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Colombian archbishop removes from ministry 15 priests accused of sexual abuse

April 6, 2020 CNA Daily News 1

Villavicencio, Colombia, Apr 7, 2020 / 12:00 am (CNA).- The president of the Colombian bishops’ conference, Óscar Urbina, suspended 15 priests of his archdiocese from ministry who have been accused of sexual abuse. Other jurisdictions in the country have removed four other priests.

Archbishop Óscar Urbina of Villavicencio told Colombian media that the accused priests represent 15% of the city’s priests.

The priests are accused of committing sexual abuse in Colombia, Italy and the United States, Caracol Radio reported.

Fr. Carlos Villabón, communications director and chancellor for the archdiocese of Villavicencio, told ACI Prensa, CNA’s Spanish language news partner, that the 15 priests were suspended while a canonical investigation proceeds at the Vatican.

“On March 16, 2020 these 15 priests were notified after a preliminary investigation was carried out. They are neither convicted nor acquitted by this suspension, only asked to relinquish their parish duties, cease celebrating the Eucharist and cease their ministerial service while the complete investigation is conducted,” the priest explained.

The results of the preliminary investigation “are now being sent to the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith at the Vatican, and there they will determine the gravity of the facts and what the Church calls a penal canonical process will be conducted,” Villabón said.

“It’s unknown how much time the canonical process will take, but the idea is that it proceed as quickly as possible, considering that in Italy and in many parts of the world there’s a quarantine because of the coronavirus,” the communications director added.
Caracol Radio published a list of the 19 priests, but Villabón told ACI Prensa that the archdiocese would neither confirm nor deny the names reported.

 “According to a witness under protection by the prosecutor’s office, the 19 priests apparently formed a network of abusers, Caracol Radio reported.

In an April 3 statement, the archdiocese of Villavicencio announced that an accusation was received Feb. 14, 2020 concerning “acts against sexual morality by some priests of this archdiocese.”

“Having as a priority the alleged victim, we expressed to him our deep pain and solidarity and have offered him psychological and spiritual accompaniment. We reaffirm our commitment to act with clarity and transparency for his good and that of the Church,” the statement said.

Following the protocols of the Archdiocesan Commission for the Protection of Minors, once the abuse was reported, the regional prosecutor’s office was notified and “we made ourselves completely available to cooperate in the investigations taking place in this case,” the statement said.

The archdiocese said that it has taken steps “to eradicate the terrible evil of abuse within and outside our institution. We ask to be informed of any situations where one of our members has finally betrayed his vocation of service and dedication to the Lord and the community.”

A version of this story was first reported by ACI Prensa, CNA’s Spanish-language news partner. It has been translated and adapted by CNA.

 

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Jerusalem archbishop blesses city with True Cross relic

April 6, 2020 CNA Daily News 2

CNA Staff, Apr 6, 2020 / 01:00 pm (CNA).- Unable to lead the traditional Palm Sunday procession through Jerusalem, Archbishop Pierbattista Pizzaballa, OFM, apostolic administrator of the Latin Patriarchate of Jerusalem, blessed the city with a relic of the True Cross on April 5.

The annual procession, which recalls Christ’s entry into the city and the beginning of Holy Week, was cancelled in line with international efforts to curb the spread of COVID-19, with public gatherings and events suspended in Israel. 

“We decided since we cannot have the palm procession, to have anyway a moment of prayer this afternoon,” said Pizzaballa on Sunday. The archbishop led a short, multi-lingual “moment of prayer” at Dominus Flevit, a church located on the Mount of Olives.

The church, which is shaped like a teardrop, overlooks the city, and was built to mark the Gospel account of Jesus weeping as he envisioned the destruction of Jerusalem.

The prayer service ended with Pizzaballa raising a relic of the True Cross over the city in benediction. 

Jerusalem, said Pizzaballa, “is a symbol of the church, the symbol also of humanity. It is the house of prayer for all the people, according to the scriptures.”

“So when we cry [over] Jerusalem, together with Jesus, we cry [over] all our human fraternity, for this difficult moment we are living, for this sad Palm Sunday, this Easter we have to celebrate.”

Pizzaballa said that sadness over being unable to celebrate the liturgical feasts of Holy Week is real, but “maybe, in a way also very true, very essential.” 

“Today we have not celebrated the solemn and beautiful entrance of Jesus to the city of Jerusalem like every year, with faithful from all the parishes of the diocese and with pilgrims from all over the world,” Pizzaballa said during the prayer service.

“We have not raised our palms and olive branches to cry out ‘Hosanna’ to our king, Jesus the Christ.” 

Instead, the archbishop asked Catholics in the Holy Land and around the world to consider what the Lord may be trying to say during these times.

He noted that, while the people of Jerusalem in the Gospel greeted him with cheers on Palm Sunday, Jesus knew that “He came to Jerusalem, not to be on the throne like David, but to be put to death.” 

“The meaning that Jesus attributes to his ‘triumphal entry’ is different from the meaning that the people of Jerusalem saw in it,” he said.

“Perhaps this is the lesson that Jesus wants to teach us today. We turn to God when there is something that harms us. When we are in trouble, suddenly we all want to ask big and difficult questions.”

While people may be praying for an end to the COVID-19 pandemic as we often do for solutions  to other problems, the archbishop said that  “Jesus responds in His own way” to these prayers. 

“Precisely because Jesus says ‘yes’ to our deepest desires, He will have to say ‘no’ to our immediate desires,” he said.

Drawing comparisons between this year’s Palm Sunday and the biblical Palm Sunday during Christ’s earthly life, Pizzaballa said the story of Jesus’ entrance into Jerusalem “is a lesson on the discrepancy between our expectations and God’s response.” 

The crowd who greeted Jesus was disappointed that their salvation was not immediate, said Pizzaballa, but “Jesus’ entry into Jerusalem is truly the moment when salvation is born.” 

“The ‘Hosannas’ were justified, even if not for the reasons the Jerusalemites had supposed,” he said. 

This remains true today, he explained. Although it may seem as though God is not answering prayers and leaves people “disappointed,” this is in part because “our expectations remain without an apparent response.”

Christianity, he said, “is based on hope and love, not certainty,” and that while God will not answer all problems with certainty, “He won’t leave us alone.” 

“And here, today, despite everything, at the gates of His and our city, we declare that we really want to welcome Him as our King and Messiah, and to follow Him on His way to His throne, the cross,” he said.  

“But we also ask Him to give us the strength necessary to carry it with His own, fruitful love.”

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Raphael revisited: Vatican offers virtual tour 500 years after artist’s death

April 6, 2020 CNA Daily News 1

Vatican City, Apr 6, 2020 / 12:10 pm (CNA).- Monday, April 6 marks the 500th anniversary of the death of Raphael, the Renaissance painter responsible for “The School of Athens” and “The Transfiguration.”

While the Vatican Museums was due to unveil the last phase of restoration of its Raphael Rooms this week, the restored frescoes remain hidden from the public after coronavirus restrictions closed the museums a month ago. However, the Vatican is encouraging people to make virtual museum visits to “admire, even from a distance, the splendor of Raphael’s art.”

Art historian Elizabeth Lev shared with CNA her advice for Catholics who wish to spend some time contemplating Raphael’s works of art during the coronavirus quarantine.

“From his early Oddi altarpiece painted when was about 19 or 20 to the fresco of the School of Athens, to his dazzling tapestries and his architectural feat of a portico decorated with scenes from the Bible, it’s easy to understand why Raphael was hailed as an exemplar of ‘Catholic excellence,’” Lev said April 6. 

“Raphael produced some very powerful altarpieces and, in some cases, even created new types of iconography, especially in the Madonna of Foligno and his St Cecilia panel in Bologna. He reinvented the ‘sacred conversation,’ which are paintings where saints dialogue with Mary and Jesus, welcoming viewers into greater prayer and contemplation,” she said.

The Vatican Museums offer a virtual tour of the Raphael Rooms with a 360 degree view of each room. Raphael was commissioned by Pope Julius II to paint the four rooms in the Apostolic Palace which formed part of the papal apartments. 

The School of Athens fresco placing Plato alongside Aristotle can be viewed in the Room of the Segnatura, along with illustrations of the cardinal and theological virtues. 

The Room of Constantine was the last of the Raphael Rooms to undergo restoration, a project which began in the 1980s. The virtual tour of the Room of Constantine displays paintings of Constantine’s baptism, vision of the cross, and the Battle of the Milvian Bridge before the restoration. 

One room in the Vatican Museums’ Pinacoteca, or painting gallery, displays Raphael’s Crowning of the Virgin, Madonna of Foligno, and The Transfiguration. 

“In this very unique week, I would propose reflecting on Raphael’s Transfiguration painted just before he died and placed upon his tomb during his funeral,” Lev said. “In this work, Raphael paints two distinct areas, the lower section where the apostles attempt to heal a boy possessed by demons (Mark 9:17-29) and then the upper section where Jesus reveals himself to Peter, James and John and God the Father announces ‘This is my dearly loved Son. Listen to him.’”

“People are afraid and confused, trying to control things they cannot and struggling pointlessly in the shadows. But lifting one’s gaze, one sees Jesus. Everything is subordinate to Him, and he appears as transfigured, a dynamic, powerful light that can repel the encroaching darkness. What an inspiring way for us to envision Jesus during these dark days,” she said.

Lev also recommends Raphael’s Madonna and Child paintings, such as The Alba Madonna in the National Gallery in Washington, D.C.

“These were small devotional works, meant for contemplation in the home, appropriate for all of us who are housebound,” she said. “He did endless variations on them, so there is something for everyone — versions where Joseph hovers protectively, others where young John and Jesus cavort.”

Born Raffaello Sanzio in 1483 in Urbino, Italy, Raphael went on to work in Rome from 1508 to 1520, serving Pope Julius II and Pope Leo X.

Raphael died at the age of 37 on Good Friday, April 6, 1520. He is buried in the Pantheon, which had already been consecrated as the Basilica of St. Mary and the Martyrs, where the artist’s tomb remains on display.  

“He was brilliant and tremendously successful. When he died at the age of 37 he was already running the equivalent of a Fortune 500 company: the largest studio of the Renaissance,” Lev said.

Earlier this year, the Vatican Museums displayed 10 of Raphael’s tapestries in their original place in Sistine Chapel for one week. The tapestries, commissioned by Pope Leo X in 1515, depict the lives of St. Peter and St. Paul in the Gospels and the Acts of the Apostles.

Raphael painted the Apostolic Palace at the same time as Michaeangelo was working on the Sistine Chapel

“Michelangelo was eight years his senior and was already working in the Sistine chapel when Raphael arrived to paint the apartments of Pope Julius. The two had completely different perspectives on painting. Raphael’s was more similar to Leonardo’s, with careful backgrounds and elegant compositions, while Michelangelo’s figures were sculptural and monumental,” Lev explained.

“As these two Titans clashed stylistically, the world’s greatest works of art were born,” she said.

The Sistine Chapel, the Pio Clementino Museum, the Chiaramonti Museum, the New Wing, the Niccoline Chapel, and the Room of the Chiaroscuri can also be viewed via virtual tour on the Vatican Museums website.

Rome’s Scuderie del Quirinale museum had also opened a major exhibition on Raphael this year, which brings together 200 works of art from Louvre, the Uffizi and elsewhere. This exhibition was forced to close 72 hours after its March 5 opening due to the Italian government’s closure of all museums in response to the coronavirus outbreak. 

A video posted on YouTube by the museum allows quarantined Italians and art lovers around the world to catch a glimpse of the paintings displayed in this exhibition originally scheduled to end June 2. 

“Most of us lead very busy lives that were abruptly halted by the quarantines. As we are all required to exercise the virtue of patience these days, we can also rediscover the skill of looking carefully at things, appreciating details and the value of serenity. And nowhere are those qualities better expressed than in the art of Raphael,” Lev said.

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Vatican Major Penitentiary: Mercy does not cease amid coronavirus

April 6, 2020 CNA Daily News 2

Vatican City, Apr 6, 2020 / 11:21 am (CNA).- In an Easter letter to confessors on Saturday, the head of the Apostolic Penitentiary wrote that while ‘social distancing’ is necessary amid the coronavirus, ‘mercy does not cease’.

Despite the restrictions placed by many civil and ecclesial governors, “Mercy does not cease and God does not distance himself,” Cardinal Mauro Piacenza, the Major Penitentiary, wrote April 4.

“The social distancing required for health reasons, while necessary, cannot and must never turn into ecclesial distancing, let alone theological-sacramental distancing,” he added.

The Apostolic Penitentiary is the Holy See’s tribunal with responsibility for the internal forum and indulgences.

Cardinal Piacenza recalled his March 19 decree granting plenary indulgences to those suffering from Covid-19, asd well as health-care workers, their family, and those who care for them in any capacity; as well as an attached note on the sacrament of confession calling for reflection on its “urgency and centrality.”

In his letter to confessors, the Major Penitentiary wrote: “Mercy does not cease because where ordinary celebration of the sacrament is impossible, we are committed to pray, to console, to present souls to divine Mercy, fulfilling that priestly role of intercessors, which was conferred on us on the day of ordination.”

“Mercy does not cease because we all need the closeness and the ‘caress’ of Jesus, which also materializes in a moment of listening and dialogue, capable of opening a perspective of hope and light, in this circumstance of trial.”

Mercy “is expressed in the pastoral creativity of so many confreres,” he said, “who try in every way to make themselves close to the people entrusted to them, giving testimony of faith, courage, fatherhood, fully living their priesthood.”

Nor does mercy cease “because the sacrifice of the Holy Mass does not cease, even if celebrated without the physical presence of the people, from which every grace flows for the Church and for the world.”

Cardinal Piacenza wrote that “from the Cross, the bloody sacrifice of Christ, the possibility of salvation and reconciliation is given to all men; salvation also flows from the Eucharistic celebration, the bloodless sacrifice of Christ, the current re-presentation of the bloody one. In this sense, despite today’s dramatic circumstances, we are called to rediscover the centrality of the priestly ministry and, above all, what is essential in it: the work of Christ more than ours, the sacramental implementation of salvation, of which we are ministers, that is, servants.”

“Mercy does not cease but is expressed in every consideration to which the pandemic pushes us, in the rediscovery of the values for which it is worth living and dying, in the rediscovery of silence, of adoration and of prayer, in the rediscovery of the closeness of the other and, above all, of God.”

Neither does mercy cease, he said, “at the celebration of the sacred liturgy, which faithfully actualizes the mysteries of salvation, but becomes lived charity, which extends a helping hand to those who suffer,  and through the priestly ministry God’s forgiveness is offered.”

“Mercy does not cease even towards those who have been called to eternity because each of them is reached by the prayers of suffrage in the paschal certainty that with death, relationships are not broken but are transformed, strengthened, in the communion of saints.”

Cardinal Piacenza concluded urging that confessors “entrust this time, our ministry of Reconciliation, and this Easter so anomalous, to the protection of the Holy Virgin, Mother of Mercy in the certainty of her intercession so that each and every one may be given that new life, which is the yearning of every believer and of every man.”

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Moving ‘Vicar of Christ’ title in Vatican yearbook is “theological barbarism”, says cardinal

April 6, 2020 CNA Daily News 1

Vatican City, Apr 6, 2020 / 08:30 am (CNA).- A cardinal has criticized the Vatican’s official yearbook after it listed the term Vicar of Christ to a section headed “historical titles” in its latest edition, published March 25. 

A Vatican spokesman said the change merely highlights the historical dimension of the title.

Under the heading “historical titles”, the yearbook lists the designations “Vicar of Jesus Christ, Successor of the Prince of the Apostles, Supreme Pontiff of the Universal Church, Primate of Italy, Archbishop and Metropolitan of the Province of Rome, Sovereign of Vatican City State, Servant of the Servants of God.”

On Thursday, Cardinal Gerhard Mueller, the Vatican’s former doctrinal chief, described the change as an act of “theological barbarism.”

In a commentary for the German weekly Die Tagepost, the cardinal said that, while the Annuario is issued by the Vatican Secretariat of State via the Vatican Publishing House, it is “only an address book and lacks any teaching authority.”

As in the 2019 edition of the Annuario Pontificio, the new edition has a single page describing the pope as “Francis, bishop of Rome.” But instead of heading a subsequent page with the title “Vicar of Christ.” as it did in 2019, the 2020 edition has the pope’s baptismal name, Jorge Mario Bergoglio, followed by a brief biography.

Mueller argued that the next section, marked “historical titles”, mixed the term Vicar of Christ with designations that “have nothing to do with primacy and have only grown historically but [have] no dogmatic meaning, such as ‘Sovereign of Vatican City State’.”

“It is a theological barbarism to devalue the Pope’s titles ‘Successor of Peter, Vicar of Christ and visible head of the whole Church’ as a mere historical ballast,” he wrote.

Matteo Bruni, director of the Holy See press office, told the Italian bishops’ newspaper Avvenire that the yearbook was not declaring that the title Vicar of Christ was merely of historical significance. 

If that were the case, Avvenire reported, the title would simply have been removed. Bruni cited Pope Benedict XVI’s decision to drop the title “Patriarch of the West” from the Annuario in 2006. This was widely understood to be an ecumenical gesture aimed at healing the centuries-long breach between Catholics and other Christians. 

Bruni said that the titles were classified as “historical” because they are tied historically to the title bishop of Rome. A new pope acquires them the moment he is elected in a conclave.  

The Annuario Pontificio, which contains more than 2,000 pages and has a distinctive red cloth binding, contains a directory of the Roman Curia, as well as the names and addresses of the world’s bishops and official Vatican statistics.

The Church has published a yearbook in various forms since 1716.

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Turin Shroud to be displayed via livestream on Holy Saturday amid pandemic

April 6, 2020 CNA Daily News 1

Turin, Italy, Apr 6, 2020 / 04:00 am (CNA).- Catholics around the world will be invited to pray virtually before the Turin Shroud on Holy Saturday as the world struggles to contain the coronavirus pandemic, Church officials have said.

The Shroud, which bears the image of a crucified man and has been venerated for centuries as Christ’s burial cloth, will be displayed via livestream at 5pm local time April 11. 

Archbishop Cesare Nosiglia will preside over a liturgy from the chapel of Turin cathedral where the Shroud is kept in a climate-controlled vault. It will be broadcast live on television and social media. 

The archbishop said he was responding to thousands of requests from people asking to venerate the Shroud amid a global crisis that has so far claimed nearly 70,000 lives. 

“Thanks to television and social networks,” he said, “this time of contemplation will make available to everyone throughout the world the image of the sacred cloth, which reminds us of the Lord’s passion and death, but also opens our hearts to faith in His resurrection.”

He said he hoped that the ceremony would give strength to those suffering amid the pandemic. 

“Yes, the love with which Jesus gave us his life and which we celebrate during Holy Week is stronger than any suffering, every illness, every contagion, every trial and discouragement,” he said. “Nothing and no one can ever separate us from this love, because it is faithful forever and unites us to him with an indissoluble bond.”

Turin is located in northwest Italy, not far from the epicenter of the coronavirus outbreak in the country, which has led to nearly 16,000 deaths and a nationwide lockdown since March 10. 

Archbishop Nosiglia announced last year that the Shroud would be displayed in December 2020 when Turin hosts an annual meeting organized by the Taizé Community. This would be the fifth time that the Shroud has gone on public display since the year 2000. 

The last time the Shroud was presented to the public was in 2015. Pope Francis prayed before the relic during a visit to Turin on June 21 that year. Afterwards, he described it as an icon of Christ’s love. 

“The Shroud,” the pope said, “attracts people to the face and tortured body of Jesus and, at the same time, urges us on toward every person who is suffering and unjustly persecuted.” 

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