Church beatifies German priest who was executed by Nazis in 1944

Rome, Italy, Jun 11, 2019 / 09:01 am (CNA).- The recently installed head of the Knights of Malta directed Monday that all liturgical ceremonies within the community must use the ordinary, and not the extraordinary, form of the Roman rite.

“I have thus decided, as supreme guarantor of the cohesion and communion of the Order of St. John of Jerusalem of which Providence made me Grand Master, that henceforth all the liturgical ceremonies within our Order must be performed according to the ordinary rite of the Church (rite of St. Paul VI) and not the extraordinary rite (Tridentine rite),” Fra’ Giacomo Dalla Torre wrote in a June 10 letter to the order.

“This decision applies to all the official liturgical celebrations such as investitures, masses [sic] during our pilgrimages, memorial masses, [sic] as well as the feasts and solemnities of the Order.”

Dalla Torre was elected grand master of the Knights of Malta in May 2018, after serving as interim leader for a little over a year.

His appointment as interim grand master was part of ongoing reform of leadership after the Knights’ former grand master, Matthew Festing, resigned at Pope Francis’ request Jan. 24, 2017.

Festing’s resignation in early 2017 had marked the end of a month-long back and forth between the Order of Malta and the Holy See, beginning with the forced dismissal of Grand Chancellor Albrecht von Boeselager from both his position and his membership in the order in early December 2016. Boeselager, whose brother Georg von Boeselager was appointed a member of the Board of Superintendents of the IOR in 2016, was reinstated after Festing was pressured to resign.

Boeselager had been dismissed because of allegations that under his tenure the order’s charity branch  had inadvertently been involved in distributing condoms in Burma to prevent the spread of HIV.

The Sovereign Military Order of Malta is a Catholic lay religious order originally founded as the Knights Hospitaller around 1099 in Jerusalem. Now based in Rome, it is present in 120 countries with over 2,000 projects in the medical-social field and more than 120,000 volunteers and medical staff.

Dalla Torre said that as religious superior, it is his duty to ensure that “the communion that unites all the members of our religious family” is “present in every aspect of our Order’s life.”

“Among all the elements which constitute our spiritual life, the question of the liturgy to use in our celebrations has a particular significance.”

He wrote that “As you all know, Benedict XVI’s Motu Proprio Summorum Pontificium, [sic] albeit leaving every priest the freedom to celebrate privately in an extraordinary form, nevertheless states that inside a religious institute the matter is to be decided by the Major Superior according to the norm of law and their particular statues (Summorum Pontificium, [sic] art. 3).”

Summorum Pontificum states that “If communities of Institutes of Consecrated Life and Societies of Apostolic Life, whether of pontifical or diocesan right, wish to celebrate the conventual or community Mass in their own oratories according to the 1962 edition of the Roman Missal, they are permitted to do so. If an individual community or an entire Institute or Society wishes to have such celebrations frequently, habitually or permanently, the matter is to be decided by the Major Superiors according to the norm of law and their particular laws and statutes.”

Dalla Torre asked that all members of the Knights be informed of the decision, in particular the head chaplains, so that it may be respected.

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London, England, Jun 25, 2019 / 11:02 am (CNA).- Following a decision by the Court of Appeals in England to overturn an order for a forced abortion on a disabled woman, new details have emerged about the case.

Lawyers told the appeal court Monday that doctors had prepared the woman for the enforced abortion by promising her a new doll after the procedure. 

Fiona Paterson, the barrister representing the National Health Service (NHS) hospital trust that cares for the woman, told the appeal court on Monday that doctors had informed the woman that “she would go to sleep” and that “she would have an operation and when she woke up the baby would no longer be in her tummy.” 

To try to placate the woman, who did not wish to undergo the procedure, doctors told her that she would be given a new doll to play with after undergoing the abortion.

Observing that the woman had previously been given a doll, Paterson said that doctors thought “the prospect of a new [doll] might be very appealing to her.”

The woman reportedly has a mental age between six and nine years old, as well as a mood disorder. She was 22 weeks pregnant at the time the case was decided at the Court of Protection on June 21. 

Both the woman, who cannot be named because of privacy restrictions, and her mother are described as being of Nigerian descent, Catholic, and opposed to abortion. 

On Friday, Mrs Justice Nathalie Lieven ruled that an abortion would be the “best interest” of the woman, despite the her own objections and those of her mother (a former midwife) and her social worker. Doctors said they were concerned that the woman would be unable to physically or emotionally handle labor, or the recovery from a cesarean section. 

The court-ordered abortion was overturned on June 24, after the pregnant woman’s mother petitioned the Court of Appeal. The three appeal justices–Justices Richard McCombe, Eleanor King, and Peter Jackson, said they would explain their reasoning for their decision in the future. 

“I have to operate in [her] best interests, not on society’s views of termination,” Lieven said at the time of her original ruling. Lieven had previsouly acted as a legal repreetative for the British Pregnancy Advisory Service, the UK abortion provider, and argued in court that abortion restrictions in Northern Ireland were analogous to “torture.”

The woman’s mother made clear that she would care for her grandchild, but Lieven rejected this argument as she said it would be too complicated and risky for the child, and the potential removal of the child from the woman’s custody would be more traumatic than if she underwent an abortion. 

In her ruling, Lieven said that she did not believe the woman had the ability to understand what being pregnant meant. 

“I think she would like to have a baby in the same way she would like to have a nice doll,” she said. 

The case’s handling has proved controversial. Over 75,000 people signed a petition requesting that the UK’s health secretary intervene. 

A spokesperson for the pro-life group Right To Life UK, Clare McCarthy, welcomed the decision by the appeal court but cautioned that the decision would not protect mothers or children in similar circumstances.

“Unfortunately, we fear that this is not a one-off case,” McCarthy said.

“We are calling on the Department of Health to urgently reveal how many women have been forced to have an abortion in the UK over the last 10 years and make it clear how they will ensure it will not happen again.”

[…]

Church of the Sacred Heart in Bordeaux, France. / Credit: Olivier432 – Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)

ACI Prensa Staff, Mar 18, 2023 / 08:00 am (CNA).
The walls of Sacred Heart Church, located in downtown Bordeaux, France, were vandalized wit… […]