US

Denver, Colo., Mar 14, 2018 / 03:09 pm (CNA).- On Wednesday, thousands of students throughout the United States walked out of classrooms as part of National School Walkout, a demonstration calling for safer schools and increased gun control, in the wake of the February high school shooting that left 17 Florida students dead.

Many of the walkouts were planned to last 17 minutes, in honor of each of the students who were shot and killed at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida on Feb. 14. Many Catholic schools used the day as a chance to call their students to prayer, either in addition to or instead of a walkout.

Schools in the Archdiocese of New Orleans were asked to hold 17 minutes of prayer in solidarity with shooting victims and the walkouts. The prayer services included the rosary, as well as the archdiocesan prayer against violence, murder and racism, which is recited regularly at Masses in the region.

“We didn’t hear of any schools or students participating (in the walk-out), but we were hearing from our school communities, ‘What could we do, what could we offer in support of lessening gun violence?’” Dr. RaeNell Houston, superintendent of Catholic Schools in New Orleans, told the Clarion Herald.

“Our children deserve to be safe in our school communities,” Houston added. “But we felt intentional, dedicated prayer would yield more fruitful results than a walkout. I am a witness to how God answers prayer. And we felt our time was best utilized and our statement would be bold if we dedicated that 17 minutes of prayer on behalf of the Florida victims and our country and for the safety of our children.”

Cardinal Ritter College Prep, a Catholic urban high school in St. Louis, participated in an organized school event.
 
Students left campus at 9:30 am and walked to nearby St. Francis Xavier Church on the campus of St. Louis University. Ronnie Robinson, the father of a recent graduate, was invited to participate in the march. Robinson and his family have lost two sons to gun violence in recent years.

After a period of prayer and silence, students returned to their classrooms to discuss the events of the day, to review the school’s active shooter policy, and to resume classes.

Elias Mendoza, principal of St. Francis Catholic High School in Sacramento, California sent a memo to parents in early March, in anticipation of the walkouts, noting that school officials recognized both the students concerns and as well as their own obligation as school employees to remain politically neutral.

Instead of a walkout, St. Francis offered a prayer service for peace and healing, noting safety concerns regarding students leaving campus in the middle of the school day.

“Together with students and school leaders, we’re working to provide students with an alternative avenue to express their viewpoints in a constructive and meaningful way, while remaining on campus, where safety measures are in place to ensure supervision and security,” Mendoza said in his letter.

“At St. Francis, we care about our (students), our families, and the faith-based community we represent.  Moving forward, I ask for your prayers and partnership in doing all that we can to reassure our students and to make them strong resilient young women,” he concluded.

The Archdiocese of Newark, New Jersey said on Twitter that several of the schools participated in the national walk out, and held prayer services afterward.

 

 

Today, #Catholic Schools throughout the Archdiocese of Newark took a stand against gun violence by participating in the #NationalWalkoutDay. Several schools, including St. Mary of the Assumption and Saint Dominic Academy, held prayer services following the #Walkout. #Enough pic.twitter.com/sk9Xcf1Q14

— Newark Archdiocese (@NwkArchdiocese) March 14, 2018

 

 

Sister Brittany Harrison, FMA, is the Theology Department Chair at Mary Help of Christians Academy in New Jersey.

In an interview about the walkouts with Relevant Radio, Harrison said that she was inspired by the students throughout the country who were “deciding to rise up, make their voices heard, and make social change.”

“As a Salesian, that’s what I believe in, the power of young people. So to see them doing that is just an incredible thing for me,” she said.  

Harrison said that while the official walkout, sponsored by the organizers of the national Women’s March, was focused on gun control legislation, her students wanted to make their event less political and more focused on school safety in general.

Rather than the walkout, the school held a prayer service and also gave students time to write government officials about the changes they’d like to see.

“As Catholics we can really model what it is to affect social change, and our young people really want to do that,” she said.

The Diocese of Peoria, Illinois encouraged its students to take part in some kind of alternative, prayerful show of solidarity rather than the walkout, citing concerns about some of the sponsors of the national walk-out as well as safety concerns.

“Unfortunately, some of the sponsors of the National School Walkout advocate for positions that are contrary to the Church’s teachings on the sanctity of human life in all of its stages,” the Office of Catholic Schools stated in a letter to diocesan Catholic school officials.  

“Due to this fact, as well as concerns for student safety on this day of national attention, our schools are directed to not permit students to stage a walkout.”

Instead, the letter suggested that diocesan schools hold Masses or prayer services for the victims.

Catholic schools in the Archdiocese of Detroit held memorial services for the victims of the Parkland shooting, including posters with pictures and brief biographies of the victims.

 

Students and faculty at @Shrine_Schools gathered this morning for a memorial service in honor of the victims of the #ParklandSchoolShooting #NationalWalkoutDay pic.twitter.com/IR3ZIijecZ

— Detroit Archdiocese (@DetroitCatholic) March 14, 2018

 

 

Queen of Angels elementary school in the Archdiocese of Atlanta said on Twitter that they were hosting a “walk in” rather than a walkout, and used the day as a time to encourage their students to focus on ways they could be kinder and more inclusive.

 

 

#WalkIn-Today at 10 AM while students across the nation #walkout in protest of gun violence, QA students will spend 17 minutes reaching out to others that we don’t spend enough time getting to know, and praying that all young people feel included in their communities. pic.twitter.com/civ6qR3JTC

— QA Catholic School (@QASchool) March 14, 2018

 

 

In Erie, Pennsylvania, two Catholic schools – Cathedral Preparatory School and Villa Maria Academy – held school-wide Masses and prayer services for the victims and for peace. Father Scott Jabo, president of the schools, told Fox News that the schools considered how they could approach the walkout day differently as a Catholic school.

“By praying for the victims, we could bring a great focus to the victims in this situation, and by unified prayer, we could have a powerful impact,” Jabo said.

He added that at the prayer service, the names and a short biography of each of the 17 Parkland victims would be read aloud, “to make it real that these are real people who died.”

“(We’re) doing something that was a Catholic school we can and should do and that is pray, and unleash that power of prayer,” he said.

 

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Minneapolis, Minn., Mar 13, 2018 / 04:24 pm (CNA/EWTN News).- Archbishop Bernard Hebda of the Archdiocese of St. Paul and Minneapolis said it is the duty of the laity to represent the Catholic faith in the public arena, especially pointing to the curre… […]

Washington D.C., Mar 13, 2018 / 04:07 pm (CNA/EWTN News).- As populists across the U.S. and Europe express discontent with the current state of democracy, George Weigel has pointed to the importance of family and civil society in encouraging and cultivating the virtuous citizenry necessary for democratic renewal.

“Democracy is not a machine that can run by itself,” said George Weigel in the Ethics and Public Policy Center’s 17th annual William E. Simon Lecture held March 6 in Washington, D.C.

“The vitality of the public moral culture is crucial to the democratic project because it takes a certain kind of people, living certain virtues, to make free politics and free economics work so that the net result is genuine human flourishing.”

“The ‘culture of Me’ is incapable of defending the claim that the democratic project, for all its discontents and flaws, is nonetheless morally superior to the various authoritarianisms on offer in the 21st-century world, because it is itself committed to the authoritarianism of the imperial autonomous Self,” warned Weigel, who cited the continued influence of the 1960’s “unbridled self-absorption” and rejection of traditional virtues on today’s public culture.

Two elements of modern American culture that hinder democracy are moral relativism, the idea that “your truth” can be different than “my truth,” and expressive individualism, a certain self-centered notion that “the good” is defined by what an individual wills or wants.

Weigel pointed out that “a truth-starved and morally anorexic culture is incapable of sustaining free politics and free economics because it cannot answer the questions, why be civil and tolerant and why accept the electoral choice of the majority?”

A self-absorbed “culture of Me” is also linked to consumerism, in which “human worth is measured by what a person has rather than who a person is,” said Weigel.

The foundation for rebuilding a virtuous moral culture are the family, religious communities, and civil associations, according to Weigel, who stressed, “the family is of immense importance, because stable families are the first schools of freedom rightly understood as freedom for excellence, freedom for nobility, and freedom for solidarity.”

“The deconstruction of the family by the sexual revolution is closely correlated to many phenomena that now threaten the democratic project, from crime and substance abuse to aggressive forms of identity politics that seek to shut down public debate,” continued Weigel, pointing to the research of Mary Eberstadt.

“Americans must once again affirm that there are self-evident truths that can be known by reason; that knowing these truths teaches us both our obligations and the limits of the legitimate role of the state in our lives; and that affirming these truths is what makes an ‘American’, irrespective of anyone’s grandparents’ country-of-origin,” he continued.

Weigel says he has hope for a renewal of virtue in America’s democracy, but “both conservatives and progressives in these United States need a thorough examination of conscience about their respective responsibilities for our current democratic discontents, which are no longer just a matter of frustration with Washington political dysfunction.”

“Statesmanship requires a firm commitment to certain built-in truths about human beings and their communities, and the skills taught by the virtue of prudence in making those truths live in our common life. So let us measure ourselves, and those who would lead us, by those truths and by that virtue.”

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Atlanta, Ga., Mar 12, 2018 / 02:26 pm (CNA/EWTN News).- The Archbishop of Atlanta released a statement Friday announcing his opposition to a bill in the Georgia legislature that would discriminate between government and private entities in past cases o… […]

Los Angeles, Calif., Mar 12, 2018 / 02:00 pm (CNA/EWTN News).- Sister Catherine Rose Holzman, 89, was one of five remaining members of her religious community, the Sisters of the Immaculate Heart of Mary in Los Angeles.

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Denver, Colo., Mar 12, 2018 / 02:02 am (CNA/EWTN News).- These biblical commandments probably sound familiar: Thou shalt not kill. Thou shalt not steal. Thou shalt not commit adultery.

These might not: Do not shave your beard with a razor. Do not wear garments of mixed fibers. Stone adulterers.

In a new T.V. show on CBS, main character Chip Curry, a film critic for a New York paper and soon-to-be father, sets out to improve his moral life by following every law in the Bible – all 613 of them – as literally as he possibly can, with the help of his ‘God squad’, which includes a rabbi and a Catholic priest.

The premise of the show is based on the 2007 New York Times bestseller A Year of Living Biblically, in which author A.J. Jacobs describes his real-life journey of taking the Bible as literally as possible for a year.

While the results in the show and the book are largely comical and portrayed in good humor (at one point a pebble is chucked at a cheating spouse), following every law ever given by God to the letter is nearly impossible, and not what Catholics are called to do, biblical scholar Andre Villeneuve told CNA.

“Good luck if you really want to try to live the Old Testament completely literally,” Villeneuve, who has a doctorate in biblical studies and teaches at St. John Vianney Seminary in Denver, Colo., told CNA.

“It would mean you would have to stone your son if he’s rebellious and doesn’t listen to you. You would have to stone adulterers. You would have to check every time you approach a woman that she’s not on her period because you’re not allowed to touch her,” he said, “a lot of these things that have to do with purity which are really frankly awkward and would be really problematic, if not impossible, to observe.”

The problem with such literal fundamentalism, he said, is that it doesn’t read and interpret the Bible in light of salvation history and in light of the intent of the laws given by God.

“The 613 commandments in the Old Testament, in the Hebrew Bible, they were given to Jews to begin with, so it’s ridiculous for anyone, whether a Catholic or Christian, to say they’re going to live by all of these commandments, because they were never given to Gentiles,” he said.

Some of these commandments still stand, however – most notably, the 10 Commandments. When Christ came and established a new covenant, the apostles decided which laws were still meant to be followed by Christians, and which laws pertained only to Jews, Villeneuve said.

“What the (apostles) did is…they saw the law as divided into three categories – the moral laws, the ceremonial laws, and the judicial laws,” he said. “So what has been considered to be universal and perennial and never to be changed are the moral laws, which are the 10 Commandments and their interpretation.”

The ceremonial laws related to Jewish worship, or the judicial laws related to matters such as what kind of compensation you can expect if your neighbor’s animal comes onto your property, are not binding for Christians.

Catholics can distinguish what laws of the Bible to follow and what it means to follow them by reading the Catechism and following the teachings and traditions of the Church, Villeneuve noted.

“The easy answer … is that today we have the Catechism of the Catholic Church, and the third part is called Life in Christ, or the Moral Law. That’s where you can see the Catholic interpretation of the Ten Commandments in light of jesus’ teaching, and the apostles and the teachings of the Church,” he said. “It’s essentially extracting what is universal about the commandments without taking up all the specific commandments that were given to Jews in their times and culture.”

Even the Jews do not follow and interpret all of the 613 commandments in the Hebrew Bible exactly literally, Villeneuve noted.

As an example, he pointed out that the law “an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth” may seem cruel at face value, but it was never interpreted literally, even by the Jewish people.

“It doesn’t mean literally gouging out an eye, it means what is an eye worth as far as livelihood, quality of life … and therefore your neighbor should compensate you by so much, by paying you back,” he said. “It’s read and interpreted in a way that’s not literal.”

“The bottom line is that the fundamentalist reading of scripture doesn’t work; even the Jews don’t live that way,” Villeneuve added.

“We don’t read scripture in a vacuum, we don’t believe in ‘sola scriptura’ (the Protestant doctrine of ‘scripture alone’), but it’s always read in light of Christian tradition and the teachings of the Church and the magisterium.”

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