Americas

Mexico City, Mexico, May 22, 2017 / 03:22 pm (CNA/EWTN News).- The Mexican Bishops’ Conference offered prayers for journalists as they face increased violence in their efforts to uncover truth.

“The Mexican Bishop’s Conference expresses its support and solidarity with journalists throughout Mexico, facing violence attacks in the exercise of their profession,” the bishops said in a May 21 statement.

According to the international journalist advocacy group Reporters without Borders, an estimated 105 journalists have been murdered in Mexico since the year 2000. This makes Mexico the third most deadly country in the world for journalists, after Syria and Afghanistan, and ahead of Iraq.

So far in 2017 alone, six journalists have been murdered in Mexico.

The most recent was Javier Valdez, shot dead May 15 in Culiacan, Sinoloa. The journalist, a correspondent for “La Jornada” in Sinaloa, had done in-depth reporting on drug trafficking and organized crime in Mexico.

In their statement, the Mexican bishops recalled Pope Francis’ words that the journalist “has a very important role and at the same time a very great responsibility.”

“Freedom, in the form of expression, is a gift bequeathed by God, so no one has the right to take it away from anyone…there is nothing to justify an attack on that freedom,” they stated.

“We join in prayer that the Lord Jesus may console and alleviate the suffering and the worries that overwhelm the entire profession that today is afraid to do its work, since we are aware that the aggression is being directed at people who are members of the media in general: reporters, cameramen, editors, bureau chiefs, managers, among others.”

The Bishops of Mexico stressed that “hatred and resentment must not be the protagonists in the history of salvation, which is why we speak out in readiness to continue working strenuously to establish peace in our nation.”

“We are aware that only through actions of solidarity is it possible to heal society,” they said.

The Mexican Bishops’ Conference reiterated the commitment of the Church in the country to spiritually accompany “the families of the victims of those who have suffered attacks, extortion, kidnappings, murders, because of their reporting work, as a consequence of the social deterioration that prevails in our country.”

“Before God, no one’s work is unimportant, especially when it comes to the search for and dissemination of the truth which clearly allows the Kingdom of God to be built up.”

The bishops also called on the civil authorities to ensure “that everyone can exercise their profession in freedom and security, to fight the impunity and corruption which is striking and wounding our country so much.”

“Holy Mary of Guadalupe, Queen of Mexico, save our homeland an preserve our faith,” they concluded.

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Fatima, Portugal, May 21, 2017 / 03:02 am (CNA).- The photo of a baby dressed up as the pope at the Fatima Shrine rocked social media during Pope Francis’ pilgrimage to Portugal for the centenary of the apparitions of the Virgin Mary.

But what many do not know is the moving story behind this tender picture.

Diego Guerreiro is from the Portuguese city of Pinhal Novo, located some 25 miles from the capital, Lisbon. He was born prematurely at 33 weeks, weighed three pounds eleven ounces and measured 16 inches.

Speaking to Tvi24, his mother Carla said that after the birth she could not see her baby. “They had to immediately resuscitate him and take him away to the intensive care unit,” she said.

The little one “had trouble breathing. None of the doctors could explain why he was struggling to breathe so much,” said Carla, who has another seven-year-old son.

She said that Diego was in the Santa Maria Hospital for 76 days, where he experienced both many improvements and setbacks in his health. The baby spent half that time in neonatal intensive care with respiratory assistance.

MiniPope is doing the rounds on social media. Born premature, mother promised to bring him to #Fatima100 if he lived. Grandma made costume pic.twitter.com/0DWTdFxYIT

— Filipe d’Avillez (@Favillez) May 12, 2017

The evening of the day he was to be discharged, Diego again had a severe reversal and was returned to intensive care. At that time, Carla asked Pope Francis to intercede for her son and promised that when the pontiff went to Fatima on May 12-13, she would bring the baby to the shrine.

On Thursday May 11, they arrived at Fatima and spent the night in their car in order to go to the Shrine at 8:00 a.m. the following day. They got a place near the security barrier installed along the route where the popemobile would pass.

For this occasion, the mother and the grandmother had the idea of dressing him up like Pope Francis. They both searched the Internet for a pattern that “would be easy to make” and the grandmother sewed the outfit.

To complete the ensamble, Carla put around his neck a rosary that Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI gave to the baby’s father when he was at the Fatima Shrine as part of the security detail of the pontiff.

Diego is still having problems, with his mother saying “actually he can faint at any moment.” Meanwhile, she remains steadfast and alert to help her son when needed.

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San Salvador, El Salvador, May 19, 2017 / 01:14 pm (CNA/EWTN News).- A nearly 40 year-old murder case was reopened this week to properly prosecute the suspected killer behind the Salvadorian archbishop’s martyrdom.

Because of an amnesty law that prohibited the prosecution of criminal acts stemming from the El Salvador Civil War, the alleged murderer of Archbishop Oscar Romero was never convicted of any crime. The law was lifted last year by the country’s constitutional court, reopening cases from 1980 to 1992.

Judge Ricardo Chicas reopened the case on Thursday and ordered that charges be sought against the main suspect, whose case was dismissed in 1993 because of the amnesty law.

Alvaro Rafael Saravia was a soldier and is the main suspect tied to a right-wing death squad who killed the priest at a hospital in San Salvador. Blessed Romero was killed while saying mass at the hospital’s chapel. The archbishop was well known for preaching against the country’s poverty and corruption from the pulpit.

Social and economic inequality of the 1970s resulted in demonstrations and rebellions against the El Salvador government. The protests were encountered by government repression, leading to death squads and forced disappearances. Pro-government forces fought against left-wing guerilla groups from 1979 to 1992.

The El Salvadoran Civil War claimed an estimated 75,000 lives before a peace agreement was established in 1992.

Many of the clergy spoke against El Salvador’s inhumane practices, and many Catholic leaders faced backlash once they denounced the government. Blessed Romero especially decried both the social injustices which heavily oppressed the poor and the military’s oppressive tactics.

Blessed Romero became exceedingly outspoken once a close friend and teacher to the archbishop was gunned down by military forces on the way to Mass. Before he died in 1980, 30 priests in his archdiocese were either murdered or expelled from the state, and many more lay faithful were subject to the same fate.

Investigation into Archbishop Romero’s canonization officially opened in 1993, but was delayed until the early 2000s because of complex politics and false reports. In January of 2015, the Congregation for the Causes of Saints unanimously recognized the priest as martyr due to the hatred towards the faith identified within the act, and Pope Francis approved for the beatification a month later.

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Toronto, Canada, May 18, 2017 / 12:02 am (CNA/EWTN News).- Legalized euthanasia must still be fought – and that fight requires a broad argument that can persuade people of all beliefs, Cardinal Gerhard Mueller told a Canadian audience May 15.

Euthanasia is not only wrong in itself, but its legalization creates “toxic and deadly pathologies that disproportionately afflict the weakest members of society,” the cardinal told the Canadian Catholic Bioethics Institute at a gathering at Toronto’s St. Michael’s Cathedral Basilica.

A clear understanding of legal assisted suicide’s individual and social wrongs is needed to persuade Canadians to take the steps to reverse the “dangerous legal error” of the Canadian Supreme Court and Parliament, which recently legalized euthanasia and assisted suicide nationwide.

He voiced confidence that all persons of good will should be able to see “the profound and inevitable social harms that fall disproportionately on the weak and vulnerable when euthanasia is legalized.”

“The goodness of a society can be measured by how well it treats and protects its weakest and most vulnerable members,” he said. “Nations that legalize euthanasia fail to care rightly for the least of our brothers and sisters.”

In Cardinal Mueller’s view, the prudential argument against euthanasia is the most powerful argument in a pluralistic society that can persuade people of all religious beliefs, including those without religious beliefs.

He found an example of such persuasion in early 1990s New York. A commission called the New York Task Force on Life and Law had been convened by then-New York Gov. Mario Cuomo. The commission began its work expecting to recommend legal assisted suicide.

“But when they studied the question carefully and dispassionately, they quickly realized that the toxic and deadly social pathologies that would inevitably accompany legalization were too grave and severe to justify such a course of action,” he said.

“The committee recommended that assisted suicide and euthanasia should remain illegal, because decriminalizing these practices would inexorably lead to: grave and lethal new forms of fraud, abuse, coercion and discrimination against the disabled, poor, elderly, and minorities; deadly forms of coercion by insurers and faithless family members; corrosion of the doctor-patient relationship; an eventual shift to non-voluntary and involuntary euthanasia; and widespread neglect of treatment for mental illness and pain management.”

The cardinal cited the commission’s own words:

“We believe that the practices would be profoundly dangerous for large segments of the population, especially in light of the widespread failure of American medicine to treat pain adequately or to diagnose and treat depression in many cases. The risks would extend to all individuals who are ill,” it said. They would be most severe for those whose autonomy and well-being are already compromised by poverty, lack of access to good medical care, or membership in a stigmatized social group.”

The commission said the risks of legalizing assisted suicide and euthanasia for marginalized groups are “likely to be extraordinary” given that the health care system and society “cannot effectively protect against the impact of inadequate resources and ingrained social disadvantage.”

According to the cardinal, the New York task force was particularly struck by the situation in the Netherlands at the time, where there was one case of killing without consent for every three or four who died in consensual euthanasia. The commission projected that if euthanasia were similarly practiced in the U.S., about 36,000 people would die in voluntary euthanasia per year and another 16,000 would be victims of non-consensual euthanasia.

As an example of involuntary euthanasia, the cardinal cited reports from the Netherlands in which “a doctor surreptitiously euthanized a nun over her objections, and justified it on the grounds that she was mistaken about her best interests due to an irrational and superstitious commitment to religious belief.”

In U.S. states where euthanasia has been legalized, there have been cases of insurance companies that offer to pay for assisted suicide drugs rather than pay for costly medical treatment. Family members have also pressured patients into choosing suicide.

The cardinal distinguished assisted suicide and euthanasia from aggressive pain treatment, which aims to eliminate suffering through potentially risky means, not to kill the patient.

He said assisted suicide or direct killing are deceptively described as “aid in dying.” This is “a fabricated expression whose only rhetorical function is to conceal the very nature of the death-dealing action it describes.”

“The use of euphemism or obscure terminology in issues involving life and death should always alert us to an effort to hide the truth,” Cardinal Mueller said.

He countered justification for assisted suicide that claims that euthanasia only affects the patient and people are entitled to choose the time and manner of their death.  

“Anyone who has ever experienced the suicide of a loved one or even a casual acquaintance knows the profound effects this can have on entire communities,” he said, citing the demonstrated risks of suicide spreading like a “contagion.”

Euthanasia is not self-contained, as it affects families and communities and alters the medical community’s relationship to patients and the public.

Suicidal patients are often not in a position to exercise autonomy, and suicidal desires often depart once mental illness and pain are effectively treated.

“This is true even among the terminally ill,” he said.
The cardinal defended doctors and nurses who could face coercion for refusing to participate in euthanasia.

“ No one who trains and takes an oath to care for the sick should be pressed into ending the lives of the very people that they have promised to serve,” he said, saying that refusal to aid in euthanasia “represents basic fidelity to the very medical art that the physician professes.”

Cardinal Mueller said church teaching on euthanasia is accessible and enduring.

“The Catholic Church has long recognized that every human being, no matter his or her condition or circumstance, is possessed of inalienable and equal dignity,” he said. “This beautiful truth about the human person and his matchless worth is intelligible and self evident to every person of good will, regardless of faith tradition.”

The cardinal cited the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith’s 1980 Declaration on Euthanasia, which said that making an attempt on the life of an innocent person opposes God’s love for the person.

While there are psychological factors that diminish or remove moral responsibility, to take one’s own life is “often a refusal of love for self, the denial of a natural instinct to live, a flight from the duties of justice and charity owed to one’s neighbor, to various communities or to the whole of society.”

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Mexico City, Mexico, May 17, 2017 / 06:04 am (CNA/EWTN News).- A Mexican priest is in “delicate but stable” condition after being stabbed in the neck Monday evening at Mexico City’s cathedral, according to government and church authorities.

Father José Miguel Machorro Alcalá, 55, was stabbed in the neck and torso May 15 at the conclusion of saying Mass at the cathedral.

Witnesses reported that it appeared the attacker’s intention was to slit the priest’s throat.

Authorities detained a suspect at the scene who had reportedly attempted to flee the cathedral. The suspect has been identified as John Rock Schild, who identified himself as an artist from the United States. He is believed to be about 30 years of age.

Afortunadamente la policía detuvo al agresor! pic.twitter.com/ehHNRhK19w

— Padre José Aguilar (@PadreJosedejesu) May 16, 2017

At a news conference, the lawyer of the Archdiocese of Mexico, Armando Martínez, asked for prayers for the priest and said the motive for the attack was still unclear.

“We cannot talk about terrorism, we cannot talk about motives, because we obviously have no significant facts,” he said.

In a radio interview Tuesday morning, archdiocesan spokesman Hugo Valdelomar said the attack occurred as Fr. Machorro was blessing the congregation with holy water. He said the priest suffered severe injuries to his neck and near his lung.

Fr. Machorro was transferred by helicopter to a private hospital. He was operated on, and is now stable but in intensive care, according to the Mexico City archdiocese.

Masses at the cathedral are continuing at regularly scheduled hours.

The attack is one of many recent attacks against priests in Mexico. Drug trafficking has led to increased murder and kidnapping in the country. In recent years, 17 priests have been murdered and many others have been kidnapped or assaulted.

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Mexico City, Mexico, May 15, 2017 / 03:50 pm (CNA/EWTN News).- Four representatives from Courage International, Inc. – a Catholic ministry which supports those who experience homosexual inclinations in choosing chastity – participated in th… […]

Caracas, Venezuela, May 11, 2017 / 03:02 am (CNA/EWTN News).- Garbage dumps have become “a regular place for people to eat” in Venezuela, says a local priest lamenting the nation’s increasingly dire economic and political crisis.

“There’s a lot of suffering,” Fr. Victor Salomon, a priest who works in the Archdiocese of Caracas, told CNA.

“This has been something commonly seen. It is really something very painful because the people are really in great need.”

Riots have spiked in Venezuela in recent years, resulting from unemployment, food and medicine shortages, and President Nicolás Maduro’s authoritarian policies.

Price controls in 2003 caused inflation rates to sky rocket on basic necessities, baring the access of food and medicines to the people. Poor socialist policies have effected an estimated 160 products, and while they remain affordable on the shelf, they are soon swept off and sold on the black market at a triple digit inflation rate.

Violent riots have fluctuated since the death of the previous president Hugo Chavez in 2013, but gained even more traction after opposition leaders were arrested last year and Maduro’s attempt for more power by dissolving the legislature in March of this year.

Speaking to CNA, Fr. Salomon said that repression has intensified since President Maduro announced the convocation of a Constitutional Assembly.

In that regard, he said that “some very painful scenes have come out, for example armored vehicles running over some of the protesters, or even people from the National Guard with a repression never seen before, firing at point blank range at those who are protesting. It’s really very painful.”

The priest said that Venezuelans do not want more violence, shortages or “more violations of the constitution and human rights.”

Pope Francis recently sent a message to the country’s bishops, urging them to continue promoting a culture of encounter.

“Dear brothers, I wish to encourage you to not allow the beloved children of Venezuela to allow themselves to be overcome by distrust or despair since these are evils that sink into the hearts of people when they do not see future prospects,” the Pope said May 5.

“I am persuaded that Venezuela’s serious problems can be solved if there is the desire to establish bridges, to dialogue seriously and to comply with the agreements that were reached.”

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St. Catharines, Canada, May 10, 2017 / 10:04 pm (CNA/EWTN News).- A Catholic school district in southern Ontario has responded to complaints after its cancellation of a play about gender identity for elementary students because of age-appropriateness c… […]

Regina, Canada, May 7, 2017 / 03:28 am (CNA/EWTN News).- The Saskatchewan government has said it will seek a temporary exemption to block a judge’s ruling that could force up to 10,000 students out of Catholic schools because they are not Catholi… […]

Santiago de Cuba, Cuba, May 5, 2017 / 09:04 am (CNA/EWTN News).- Following the Cuban bishops’ ad limina meeting with Pope Francis on Thursday, one of the nation’s bishops commented that the island is eagerly awaiting change.

“Cuba is waiting for change. Some changes happen faster than others, but we Cubans, whatever our personal ideas may be, realize that the people can live in better spiritual and material conditions, and that things must change,” Archbishop Dionisio García Ibáñez of Santiago de Cuba told Vatican Radio May 4.

“They are economic and social changes, which necessarily go together … There are cultural changes which are rather rapid, especially among the youth who have familiarity with digital means of communication and have another mode of thinking. This makes the world come to Cuba and come to know better its reality. Political change is also to be expected: it is the structures, and above all the legal one, which have to change.”

Cultural change has been the most visible effect of the opening between the United States and Cuba, Archbishop García commented, saying that “there are now more possibilities for travelling abroad, and tourists can more easily come to Cuba. Although it is still limited, the population has a greater access to new communications technologies and this produces a cultural change which is the condition for any other change, because it makes it possible for persons to chance their own criteria for judgement.”

He said there has been a change for the Church in that “there is a better understanding of religion, and the people can express their own faith.”

“Cubans are a religious people, but we also see there is little faith formation. For us bishops, it is a difficult problem to face. However, we are a creative Church which has been close to its people and who is now witnessing their faith.”

Archbishop García also noted that  “we have vocations, although there are not enough. Thanks be to God, we have fidei donum missionaries, both diocesan and religious, but we still need more. But I would like to say that any missionary who come to Cuba and who wishes to work, has much to do because he finds receptive persons.”

An important and positive change for the bishops has been an easing of permits for visas and residency for missionaries, he added: “The situation has changed a lot. I can say that now there are no more obstacles than before, because when a bishop asks for an entry visa for a missionary he does not encounter problems.”

Asked about the buildings the Church is recovering, the bishop said that “this process has just begun. It’s already a positive thing. In certain dioceses they have returned some buildings, but it’s a slow process.”

“We are working with the state in order that, after 50 years in which the population has grown, we might be able to have the places for worship that we need.”

While they wait for this to move forward, the archbishop explained, “we have houses of prayer, that is, the faithful make their homes available for their communities to gather there. There aren’t parish churches with their pastoral buildings, but nevertheless the Church lives.”

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