Tabernacle stolen from Canadian Catholic cathedral 

Lima, Peru, May 3, 2017 / 12:06 am (CNA/EWTN News).- In a radio interview for the Feast of St. Joseph the Worker, a cardinal from Peru discussed the sanctification of work and outlined a typical day in his own life.

“How many hours does a cardinal work?” asked journalist Miguel Humberto Aguirre. “I think all of them,” replied Cardinal Juan Luis Cipriani of Lima.

In his weekly Saturday radio program on station RPP April 29, Cardinal Cipriani said that his day usually starts at 5:00 a.m. and normally ends around 10 or 11 at night.

He said that he gets up “early to be able to pray because there’s a moment for prayer, for the Divine Office where there won’t be phone calls or interruptions. So you try to do it first thing in the morning. Very early, I go into the chapel and many times I celebrate Mass” at that time.

Then, the archbishop continued, “comes work itself, and part of the work is to be informed about what’s going on in the country and the world, that is, to read news about the Pope, things about Peru,” and other topics.

Then comes “the office like anybody else: people who want me to bless their house, people who are going to get married, people with some difficulty, times to meet with priests who want to talk, I go to a hospital to bless a facility, I talk with a person who has a problem in their home life, and so on.”

Cardinal Cipriani also said that an important part of his daily work is that spent “praying the Rosary or reading a little theology to keep up to date.”

“I also have to go and attend social obligations. Sometimes a family invites you to some anniversary.” In the end, he reflected, “you spend the entire day serving. My time is for others, I don’t have my own time.”

“That’s the way it is for everybody,” he continued. “In the case of a married man, your time is for your wife, your children and your grandchildren, you don’t close yourself off.”

At the end of the day, he said, “to relax a little bit, I watch NBA basketball.” The cardinal himself was part of Peru’s national basketball team in the 1960s.

The cardinal also touched on the idea of sanctifying our work, pointing to St. Joseph as the patron in this regard.

The first key in seeking to sanctify work is to perform one’s tasks well, whatever they may be. “So right now we’re working on the radio, let’s do it right,” he told the radio host as an example. “May the people listen to us and say ‘it helped me, it was well done, it gave us some insights, it’s been inspirational for us’.”

Similarly, he went on, “the person who plays soccer should play it well, try to score goals, try to win. The person who’s in Congress should try to make proper laws, study the issues, attend your meetings. Do you work well.”

“We spend a lot of time engaged in our work, whether it’s at the office or at home. From the time we have breakfast and get ready, and then when we come back home and take care of the kids. We have to find God there,” he emphasized.

The second key to sanctifying work is found in the virtues, Cardinal Cipriani said.

“And you who are working, how to do you live out honesty, joy, generosity, justice, patience?” he reflected. “Do you do your work because the boss is looking, or do you do it knowing that you must do it well?”

“I sanctify myself if I do the work well, and if I do it before my Creator and my Father,” he emphasized.

[…]

Fernando Villavicencio, a candidate for president in Ecuador, was shot and killed Aug. 9, 2023, by an unidentified man at a political rally. / Credit: Christian Medina – National Assembly of Ecuador (CC BY-SA 2.0)

ACI Prensa Staff, Aug 10, 2023… […]

Quito, Ecuador, Nov 16, 2020 / 11:50 am (CNA).- Cardinal Raúl Eduardo Vela Chiriboga, who served as Archbishop of Quito from 2003 to 2010, died Sunday after spending several weeks in palliative care.

Cardinal Vela, who was 86, died of natural causes at the Saint Camillus Hospice in Quito Nov. 15, the archdiocese told ACI Prensa, CNA’s Spanish language news partner.

The cardinal had received palliative care at the hospice “for several weeks due to various health complications,” the archdiocese said.

Fr. Alberto Redaelli, the director of the Saint Camillus Hospice, told the archdiocese that the cardinal died “accompanied by his closest family and friends” and “moments before his death they had been praying Vespers.”

The funeral Mass will be said. Nov. 17 at 10:00 a.m. in the Cathedral of Quito.

The Ecuadorian bishops’ conference said they “mourn his loss, but we are consoled knowing that as a faithful servant, God will receive him into his glory. We thank God for his generous dedication to the Church and the Ecuadorian people,” and asked “all the faithful for their prayers for his eternal rest.”

Cardinal Vela was born Jan. 1, 1934. He studied philosophy and theology at the San José Major Seminary in Quito and was ordained a priest of the Diocese of Riobamba July 28, 1957.

In 1969 he was appointed undersecretary of the Ecuadorian bishops’ conference.

Vela was appointed auxiliary bishop of Guayaquil April 20, 1972. He served as secretary of the bishops’ conference from 1972 to 1975.

On April 29, 1975 he was appointed Bishop of Azogues, where he served until 1989 when he was appointed bishop of the Ecuadorian military ordinariate. He served in that position until 2003, when he was appointed Archbishop of Quito.

Vela served as Archbishop of Quito until Sept. 11, 2010, when he was 76. He was elevated to cardinal that November.

Pope Francis named him his envoy to the Tenth National Eucharistic and Marian Congress of Peru held in Piura in 2015, and also made him his envoy to the jubilee for the 400th anniversary of the death of Saint Rose of Lima, held in 2017 in Peru.

In 2015, shortly before the Synod on the Family, Cardinal Vela told CNA that “The Church is the depository of the faith, and that faith is the teaching of Jesus: we can’t go against his commandment.”

He said there is no room “to expect ‘extraordinary things’ from the synod, outside of the doctrine of the faith,” and that “fundamental truths” cannot be changed, even “by more news outlets stirring things up by saying things contrary to, or wanting to misinterpret, what the Lord commands.”

The cardinal said there is a need to develop “a better pastoral approach to the faithful, as well as to the faithful who are separated, or who are in other unions.”

“However, this does not mean that they will again have the opportunity to return to receiving Communion, because their situation is irregular.”

What can be done, he added, is “to give them other (spiritual) ‘arms’, if the term can be used, such as spiritual communion, and feeling supported and aided in prayer, so that they can discover the mercy God has for each of us.”

[…]