Dodgers pitcher denounces team’s decision to honor anti-Catholic group: ‘God cannot be mocked’

Cambridge, Massachusetts, Apr 16, 2022 / 09:03 am (CNA).

One convert’s journey to Catholicism began with an invitation to an ice-cream social. 

Another says he instantly believed in the Real Presence the moment someone explained what the round object was that everyone was staring at during eucharistic adoration.

For a third, the poems of T.S. Eliot — and a seemingly random encounter with a priest on a public street — led to deeper questions about truth and faith.

Their paths differed but led them to the same destination: St. Paul’s Catholic Church in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where they are among 31 people set to be fully initiated into the Catholic Church during the Easter vigil Mass on Saturday, April 16.

That number of initiates is a record high for St. Paul’s, a nearly century-old Romanesque-style brick church whose bell tower looms over Harvard Square.

A scheduling backlog caused by the COVID-19 pandemic is partly responsible for the size of this year’s group of catechumens (non-baptized) and candidates (baptized non-Catholics.) But Father Patrick J. Fiorillo, the parochial vicar at St. Paul’s, believes there’s more to it than that.

“There’s definitely a significant segment of people who started thinking more deeply about their lives and faith during COVID-19,” Fiorillo said. “So, coming out of Covid has given them the occasion to take the next step and move forward.”

Fiorillo is the undergraduate chaplain for the Harvard Catholic Center, a chaplaincy based at St. Paul’s for undergraduate and graduate students at Harvard University and other academic institutions in the area. This year, 17 of the 31 initiates are Harvard students.

“Everybody assumes that, because this is the Harvard Catholic Center, that everybody here is very smart and therefore has a very highly intellectual orientation towards their faith,” Fiorillo told CNA.

“That is definitely true of some people. But I would say the majority are not here because of intellectually thinking their way into the faith. Some are. But the majority are just kind of ordinary life circumstances, just seeking, questioning the ways of the world, and just trying to get in touch with this desire on their heart for something more,” he said. 

Fiorillo says welcoming converts into the Church at the Easter vigil is one of the highlights of his ministry.

“It’s an honor. It gives me hope just seeing all this new life and new faith here. So much in one place,” he said.

“When I tell other people about it, it gives them hope to hear that many young people are still converting to Catholicism, and they’re doing it in a place as secular as Cambridge.”

Prior to the Easter vigil, CNA spoke with five of St. Paul’s newest converts. Here are their stories:

‘This is what I’ve been looking for’ 

Katie Cabrera, a 19-year-old Harvard freshman, told CNA that she was excited to experience the “transformative power of Christ through his body and blood” at Mass for the first time at the Easter vigil. 

A native of Dorchester, Massachusetts, she said she was baptized as a child and comes from a family of Dominican immigrants. Her father, who grew up in an extremely impoverished area, lacked a formal education, but always kept the traditions of the Catholic faith close to him in order to persevere in difficult times. 

Her father’s love for her and his Catholic faith deeply inspired Cabrera, and served as an anchor for her faith throughout her life. 

Growing up, however, Cabrera attended a non-denominational church with her mother. Because she felt the church’s teachings lacked an emphasis on God’s love and mercy, Cabrera eventually left.

“Even though I Ieft, I always knew that I believed in God,” Cabrera said. “So, I was at a place where I felt kind of lost, because I always had that faith, but I didn’t know what to do with it.”

After she arrived at Harvard, she accepted a friend’s invitation to attend an ice-cream social at the Harvard Catholic Center — “and that was like, sort of, how it all started,” she told CNA.

Once she was added to the email list for the center’s events, she felt a “calling” that she “really wanted to officially become Catholic” after many difficult years without a faith community. 

Catholic doctrine about the sacraments was no hurdle for Cabrera, as she credits Fiorillo with explaining the faith well. 

“There was a void that existed in my heart,” she said. “As soon as Father Patrick started teaching about marriage and family, theology of the body, and the sacraments, I was like, ‘This is what I’ve been looking for my whole life.’”

‘What’s the Eucharist?’

“What is that thing on the thing?”

Kent Shi laughs when he recalls how perplexed he was the first time he attended eucharistic adoration at St. Mary’s of the Assumption in Cambridge.

Someone helpfully explained that what Shi was looking at was the Eucharist displayed inside a monstrance.

“What’s the Eucharist?” he wanted to know.

For many non-Catholics considering entering the Catholic Church, the Real Presence can be a major obstacle.

Not Shi. He says that once the Eucharist was explained to him that day, he instantly believed.

Shi, 25, told CNA that he considered himself an agnostic for most of his life, meaning he neither believed nor disbelieved in God.

Between his first and second years as a graduate student in Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, however, he accepted Christ and started attending services at a Presbyterian church.

One day in the summer of 2021, a crucifix outside St. Paul’s that Shi says he “must have passed multiple times a week for months and never noticed” caught his eye, and deeply moved him.

Shortly after, he accepted a friend’s invitation to attend eucharistic adoration at St. Mary’s even though he “didn’t know what adoration meant.” Unaware of what he was about to walk into, Shi asked a friend what the dress code was for adoration. His friend replied, “Respectful.”

And so, respectfully dressed in a button-down shirt and slacks, Shi sat in the front row with his friend, only a few feet from the monstrance. That’s when the questions began.

It wasn’t long after that encounter that Shi began attending Mass at St. Paul’s and the parish’s RCIA (Rite of Christian Initiation for Adults) program. Shi asked CNA readers to pray for him and his fellow RCIA classmates.

“There’s a lot of prodigal sons and daughters here, so we would very much appreciate that,” he said, “especially me.”

Poetry and art opened the door

For Loren Brown, choosing to attend a secular university like Harvard proved to be “providential.”

The 25-year-old junior from La Center, Washington, said he comes from a “lapsed” Catholic family and wasn’t baptized.

He didn’t think much about the faith until the spring semester of his freshman year, when, he says, Catholic friends of his “began to question my lack of commitment to faith.”

Later, when students were sent home to take classes virtually due to the pandemic, he had time to reflect and began to read some of the books they’d recommended to him. The poetry of T.S. Eliot (his favorite set of poems being “Four Quartets”) and the “Confessions” by St. Augustine, in particular, “pulled me towards the faith,” he said.

Brown describes his conversion as a “gradual process” which backed him into a “logical corner.” But a chance meeting with a priest also played a pivotal role.

One day in the summer of 2021 while walking back to his dormitory he encountered a man wearing a priestly collar outside St. Paul’s Church on busy Mount Auburn Street.

It was Father George Salzmann, O.S.F.S., graduate chaplain of the Harvard Catholic Center.

“He asked me how I was doing, what I was studying, and we immediately found a common interest in St. Augustine,” Brown told CNA. 

“You know, there’s this great window of St. Augustine inside St. Paul’s and you should come see it,” Brown remembers the gregarious priest telling him. Salzmann wound up giving Brown a brief tour of the church, which was completed in 1923.

The next week, Brown found himself sitting in a pew for his first Sunday Mass at St. Paul’s. He hasn’t missed a Sunday since, a routine that ultimately led him to join the RCIA program that fall.

Brown says he now realizes that coming to Harvard was about more than majoring in education.

“What I wanted out of Harvard has completely changed,” he said. “Instead of an education that prepares me for a job or a career, I want one that forms me as a moral being and a human.”

‘I can’t do this alone. Please help me.’

Verena Kaynig-Fittkau, 42, is a German immigrant who came to the U.S. 10 years ago with her husband to do her post-doctoral research in biomedical image processing at Harvard’s engineering school.

The couple settled in Cambridge, where they had their first child. Two subsequent pregnancies ended in miscarriage, however. That second loss was overwhelming for Kaynig-Fittkau, who says she was raised as a “secular Lutheran” without any strong faith.

“It broke me and a lot of my pride and made me realize that I can’t do things by myself,” she told CNA.

She found herself on knees one Thanksgiving, pleading with God. “I can’t do this alone,” she said. “Please help me.” 

She says God answered her prayer by introducing her to another mother, who she met at a playground. She was a Christian who later invited Kaynig-Fittkau to attend services at a Presbyterian church in Somerville, Massachusetts.

In that church, there was a lot of emphasis on “faith alone,” she said. But Kaynig-Fittkau, who now works for Adobe and is the mother of two girls, kept questioning if her faith was deep enough. 

Then one day she stumbled upon a YouTube video titled “The hour that will change your life,” in which Father Mike Schmitz, a Catholic priest from the Diocese of Duluth, Minnesota, known for his “Bible in a Year” podcast, speaks about the Eucharist.

Intrigued, she began watching similar videos by other Catholic speakers, including Father Casey Cole, O.F.M., Bishop Robert Barron, Matt Fradd, and Scott Hahn, each of whom drew her closer and closer to the Catholic faith.

Familiar with St. Paul’s from her days as a Harvard researcher and lecturer, she decided to attend Mass there one day, and made an appointment before she left to meet with Fiorillo.

When they met, Fiorillo answered all of her questions from what she calls “a list of Protestant problems with Catholicism.” She entered the RCIA program three weeks later.

Recalling her first experience attending eucharistic adoration, she said it felt “utterly weird” to be worshiping what she describes as “this golden sun.”

A conversation with a local Jesuit priest helped her better understand the Eucharist, however. Now she finds that spending time before the Blessed Sacrament is “amazing.”

“I am really, really, really excited for the Easter vigil,” Kaynig-Fittkau said. “I can’t wait, I have a big smile on my face just thinking about it.”

The rosary brought him peace

Another catechumen at St. Paul’s this year is Kyle Richard, 37, who lives in the Beacon Hill neighborhood of Boston and works in a technology startup company downtown. 

Although he grew up in a culturally Catholic hub in Louisiana, his parents left the Catholic faith and joined a Full Gospel church. Richard said he found the church “intimidating,” which led him eventually to leave Christianity altogether.

When Richard was in his mid-twenties, his father battled pancreatic cancer. Before he died, he expressed a wish to rejoin the Catholic Church. He never did confess his sins to a priest or receive the Anointing of the Sick, Richard recalls sadly. But years later, his non-believing son would remember his father’s yearning to return to the Church.

“I kind of filed that away for a while, but I never really let it go,” he said.

Initially, Richard moved even farther away from the Church. He said he became an atheist who thought that Christianity was simply “something that people used to just soothe themselves.”

Years later, while going through a divorce, he had a change of heart.

Feeling he ought to give Christianity “a fair shot,” he began saying the rosary in hopes of settling his anxiety. The prayer brought him peace, and became a gateway to the Catholic faith.

Before long, he was reading the Bible on the Vatican’s website, downloading prayer apps, and meditating on scripture.

A Google search brought him to St. Paul’s. Joining the RCIA program, he feels, was a continuation of his father’s expressed desire on his deathbed more than a decade ago.

“I think he would be proud, especially because he was born on April 16th and that is the date of the Easter vigil,” he said.

[…]

Washington D.C., Feb 12, 2020 / 12:00 pm (CNA).- Black Catholic communities have been a part of the Church in the Washington, DC area for centuries.

But it wasn’t until the height of the Civil War that black Catholics in DC began the process of founding a parish of their own— with the help of President Abraham Lincoln.

In the 16th and 17th century, Spanish laws in North America freed slaves who converted to Catholicism. Some of these freed slaves and their descendants formed their own settlement in the region that would become Florida.

Meanwhile, in Maryland, in the decades before the American Revolution, Jesuit missionaries evangelized black slaves, including some owned by their order, along with freemen. Over the centuries, large African-American Catholic populations settled in cities including Baltimore, Philadelphia, Chicago and numerous cities throughout the South.

Monsignor Charles Pope, pastor of the historically black DC parish of Holy Comforter-St. Cyprian, told CNA that racial prejudice has played a role in the region’s Catholic history; that white parishioners enforced racial segregation, forcing black Catholics to sit in back of church or choir loft, and to wait to receive the Eucharist until after white Catholics had done so.

Black Catholics “had many reasons to walk out of the Catholic faith, being treated like that, and yet they didn’t. They stayed, they worked, they built their own church.”

“It’s a remarkable story of resilience,” Monsignor Pope said.

Beginnings of a black Catholic parish

In the mid-19th century, black Catholics were not permitted to worship in the main sanctuary of St. Matthew’s Church in downtown DC. They were likely relegated to the church basement to worship, and while black children had a separate Sunday school to attend, they were not at all allowed to attend the parish day school.

By 1864, the black Catholic community had had enough of being related to the margins of St. Matthews to worship, and decided to build their own place of worship.

According to historian Morris MacGregor, who wrote a book in 1999 entitled “The Emergence of a Black Catholic Community: St. Augustine’s in Washington,” a group of free black men and women came to the pastor of St. Matthew’s, Father Charles White, to ask him what could be done.

White was apparently supportive of the idea of building a new church building for the black Catholic community, though he didn’t initially envision it becoming a separate parish. He convened a committee which included the superintendent of the parish Sunday schools, as well as two black parishioners, one of whom was named Gabriel Coakley.

Gabriel Coakley was a Washington businessman, who according to his granddaughter was a cabinetmaker. Some sources say his wife Mary was a seamstress in the White House.

White agreed to underwrite the down payment for a lot on which to build the church using money from St. Matthews, but suggested fundraising efforts would be needed to continue the church’s construction.

The committee came up with a potentially winning idea: why not hold a massive Fourth of July fundraising picnic on the White House lawn?

Coakley appears to have been chosen as the leader and spokesman for the group, and by most accounts seems to be the one who met personally with Lincoln to ask for the use of the White House grounds for a fundraiser picnic to raise money for the new church.

Lincoln’s support

Even at the height of the Civil War, personal access to the President was much simpler than it is today. Coakley simply made an appointment to meet Lincoln and was welcomed into the White House on June 27, 1864.

Though not himself a Catholic, Lincoln was evidently supportive of helping black Catholics in DC build their own place to worship. He agreed at once, and told Coakley to go to General Benjamin French’s office to tell him that he had given permission for the event.

French was a prominent Mason, so Coakley feared that he would not be keen to grant permission for an unusual event organized by black Catholics.

Nevertheless, records show that General Benjamin French issued a permit for the use of the White House lawn on June 30, 1864, and, after Coakley returned to the White House to seek the president out once again, Lincoln signed it.

Here’s where the historical record gets slightly fuzzier.

It remains unclear whether Lincoln himself actually attended the event. A Washington Post article from the 1980s proclaims that the festival was “held” by President and Mrs. Lincoln, “who strongly supported a church for black Catholics in the nation’s capital.”

MacGregor wrote that “President Lincoln and members of his cabinet likely made a brief appearance,” it is not officially recorded— at least in Lincoln’s writings— whether he was actually there or not.

Regardless, the event was a success.

An estimated 1,500 parishioners from at least six DC-area parishes attended, and the picnic raised over $1,200 a very large sum at the time.

With the funds in hand, work began on the De Porres Chapel and school, which opened in 1866 on Fifteenth Street.

MacGregor says it took a while for the chapel to attract a congregation, because despite harsh treatment at their home parishes, many black Catholics were still attached to their congregations.

Nevertheless, black Catholics at various parishes around DC remained frustrated by discrimination, and with the support of an Italian priest named Father Felix Barotti, a black Catholic parish at last came to fruition.

The original St. Augustine’s Church, which replaced the De Porres chapel in 1876, sat on the site of what eventually became the headquarters of the Washington Post.

It was the first African American Catholic parish in the city, and was a great success. The parish hosted the first National Black Catholic Congress in 1889, and parishioners hosted marchers and participated in the 1963 March on Washington.

The parish also has a school which has been operating for over 150 years.

In 1961, St. Augustine parish merged with the nearby, mostly white St. Paul’s Church, which had been experiencing declining attendance. The new, merged parish was renamed Sts. Paul and Augustine until 1982, when the name was restored to St. Augustine’s.

The original St. Augustine’s church, sadly, was razed in 1946.

Today, however, St. Augustine’s parish has one of the largest congregations in all of DC, with over 2,000 registered members.

Changing demographics

Similar to the parishioners at St. Augustine, the parishioners of Holy Comforter-St. Cyprian, another historically black DC parish, raised the funds necessary to build their first church building.

Last year, the parish community celebrated its 125th anniversary.

Holy Comforter-St. Cyprian has a long African American Catholic heritage, but now, the neighborhood is changing. Pope estimated that the congregation is now probably about 40% white.

“Every now and then people feel a little bit sad, it just feels kind of like the end of an era,” he said.

“We still have a very bright future as a parish, and there are many good, new things that are up and running now, too. So it’s always a mix of a little bit of sadness but also hope and enthusiasm for a parish that is now much more diverse.”

He said people use the term “gentrification” to describe changes in DC’s historically black neighborhoods.

“I don’t think that’s entirely accurate; it hides more than it discloses,” Pope reflected.

“There’s a subtlety to it. Most of the older black folks here in the neighborhood were not poor, they were working class— some of them had good government jobs with decent pensions.”

Many of the aging back parishioners have sold their homes at a tidy profit, while choosing to downsize or move to the suburbs, for well over $1 million, he said.

“The ones who are leaving aren’t necessarily all that poor, and the ones that are coming in aren’t necessarily all that rich. Most of them are young adults…it’s an odd thing.”

“As a parish, I think we’re handling it as best we can,” he said.

 

[…]

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Cordoba, Spain, Sep 17, 2022 / 07:00 am (CNA).
In his weekly pastoral letter, Bishop Demetrio Fernández González of Córdoba, Spain, said that the desire for money, dreaming about a big checking account, and getting ou… […]