St. Ignatius of Antioch: the early Church Father who longed for union with Christ

Paris, France, Apr 26, 2019 / 09:49 am (CNA).- Sure, smoking causes lung cancer, heart disease, low birth rates, strokes, and arthritis. But smoking didn’t cause the April 15 fire at the Cathedral of Notre-Dame in Paris, at least according to construction workers who smoked on the site.

A spokesman for a scaffolding firm doing work on the cathedral told reporters last week that while his workers “sometimes” smoked on the oak roof of the building, cigarettes were not the cause of the conflagration.

“We condemn it. But the fire started inside the building… so for company Le Bras this is not a hypothesis, it was not a cigarette butt that set Notre-Dame de Paris on fire,” Le Bras Frères spokesman Marc Eskenazi told Reuters April 24.

Eskenazi’s remarks came after French newspaper Le Canard Enchaine reported that police had found seven cigarette butts in the burnt-out cathedral, and sources close to the investigation confirmed the report.

“If cigarette butts have survived the inferno, I do not know what material they were made of,” Eskenazi said, questioning how the butts could have survived the blaze at Notre-Dame Cathedral. The spokesman also said it is impossible for cigarette butts to set even dry wood on fire.

The company also said that the fire was not started by its own scaffolding elevators, noting that their electrical systems were well-maintained, and that power was not running to the elevators at the time the fire begin.

Still, French prosecutors say they have not ruled out any possibilities regarding the start of the fire, and that they continue to investigate all possible causes.

The fire began on the evening of April 15, and destroyed the cathedral’s roof, and spire. While the images of the cathedral’ exterior suggested nearly total devastation after the fire, the cathedral’s vaulted stone ceiling mostly held, and protected many of the cathedral’s religious and historical treasures from the flames.

There is no formal estimate yet for how long the cathedral restoration will take. While France’s President Emmanuel Macron has said that he would like to see restoration completed within five years, experts say that possibility is extremely unlikely.

Nearly one billion euro have been pledged to the restoration effort.

The cathedral’s famed rose windows, its bell towers and massive bells, and its organ were all intact after the fire. The Church’s most important religious items were spared from the fire: the Eucharist, and relics of Christ’s crown of thorns and cross were saved during the fire.

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Father Oleksandr Repin among the church ruins / Benedictine Missionary Sisters

Warsaw, Poland, Nov 18, 2022 / 09:32 am (CNA).
After the liberation of the Mykolaiv district in Ukraine from the Russian army last week, residents began to return to… […]

Hollie Dance (center left) and Paul Battersbee (center right)), the mother and father of Archie Battersbee, speak to the media as they leave the Royal Courts of Justice on June 29, 2022 in London, England. Archie’s parents ultimately lost their legal fight to keep their son on life support. He died on Aug. 6, 2022. / Carl Court/Getty Images

Washington, D.C. Newsroom, Aug 7, 2022 / 06:40 am (CNA).

Archie Battersbee, the 12-year-old British boy whose family waged an unsuccessful legal fight to stop his doctors from disconnecting him from a ventilator, died Saturday.

“Can I just say I’m the proudest mum in the world — such a beautiful little boy, and he fought right until the very end,” his mother, Hollie Dance, told reporters outside the Royal London Hospital, where Archie died, the New York Times reported. “And I’m so proud to be his mum.”

Archie had been in a coma on a ventilator since April when he was found unconscious with a ligature around his neck. According to news reports, his family suspects he may have been taking part in a social media challenge.

Archie’s doctors at Royal London Hospital had maintained that the boy, whose heart was still beating, was “very likely” brain-stem dead, but a conclusive test was never performed. A UK High Court judge granted the doctors’ request to perform the test, but the test — required by the UK’s Code of Practice — was not carried out because doctors determined there was a danger it could produce a false negative result.

His family, which opposed the brain stem test because they believed it to be too dangerous, argued that Archie needed more time to recover to whatever extent possible.

The family presented video evidence they said showed Archie crying and gripping his mother’s hand. In a June 13 ruling, the High Court judge said the evidence was unconvincing. She ordered that doctors remove the boy from the ventilator, saying the available medical evidence showed that Archie was brain dead as of May 31. An appeals court subsequently upheld the decision.

Last week, Archie’s parents exhausted their legal options when the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) refused to intervene in the case.

“It was the last thing, wasn’t it? And again our country has failed a 12-year-old child,” Dance said, according to the BBC.

Catholic bioethics experts condemned the decision by the hospital to take Archie off of life support. Before Archie’s death, the Anscombe Bioethics Centre, based in the UK, released a statement saying, “It seems extraordinary that questions of life and death should be matters of a balance of probability rather than determination beyond a reasonable doubt.”

Baptized in the hospital

The bioethics center issued a statement following the announcement of Archie’s death.

“The court battle over Archie Battersbee’s care is the latest example of the dying of children becoming complicated by unresolved conflict between parents and hospital authorities. It seems clear that there are serious problems with the current clinical, interpersonal, ethical, and legal approach to these situations,” the statement said.

“The tragic case of Archie Battersbee must lead to reform so that such conflicts can be averted in the future,” the center said.  

“Our last thoughts and our prayers are for Archie’s family, and for Archie himself. May his soul, and the souls of all the faithful departed, through the mercy of God, rest in peace,” the statement concluded.

In court testimony, a family spokeswoman described Archie’s family as “vaguely Christian” but not church-goers prior to his brain injury. Archie, however, was attracted to Christianity because he saw mixed martial artists praying before they entered the ring, the spokeswoman testified.

“Archie had saved up for and then begun wearing a small cross and a St Christopher’s ring in the two years before the accident,” the June 13 High Court ruling states.

“Archie had been speaking about being baptised and wanted his mother to take him to a church service at Christmas. This led to the family having Archie christened as he lay unconscious. Archie’s mother, brother and sister were christened then on Easter Sunday at the hospital,” the ruling states.

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