New Catholic trade schools are sprouting up across the country — here are four 

Washington D.C., Jan 23, 2017 / 11:52 am (CNA/EWTN News).- Amid signs proclaiming “Keep Your Rosaries Off My Ovaries,” “#IstandWithPlannedParenthood”, and a host of other homemade posters ranging from the snarky to the explicit … […]

Orange, Calif., Nov 1, 2018 / 04:16 pm (CNA/EWTN News).- On any typical weekend, the white cassock-clad priests of the Norbertine order from St. Michael’s Abbey in southern California preach in about 35 parishes, sharing the fruits of their contemplative and communal life with the Church.

As canons regular, they are religious priests who live in community and share a charism and common life of prayer. During the week, they are teachers and preachers in area schools, colleges, and catechetical programs.

But the order felt called to bring their preaching and formation beyond the bounds of their abbey and apostolates in the Orange County and Los Angeles areas, and so on All Saints’ Day they launched a digital library called “The Abbot’s Circle” which will provide video, audio, and written resources on the Catholic faith.

“Many people, after they’ve gone through Catechism or Catholic school, they lack further formation in their faith,” Father Justin Ramos, O.Praem., a priest of the order and a Latin teacher, told CNA.

“The Abbot’s Circle is really a great means for people to be able to hear homilies during the week, not just on Sunday, or read reflections and learn about their faith in the various ways in which we offer it.”

The Abbot’s Circle website includes video, podcasts and written reflections, as well as chant recordings and audio lectures and a documentary on the fathers called “City of Saints.”

The digital library, which is free for the first two weeks of its launch, will be a subscription service that donors will be able to access for a monthly donation of $10 a month or more.

Shane Giblin, chief advancement officer for the Norbertine Fathers at St. Michael’s, said the platform was a way to thank and spiritually feed the order’s benefactors, while contributing to the day-to-day costs of running the abbey.

“The guy in the pew on Sunday who’s just trying to make his life work, we want to reach that person and help him make sense of his life and help him grow spiritually,” Giblin told CNA.

“The beauty of the Norbertines is watching them meet people where they’re at…whether they’re highly engaged Catholics, or just very eager to learn more about the faith, or whether they’re just new to their faith and wanting to learn more, they’re able to reach them in a very unique way,” he said.

New content will be added to the platform will be added every week, Giblin said, and will answer such questions about the Catholic faith as: How do we attain salvation? Why do we pray to the saints? What role does Mary play in the life of a priest?

Giblin said the website allows users to submit their questions and prayer intentions, and the frequency of new content allows the priests to respond to the needs of the people using the platform.

The Norbertines also believe The Abbot’s Circle is one way their order is called to respond to the current crisis of abuse scandals in the Church.

“St. Norbert, a Catholic reformer, founded the Norbertines to lift up a demoralized clergy, preach to the lay faithful, and so renew the Church in difficult times,” Fr. Chrysostom Baer, prior of St. Michael’s Abbey, said in a statement about The Abbot’s Circle.

“We are fulfilling this very same mission today, in a time when both laity and clergy are demoralized by scandal, by using new media to connect with the faithful and offer support and guidance. While atypical for religious priests to use digital media in this way, we believe in the power of new media to reach out to the faithful and support them in their faith lives.”

Ramos said he thinks the digital library will offer Catholics hope at a dark time in the Church, particularly in knowing that there are orders of priests striving to live holy lives and to teach the faith in line with tradition and the magisterium of the Church.

“The message that we want to convey to people is that there is hope, and part of that hope is to know your faith well and to be able to live it out well, and it empowers the layperson to understand more about their faith and defend it,” he said.

“Our faith is always tried when things like this happen, and to strengthen it, it’s just one way to help,” he added.

Fr. Ambrose Criste, O.Praem., who serves as novice master and director of vocations and formation for the order, told CNA he thinks The Abbot’s Circle responds to Catholics who are “hungry” for good formation.

“They’re hungry for clear doctrine – what does the Church teach and what does the Church believe? I think there’s so much confusion that comes from the world and the mainstream media, and from to be honest from much of the Catholic media,” Criste told CNA.

“And so clarity of doctrine is something that the faithful really want. They also want priests and consecrated religious who are striving for holiness and who aren’t afraid to talk about it, because otherwise I think what the faithful hear is the spirit of the world, and how that has infected even people in the Church.”

Ramos said The Abbot’s Circle is an “ingenious” way to live out the charism of the Norbertine order and to share the fruits of their contemplation, prayer, and community.

“What takes us away from prayer is our apostolic work, when we have to go into the parishes and we can’t be with the community. But now that we have this means to communicate and to proclaim the truth of our faith…and I think it reinforces our way of life because we don’t have to do as much exiting from the monastery as we would otherwise have to do in order to reach a greater audience.”

The launch of The Abbot’s Circle follows the end of a successful $120 million capital campaign by St. Michael’s Abbey to support the building of a new abbey, as the order is running out of space for its new members. It also follows a documentary series on the order called “City of Saints”, which was released last year.

“Holiness is attractive, young men don’t want to live their lives by halves,” Giblin said. “They want what the Norbertines at St. Michael’s have, and because of that we ran out of room.”

The abbey currently supports 38 seminarians, with three aspirants on a waitlist. Giblin said the community has become the “unsung heroes” of the Church in southern California, where they are renowned for their holiness, service and preaching, and that the new platform is another way to share their gifts with the world.

“Holiness is attractive, and people are looking for that in the modern world, and they invest money in it because they crave it, they want more of it,” Giblin said. “And we hope The Abbot Circle website is a larger platform to showcase the holiness of the men here, and I think the world is very much hungry for that.”

[…]

Stockton, Calif., Feb 22, 2017 / 12:04 am (CNA).- If President Donald Trump is the candidate of “disruption,” similar disruption is needed to build a better society, Bishop Robert McElroy of San Diego told a gathering of faith-based groups co-sponsored by the Vatican.

“Well now, we must all become disruptors,” the bishop said Feb. 18 at the U.S. regional gathering for the World Meeting of Popular Movements, which aims to promote structural changes for greater justice in racial, social, and economic areas.

“We must disrupt those who would seek to send troops into our streets to deport the undocumented, to rip mothers and fathers from their families. We must disrupt those who portray refugees as enemies rather than our brothers and sisters in terrible need. We must disrupt those who train us to see Muslim men, women and children as forces of fear rather than as children of God.”

“We must disrupt those who seek to rob our medical care, especially from the poor,” he continued. “We must disrupt those who would take even food stamps and nutrition assistance from the mouths of children.”

At the same time, the bishop told the multi-religious audience of the need for constructive action: “as people of faith, as disciples of Jesus Christ, as children of Abraham, as followers of the Prophet Muhammad, of people of all faiths and no faith, we cannot merely be disruptors, we also have to be rebuilders.”

The Feb. 16-19 conference was held in Modesto, about 30 miles southeast of Stockton. It was organized with the support of the Dicastery for Promoting Integral Human Development, the Catholic Campaign for Human Development, and the PICO National Network.

The PICO network is composed of faith-based community organizations. It claims 1,000 member institutions representing over 1 million families in 17 U.S. states. The network’s Latin American branch has been supported for a decade by Cardinal Oscar Rodriguez Maradiaga of Tegucigalpa, who now coordinates the Council of Cardinals advising Pope Francis. The cardinal addressed a launch event PICO’s “Year of Encounter with Pope Francis” campaign in early 2015.

The Pope himself sent a message to the California meeting that praised the gathering’s “constructive energies” and criticized the brutality of an economic system “that has the god of money at its center.” He encouraged their efforts “to fight for social justice, to defend our Sister Mother Earth and to stand alongside migrants.”

For Bishop McElroy, the meeting was an opportunity to call to rebuild the country.

“Let us disrupt and rebuild. And let us do God’s work,” he said, advocating the advancement of human dignity and equality.

“We must rebuild a nation in solidarity, what Catholic teaching calls the sense that all of us are the children of the one God,” he said, calling for a $15 minimum wage, decent housing, food for the poorest, and attention to environmental issues in the face of industrial threats.

“We must identify the ways in which our very ability to see, judge and act on behalf of justice is being endangered by cultural currents which leave us isolated, embittered and angry.”

Citing Benedict XVI, he said that truth itself is “under attack” and “whole industries have arisen to shape public opinion in destructively isolated and dishonest patterns.”

He said social issues like jobs, housing, immigration, economic disparities and the environment must be made “foundations for common efforts rather than of division.”

Bishop McElroy flatly criticized free market ideology as a rival to human dignity.

“The fundamental political question of our age is whether our economic structures and systems in the United States will enjoy ever greater freedom or whether they will be located effectively within a juridical structure which seeks to safeguard the dignity of the human person and the common good of our nation,” he said.

“In that battle, the tradition of Catholic social teaching is unequivocally on the side of strong governmental and societal protections for the powerless, the worker, the homeless, the hungry, those without decent medical care, the unemployed.”

He placed property and wealth in the context of Catholic teaching that sees creation as God’s gift to all humanity.

“Wealth is a common heritage, not at its core a right of lineage or acquisition,” he said. “For this reason, free markets do not constitute a first principle of economic justice. Their moral worth is instrumental in nature and must be structured by government to accomplish the common good.”

The bishop stressed the “intrinsic human rights” to medical care, decent housing, protection of human life, food, and work. These rights are not merely negotiating points to discuss after the free market system has distributed wealth, he said.

“Rather, these rights are basic claims which every man, woman and family has upon our nation as a whole,” he said, warning that these rights are being denied to large numbers of people.

Bishop McElroy cited Pope Francis’ 2013 apostolic exhortation Evangelii gaudium and its description of an economy that excludes some people from meaningful participation in social, political, and economic life.

The bishop said that statements like “this economy kills” are not simply exaggerations. He suggested many people have known someone the economy has killed: a senior citizen who can’t afford medicine or rent; a mother or father who is working two or three jobs and is “really dying because even then they can’t provide for their kids;” and young people who turn to drugs, gangs, or suicide because they cannot find a job.

“Now mourn them,” he said. “And now call out their name; let all the world know that this economy kills.”

At other times, Bishop McElroy has been outspoken against the proposed removal of a statue of St. Junípero Serra from the U.S. Capitol, and against a California law barring health plans that restrict abortion coverage.

He urged in 2015 an overhaul of the US bishops’ voting guide to reflect how Pope Francis has “radically transformed the prioritization of Catholic social teaching and its elements.” And following the release of Amoris laetitia, he suggested that the divorced-and-remarried may make a “discernment of conscience” that “God is calling them to return to full participation in the life of the Church and the Eucharist.”

In addition to Bishop McElroy, other scheduled speakers at the Modesto conference included Bishop Stephen Blaire of Stockton; Cardinal Peter Turkson, prefect of the Dicastery for Promoting Integral Human Development; Cardinal Joseph Tobin of Newark; Bishop Shelton Fabre of Houma-Thibodaux; Archbishop José Gomez of Los Angeles; and Bishop Oscar Cantú of Las Cruces.

One co-sponsor of the event, PICO Network, came to public attention in August 2016 when a cache of documents attributed to billionaire financier George Soros’ Open Society Foundations were hacked and posted to the site DCLeaks.com.

The documents said the foundations committed $650,000 in funds for PICO Network and Faith in Public Life in 2015 to use Pope Francis’ visit to the U.S. to influence the 2016 elections and cultivate influence within the Catholic Church.

It claimed the grantees were involved in “the long-term project of shifting the priorities of the U.S. Catholic Church to focus on issues of injustice and oppression” and claimed that some U.S. bishops sought to curb Pope Francis’ influence on social justice issues. The documents are not always accurate and erroneously indicated the World Meeting of Popular Movements would take place in 2016, rather than 2017.

The same cache of documents indicated that the Soros network funds abortion advocates in Ireland as part of a strategic model to overturn abortion restrictions in Catholic countries. The Soros foundations also took part in a multi-million dollar effort to respond to videos appearing to show the politically powerful abortion provider Planned Parenthood was involved in the illegal sale of fetal tissue and body parts from aborted babies.

According to the documents, the Soros foundations gave $450,000 to the group Catholics in Alliance for the Common Good from 2006-2010, crediting the group for changing Catholic voters’ priorities on abortion. Emails to and from leading Democratic Party strategist John Podesta, published on WikiLeaks, claimed that Catholics in Alliance was a group founded with the intent of creating a “Catholic Spring” revolution against the U.S. bishops.

Christopher Hale, who became Catholics in Alliance’s executive director in late 2013, told CNA in October 2016 that the group was not concerned with the internal politics of the Catholic Church. The group has become more critical of abortion groups in recent years.

[…]