Spanish bishops on migrants: ‘We don’t love God if we don’t love our brothers’

Rome Newsroom, Mar 24, 2021 / 07:00 am (CNA).- Cardinal Charles Maung Bo committed Wednesday to ongoing support for Burma’s protest movement, provided that it remains “non-violent and peaceful.”

In a statement issued by the archdioce… […]

Rome, Italy, Jun 23, 2020 / 10:30 am (CNA).- Sister Stan Mumuni dedicates her life to caring for abandoned children with birth defects in Ghana. When the coronavirus pandemic spread to West Africa, she said that she ran to the market to buy soap and supplies, but the prices had already tripled.

“We ran to the place. The price has gone too high. We have to get food to store food to be able to feed these children,” Sister Stan said at a virtual symposium June 23.

Some of the children cared for by her religious order have such severe disabilities that they cannot eat solid food, but rely on milk. “Getting milk to feed them everyday was very, very hard,” she said.

“Many people are dying of hunger. We live in a poverty zone. … With the pandemic we have to struggle with the little we have to be able to even reach out to others to support them.”

As parts of Ghana went into lockdown, Sister Stan said that she received more and more phone calls. First, there were calls from the special needs schools asking her order to come pick up the orphaned children and bring them to their house as the schools closed.

Then there were the calls concerning newborn disabled children whose lives were at risk.

The Marian Sisters of Eucharistic Love, founded by Sister Stan in 2009, provide a home for children with special needs who were often rejected by their families and communities because of superstitious beliefs that associate birth defects with witchcraft. 

“At this period too, we have been called by so many priests: ‘Please rescue a child that is in danger,’” she said.

“‘Please, Sister, come, we have rescued two children that they wanted to kill them.’ ‘Please come, a woman gave birth and died and that child is considered ‘witch’ … and we need to do something about it.’”

Sister Stan said that although movement had become very difficult, she knew that God was calling her order to rescue these children. 

She recalled that she had heard this call very distinctly in the founding of the Marian Sisters of Eucharistic Love: “Christ told me: ‘Even though you have nothing, I am telling you to go and rescue my children.’”

“All this we have to risk our lives to go in search for such innocent victims,” she said. “Christ said: ‘Let the children come to me’ … children are precious to God.”

She added: “Our mission here on earth is to keep rescuing life, rescuing souls, and to keep spreading the good news of the kingdom of God.”

Sister Stan was one of several sisters who shared her religious order’s experience of the COVID-19 pandemic in the “Women Religious on the Frontlines” virtual symposium co-hosted by the U.S. and British embassies to the Holy See. 

Sister Alicia Vacas, regional leader of the Comboni Sisters in the Middle East, was also called to take risks to serve those in need amid the pandemic.

“Unfortunately one of our communities in Bergamo got infected at the very beginning of the coronavirus emergency, and we started receiving very bad news from the community,” Sister Alicia said at the symposium.

“And several young sisters, several of us nurses, we volunteered to go and reach them and to help them.”

Once she arrived in the town of Bergamo, located in Lombardy, the epicenter of Italy’s coronavirus outbreak, Sister Alicia said that the Comboni motherhouse “was in real chaos” because “everybody was sick.”

She estimated that 45 sisters of the 55 living in Bergamo were ill. Ten Comboni sisters from her community died during the outbreak.

“It has been a very powerful experience to live from inside the suffering of the people in Bergamo,” she said, adding that it has been an experience of Christ’s Passion.

“As a Comboni sister, I think it has been only a privilege … sharing with people’s lives, with people’s sufferings,” she said, calling it a “gift from God for the whole congregation.”

Sister Alicia, who is now back at the convent in Jerusalem, said that the coronavirus pandemic is not over and “the situation is very worrying” for many sisters in other parts of the world. 

The World Health Organization reported June 22 the largest single-day increase in coronavirus cases, with more than 183,000 new infections documented worldwide in 24 hours.

Sister Alicia said: “I have been in contact with many sisters working in places like Jordan … in South Sudan, in Chad, in Ecuador, and I can see the sisters exposed to many risks with no equipment at all. They don’t work in many cases in government hospitals. They don’t have access to tests. So they are receiving suspected cases and patients without any possibility of protecting themselves.” 

“For many other sisters who are not working in medical issues, they have to face this explosion … of poverty and social crisis, and many sisters … are dealing with starvation,” she added.

Callista Gingrich, the U.S. Ambassador to the Holy See, said that the coronavirus pandemic “has caused vast unemployment, poverty, and food insecurity — further challenging the work of women religious.”

“I want to take a moment to recognize and honor the tremendous sacrifices made by women religious during this pandemic,” she said. “Here in Italy, and around the world, many faithful sisters have made the ultimate sacrifice while caring for others. As we continue our work together, let us preserve and honor their memory.”

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Rome, Italy, Mar 6, 2019 / 03:10 am (CNA).- As Christians prepare to engage in the fasting and abstinence of Lent, they can find guidance in the words of Pope St. Leo the Great’s sermons.

Stressing Lenten discipline as a way to struggle against our sins and against the devil’s temptations, the fifth century pope advised self-scrutiny, purification, forgiveness of enemies and almsgiving to the poor.

“Let us prepare our souls for fighting with temptations, and understand that the more zealous we are for our salvation, the more determined must be the assaults of our opponents,” he said in his Lenten sermons, elsewhere adding “there are no works of power, dearly-beloved, without the trials of temptations, there is no faith without proof, no contest without a foe, no victory without conflict.”

Pope Leo I was involved in the theological questions of the fifth century, most famously affirming Christ’s two nature, human and divine, for the Council of Chalcedon.

He also led a delegation which successfully negotiated with Attila the Hun to turn his invading forces away from Rome.

He was named a Doctor of the Church in the eighteenth century. His writings and sermons proved enduring and influential. While some of his comments are specific to his time, as a whole he offers special advice for Lent.

True peace and true freedom come only “when the flesh is ruled by the judgment of the mind, and the mind is directed by the will of God,” he said in his sermons.

For St. Leo the Great, the Christians’ enemies are often our vices, disordered desires and sins.

“We cannot otherwise prevail against our adversaries, unless we prevail against our own selves,” he counseled. The contrary desires of flesh and spirit must be disciplined, and the mind will lose to the body if bodily desires become too strong.

When the mind is subject to God and delights in heavenly gifts, when it has “trampled underfoot the allurements of earthly pleasure” and has not allowed sin to reign, Leo says, “reason will maintain a well-ordered supremacy, and its strongholds no strategy of spiritual wickedness will cast down.”

“Christian people, whatever the amount of their abstinence, should rather desire to satisfy themselves with the Word of God than with bodily food,” said Leo the Great.

He counseled self-scrutiny to root out discord and wrong desires and to be attentive to God’s commandments. Citing St. Paul, he said Lenten fasting is a time to cleanse ourselves “from every defilement of flesh and spirit.”

“Now let godly minds boldly accustom themselves to forgive faults, to pass over insults, and to forget wrongs,” he said in one sermon.

“Let all discords and enmities be laid aside, and let no one think to have a share in the Paschal feast that has neglected to restore brotherly peace,” he said in another.

Care for the poor and others in need should be an even greater priority.

“Let us not pass over the groans of the poor with deaf ear, but with prompt kindness bestow our mercy on the needy, that we may deserve to find mercy in the judgment,” said the saint, later adding “let each bestow on the weak and destitute those dainties which he denies himself.”

“Let our humaneness be felt by the sick in their illnesses, by the weakly in their infirmities, by the exiles in their hardships, by the orphans in their destitution, and by solitary widows in their sadness: in the helping of whom there is no one that cannot carry out some amount of benevolence,” he continued.

Warning against the dangers of spiritual pride and hypocrisy, he also gave advice on how to follow Lenten disciplines.

“The self-restraint of the religious should not be gloomy, but sincere; no murmurs of complaint should be heard from those who are never without the consolation of holy joys,” he said, adding “no one is so holy that he ought not to be holier, nor so devout that he might not be devouter.”

At times, the foes of Christians are not simply the flesh, but even the demonic, he said. The approach of Easter makes the devil grow “furious” and “consumed with the strongest jealousy and now tortured with the greatest vexation.”

It is a time when “the Christian army has to combat him, and any that have grown lukewarm and slothful, or that are absorbed in worldly cares, must now be furnished with spiritual armor and their ardor kindled for the fray by the heavenly trumpet.”

The approaching baptism of new Christians at Easter, and the growing penitence of lapsed Christians, is also a target of the devil’s anger.

“For he sees whole tribes of the human race brought in afresh to the adoption of God’s sons and the offspring of the New Birth multiplied through the virgin fertility of the Church,” St. Leo the Great said. “He sees himself robbed of all his tyrannical power, and driven from the hearts of those he once possessed, while from either sex, thousands of the old, the young, the middle-aged are snatched away from him, and no one is debarred by sin either of his own or original.”

The devil sees, too, those who have lapsed, “deceived by his treacherous snares,” now becoming “washed in the tears of penitence” and seeking mercy and reconciliation in the Church.

Leo the Great also promoted fasting as a way to prepare to conquer earthly foes.

When the Hebrews and Israelites were oppressed by the Philistines “for their scandalous sins,” they restored their mental and physical powers by commanding a fast in order to be able to overcome their enemies.

“For they understood that they had deserved that hard and wretched subjection for their neglect of God’s commands, and evil ways, and that it was in vain for them to strive with arms unless they had first withstood their sin,” he said.

Abstinence from food and drink was “the discipline of strict correction,” he said. In order to defeat their foes, they “first conquered the allurements of the palate in themselves.”

Similarly, those of us who face opposition and conflict “may be cured by a little carefulness, if only we will use the same means.”

Though all seasons of the year are full of God’s blessings, St. Leo the Great said, Lent is a time when “all men’s minds should be moved with greater zeal to spiritual progress.” Lenten discipline “should heal us and restore the purity of our minds, during which the faults of other times might be redeemed by pious acts and removed by chaste fasting.”

[…]