Month: June 2020

Denver Newsroom, Jun 30, 2020 / 03:00 am (CNA).- Seth McGarry, a pitcher in the Philadelphia Phillies minor league system, has never really not played baseball. But with baseball stadiums closed around the nation due to the COVID-19, he might spend his summer without the game.

“My entire past and childhood was always spent at a baseball field. I love competing,” McGarry told CNA. He started playing when he was five years old, attended Florida Atlantic University on scholarship, and was drafted into the minor leagues at age 21, before he graduated.

The baseball world has been reluctant to make a decisive call for the season. McGarry says that his team has spent months in a state of uncertainty.

“We’ve had to be in limbo and on standby, where we still had to train and throw and lift everyday to stay ready in case something happened,” McGarry said.

With gyms closed and practices prohibited, McGarry said that it has been difficult to train for the possibility of some semblance of a season. Players who live in rural areas did not have anyone to throw with or any equipment to lift.

And it’s still uncertain what the summer will hold. They may be asked to report for some kind of instructional league, while some may be invited to spring training with the major leagues. McGarry has no idea what those possibilities would look like.

But uncertainty, McGarry said, is just part of the game of baseball.

“With the baseball life, there is so much uncertainty and not knowing,” said McGarry. During a normal season, he plays every day and travels all over the northeast in a team bus.

Staying home, he finds, offers the respite of consistency.

“It’s been really nice to kinda have this time to just be in the same place for more than five or six months,” said McGarry. He was married in February 2017 and has an 8-month-old baby girl, Hannah.

During a regular season, McGarry goes months without seeing his family. But the pandemic has allowed him to spend more time with his wife and to see his baby daughter grow.

“Just being able to see her everyday, and sleep in my own bed, and have home-cooked family dinners all the time together, it’s been really great,” said McGarry.

For McGarry, getting to spend time with his family far outweighs the disappointment of not being able to showcase the progress he made over the offseason.

“The whole entire season I’d spent training and trying to get better at certain things, so not being able to play and complete and showcase that was a little frustrating. But at the same time, it was kind of a relief,” said McGarry. “I’ve gotten to see a lot of stuff that I wouldn’t have gotten to see, like [Hannah] crawling and standing. A lot of that stuff I wouldn’t have gotten to see in person.”

McGarry said that not everyone has been so lucky. His team has a lot of international players who were not able to return home before borders closed and who are now stuck in hotels.

One international player McGarry knows has been stuck in Sarasota, Florida, for months. McGarry said that his friend is just trying to “make the most out of his situation,” but it hasn’t been easy.

In the tumults of baseball life, McGarry’s Catholic faith is a constant. During the season, the team is provided with a priest for Mass, and also a translator for the international players.

But McGarry said that instead of asking God to change anything about his current situation, he has tried to approach the Lord with gratitude for what he does have.

“I think during all this time, instead of asking for guidance or for help, I spent more time just giving thanks and appreciating what I had with the time I get now with my daughter and wife, instead of searching for or asking for more.”

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CNA Staff, Jun 29, 2020 / 11:01 pm (CNA).- Amid a surge of coronavirus cases in Texas, four retired clerics, including two bishops, have tested positive at a priests’ retirement home in Houston.

“We ask that you please pray for all those impacted by COVID-19, and in particular for all of our priests,” the Archdiocese of Galveston-Houston said June 29.

Archbishop Joseph A. Fiorenza Priest Retirement Residence was exposed to COVID-19 after a food service worker and an independent caregiver tested positive for the virus.

Among the infected priests are Archbishop Emeritus Joseph Fiorenza, 89, and Auxiliary Bishop Emeritus Vincent Rizzotto, 88. None of the four who have tested positive for the virus have developed serious symptoms. Out of the 18 priests in the residence, 12 have tested negative for the coronavirus, and two have not yet received their results.

Texas is seeing as many as 5,000 diagnoses of infection with the coronavirus a day.

“Over just the past few weeks, the daily number of cases have gone from an average of about 2,000, to more than 5,000,” Governor Greg Abbott said June 28.

The surge follows loosening of restrictions in the state, but the governor recently closed bars again, and reduced the capacity at which restaurants are allowed to operate.

Dr. Peter Hotez, dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine and professor of Pediatrics and Molecular Virology & Microbiology at Baylor College of Medicine, told KHOU 11 that “We opened up the state too early, and we didn’t put in enough belts and suspenders to do it properly.”

The state had begun reopening in early May.

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CNA Staff, Jun 29, 2020 / 03:31 pm (CNA).- The Archdiocese of St. Louis on Sunday released a statement Monday defending the city’s namesake, amid calls from activists to tear down a prominent statue of King Louis IX. 

“For Catholics, … […]

CNA Staff, Jun 29, 2020 / 01:45 pm (CNA).- After a mob tore down statues, including a figure of St. Junípero Serra statue, in a San Francisco park, Archbishop Salvatore Cordileone was joined by several dozen Catholics Saturday in prayer and acts of spiritual reparation.

“Evil has made itself present here. So we have gathered together to pray for God, to ask the saints…for their intercession, above all our Blessed Mother, in an act of reparation, asking God’s mercy on us and on the whole city, that we might turn our hearts back towards him,” Cordileone said in a June 27 video.

The St. Junípero Serra statue was torn down in Golden Gate Park the evening of June 19 by a crowd of about 100 people. The crowd also tore down statues of Francis Scott Key, author of the National Anthem, and Ulysses S. Grant, U.S. president and Union Army general who defeated the Confederate States of America.

On Saturday, several dozen people joined the Archbishop of San Francisco to pray.

“The presence of so many wonderful people here was of great comfort for me,” the archbishop said. “I feel such a great wound in my soul when I see these horrendous acts of blasphemy disparaging the memory of Serra who was such a great hero, such a great defender of the indigenous people of this land.”
Cordileone said the statue was “blasphemously torn down”

“An act of sacrilege occurred here. That is an act of the Evil One,” he said in the video.

“We came together to say the prayer of the rosary, and also the prayer of exorcism, the St. Michael Prayer, because evil is here, this is an activity of the evil one, who wants to bring down the Church, who wants to bring down all Christian believers,” he said.

“So we offer that prayer, and bless this ground with holy water so that God might purify it, sanctify it, that we in turn might be sanctified,” he said, encouraging Catholics to pray, to fast and to inform themselves.

“There’s a lot that people don’t know. There’s a lot of ignorance of the real history. I’d ask our people to learn about the history of Father Serra, of the missions, of the whole history of the Church, so that they can appreciate the great legacy the Church has given us.”

The exorcism prayer Cordileone offered, the St. Michael Prayer, invokes the intercession of the Archangel Michael against the power of Satan. It is not the same as those exorcism prayers offered by the Church if a person is believed to be the subject of demonic possession.

During the eighteenth century, the saint founded nine Catholic missions in the area that would later become California, many of those missions would go on to become the centers of major California cities.

Serra helped to convert thousands of native Californians to Christianity and taught them new agricultural technologies. His statue in Golden Gate Park was first placed there in 1907. It was crafted by well-known American sculptor Douglas Tilden.

Critics have lambasted Serra as a symbol of European colonialism and said the missions engaged in the forced labor of Native Americans, sometimes claiming Serra himself was abusive.

But Serra’s defenders say that Serra was actually an advocate for native people and a champion of human rights. They note the many native people he helped during his life, and their outpouring of grief at his death.

Biographers note that Serra frequently intervened for native people when they faced persecution from Spanish authorities. In one case, the priest intervened to spare the lives of several California natives who had attacked a Spanish outpost.
In one letter urging fair treatment of native people, Serra wrote that “if the Indians were to kill me…they should be forgiven.”

Los Angeles Archbishop Jose Gomez said in 2015 that Serra had “deep love for the native peoples he had come to evangelize.”

“In his appeals, he said some truly remarkable things about human dignity, human rights and the mercy of God,” the archbishop added.

In 2017, Gomez praised Serra as an overlooked American founder.

“Remembering St. Junípero and the first missionaries changes how we remember our national story. It reminds us that America’s first beginnings were not political. America’s first beginnings were spiritual,” Gomez said in a 2017 homily.
Pope Francis canonized the Franciscan missionary in Washington, D.C. on Sept. 23, 2015.

“Junípero sought to defend the dignity of the native community, to protect it from those who had mistreated and abused it,” the pope said in his homily at the Mass of canonization. “Mistreatment and wrongs which today still trouble us, especially because of the hurt which they cause in the lives of many people.”

The legacy of the Church, Cordileone said, is “a wonderful legacy that we should be proud of. There are those who want us to be ashamed of it. We have every reason to be proud of it.”

“But also we have to approach living our Christian life with humility and to continue to give goodness to the world, and to give the world beauty and truth, with the help of the grace of God,” he said.

“Our Lady is always asking us to pray the rosary,’” he added. “The rosary has the power even to change history”

Cordileone said Serra had a personal importance for him.

“He was someone who was very much a part of my life growing up,” said the archbishop.

“I grew up very close to the first mission he founded, in San Diego.”

The toppling of the statue made him “very distressed” and “inflicted a great wound in my soul.”

“So the presence of so many people here was of great support to me,” he said.

In a June 20 statement, Cordileone said that important protests over racial injustice have been “hijacked” by a mob bent on violence.

“St. Serra made heroic sacrifices to protect the indigenous people of California from their Spanish conquerors, especially the soldiers,” he said. “Even with his infirm leg which caused him such pain, he walked all the way to Mexico City to obtain special faculties of governance from the Viceroy of Spain in order to discipline the military who were abusing the Indians. And then he walked back to California.”

Cordileone said he did not want to “deny that historical wrongs have occurred, even by people of good will, and healing of memories and reparation is much needed. But just as historical wrongs cannot be righted by keeping them hidden, neither can they be righted by re-writing the history.”

In 2018, San Francisco’s city government removed a statue of the saint from a prominent location outside City Hall. Stanford University’s Board of Trustees recommended to rename some, but not all, features on campus named for the priest. The student government had said the Catholic missions had a harmful impact on Native Americans.

A statue of the saint remains displayed in the U.S. Capitol.

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CNA Staff, Jun 29, 2020 / 01:01 pm (CNA).- Monday’s Supreme Court decision overturning a Louisiana law holding abortion clinics to the same standards as other surgical centers ‘continues a cruel precedent’, the chair of the US bishops… […]

Washington, D.C. Newsroom, Jun 29, 2020 / 12:30 pm (CNA).- Lawmakers, legal scholars, and pro-life leaders all criticized a Supreme Court ruling on Monday that overturned state safety regulations for abortion clinics in Louisiana.

State Sen. Katr… […]