CNA Staff, Jan 7, 2021 / 07:19 pm (CNA).- Archbishop Francisco Moreno Barrón of Tijuana, on the border of Mexico and the United States, reported January 6 that he “remarkably improved” from COVID-19, which he had contracted after undergoing a prostate surgery and put him in danger of death.
In his statement, Archbishop Moreno Barrón said he will continue, “with some care for my operation to stay at home, waiting for a negative COVID-19 test result.”
He said he will also continue to “take care of my immune system and the lung fields that were affected.”
The Mexican archbishop thanked everyone “for their valuable prayers, which strengthened me, and for all their messages, which I could not answer in my isolation also from social networks.”
“As your archbishop, I want to be in the best physical condition to continue walking together, proclaiming that Christ lives risen in our midst and giving a new face of the Church in the midst of our society,” he said.
“I express to all my love as a father and pastor and I bless you always,” he concluded.
Four bishops and more than 120 priests have died in Mexico from COVID-19. Nine other Mexican bishops have tested positive, and most have recovered or are making favorable progress.
According to the Government of Mexico, as of January 5, 2021, more than 1.6 million cases of coronavirus have been confirmed in the country, and more than 146,000 deaths have been registered.
In the state of Baja California, more than 35,000 cases and more than 5,000 deaths have been recorded.
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Students participating in the CEDE workshop for St. John’s College High School gather for a group photo at the basilica at Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C., in November 2022. / Credit: Photo courtesy of CUA
CNA Staff, Apr 20, 2024 / 06:00 am (CNA).
When Luke Burgis moved to Silicon Valley to start a business, he never expected he would become a seminarian and then go on to launch entrepreneurship programs for Catholic students.
Burgis had attended NYU, worked on Wall Street, started several businesses in Silicon Valley, and moved to Las Vegas before deciding he wanted more meaning in his life. With the encouragement of a friend, he rekindled his Catholic faith. After five years in seminary, he ultimately discerned he would not become a priest, but he still found himself in need of deeper meaning in his work.
So he founded Catholic Entrepreneurship and Design Experience (CEDE, pronounced “seed”) in 2020 to help students across the country connect their working lives with their faith.
Four years later, CEDE is a thriving organization based at Catholic University of America (CUA) in Washington, D.C., with programs and educational materials across the world. Burgis is the entrepreneur-in-residence and assistant clinical professor of business at CUA. He has developed educational materials shared with Catholic schools and home-school communities in addition to teaching business classes at CUA.
“I didn’t understand how I could actually live out my values and be a Catholic in the business world that I was in, even after I’d had that reconversion experience,” Burgis said when asked what inspired him to found CEDE.
“But I knew that there was some gap that we had to close in Catholic education between the theoretical or the principles of Catholic social teaching and the way that it actually plays out on the ground, if you’re trying to start something,” he explained. “We launched CEDE to try to reintegrate these disciplines.”
This year, Burgis is launching a new project for CEDE — a summer entrepreneurship program for high school students. The 10-week virtual Startup Venture Challenge will teach high schoolers how to start a business.
“CEDE introduces students to basic principles of entrepreneurship within the context of Catholic social teaching and helps them understand that ultimately they are the entrepreneurs of their own lives, whether they ever start a business or not,” Burgis said.
“We’re trying to train young Catholics to think more like an entrepreneur, which means finding creative ways to solve problems or to see solutions where other people only see problems,” he said. “We think that that’s really important for all Catholics, period, and that if we had a more entrepreneurial Church, we would have a more adaptive and creative Church.”
Luke Burgis speaks at a CEDE Workshop in November 2022. Credit: Photo courtesy of CUA
But being a “Catholic entrepreneur” isn’t necessarily about starting a business, Burgis noted.
“Our goal here is not really to create more business owners,” he explained. “Our goal is to help more young Catholics in Catholic schools be equipped and confident to go out into the world, whatever their vocation is.”
Burgis wanted to connect what he learned about business with Catholic teaching.
“[At NYU] I just learned: ‘Here’s what profit is. Profit is good. Pursue it,’” he recalled. “Most of my classmates simply wanted to make as much money as they could.”
“When I left seminary, I realized that there was a real disintegration or gap between what I had learned at my Catholic schools … and what things actually look like in practice when you’re actually out there in the world trying to do things,” he explained.
CEDE’s model of education is about “experiential learning,” “creative problem-solving,” and independence and “differs” from the rules-based form of education many American students are accustomed to, Burgis said.
“That’s much of what being an entrepreneur feels like,” he said of the model. “You’re not given a roadmap, you’re not told what to do, you have to figure things out, and you have to make decisions and take responsibility for those decisions.”
Burgis said it will feel like “a challenge.”
“You’re being challenged, being given this mission,” he said. “We want to empower the students to accomplish that mission by working together and finding creative ways to solve problems on their own without being told how to do it. We actually want to make them a little uncomfortable.”
Students don’t need to have business ideas to join, as the first three weeks will be spent building up an idea. The full schedule involves a discernment stage, launching, testing, and then a resources and community stage.
“We want them to feel what it feels like to have a fire ignited within themselves, to exercise their own creativity, to take ownership of it, to take total responsibility, and to be proud of that, and to be able to serve others through their gifts and talents,” Burgis said.
The program runs from June 10 to Aug. 12 and is fully virtual and amenable to the students’ work schedules. The cost is $250, with scholarships available. Applications are open for teenagers ages 14–18.
Bishop Emeritus Howard Hubbard of Albany / Catholic News Agency
Denver Newsroom, Mar 28, 2022 / 14:34 pm (CNA).
In a deposition released March 25, the former Bishop of Albany admitted that he did not report several instances of alleged sexual a… […]
Boston, Mass., Jun 27, 2017 / 03:25 am (CNA/EWTN News).- A case about whether a troubled teenager convinced her depressed boyfriend to commit suicide through her words and text messages may have possible implications for physician-assisted suicide cases.
On June 16, a Massachusetts judge ruled that Michelle Carter was found guilty of involuntary manslaughter, for words and texts exchanged with her depressed boyfriend Conrad Roy III as he attempted to commit suicide two years ago. Both Carter and Roy were teenagers at the time.
The ruling of manslaughter was decided based on Carter’s words to Roy, mostly in a phone call, urging him to re-enter a truck she knew to be full of carbon dioxide, where he was attempting his suicide. Carter had also sent Roy numerous texts encouraging his suicide and later texted a friend about her phone call with Roy.
In Massachusetts, an involuntary manslaughter charge can be brought when an individual causes the death of another person by engaging in behavior that is considered reckless enough to cause harm.
While some states have laws that criminalize the encouragement of suicide, Massachusetts does not, complicating Carter’s case.
Legal experts wonder whether the case could set new legal precedents when it comes to legalizing assisted suicide.
Daniel Medwed, professor of law and criminal justice at Northeastern University school of law, told USA Today that the case may set a precedent of criminalizing those who sympathize with someone who expresses a desire for assisted suicide.
“Don’t forget, there’s a still a big societal debate going on about assisted suicide,” he said. “This sort of verdict would imply that anyone being sympathetic to a loved one could be at fault.”
Matthew Segal, a lawyer with the American Civil Liberties Union of Massachusetts, said the verdict “is saying that what she did is killing him, that her words literally killed him, that the murder weapon here was her words.”
Anti-assisted suicide groups believe that the case is significant because of the weight it places on outside pressures on already vulnerable people to take their lives, though it remains unclear if the case will set any legal precedent regarding the issue in reality.
Tim Rosales, a spokesperson for Patient’s Rights Action Fund, told CNA that when it comes to assisted suicide, there are often outside pressures that can influence the person’s decision to end their life.
“Whether it’s the denial of a certain type of treatment, or there is the insinuation by a physician or a family member or someone close to them about the potential of assisted suicide versus (continued care), all of those go into someone’s mindset and decision making,” he said.
These outside pressures can be particularly strong “when they’re in a vulnerable state, and mental illness as well as physical illness can be one of those things that puts people in a vulnerable state,” Rosales said.
“I think we have to be exceedingly cautious and that’s one of the big reasons why you have a lot of opposition to something like assisted suicide, because at its very core it is fraught with the possibility for abuse or dangers,” he said.
“I think in (the Carter case) certainly the dynamics surrounding it kind of give us an indication of how vulnerable people can be at times and how influential those close to us are during those vulnerable times.”
John B. Kelly, New England Regional Director of the disability advocacy and anti-assisted suicide group Not Dead Yet, told CNA that he does not believe the Carter case will affect future assisted suicide legislation because the decision drew heavily from a 2002 case, Commonweath v. Levesque.
In the case of Commonwealth v. Levesque, homeless couple Thomas S. Levesque and Julie Ann Barnes were found responsible for the death of six firefighters who ran into a factory building as it burned. Levesque and Barnes had been living in the factory, escaped the fire and failed to report it.
In the Carter case, Judge Lawrence Moniz drew from the case directly in his verdict, saying that “where one’s actions create a life-threatening risk to another, there is a duty to take reasonable steps to alleviate the risk. The reckless failure to fulfill this duty can result in a charge of manslaughter.”
“I don’t think that it adds any legal precedent to deciding what are words and what’s coercion (in assisted suicide cases),” Kelly told CNA.
“But I think we can say that words matter, and that this ruling underlines the commonsense notion that we make choices in a context, and that those contexts can be influenced by other people,” he said.
“Assisted suicide proponents argue that an individual makes that choice freely without any impact, but we know that it’s hard to choose…when you’re seen as a burden by those around you and your doctor thinks you would be better off dead, those are influences that would be very difficult for vulnerable people to resist.”
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