Denver, Colo., Mar 1, 2017 / 06:24 am (Denver Catholic).- St. Bernadette Parish, the pioneer Catholic church of Lakewood, Colorado, outgrew its first worship space just 18 years after being founded in 1947. Today, the half-century-old church remains la… […]
Washington D.C., Mar 1, 2017 / 02:25 am (CNA/EWTN News).- As Ash Wednesday kicks off the Lenten season, Catholics enter into 40 days of abstaining from sweets, technology, alcohol and other luxuries.
But did you know that Catholic monks once brewed be… […]
New York City, N.Y., Mar 1, 2017 / 12:08 am (CNA/EWTN News).- Dorothy Day, the co-founder of the Catholic Worker Movement whose cause for canonization has been opened, is the subject of a new book by her own granddaughter, Kate Hennessy.
“My grandmother and my mother really thought carefully and closely about some pretty basic things that I think we have lost sight of,” Hennessy said. “One is: what am I meant to do, what is each of us meant to do, in terms of occupation and vocation? What skills can I offer the world? They both felt that that was so important.”
Day was also captivated by “this idea that we each have a role to play, that each are capable of doing something,” she said. “I think that’s very, very hopeful. In these times people are unsure of what to do – I mean the problem seems so big. My grandmother was saying [that] what we can do is so little, but that is what we are given to do. That’s only what we can do, so let’s move forward and do what we each think that we can do. That’s what I hope people will come away with from this story.”
Hennessy is the youngest of Day’s nine grandchildren, through her daughter Tamar. She spoke to CNA about her book Dorothy Day: The World Will Be Saved by Beauty, a biography-memoir about her grandmother.
Born in Brooklyn in 1897, Day was baptized Episcopalian at the age of 12. She displayed signs at a young age of possessing a deep religious sense, fasting and mortifying her body by sleeping on hardwood floors.
She was strongly influenced by Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle, and she worked as a journalist for a socialist publication. She had a series of disastrous romances, and procured an abortion.
She had a profound conversion, and had her daughter baptized as a Catholic. She was herself received into the Church in 1927.
She co-founded the Catholic Worker Movement with Peter Maurin in 1933, starting soup kitchens, farm communities, and a Catholic newspaper.She dedicated her life to aiding and advocating for the poor and leading a life characterized by voluntary poverty and works of mercy.
Her legacy lives on today in some 185 Catholic Worker communities in the U.S. and around the globe.
The Catholic Worker was meant “to bring the word that the Church had a call among social action,” Hennessy reflected.
Hennessy considers Day’s profound influence on others to be the clearest evidence of her sanctity.
“So many people have said to me that when they met my grandmother, when they read her books, or when they worked at the Catholic Worker, that it had just changed their lives forever … What is my vocation, what should I be doing as an occupation? Or how should I be treating people, how should I be as a moral person?”
Holy persons like Day “help us, they lead us to change our perception of reality, in a way, and become more engaged in the world.”
Hennessy recalled the beauty of a Catholic Worker Farm where she had spent summer breaks in upstate New York. She said Day had a powerful eye of observation and was able to see beauty anywhere.
“One of the things that I think my grandmother was so good at, and really teaches us, is how she could see beauty anywhere. She would see beauty in a tree that was struggling to grow in the middle of the city. She could see beauty in any little bit of nature that she could see … or eating from a lovely plate that had been donated.”
That beauty can be found at the Catholic Worker houses, she said: “Just being able to invite people in, and set them down with a cup of coffee and a bowl of soup, is also a form of beauty.”
Washington D.C., Feb 28, 2017 / 02:01 pm (CNA/EWTN News).- While physician-assisted suicide is promoted as empowering terminally-ill patients, it could result in the poor being coerced to take their lives, experts warned at an event this week.
“… […]
Lincoln, Neb., Feb 27, 2017 / 03:24 pm (CNA/EWTN News).- Controversial immigration policies issued by United States President Donald Trump’s have thus far prompted numerous critiques from concerned U.S. Catholic bishops.
The most recent order, i… […]
Washington D.C., Feb 27, 2017 / 02:24 pm (CNA/EWTN News).- The U.S. bishops are responding with solidarity and concern for the Jewish community, following a surge in anti-Semitic actions in recent weeks.
“On behalf of the Bishops and people of the Catholic Church, as the Chairman of the Bishops’ Committee for Ecumenical and Interreligious Affairs, I want to express our deep sympathy, solidarity, and support to our Jewish brothers and sisters,” said Bishop Mitchell T. Rozanksi of Springfield in a press release.
“I wish to offer our deepest concern, as well as our unequivocal rejection of these hateful actions,” Bishop Rozanski continued.
On Feb. 20, more than 150 headstones were damaged in University City, Missouri at the Chesed Shel Emeth Cemetery. Just a week later, over 100 headstones were found similarly knocked over at the Mount Carmel Jewish Cemetery in Philadelphia.
Archbishop Charles Chaput of Philadelphia was “deeply saddened” by the vandalism at Mount Carmel Jewish Cemetery, and called for “prayerful solidarity with the families of those whose final resting places have been disturbed.”
“As a community, we must speak out to condemn inflammatory messages and actions that serve only to divide, stigmatize, and incite prejudice,” the archbishop continued. “We must continually and loudly reject attempts to alienate and persecute the members of any religious tradition. Rather, as members of diverse faith and ethnic communities throughout the region, we must stand up for one another and improve the quality of life for everyone by building bridges of trust and understanding.”
No suspects have been named in either case, but the damage has reached hundreds of thousands of dollars.
More than 50 bomb threats targeting the Jewish community have also been reported across the country since the beginning of the year, including scares at Jewish community centers in Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Milwaukee.
According to the Anti-Defamation League, violent anti-Semitic actions soared in 2015, and continued into 2016 with increased online anti-Semitic harassment.
Leaders and officials have denounced the surge in anti-Semitic actions, including words from President Donald Trump last week, who said the recent attacks on the Jewish community were “horrible and are a painful and a very sad reminder of the work that still must be done to root out hate and prejudice and evil.”
Mayor Jim Kenney of Philadelphia also spoke out, saying that “hate is not permissible in Philadelphia,” and that the perpetrators “will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law,” according to the New York Times.
Echoing these sentiments, Bishop Rozanski promised that “the Catholic Church stands in love with the Jewish community in the current face of anti-Semitism.”
Quoting Pope Francis, he pointed to the dangers of the anti-Semitic attacks, linking them to acts of dehumanization, which is most notably seen in hatred towards neighbors.
However, the Springfield bishop also voiced hope that these attacks could be an opportunity for neighborly love to shine brightly.
“But here we also find an opportunity: that the light of the love of neighbor may illuminate the Earth with its stunning brightness like a lightning bolt in the dark; that it may wake us up and let true humanity burst through with authentic resistance, resilience and persistence.”
“I encourage everyone to remember their neighbor, to find the opportunities to be lights of resistance, resilience, and persistence during these contentious times, especially with all our brothers and sisters of faith.”
Los Angeles, Calif., Feb 27, 2017 / 09:55 am (CNA).- They came from across the Archdiocese of Los Angeles to stand together, worship side-by-side and honor their shared history: African American Catholics, a small yet faith-filled community, sang God&r… […]
Denver, Colo., Feb 26, 2017 / 03:46 pm (CNA).- When Josh and Laura Martin, both converts to the faith, moved their growing family of six from the city of Dallas, Texas to the hills of Oklahoma, they didn’t necessarily know that they were particip… […]
Boulder, Colo., Feb 26, 2017 / 03:02 am (CNA/EWTN News).- For Erika Bachiochi, the Catholic Church has been able to offer a genuine pro-woman theology which not only safeguards and protects her stance as a feminist, but also enhances her ability to be strong in all aspects of her life.
Dr. Mary Anne Case would like to differ. She believes that while Catholic feminism exists, the institutional Catholic Church – namely the Vatican and Magisterium – is overtly anti-woman.
These two legal scholars from varied backgrounds met on the common stage of feminism at the Aquinas Institute for Catholic Thought’s 10th annual Great Debate in Boulder, Colo. on Feb. 23. The two women presented dissenting arguments for both sides of the spectrum on Catholic feminism and tackled the question: is the Church anti-woman?
Dr. Case, a law professor at the University of Chicago, answered in the affirmative, while Erika Bachiochi, a visiting fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, answered in the negative.
“In my lifetime, the Church that had made me a feminist betrayed me,” Dr. Case said in her opening statements.
“I think the Church has let us down, and I think the Church has let us down relatively recently. The early church was very much not anti-woman. The gospels are not anti-woman,” she continued, saying the Catholic Church of the past was not anti-feminist.
However, Dr. Case argued that when the Church definitively said “no” to priestly ordination for women in the 1970s, they closed the door to half of the population of the Church.
“The problem with the Catholic Church is that all authority flows from ordination. The Magisterium – as it need not be – is composed of men and cardinals,” Dr. Case said, suggesting that women should at least be allowed in the decision-making that flows from the hierarchy of the Magisterium.
The law professor spoke at the debate wearing a button from the 1970s on her shirt that said “If you aren’t going to ordain women, stop baptizing them.”
This, she said, is a representation of the economy of salvation: if women cannot be priests because they do not image Christ, how can women become saved in the eyes of the Church, since salvation can only arrive through the extent that Christ images us?
Dr. Case also pointed to some of the Catholic Church’s greatest thinkers, such as St. Thomas Aquinas, who believed that “women are necessarily in a state of subjection,” and that females are “misbegotten males.” She also highlighted that the Sistine Chapel’s Creation of Man, is indeed that of a man – and does not include Eve.
Within the last 50 years, Dr. Case believes that the Church shifted away from the idea that men and women are equal when it introduced the idea of complementarity, particularly seen in Pope St. John Paul II’s Theology of the Body, saying that placing characteristics or roles on each gender negates their equality.
“There should be no fixed notions concerning the role of males and females,” Dr. Case suggested, and pointed to St. Augustine’s notion that the soul does not have a sex.
In response, Bachiochi said that “papal teaching has rejected the essentialist view that woman and men possess mutually exclusive fixed character traits.” Sexuality does not take away from the equality of men and women, she said, but simply makes them “distinctive.”
While Bachiochi was once a pro-choice, socialist feminist, she has since shifted her beliefs towards the teachings and beliefs of Catholicism. She agreed with Dr. Case on a number of different levels, saying that “there should be more women’s voices in the Church.”
However, the most notable differences between the two scholars was on the point of clerics and sexual teachings. While Dr. Case argued that women can and should be ordained Catholic priests, Bachiochi said the notion reeked of clericalism.
“I have no less authority than a priest as a baptized Christian,” Bachiochi said.
“A priest has authority to represent Christ in a sacramental way, and I have the authority to represent Christ in every other area of my life,” she said, adding that the focus on female priests can also take away from the good work that professional and religious women are already doing within the Church.
However, Dr. Case pointed out that men in the Catholic Church “have all of the opportunities, and then some. How can the church not be anti-women…if women are not part of the decision making?”
To this, Bachiochi agreed that more female voices are needed within the Church, but did point to the Pontifical Council of the Laity, which seeks female voices, and other prominent church leaders such as Mary Glendon, who serves on various Vatican boards, and Sr. Prudence Allen, R.S.M., who is a philosopher appointed to the Vatican’s International Theological Commission.
Bachiochi went on to find fundamental differences with the modern idea of feminism, which claims that abortion and contraception rights are the capstone to the whole movement. She has found in her own experience that these same notions can also be the downfall to women.
Instead, Bachiochi suggested that Catholic feminism indeed exists, and is protected by the Church, precisely because of its teachings about sexual and reproductive rights, particularly Natural Family Planning.
“I believe that Catholic Christianity, and in particular the controversial sexual teachings of the Catholic Church, are deeply pro-woman. It was precisely these teachings on monogamy, divorce, birth control, abortion and infanticide that attracted women in the first century into the Christian fold,” Bachiochi stated.
“As a feminist, NFP does something that contraception neglects… it gets men to think about the reality,” she noted, saying that through NFP, less pressure is put on the woman to take the pill or get an IUD, and more emphasis is placed on men and their responsibility in the sexual act.
She also mentioned that the Catholic Church in particular has always been pro-woman, as seen through its recognition of female saints, political leaders, and scholars, and its production of educational systems and healthcare centered around the good of women.
Bachiochi additionally noted that “Mary, the Mother of God, is heralded by the Catholic Church as the single greatest human that has ever lived.”
“The greatest among us are not the clerics, but the saints.”
Cincinnati, Ohio, Feb 25, 2017 / 04:15 am (CNA/EWTN News).- Catholics in Cincinnati are hoping that an upcoming meeting of bishops and leaders will give the local Church a much stronger voice to address issues of racism and violence.
“It is a bl… […]
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