Month: August 2020

CNA Staff, Aug 6, 2020 / 01:00 pm (CNA).- The Knights of Columbus announced a new initiative Thursday to report on Christian persecution in Nigeria, where at least 60,000 Christians have been killed in the past two decades.

Since 2014, the Catholic fraternal and charitable organization has spent more than $25 million on behalf of persecuted Christians and other religious minorities targeted for elimination in the Middle East, the organization says, which includes the rebuilding of the majority-Christian town of Karemlesh on the Nineveh Plain.

Nigeria is Africa’s most populous nation and the demographics overall are almost evenly split between Christians and Muslims.

Nigeria’s Christians, especially in the northern part of the country, have for the past several decades been subjected to brutal property destruction, killings, and kidnappings, often at the hands of Islamic extremist groups.

“The effort is similar to what we have done in Iraq and is based in the hope that greater attention by American diplomacy and humanitarian aid can make a difference there,” said Knights of Columbus Supreme Knight Carl Anderson in an Aug. 6 announcement of the new initiative.

Multiple Nigerian Catholics have told CNA in recent days that attacks on Christians by Fulani Muslim herders, as well as by the militant group Boko Haram, have not slowed in the midst of the global coronavirus pandemic.

The worst of the persecution, in the north, comes at the hands of Muslim terrorists against the majority-Christian population, CNA has been told.

Such incidents include attacks in late July on four Christian villages in Southern Kaduna, in which more than 62 Christians were killed by Islamic terrorists. Last month, an Islamic extremist group boasted of killing five international aid workers, three of whom were known employees of Christian aid agencies.

In other areas, many Christians, especially clergy, suffer kidnappings at the hands of terrorists seeking ransom. In many cases, for kidnapped priests, their parishioners band together to raise the ransom money.

In a high-profile case from earlier this year, gunmen abducted four seminarians from Good Shepherd Seminary in Kaduna, holding them for random. The kidnappers eventually released three of the seminarians, but killed 18-year-old Michael Nnadi after he refused to renounce his faith.

Fr. Charles Uganwa, communications director of the south-central Issele-Uku diocese, said six priests of the diocese have been kidnapped by Fulani herdsmen in the past two years. The most recent priest kidnapping took place in June.

“He was released after about four days in captivity. He was so injured. He was beaten with clubs and with stones, with the butt of their gun. He was seriously injured. He had to be in the hospital for many weeks,” Uganwa told CNA.

Father Joseph Fidelis, a priest of the northeastern diocese of Maidugui, told CNA this week that he estimates that since 2009, Boko Haram has driven out half of the 300,000 Catholics who used to live in the diocese. Though Catholics there still celebrate Mass openly, they have to take stringent security measures against suicide bombers.

“Boko Haram is still very active, not in the city so much [as] in the outskirts…They still do the kidnapping, they still do the bombing. They still set mines on the road,” Fidelis said.

The problem of internally displaced people (IDP), mostly Christians who have been driven from their homes, is especially acute in the north, where thousands of the destitute live in refugee camps.

“Around here, around Maiduguri, over 1.2 million are displaced. About 1.4 million, and the number keeps rising on a daily basis. [In] the entire country, you have over 2.4 million people internally displaced. Now that’s quite huge,” Fidelis said.

Part of the problem, Nigerian Christians have told CNA, is that the Muslim-controlled government has largely responded slowly, inadequately, or not at all to the problem of Christian persecution.

“The most important issue is that unfortunately, the government in Nigeria does not show enough will, either in speech or in action, to help to curb the violence and the bloodshed that we see, either from the terrorists or from bandits or from a headsman, because we have so many sorts of groups running riots all over the Northeast of Nigeria,” Bishop Emmanuel Badejo of the southern diocese of Oyo told CNA.

Bishop Badejo said although his diocese is more peaceful than some in the north, with Muslims and Christians largely co-existing peacefully, there are some means of persecution that are more systemic and subtle, with government appointments and written laws seeming to favor Islam over Christianity.

“It’s no secret that in Nigeria, especially with the [President Muhammadu] Buhari government, there are all written laws that have not favored Christians at all, that have favored, in other words, the Muslims,” Badejo said.

“The Christian Churches have protested, Christian leaders have protested, but the federal government has not said any word in order to show any desire to protect the Christian religion.”

The Knights hope to raise greater awareness of Nigerian Christians’ plight by means of their new initiative.

In addition to financial aid, the Knights of Columbus have in the past advocated for persecuted Christians before the U.S. government, sending researchers to Iraq in 2016 to compile a 300-page report on the crimes of the so-called Islamic State (ISIS) against Christians in the country.

Anderson has also testified multiple times before Congress, urging action to protect the Middle East’s Christians from potential extinction.

Later that year, both houses of Congress unanimously passed resolutions declaring ISIS’ targeting of Christians and other religious and ethnic minorities in the Middle East to be a genocide.

Christianity had been present in the Nineveh plain in Iraq – between the city of Mosul, the country’s second-largest city, and Iraqi Kurdistan– since the first century. ISIS’ brutal invasion six years ago displaced at least 125,000 Christians from the area, and to date only about 40,000 have been able to return.

The Knights have worked closely with the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) to ensure funds reach persecuted Christians in the Middle East.

The Knights are in the midst of their 138th annual convention, which this year is being held virtually for the first time, due to restrictions in place because of the coronavirus pandemic.

Founded in New Haven in 1882, the Knights of Columbus was originally intended to assist widows and their families upon the deaths of their husbands. It has grown into a worldwide Catholic fraternal order, with more than 2 million members carrying out works of charity and evangelization across the globe. The Knights also offer life insurance policies to their members.

The convention comes a few months after the Vatican announced that Fr. Michael McGivney, founder of the Knights of Columbus, will be beatified following Pope Francis’ approval of a miracle attributed to his intercession.

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Washington, D.C. Newsroom, Aug 6, 2020 / 12:00 pm (CNA).- A new federal ethics advisory board for fetal tissue research has convened to consider future federally-funded research proposals that involve tissue from aborted babies.

The Human Fetal Tissue… […]

Washington, D.C. Newsroom, Aug 6, 2020 / 09:00 am (CNA).- A Catholic congressman is asking the U.S. Attorney General to respond to a spate of acts of vandalism against churches around the country.

In a letter to Attorney General William Barr on Wednes… […]

Washington, D.C. Newsroom, Aug 6, 2020 / 08:00 am (CNA).- In 1903, Pope St. Pius X wrote that it was the liturgy where the laity acquire the Christian spirit “from its foremost and indispensable font, which is the active participation i… […]

Denver Newsroom, Aug 6, 2020 / 06:00 am (CNA).- Professor Angela Alaimo O’Donnell has studied Flannery O’Connor, an American Catholic author from the South, rather extensively. She wrote a book on O’Connor’s treatment of racial issues specifically, entitled “Radical Ambivalence: Race in Flannery O’Connor.”

So when the Fordham professor heard that Flannery O’Connor’s name would be removed from a residence hall at Loyola University Maryland, due to concerns over apparently racist remarks in some of her personal correspondence, O’Donnell decided to act by petitioning the university to reconsider. Her petition has been signed by more than 200 people, including O’Connor scholars, theologians, and writers of color.

So far, O’Donnell has not received a response.

“I was hoping to get a note from Father Linnane (president of Loyola University) just acknowledging the letter, but I haven’t heard anything from him. He probably is besieged by a lot of letters. I’m hoping that he will eventually respond, but so far I haven’t heard anything,” O’Donnell told CNA.

“I thought it was a great teachable moment for Loyola to have an opportunity to talk with students and take their time. I really don’t understand the rush,” she said. O’Donnell’s advocacy for O’Connor is not so much about a building, she said, and it’s not to deny O’Connor’s racist comments.

Rather, it’s about the swift erasure – the canceling, if you will – of O’Connor without the campus community considering a fuller picture of her person and what her work has to say to the current generation.

“I know Father Linnane says people can still teach Flannery O’Connor, that she’s not being removed from campus,” O’Donnell said. “But I don’t think Father Linnane realizes that, effectively, she’s not going to be on campus anymore, unless the faculty member (teaching her works) is tenured and also is very brave, and wants to have these conversations about race.” 

O’Connor was a short story writer, novelist, and essayist as well as a devout Catholic who attended daily Mass. She lived most of her life in Georgia and became renowned for her biting Southern Gothic style of fiction. She died of lupus in 1964, at the age of 39.

Attention was drawn to apparent racism in O’Connor’s personal writings by “How Racist Was Flannery O’Connor?”, a piece that appeared in the New Yorker in June. There, Paul Elie wrote that “letters and postcards she sent home from the North in 1943 were made available to scholars only in 2014, and they show O’Connor as a bigoted young woman.” Some of the passages quoted by Elie had been published for the first time in O’Donnell’s book.

O’Donnell said professors should not ignore O’Connors comments about race in her correspondence. Rather, she said, they should be seen as just one piece of the full picture of who Flannery O’Connor was, and be compared to the way she treats racism in her works of fiction.

“It’s got to be a conversation about race. I welcome that,” O’Donnell said, adding that the purpose of her book in the first place was to genuinely pose the question of how Flannery can still be taught in classrooms given some of her problematic racist comments in her personal letters.

“How do you teach Flannery O’Connor in the classroom? What can you do? Because I think it’s worth us considering it from the angle of pedagogy and culture, how you encounter every writer. Every writer needs to be reevaluated with each new generation, and then we decide what it is that he or she has to offer, and whether or not it’s helpful. And so this is a really good moment to reevaluate O’Connor in a thoughtful way,” she said, “and not the way that Elie does, and not the way that Loyola has done.”

In many ways, O’Donnell noted, O’Connor is the perfect author for this moment in history especially because of how she treats racism in her work, which faces its ugliness head-on and views it as a sin.

“Her stories are powerful, iconic stories, and very realistic gritty depictions of what it was like to be alive in a culture, the very, very racist culture of the American south during the Civil Rights Movement, during a time of enormous change,” O’Donnell said.

And O’Connor’s favorite description of her job as a fiction writer was to live “hotly in pursuit of the real,” O’Donnell said, so her stories “do not look away from very difficult and challenging situations.”

In her stories, O’Connor portrays “a complex sort of dance that black Americans and white Americans had to negotiate in order to live together in a segregated culture. And it always reflects badly on white people, because they were – most white people are – ignorant of their racism. And the few who do know it oftentimes are proud of it and think it’s a badge of honor. And she just mercilessly exposes those people,” O’Donnell said.

O’Donnell said there are “all sorts of ways” in which Americans today experience the same or similar kinds of racism, whether personally or systemically. “And the fact that we have this writer who exposes it so knowingly, and exposes it to censure, it’s a powerful way of seeing how far we have not come,” she said.

As a devout Catholic, O’Connor also “thought about this in theological terms. She thought that racism was a sin. A sin against God, a sin against human beings, a sin against grace. And so in a number of her stories the people who are the most egregious racists really get their comeuppance in the course of the story,” she added.

Alice Walker, an African American writer and feminist who grew up in the same area of Georgia as the O’Connors, was one of the signatories of the petition sent to Loyola University Maryland. The letter opens with a statement from Walker, who said: “We must honor Flannery for growing. Hide nothing of what she was, and use that to teach.”

Walker herself is an admirer of O’Connor’s work. In an essay that appeared in the Dec. 1994/Jan. 1995 edition of Sojourners magazine, Walker wrote that it was O’Connor’s biting portrayal of Southern white people that initially captured her attention.

“It was for her description of Southern white women that I appreciated her work at first, because when she set her pen to them not a whiff of magnolia hovered in the air (and the tree itself might never have been planted), and yes, I could say, yes, these white folks without the magnolia (who are indifferent to the tree’s existence), and these black folks without melons and superior racial patience, these are like Southerners that I know,” Walker wrote.

O’Donnell added that Walker has also, in her past critiques of O’Connor, “really admired the fact that O’Connor did not pretend to be able to get inside the minds of her black characters.”

O’Connor admitted at one point that she did not write from the perspective of African Americans because she did not understand them.

“And so Walker saw this as a kind of a respectful distance that O’Connor kept, allowing black characters to have their own privacy, so she never pretends to know what they’re thinking.”

“I think what Walker valued was that she could see in O’Connor, this development, this struggle, and was wrestling with the problem of race. And…it’s foolish and shortsighted not to honor that and acknowledge that as being human.”

Something else that people today can learn from O’Connor is how to face and challenge the racism that exists even within themselves, O’Donnell said.

“All of us who are born and raised in this white privileged culture, we imbibe this from the time that we’re born into the world, and it’s impossible for us to escape it. It’s just impossible,” she said.

“The best that we can do is be knowledgeable about the fact, be knowledgeable of our blindnesses, and try to work against them and do what we call now anti-racist work. And one of the forms that anti-racist work took for O’Connor was: ‘Okay, I know I have this problem. I know all the people I live with and love have this problem, including my mother and including my aunt and my friends. And so I’m going to write stories that expose this problem.’”

For those who want to read some of O’Connor’s most poignant fiction that treats racism, O’Donnell recommended four stories. The first, “Revelation,” was one of O’Connor’s “last stories and one of her most powerful stories. It is a portrait of a racist who has a wake-up call and understands very clearly what she’s guilty of by the end of the story. And in some ways that person, that main character, is a portrait of O’Connor.”

Another story by O’Connor about race that O’Donnell recommended is “Everything That Rises Must Converge,” in which one of the characters seeks to atone for the racism of his mother, and must confront his own hypocrisy. 

Another story, “The Geranium,” is one of the first that O’Connor ever published.

“It’s about an old white man who goes to live in New York with his daughter, and is horrified when he moves next door to black people. And he has a wake-up call,” O’Donnell said.

“And the last story that Flannery worked on on her death bed was a rewriting of that same story, it’s called ‘Judgment Day.’ So, O’Connor’s work – she only wrote 31 stories- is book-ended by these two stories and that story she rewrote four times in the course of her life.”

“And with each new version, her depiction of the relationship between the races gets more and more complex as she goes along. That is a sign of somebody who, throughout the course of her professional life as a writer, is growing and changing and developing,” O’Donnell said.

“She’s at war with herself in many ways and trying to figure out what she thinks. But the victory is you can see in the stories where she’s going and what she thinks,” she added. 

O’Donnell said that going forward, she hopes that Flannery O’Connor gets a fairer and more honest consideration than a cursory glance at some of her racist remarks in her personal letters.

At Loyola University Maryland, Flannery O’Connor’s name could be used on a more appropriate building, such as a literary arts building or theater, she noted.

“I would really just encourage people to read the stories and decide for themselves what O’Connor is doing,” O’Donnell said. “And also to understand that the things that she says in her letters are problematic. Absolutely, no question about it. Nobody is going to side step that.”

“But we don’t remember Flannery O’Connor for her letters. We remember her for her stories. That’s where we go when we have to decide whether that work is worth it. It’s a decision we have to make.”

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Denver Newsroom, Aug 6, 2020 / 03:04 am (CNA).- The Diocese of Providence, Rhode Island, is welcoming eight new seminarians this year – the highest number of incoming seminarians in nearly four decades.

“Some great news to share: The Providence Diocese is welcoming 8 *new seminarians* this year, the most new seminarians in almost 40 years,” said Bishop Thomas Tobin of Providence, RI on Twitter last week.

“Pray for our seminarians, including the new students. God said, ‘I will give you shepherds,’ and indeed He is!” the bishop added.

Father Brian Morris, vocations director for Our Lady of Providence Seminary in the diocese, attributed the recent increase in seminarians to the community’s dedicated prayer efforts. He told CNA the seminary has held adoration every Thursday for an increase in vocations, and parishes have hosted similar efforts.

“It’s the result of a lot of prayer. People throughout our diocese have been praying diligently for more vocations, more young men who consider the call to the priesthood,” he said.

“Why God chose this year? I don’t know, that’s up to him, but I think some of it is to deal us some good news. [We are] in a time right now [of] negativity and so much going on. This is wonderful news for our diocese, and I think God is showing us a little light in the dark.”

Like many areas in the U.S., the Diocese of Providence has faced a clergy shortage as older priests retire, including some who had been responsible for multiple parishes. These parishes are often then faced with practical challenges, such as limited sacramental ministry.

In addition, some parishes have closed in recent years as church attendance drops.

Father Chris Murphy, the rector of the seminary, told CNA that the increase in seminarians is encouraging. However, he stressed that quantity alone is not the goal.

“We want to pray for good priests, not just many priests … The Church is not desperate for many priests. The Church is desperate for good and Holy priests,” he said.

“We have to remember to trust in the Lord that he’s going to provide the shepherds for the Church that the Church needs at the current time.”

The diocese has also taken serious steps to enhance its vocation efforts, Murphy said. Events such as Hiking with the Saints offer opportunities to interact with priests. Additionally, the diocese reintroduced Quo Vadis retreats – which allow high school boys to deepen their faith and learn more about vocations – after a several year hiatus.

While these events and retreats are helpful, Murphy said, the greatest fruits have been borne from building personal relationships with young men over the years. These relationships have included one-on-one meetings or phone conversations while the men are away at college.

“I would say even more important than [events] is the example of the witness of the priests in these men’s lives – their pastors, their chaplains, their theology teachers at the high schools for the Catholic high school students,” he said.

The priest said that he tries to provide opportunities for fraternity, but added, “truth be told, I think that a lot of the work is done at the local level through the parishes.”

Father Morris said the increase in seminarians is a sign of hope for the local Church and community.

“I just think it’s a wonderful, hopeful image to see these young men, who come from very diverse backgrounds and [have] different personalities, to show that there is not like a cookie-cutter image of a priest, to show that young men are still looking at something greater than what the world is offering them,” he said.

“It’s encouraging people that it’s okay to give your life to Christ, to give your life to God and not be afraid of what you’re missing out in this world because there’s something greater.”

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