Cardinal: Danish bill requiring translation of homilies threatens religious freedom

CNA Staff, Dec 2, 2020 / 03:01 am (CNA).- In the wake of several suspected Islamist attacks in France this year, President Emmanuel Macron has asked the country’s Muslim leaders to sign a “charter of republican values” agreeing to a rejection of Islam as a political movement.

According to the BBC, Macron’s proposed charter is one part of a wider government strategy to curb foreign influence and prevent violence and threats from extremists.

Macron has, since his 2017 election, emphasized support for secular government and has criticized what he calls “Islamist separatism,” encouraging the nation’s Muslims to integrate into French society. As part of legislation that Macron has introduced to tackle extremism, homeschooling would be restricted.

The charter will, among other things, state that Islam is a religion and not a political movement, the BBC reports.

Members of the French Council of the Muslim Faith agreed in November to form a national council of imams, and the CFCM is set to meet with Macron this week to discuss the proposed charter. The CFCM will be charged with accrediting imams.

France is home to Western Europe’s largest Muslim minority, at around 5 million.

The debate over the charter and the “French values” it contains continues following at least three suspected Islamist terrorist attacks during 2020.

In mid-October, a Muslim student beheaded teacher Samuel Paty after Paty showed his class a cartoon depicting Muhammad.

Eyewitnesses said that suspect Abdoullakh Abouyedovich Anzorov shouted “Allahu akbar”— Arabic for “God is great”— as he murdered Paty near the middle school where he taught. The 18-year-old Russian national of Chechen origin was shot dead by police shortly after the murder.

Public schools in France held a minute of silence in tribute to Paty Nov. 2, and some classrooms held discussions on freedom of expression.

The discussions of freedom of expression led to the police investigation of at least 17 minors, one of whom is Catholic, the New York Times reported.

The justice ministry said 14 minors were interrogated in police stations or held in custody. Some of their families were questioned about their religious practices.

One 16-year-old near Marseille was arrested for continuing to listen to music on headphones during the minute of silence.

Another Islamic attacker on Oct. 29 killed three people inside Notre-Dame de Nice. Police shot and arrested the perpetrator, Brahim Aouissaoui. Aouissaoui reportedly arrived in Europe in late September, first at the Italian island Lampedusa before traveling to France.

Other attacks took place in France Oct. 29. In Montfavet, near Avignon, a man waving a handgun made threats and was killed by the police two hours after the Nice attack. Radio station Europe 1 said the man was also shouting “Allahu Akbar.”

Mohammed Moussaoui, president of the CFCM, condemned the terrorist attack and asked French Muslims to cancel their festivities for Mawlid, the Oct. 29 celebration of Muhammad’s birthday, “as a sign of mourning and solidarity with the victims and their loved ones.”

Macron introduced sweeping anti-radicalization legislation following the attacks, which is set to be debated in the French cabinet Dec. 9. Restrictions on homeschooling are among the provisions of the bill.

Other provisions of the bill include stricter punishments for those who intimidate public officials on religious grounds; extending national identification numbers— which most students in France already have— to homeschoolers to ensure that students are attending school; and a ban on sharing personal information that allows people who want to harm a person to find them, a practice known in the U.S. as “doxxing.”

The concept of laïcité, or secularism, has been a fixture of French law since 1905. At that time, the Third Republic officially established state secularism, causing a subsequent wave of anti-Catholicism, which included the end of government funding for religious schools, mandatory civil marriage, and the removal of chaplains from the army.

The principles of laïcité have evolved over the years to apply to private citizens as well as the government, and in recent decades been applied to Muslim women who wear hijabs or other religious garb in public.

During summer 2016, the Council of State, France’s highest administrative court, ruled that the burkini ban in the town of Villeneuve-Loubet “seriously and clearly illegally breached fundamental freedoms,” including freedom of belief. 

On Nov. 30 this year, the French Council of State ruled that a proposed 30-person limit on Masses and other forms of public worship is a “disproportionate” government measure and must be modified by Dec. 2.

The country’s Catholic bishops welcomed the decision Nov. 29, saying in a statement that “reason has been recognized.”

France has suffered over a dozen Islamist terrorist attacks since 2015, including a January attack on the offices of Charlie Hebdo, a satirical newspaper, and a series of coordinated attacks in Paris during November 2015 that killed at least 130 people. The Islamic State claimed responsibility for the Paris attacks.

Father Jacques Hamel was beheaded by supporters of the Islamic State while offering Mass July 26, 2016. Following Paty’s killing this year, religious leaders gathered at a memorial to Hamel and laid a wreath in Paty’s honor.

In England, multiple Catholic bishops have expressed concern that the government’s push for “British values” in schools, meant to counter Islamist extremism, could instead harm sincere religious believers and burden Catholic schools.

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Pope Celestine V was canonized in 1313 and since 1327 has been buried in the Basilica of Santa Maria di Collemaggio in L’Aquila. / Daniel Ibáñez / CNA

Rome Newsroom, Aug 21, 2022 / 03:38 am (CNA).

Peter of Morrone was an unusual choice for pope.

He was not a cardinal, for one, but a Benedictine monk and hermit living in a remote mountainous cave. He was also around 80 years of age.

But the Church’s 11 living cardinals had spent more than two years in a stalemate over the new pope’s election. So when the saintly Peter delivered to the cardinals the message that God would punish them for any further delays — his name was put forward, and soon after, on Jul. 5, 1294, a consensus was reached.

Bishops carried to Peter’s mountain hermitage the news of his election to the papacy. He reportedly was reluctant to accept, even trying to flee. Still, on Aug. 29, 1294, he was crowned Pope Celestine V in the Basilica of Santa Maria di Collemaggio in the city of L’Aquila.

According to historical sources, besides kings, nobles, and cardinals, more than 200,000 people attended the ceremony, a grand moment of celebration.

One month later, one of Celestine’s first actions as pope was to declare the possibility for anyone to receive a plenary indulgence who, having confessed his or her sins and sincerely repented of them, devotedly visited the Basilica of Santa Maria di Collemaggio between sunset on Aug. 28 and sunset on Aug. 29, the feast of the martyrdom of St. John the Baptist.

A plenary indulgence is a grace granted by the Catholic Church through the merits of Jesus Christ, Mary, and all the saints to remove the temporal punishment due to sin.

Celestine’s indulgence was exceptional at the time, given it was available to anyone, regardless of status or wealth, and cost nothing except personal repentance at a time when indulgences were often tied to almsgiving. For this reason, some consider the Celestinian Forgiveness, as it came to be called, history’s first jubilee.

Unfortunately, Pope Celestine V did not reign long enough to see the legacy of his indulgence. As pope in 1294, he was also the ruler of the Papal States, but he soon proved to be an ineffectual political leader.

On Dec. 13, five months after his election, he resigned from the papacy.

Pope Boniface VIII, Celestine’s successor, imprisoned the former pope out of fear that opponents to the resignation might try to install Celestine as an antipope. Celestine V died a prisoner ten months later. 

Peter of Morrone was canonized in 1313 and since 1327 has been buried in the Basilica of Santa Maria di Collemaggio in L’Aquila.

According to Johannes Grohe, a professor of Medieval History, the Celestinian Forgiveness was the precursor to the Holy Years, or Jubilees, which the Church typically celebrates every 25 years. 

In 1300, Pope Boniface VIII issued a bull of indulgence proclaiming that Christians who confessed their sins, received the Eucharist and made a pilgrimage to Rome could receive a plenary indulgence.

Boniface VIII “was inspired” by Celestine V’s own “Jubilee” in L’Aquila, which started in 1294 and continued after his papal abdication and death, Grohe told EWTN News in an interview last month. “This indulgence of Pope Celestine V was the precursor, one could say, to the first great Jubilee.”

Both traditions continue to this day. In L’Aquila, the Celestinian Forgiveness, or Perdonanza Celestiniana as it is called in Italian, will celebrate its 728th year with a visit from Pope Francis on Aug. 28 to open the Holy Door.

Now a week-long festival, the Forgiveness has come to be an essential cultural, as well as spiritual, event.

Jubilee years in the Church, also called Holy Years, have continued throughout the centuries. A critical aspect of a Holy Year is the indulgence attached to walking through the Holy Door of one of Rome’s four major basilicas, including St. Peter’s.

Preparations are already underway in Rome and the Vatican for the next ordinary jubilee in 2025.

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Czestochowa, Poland, Jul 27, 2017 / 10:40 am (CNA/EWTN News).- Three hundred years ago this September the image of Our Lady of Czestochowa was crowned Queen and Protector of Poland by Clement XI.

Nearly 200 years after that, in 1909, the golden, bejeweled crowns of the image – one for Mary and one for the Christ Child– were stolen, along with a pearl “robe” also belonging to the image.

Following the theft, Our Lady was crowned again by St. Pius X in 1910, and later again by St. John Paul II in 2005, but the original crowns were never recovered.

Now, in honor of the 300th anniversary of the first coronation and as a gift to the Blessed Virgin Mary, the original crowns have been replicated in gold diadems created by an Italian artist and goldsmith renowned for his religious art.

The new crowns, which were blessed by Pope Francis May 17 at the Vatican, will be unveiled during a ceremony in Czestochowa July 28, the first anniversary of Pope Francis’ visit to the sanctuary during World Youth Day in Poland.

The crowning itself, the culmination of Poland’s Jubilee Year celebrations, will take place Sept. 8, the 300th anniversary of the first canonical coronation of the image of Our Lady of Czestochowa and the feast of the Nativity of Mary.

The artist of the new diadems, Michele Affidato, was chosen by the Pauline Fathers in charge of the Jasna Góra sanctuary for his skill and expertise in sacred art.

In the course of his work he has made many religious pieces, including golden reliquaries, and has met St. John Paul II, Benedict XVI, and Pope Francis.

He is based in the town of Crotone, in the southernmost region of Italy, which is along the sea and home to a “sister” shrine to Czestochowa called Our Lady of Capocolonna, also called the “Black Madonna.”

This shrine was dedicated as a “sister” shrine during the process of creating the new crowns and an image of Our Lady of Capocolonna was gifted to the Jasna Góra sanctuary.

Though it is uncertain exactly when the shrine in Crotone was built, it is believed it was constructed sometime between the eleventh and thirteenth centuries, one popular narrative saying it originated with the Greeks, a theory supported by the fact that the shrine is in the same area as an ancient Greek temple to the goddess Hera. Now, only a single column of the temple remains, called Capo Colonna.

More than 94 percent of Poland’s population being Catholic, the image of Our Lady of Czestochowa, also called the “Black Madonna,” has a significant meaning for Poles and is highly venerated throughout Europe.

The 2017 Jubilee Year was established through resolutions of the Polish government in December 2016, one resolution stating that “the image of the Mother of God at Jasna Góra is… one of the most important religious and material national treasures.”

Although the truly first crowning of the image as Queen and Protector of Poland was done by King John II Casimir in 1652, its first canonical coronation was by Clement XI in 1717 and is the one being honored this year.

A canonical coronation is a pious institutional act, wherein the Pope, through a bull, designates a crown or stellar halo be added to a Marian image under a specific devotional title in a particular area or diocese. The crowning of Our Lady of Czestochowa in 1717 was the first such coronation to take place outside Rome. 

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