, California.
San Diego Bishop Robert McElroy also expressed his closeness to the local Jewish communittee.
“Our hearts go out to everyone at Chabad House Poway for the senseless violence that took place earlier today. Houses of worship should be places of peace. Know that the entire Catholic Community of San Diego and Imperial Counties is keeping you in our prayers,” McElroy said in a statement.
The bishop asked that all the parishes of the diocese offer a special prayer for the victims of anti-Semitism at Sunday Mass, and circulated a draft for inclusion in the prayers of the faithful.
“For the victims of the Chabad shootings and their families; for the Jewish community, our elder brothers in faith, who are once again subjected to the evil of anti-Semitic hatred and violence, this time in our own diocese; and for our world, so consumed by anger and division, that we might understand that the gift of peace you give in today’s Gospel is a command for us to love every man and woman in the human family; we pray to the Lord.”
Cardinal DiNardo said that violence in the name of religion or or committed against people of faith was was always and everwhere intollerable.
“Unfortunately,” he said, “both in the past and today, too many preach such hatred in the name of God. This cannot be abided; it must end.”
The cardinal’s statement echoes last month’s message from Pope Francis condemning anti-Semitism. In March, speaking to representatives from the American Jewish Committee, said that for Christians, anti-Semitism is “a rejection of one’s own origins” and a “complete contradition.”
At the March audience, Pope Francis referred to interfaith dialogue as an “important tool” in increasing understanding between Judaism and Christianity, and stressed the importance of forming new generation of young people who are committed to interreligious dialogue.
Citing the “rich spiritual heritage” shared by Christians and Jews, the pope said that members of both faiths should seek each other out during this time of “depersonalizing secularism” in the Western world.
The shooting follows the devastating attack on a Pittsburgh synagogue last year.
On Oct. 27, 48-year-old Robert Bowers entered Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life Synagogue equipped with an assault rifle and three handguns. Shouting anti-Semitic slogans, Bowers killed eight men and three women. He also injured six others, including four policemen. After a shootout with Pittsburgh Police and SWAT, Bowers was wounded and eventually surrendered.
Following that attack, several Pennsylvania bishops issued round condemnations of the rising tide of anti-Semitism.
Archbishop Charles Chaput of Philadelphia said that “Religious and ethnic hatred is vile in any form, but the ugly record of the last century is a lesson in the special evil of anti-Semitism. It has no place in America, and especially in the hearts of Christians.”
Scranton’s Bishop Joseph Bambera, who is the head of the Committee for Ecumenism and Interreligious Affairs at the USCCB, issued a statement on Sunday, claiming the act of violence to be cowardly.
“Anti-Semitism is to be condemned and has to be confronted by our nation. The Committee on Ecumenical and Interreligious Affairs of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops stands with our Jewish brothers and sisters during this time of great distress. May God grant peace to the dead, healing to the injured, and comfort to the families of those hurt and killed and to all the Jewish Community.”
Vatican City, Apr 29, 2019 / 04:46 am (CNA).- Pope Francis Monday appointed Archbishop Paul D. Etienne of Anchorage to be coadjutor archbishop of the Archdiocese of Seattle.
As coadjutor, Etienne will assist Archbishop J. Peter Sartain, 66, in the administration of the Archdiocese of Seattle, and succeed Sartain upon his retirement or death.
Seattle also has two auxiliaries, Bishops Eusebio Elizondo and Daniel H Mueggenborg.
Etienne, 59, served as a priest of the Archdiocese of Indianapolis from 1992 until 2009, when he was appointed bishop of Cheyenne, Wyoming.
In 2016, Pope Francis named him to head the Metropolitan Archdiocese of Anchorage, Alaska.
Etienne wrote in a blog post April 29 that he is excited and surprised by the announcement of his new appointment, and noted that his time as head of the Anchorage archdiocese the last two and a half years was “too short.”
“But I am mindful of a phrase in Sacred Scripture that refers to God’s timing, known as ‘the fullness of time,'” he wrote. “That time has now come in God’s plan for new leadership” in Anchorage.
The archbishop said he has known Archbishop Sartain for many years, and has nothing but “admiration and esteem” for him, and that he has been praying for the people of Seattle and western Washington since receiving the news of his appointment April 13.
He also expressed his gratitude for the “profound faith” of the people of Anchorage: “We now place the future once again, as always, into the hands of a faithful and loving God,” he said.
Archbishop Etienne’s Rite of Reception in Seattle is scheduled for Friday, June 7.
Etienne, an outdoorsman, grew up as one of six children. He has two brothers who are priests and a sister who is a religious sister.
He graduated from the University of St. Thomas/St. John Vianney College Seminary in St. Paul, Minnestoa, with a degree in Business Administration before studying at the Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome.
After serving as an associate pastor and assistant vocations director in Indianapolis for a period, he returned to Rome to receive his License in Spiritual Theology.
In the U.S., he later served as the vocations director for the Archdiocese of Indianapolis, vice-rector of the Bishop Simon Brute College Seminary in Indianapolis, and as a parish priest.
He was also a member of the Council of Consultors and Council of Priests for the archdiocese before being appointed bishop of Cheyenne in 2009. He has served as metropolitan archbishop of Anchorage since November 2016.
The Archdiocese of Seattle covers the western part of Washington state, from the Canadian to the Oregon border and from the Cascade Mountains to the Pacific Ocean.
It has 173 parishes, missions, and pastoral centers and serves over 579,500 Catholics.
Reflecting on the fact the announcement of his appointment was made on the feast of St. Catherine of Siena, Etienne said he is mindful of her and her “profound love for God the Father, for her Lord, Jesus Christ, for the Holy Father and for the Church.”
“For many years, I have seen St. Catherine as a companion and a kindred spirit,” he said. “She called the Holy Father ‘Sweet Christ on earth.’ She was his emissary on various occasions, and she offered many sacrifices for the unity of the Church.”
Etienne asked for prayers through St. Catherine’s intercession, that his ministry “will be fruitful and conducive to the unity of the Church and the salvation of God’s people.”
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Paris, France, Apr 28, 2019 / 04:34 pm (CNA).- As fire ravaged the roof of Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris earlier this month, one artist from Ecuador used her skills to express the grief that she and so many people throughout the world felt as the beautiful building burned.
In a pencil sketch posted to Instagram that quickly went viral, artist Cristina Correa Freile depicted Disney’s version of Quasimodo, the famous fictional “Hunchback of Notre Dame”, crying and hugging the beloved church where he was the bellringer.
Quasimodo was the hero of a novel by Victor Hugo, written at another time when Notre Dame needed saving, from years of destruction and disrepair. Given the emotional reaction to the sketch from thousands who saw it, the beloved character may be at least part of the reason that people once more rally behind the restoration of Notre Dame de Paris.
Because the name “Quasimodo” is most frequently associated with an ugly but lovable character from a fictional story, some may be surprised to learn that the hunchback’s name is actually liturgical.
In Hugo’s novel, Quasimodo, rejected by his parents for his deformities, is abandoned inside Notre Dame Cathedral, at a place where orphans and unwanted children were dropped off.
Monseigneur Claude Frollo finds the child on “Quasimodo Sunday” and “called him Quasimodo; whether it was that he chose thereby to commemorate the day when he had found him, or that he meant to mark by that name how incomplete and imperfectly molded the poor little creature was,” Hugo wrote.
Quasimodo is the Latin name for the Sunday following Easter. It is drawn from the first words of the entrance antiphon for the day, which is the chant sung as the priest approaches the altar for Mass. The entrance antiphon (also called the Introit) for Quasimodo Sunday begins with: “Like newborn infants,” or, in Latin, “quasi modo geniti infantes.”
The full chant, drawn from 1 Peter 2:2, is as follows: “As newborn babes, desire the rational milk without guile, that thereby you may grow unto salvation: If so be you have tasted that the Lord is sweet.”
On this Sunday, also known as Low Sunday, Catholics are called to remember the newest members of the Church.
“It counsels the first communicant or the convert, likened to a newborn child, to desire the milk of the mother, to receive that nourishment and grow. Properly disposed, the new communicant doesn’t need to be told this. But the rest of us sing about this as a reminder that there are children among us who need to be cared for, and that we all should preserve the spirit of the children of God and remain humble and submissive to the Divine Will,” according to an explanation from the New Liturgical Movement website.
Today, the Sunday following Easter is typically remembered as “Divine Mercy Sunday,” a feast day established by Pope John Paul II which honors the divine mercy of Jesus, as called for in the diary of St. Faustina Kowalska, a Polish nun who received revelations of Jesus, and wrote down his words in her diary. St. Faustina was canonized by Pope John Paul II in 2000.
Vatican City, Apr 28, 2019 / 06:06 am (CNA).- On Divine Mercy Sunday, Pope Francis reflected on Christ’s wounds, which he said contain the difficulties and persecutions endured by people who suffer today.
“Touch the wounds of Jesus,”… […]
Vilnius, Lithuania, Apr 28, 2019 / 03:03 am (CNA).- Among Catholic devotions, the Divine Mercy message is well-known: the iconic image of Christ, with rays of red and white pouring from his heart; St. Faustina, called the “Apostle of Divine Mercy;” and the Basilica of Divine Mercy in Krakow, Poland.
But what you might not know is that more than 450 miles north of Krakow, in the Lithuanian capital Vilnius, there is another Sanctuary of Divine Mercy, one which houses the first image of the merciful Jesus created, and the only Image of Divine Mercy St. Faustina herself ever saw.
Archbishop Gintaras Grusas of Vilnius told CNA that the city, often called the “City of Mercy,” is not only “a place of the Divine Mercy revelations, but also a place that is in need of mercy, throughout history, and a place that in the last couple decades has been a place where we need to show mercy.”
Since long before St. Faustina and the Divine Mercy revelations, the Mother of Mercy has been the patroness of Vilnius, Grusas said.
In fact, in the 1600s, a painting of Our Lady of the Gate of Dawn was created and placed in a niche above one of the prominent city gates. Many miracles are attributed to the image, which was canonically crowned Mother of Mercy by Pope Pius XI in 1927.
It was in this small chapel of the Mother of Mercy, above the gate, that the Image of Divine Mercy was first displayed. So Vilnius has had “mercy upon mercy,” Grusas noted.
The story of St. Faustina and Divine Mercy
St. Faustina Kowalska was a young Polish nun born at the beginning of the 20th century. Over the course of several years she had visions of Jesus, whereby she was directed to create an image and to share with the world revelations of Jesus’ love and mercy.
St. Faustina received her first revelation of the merciful Jesus in Plock, Poland in February 1931. At the time, she had made her first vows as one of the Sisters of Our Lady of Mercy.
In 1933, after she made her perpetual vows, her superior directed her to move to the convent house in Vilnius. She stayed there for three years and this is where she received many more visions of Jesus. Vilnius is also where she found a priest to be her spiritual director, the now-Bl. Michael Sopocko.
With the help of Fr. Sopocko, St. Faustina found a painter to fulfill the request Jesus had made to her in one of the visions – to “paint an image according to the pattern you see, with the signature: Jesus, I trust in You” – and in 1934 the painter Eugene Kazimierowski created the original Divine Mercy painting under St. Faustina’s direction.
In its creation, St. Faustina “was instrumental in making all the adjustments with the painter,” Archbishop Grusas said.
The image shows Christ with his right hand raised as if giving a blessing, and the left touching his chest. Two rays, one pale, one red – which Jesus said are to signify water and blood – are descending from his heart.
St. Faustina recorded all of her visions and conversations with Jesus in her diary, called Divine Mercy in My Soul. Here she wrote the words of Jesus about the graces that would pour out on anyone who prayed before the image:
“I promise that the soul that will venerate this image will not perish. I also promise victory over [its] enemies already here on earth, especially at the hour of death. I Myself will defend [that soul] as My own glory.”
When the image was completed, it was first kept in the corridor of the convent of the Bernardine Sisters, which was beside the Church of St. Michael where Fr. Sopocko was rector.
In March 1936 St. Faustina became sick, with what is believed to have been tuberculosis, and was transferred back to Poland by her superiors. She died near Krakow in October 1938, at the age of 33.
“St. Faustina, because of her illness, was brought back to Krakow by her superiors. But she left the painting in Vilnius because it was the property of her spiritual director, who paid for the painting,” Grusas explained.
Jesus, in one of St. Faustina’s visions, had expressed his wish that the image be put in a place of honor, above the main altar of the church. And so, though St. Faustina had already returned to Poland, on the first Sunday after Easter in 1937, they hung the image of Merciful Jesus next to the main altar in the Church of St. Michael.
The history of the image
Archbishop Grusas explained that many people have only recently learned about the image because it was hidden for many years, and it was only rediscovered and restored within the last 15 years.
During World War II, Lithuania was under Soviet occupation and in 1948, the communist government closed the Church of St. Michael and abolished the convent. Many of the sacred objects and artworks were moved to another church to be saved from Soviet hands, but the Divine Mercy image was left undisturbed in St. Michael’s for several years.
In 1951, two women were able to pay the keeper of St. Michael’s church and save the image. Since it couldn’t be taken across the border to Poland, they gave it to the priest in charge of the Church of the Holy Spirit for safekeeping.
Five years later it was moved to a church in Belarus, where it remained for over a decade. In 1970 this church too was shut down by the government and looted, but miraculously, again the Image of Divine Mercy was untouched.
Eventually it was brought back to Lithuania in secret and again given to the Church of the Holy Spirit. In the early 2000s its significance was rediscovered and after a professional restoration it was rehung in the nearby Church of the Holy Trinity in 2005, which is now the Shrine of Divine Mercy.
So though it is a more recent arrival on the international scene, the painting “is also probably the most profound of the Divine Mercy paintings,” Grusas said. “It has a very deep theology, very closely tied with St. Faustina’s diary.”
The Shrine of Divine Mercy
Today in Vilnius the archdiocese has begun to set up a guide for pilgrims who come and wish to visit the holy sites, such as the place where St. Faustina lived, the room where the image was painted, and the several churches which all held the painting at different points.
The Shrine of Divine Mercy itself is not a large place, since it’s only a converted parish church, but its sacramental life “is really quite something,” said Justin Gough, an American seminarian studying in Rome who spent a summer working in the Archdiocese’s pilgrim office in Vilnius.
He said that “between Mass, the Divine Mercy chaplet every day in Lithuanian and Polish, adoration 24/7… vespers every Sunday night led by the youth of Vilnius,” the rosary and the sacrament of Confession, there is always some sort of prayer or sacrament taking place.
Of course the original Image of Divine Mercy is also there, he pointed out, and yet the shrine is not just about the image, but about connecting the image and what it represents to prayer and the reception of God’s mercy through the sacraments.
“I think it’s ironic in a certain sense that God teaches us about his mercy through a holy woman who died at the age of 33,” he said. “She lived a very devout life, endured great sufferings for the sake of Christ, and yet it’s through people like her that we’re taught, great sinners that we are, how to actually receive God’s mercy and to be merciful to others.”
In Vilnius, it’s a great blessing “to know a saint of the 20th century walked here, prayed here, and experienced Christ here, and that we can do that as well.”
This article was originally published on CNA Nov. 26, 2017.
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