13-year-old Filipina who loved the Eucharist is officially on path to sainthood

Hagatna, Guam, Apr 6, 2019 / 12:00 am (CNA).- The sexual abuse of minors is “a deep and sorrowful shame,” Archbishop Michael Jude Byrnes has said after Archbishop Anthony S. Apuron’s conviction in a church court, adding that the Church on Guam must “ensure that the horrible harm inflicted to the innocent is never repeated.”
 
“Our focus shall remain on making penance and reparation in our Church on Guam, attending to justice for the numerous victims of clergy sexual abuse on Guam and continuing our mission to proclaim the love of God to the people of Guam and the Marianas,” Byrnes, the new Archbishop of Agana said April 5, according to the Guam-based news site the Pacific Daily News.
 
Byrnes said the Church doesn’t rejoice when its members “plummet from grace and are found guilty of grave wrong,” such as cases of “the grievous sin of child abuse.”
 
The Apostolic Tribunal of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith in March 2018 found Archbishop Apuron, 73, guilty of several abuse-related charges. He immediately appealed the decision. The Vatican court upheld the original decision Feb. 7, and the final sentencing was announced April 4 by the CDF.
 
As punishment, Apuron was deprived of his office as Archbishop of Agana; forbidden from using its insignia including the bishop’s miter and ring; and banned from living within the jurisdiction of the archdiocese.
 
He was not removed from ministry and remains a priest under church law.
 
Apuron has denied the charges. He said he was “deeply saddened” when the Pope confirmed the church court’s ruling.
 
“I believe that the facts and evidence presented demonstrated my total innocence,” he said.
 
Archbishop Byrnes offered “deepest apologies” to the victims of Apuron, whom he listed by name. The victims were altar boys. They included the former archbishop’s nephew and a former seminarian. They said the crimes happened while Apuron was a parish priest.
 
“I am truly sorry for the betrayal and severe anguish that you suffered and continue to suffer,” Byrnes said.
 
Walter Denton, who accused Apuron of raping him at the age of 13, thanked Byrnes for “all his support.”
 
“He has made the Catholic Church a better place for the people of Guam and especially for our beautiful children who are altar servers,” he said, the Pacific Daily News reports.
 
Roland Paul Sondia, who was also abused in 1977, voiced hope that Byrnes “would do his best to try to make the Church whole again, and that’s what we want.”
 
Byrnes had been serving as coadjutor Archbishop of Agana and became full Archbishop upon Apuron’s removal.
 
Speaking to CNA last year, a source close to the Apuron case noted a contradiction between the penalty and the sentence of sexual abuse against minors – a grave offense which usually carries the penalty of removal from the clerical state.
 
On Thursday Apuron called the sentence, which prevents him from living in Guam, a penalty “analogous to a death sentence,” adding: “I lose my homeland, my family, my church, my people, even my language, and I remain alone in complete humiliation, old and in failing health.”
 
He professed his obedience to the Pope and said he submits to his judgment and thanked him for “allowing me to continue serving as a priest and archbishop without insignia.”
 
The former archbishop said the pontifical secret prevents him from “litigating my good name in public,” but claimed that “many individuals” have come forward privately and publicly in his defense “despite threats and the climate of fear in my beloved home of Guam.”
 
He blamed a climate of fear and publicity in the local media for hampering the court’s work. This climate “testifies to the presence of a pressure group that plotted to destroy me, and which has made itself clearly known even to authorities in Rome,” he said.
 
Apuron claimed that some people have told him they were asked to make false allegations against him in return for money.
 
He offered his suffering for the Pope, for his accusers, and for “those who have plotted for my removal.”
 
The archdiocese is working to settle civil lawsuits for the sex abuse claims. It filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in January. At the time, there were lawsuits seeking about $115 million in legal claims pending against the archdiocese.
 
In 2016, the territorial legislature lifted the statute of limitations for sexual abuse of minors. Since then, nearly two dozen clergy in Guam have been named as defendants in over 200 sex abuse cases, Pacific Daily News reports.
 
Byrnes has implemented new child protection policies in the archdiocese, including a safe environment program that he said will help begin a culture change in the archdiocese.

[…]

Hobart, Australia, Jan 25, 2019 / 01:46 pm (CNA).- The wind blows in great gusts over snow-capped mountains on the other side of the world, across the island of Tasmania. Whipped up by the Southern Ocean’s infamous Roaring Forties, wave upon wave of wind buffets the Australian state on the very peripheries of the world.
 
“Separated from the Australian mainland by 140 miles of the treacherous pitch and toss of Bass Strait, Tasmania is a byword for remoteness…it is like outer space on earth and invoked by those at the ‘centre’ to stand for all that is far-flung, strange and unverifiable,” Nicholas Shakespeare aptly writes in his book “In Tasmania.”
 
If you seek out the peripheries, in other words, whether from Rome, London or Washington, it is hard to get any further away than Tasmania. And yet there, on the other side of the world, on a heart-shaped island the size of West Virginia, a new Jerusalem is emerging.
 
The Monks

Tasmania’s first Benedictine monastery is gradually taking shape on over 3,000 acres of green pastureland, felicitously named Jerusalem Estate and abutting an eponymous creek in the island’s idyllic Midlands. On a visit in late August 2018 – in the middle of Australia’s winter, drawing in an Antarctic chill – the monks were still living in trailers and sheds fashioned from corrugated iron on a rented paddock at Rhyndaston, several miles down the road from their future home.
 
Once a day they travel to the neighboring town of Colebrook, to pray and celebrate Mass in the local church. They have decorated the altar and put out fresh flowers for Our Lady. Though they live like beggars, their liturgical prayer is dignified, and their Gregorian chant nothing short of divine.
 
Soon, thanks to the archdiocese, an old church will be brought in by truck from the north of the island, the monks tell CNA. Then the young Benedictines – their average age is less than 30, and most of them, with the exception of one monk and the American prior, hail from mainland Australia – will at last have a first church of their own in which to sing, pray and celebrate.

Notre Dame Priory is led by Father Pius Mary Noonan, a monk from Kentucky who lived previously as a monk in a French monastery in Flavigny-sur-Ozerain.

One day an Australian couple knocked on the door, asking the abbot to help organize a retreat in their country. That was almost 10 years ago, and Father Pius – one of the few fluent English speakers at the French abbey – became a regular pilgrim to Australia.

The retreats – which are still going strong, and are now run from Notre Dame Priory – were so successful that a permanent presence was increasingly the only feasible proposition.
 

The Archbishop

So how did Prior Pius and his young band of monks end up in Tasmania? The answer is the Archbishop of Hobart, Julian Porteous.

The monastery is under the direct supervision of the 69-year-old prelate who, like a skilled gardener, has devoted himself to helping Catholic life flourish in the fertile – though, many say, spiritually barren – soil of the island that is his diocese. The Benedictines are but one of several seeds Porteous is sowing and planting. Each plant serves a different purpose, and each, is designed to serve strengthen and enrich the garden.

The archbishop and his team face a challenge of Biblical proportions. Even compared to rest of Australia – where the percentage of Catholics attending Mass is in the single digits – – Tasmania trails behind. Today, only about 16 percent of Tasmania’s population is Catholic – about 80,000 of roughly 530,000 Tasmanians — the lowest proportion of any Australian state or territory. And, like everywhere in the West, the number of Australians professing to be agnostics or atheists is on the rise.

(What is more, Tasmania did not experience the influx of Catholic migrants from continental Europe that since the 1950s has contributed – in many ways – to a more diverse Australia. Catholics have constituted the largest Christian denomination in the country since 1986, when their population overtook the number of Australian Anglicans).

To tackle this situation, Porteous says, over a cup of coffee in his unpretentious office, “we have to find a way of strengthening Catholic life, Catholic identity, Catholic spirituality. And at the same time, we mustn’t withdraw from society.”

Paradoxical though it might seem, that is why the Benedictine monks play an important role, the archbishop tells CNA.

“I think it’s very important at this moment when there are strong secularizing tendencies in society that do permeate through the Church, that we have, if you like, some pockets of strong Catholic Life that firstly can be a source of encouragement to many in the Church but secondly, can become a witness to the society.”

Striking a balance

Referring to Rod Dreher’s influential 2017 book “The Benedict Option,” the archbishop tells CNA: “One of the possible implications behind the Benedict Option would be a certain withdrawal in to a safer environment, a more consistently Catholic kind of life that the people were kind of close in.”

But just like Benedictines did in Europe over centuries, Porteous says that his work is about striking a balance – and cultivating the beauty and richness of Catholicism by using the different charisms to strengthen, rather than compete with, parish life.
 
For that reason, the archbishop invited the South American movement Palavra Viva – the Living Word – to establish a community of consecrated lay members in the town of Launceston.

And when visiting Sunday Mass in the picturesque Huon Valley, where forestry workers, organic farmers and artists live, one can see young religious sisters in a striking blue habit usher a youth group of missionary school attendees into their seats. These are the Sisters of the Immaculata, who were formed in Sydney in the December of 2008 and moved to Tasmania in 2014.

The sisters came, as foundress Mother Mary Therese explains “with the desire for spiritual renewal in parishes, through Adoration and faith formation.”

Porteous is “very happy” with the Sisters: “They’ve got a dozen young people doing four to five month mission school at the moment. In this summer, they’ll probably have 150 young people come through the nine day program they run here in Tasmania. So they will be representative of what I believe is a new flowering of Catholic life in the Church.”

Equally, there is no lack of interest in the young Benedictines from Notre Dame Priory. “I get a fair bit of email”, Prior Pius tells CNA, huddled into an ancient armchair next to a woodfire heater struggling to warm up the rickety farmhouse they use to receive guests.

“There is a lot of interest in what we are doing.”

And what about the Tasmanians they meet in everyday life? How do they react to the troop of young men with white habits and distinct hairstyles? The prior laughs.

“People are curious. We get asked a lot of questions. They want to know: Who are you? They’re usually very happy to hear that we’re monks”, he says and adds with a laugh, “although some have been disappointed that we’re not Buddhists.”

The Catholics of this new Jerusalem have their work cut out for them.

[…]

Manila, Philippines, Jun 27, 2017 / 12:05 am (CNA/EWTN News).- Last week, members of a terrorist group destroyed a Catholic chapel, desecrating consecrated hosts and religious icons, during a nine-hour long attack on the town of Malagakit in southern Philippines.

The June 21 attack was reportedly carried out by about 300 gunmen of the Bangsamoro Islamic Freedom Fighters, known as BIFF, which has pledged allegiance to the Islamic State. In the siege they also robbed houses and stores at gunpoint, causing the displacement of hundreds of residents.

Residents were also forced to flee after being caught in a fire-fight between BIFF and government forces, according to Realan Mamon, the police chief of Pigkawayan town, where Malagakit is located.

He told the Associated Press that he had a report that gunmen were occupying a school as well, although it wasn’t immediately apparent if people were trapped inside by the fighting or taken hostage.

In the chapel, which is nearby a school also destroyed in the attack, the militants used hammers to destroy religious icons and vital fixtures. They also desecrated consecrated hosts.

Cardinal Orlando Quevedo of Cotabato decried the act Saturday, saying that he condemns “in the strongest terms possible the wicked desecration of the Catholic Chapel of Malagakit in the parish of Pigcawayan…”

“If the BIFF wants to have an image as a ‘respecter’ of all religions, it must punish its members who perpetrated the odious desecration in Malagakit and educate all its members in strictly respecting other religions,” he continued.

Cardinal Quevedo urged the Catholic faithful of Malagakit to restore the sacred space of their chapel, asking for the prayers of the entire Archdiocese for peace and harmony among all believers of all religions.

Some leaders of the town, such as Salvador Almonia, Jr., a chairman of Malagakit, have hypothesized that the attack on the chapel was intended to create division between the town’s Catholics and Muslims, who currently live together peacefully.

“That was meant to sow anger among us. We will not respond the way the BIFF want us to respond to that despicable act,” he said.

The vice governor of North Cotabato, Shirlyn Macasarte-Villanueva, urged Muslim and Christian residents to disregard attempts to sow division between them.

“Let us be sober and continue with the friendship and solidarity that we have. We just have to be vigilant and we need to help each other prevent a repeat of the incident,” Macasarte-Villanueva said Thursday.

The attack follows a May 22 siege on parts of a city on Mindanao in the Philippines, where militants burned several buildings, including the Catholic cathedral and the bishop’s residence.

At the cathedral, they took hostages including a Catholic priest and a group of church-goers, threatening to kill them if the nation’s military does not cease its current offensive against them.

They are also said to have freed more than 100 inmates from prisons in the city. The fighting has reportedly killed at least 20 people in the city.

The attack was carried out by militants of the Maute group, which was formed in 2012 and pledged allegiance to the Islamic State in 2015. The militants’ violence began after a failed army and police raid to capture Isnilon Hapilon, a local Islamist leader.

[…]