Courage of St. Joseph highlighted at Mass for Congressional staffers

Washington D.C., Nov 6, 2019 / 04:00 am (CNA).- U.S. senator and noted hip-hop enthusiast Marco Rubio shared his thoughts on rapper Kanye West’s new gospel album in a recent interview with CNA.

“I don’t know if I like it or dislike it,” Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) told CNA of the track “Selah” on West’s highly-anticipated album “Jesus is King.” Rubio said the track was the only one he had listened to on the album as of Monday.

The Florida senator has often spoken publicly about his fondness for rap, previously professing a preference for the West Coast rappers of the 1990s in their musical feud with New York East Coast artists. In a 2012 interview, Rubio described Eminem as “the only guy that speaks at any sort of depth” in the genre. 

“He’s a guy that does music that talks about the struggles of addiction and before that violence, with growing up in a broken family, not being a good enough father,” Rubio said of Eminem in 2012, while noting it was harder to find time to play rap music with a growing family of children around.

Returning to West’s new offering, Rubio told CNA that “he’s an interesting artist, and obviously someone who is going through a lot positively, and potentially, I don’t know, negatively as well,” Rubio said of West. “I don’t mean to be judgmental, he’s doing it in the public eye,” he said, “and it’s not the first time that he has religious themes in his music.” 

West’s track “Jesus Walks” was featured on his 2004 album “College Dropout.”

“His faith is clearly something that calls to him, and obviously it’s a road he’s been on for a while and it’s interesting to see it cross over into his music,” Rubio said. “What’s most interesting, however, is to see the critical reaction to it.”

Rubio discussed the album with CNA, along with his vision for “common good economics” Nov. 4, ahead of a major speech on the same theme at the Catholic University of America on Tuesday morning. 

The senator addressed students at Catholic University’s Busch School of Business on “common good capitalism” and the dignity of work, during a Vocation of Business Class taught by Professor Andreas Widmer.

Rubio said that profit making has been prioritized over the dignity of workers, with the result of many Americans being “left behind” in an economy that, overall, has grown in recent decades. He cited Pope Francis’ warning that “finance overwhelms the real economy” when profit is prioritized above all else.

The political right, he said, upholds the rights of companies and shareholders to profits, but ignores the rights of workers. The political left, meanwhile, promotes “free everything” but will “rarely focus on our obligation to work.”

“When an economy stops providing dignified work for millions of people,” he said, parents no longer have time for their children and resources to volunteer and contribute to their communities.

Furthermore, when men in particular do not have dignified work to provide for their families, he said, “the impact is corrosive and devastating.” He pointed to evidence in declines in rates of marriage, childbirth, and life expectancy, and corresponding increases in drug abuse, drug overdose and suicide.

Yet as a solution, “socialism would be far worse” than the current challenges of working families in the U.S., Rubio said.

Instead, he said, Catholics should look to “restore ‘common good capitalism’” where people have dignified work and businesses can make a profit, while reinvesting in the company.

Professor Andrew Abela, founding dean of the Busch School, agreed with the importance of Rubio drawing attention to those “left behind” in today’s economy. While the Busch School emphasizes “entrepreneurial capitalism” that exists “to serve others,” today’s “crony capitalism” promotes greed, selfishness, and a utilitarian view of workers, he said.

“The moment it’s cheaper to move to China, you’re gone,” he said of the view of workers by corporations under “crony capitalism.”

Rubio pitched specific policies as an antidote to today’s economy, including preferences in the tax code for job creation, families with children, and higher wages for workers rather than company stock buybacks.

Rubio also said the U.S. should look to invest in whole industries such as aerospace, telecommunications, transportation and housing, “to retrofit past engines of productivity” for the new economy, and also revamp the Small Business Administration.

The proposal to reenergize the Small Business Administration was “music to my ears,” Widmer told CNA, as his class seeks to form principled entrepreneurs who will create dignified jobs.

“We’re not the business school you go to, to become the next president of GE,” he said. “Here you come to run your family business.”

Immigrant Catholics have had a storied tradition of running small businesses in the U.S., he said. “The Catholics aren’t the Bill Gateses of the world. The Catholics are the dry cleaners and the lawn care companies and all of that kind of stuff,” he said.

“We have a finance department and all of that, but the majority of our students are people who will go back and run Main Street, not Wall Street and not Silicon Valley,” he said.

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Denver Newsroom, Oct 14, 2020 / 03:33 pm (CNA).-  

Catholics in California rallied in a peaceful demonstration Tuesday evening at the former site of a statue of St. Junipero Serra, which a group of activists defaced and pulled down earlier this week.

The riot at which the statue was destroyed took place Oct. 12 at Mission San Rafael Arcángel in San Rafael, CA, north of San Francisco Bay.

Father Kyle Faller, parochial vicar at the mission, led a rosary and addressed the crowd of 75-100 people Oct. 13, many of whom held signs saying “Free the Mass,” in reference to the city’s COVID-19 restrictions on public worship, which San Francisco’s archbishop has called unjust.

Faller also led a Litany of Reparation for the statue’s destruction, as well as the prayer to St. Michael the Archangel. Archbishop Salvatore Cordileone is set to offer exorcism prayers at the statue’s former site Oct. 17.

“Let this be a time for all of you to take courage and not be afraid, as our great Pope St. John Paul II said,” Faller told the crowd.

“This is what it means that our faith is not restricted to private life or in a church itself. Our faith is meant to be lived in the church but also on the streets, in our homes, in our workplaces.”

St. Serra, an 18th-century Franciscan priest and missionary, is viewed by some activists as a symbol of colonialism and of the abuses that many Native Americans suffered after contact with Europeans. However, historians say the missionary protested abuses and sought to fight colonial oppression.

While many Native peoples did suffer horrific abuse, activists tend to conflate the abuses the Natives suffered long after Serra’s death with the period when Serra was alive and building the missions. Pope Francis canonized Serra in 2015 during a visit to the United States.

Though Serra himself did not found Mission San Rafael, it owes its existence to Serra’s legacy, as he founded the first nine missions in what would become California.

The hourlong protest Oct. 12, organized by members of the Coast Miwok tribe, marked Indigenous People’s Day, the holiday that some cities and states – including California – have designated to replace Columbus Day.

A church maintenance worker had covered the statue in duct tape before the protest to protect it from graffiti, and boarded up windows at the mission. Numerous statues of the saint have been vandalized or destroyed this year, most of them in California.

The masked rioters peeled off the duct tape and sprayed red paint in the statue’s face. Some protestors tried to prevent local news cameras from filming the toppling, but Fox2 captured the statue’s fall on video. At least five people can be seen pulling on the statue’s head with nylon cords and ropes.

Faller said when he and the parish pastor, Father Luello Palacpac, looked out at the rioters pulling down the statue, they saw “people that need to be loved.”

Father Faller encouraged those in attendance to persevere in prayer and offered a reflection on Jesus’ forgiveness in the face of persecution.

“Let your heart not be embittered or stubborn in hate or anger,” he exhorted the crowd.

“On the cross, when Christ looked at those who were persecuting them, those who called for his death, and what did he say? He did not condemn them. He did not scream at them…He said to his Father, ‘Forgive them, for they know not what they do.’ That is the beating prayer of the cross, and that should be our prayer each and every day,” Faller said.

Police have arrested five women in connection with the incident and charged them with felony vandalism, Fox2 reported.

Father Palacpac could not be reached for further comment, but an archdiocesan spokeswoman told CNA that he believes the mission will be able to restore the statue.

The San Rafael Police Department said in an Oct. 13 statement that the five women had been issued citations and released, and that the cases had been forwarded to the district attorney’s office for prosecution.

The department said they had worked with representatives from the Archdiocese of San Francisco to develop a plan in response to the Oct. 12 protest. The protest’s organizers had announced the gathering on social media before it took place. 

“The archdiocese requested that we use de-escalation techniques and minimize interactions that could lead to the use of force against protestors. The Archdiocese supported a civil protest and stated that they wanted to prosecute any offenders who damaged or vandalized their property,” the police department said Oct. 13.

“During the planning process, it was recognized that the main priority would be to safeguard individuals from violence. A decision was made not to get directly involved in or interact with the demonstration as it was not our intention to inflame or escalate behaviors during the protest.”

Archbishop Cordileone on Tuesday decried the “mob rule” that led to the statue of the saint being “mindlessly defaced and toppled by a small, violent mob.”

“This kind of behavior has no place in any civilized society. While the police have thankfully arrested five of the perpetrators, what happens next is crucial, for if these are treated as small property crimes, it misses the point: the symbols of our faith are now under attack not only on public property, but now on our own property and even inside of our churches,” Cordileone said Oct. 13.

Cordileone noted that the protest against the statue began peacefully, but soon descended into violence. He encouraged people to learn more about Serra.

“There is no question that the indigenous peoples of our continent suffered under Europeans who came here and their descendants, especially after the mission era ended and California entered into the United States. But Fr. Serra is the wrong symbol of those who wish to address or redress this grievance,” Cordileone contended.

“Fr. Serra and his fellow Franciscans renounced all worldly pursuits to give their lives to serving the native peoples and so protected them from the abuses of their fellow Spaniards.”

A crowd of about 100 people tore down another St. Junípero Serra statue in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park the evening of June 19. Cordileone offered exorcism prayers after that incident.

The exorcism prayer Cordileone offered at Golden Gate Park, the St. Michael Prayer, invokes the intercession of the Archangel Michael against the power of Satan. It is not the same as those exorcism prayers offered by the Church if a person is believed to be the subject of demonic possession.

After rioters pulled down a statue of St. Junipero Serra in Sacramento on July 4, a local Catholic set up a makeshift shrine to Serra on the statue’s empty plinth July 5, and led other Catholics in cleaning graffiti from the site.

The vandalism in San Rafael is the latest in a series of attacks on Churches and Catholic statues across the country this year. On July 11, an arson attack gutted the 249-year-old Mission San Gabriel in Los Angeles, a mission church founded by St. Serra.

Eighty-three percent of Catholic likely voters are concerned about attacks on churches in recent months, according to a poll conducted Aug. 27 – Sept. 1 by RealClear Opinion Research in partnership with EWTN News.
 

[…]

Booneville, Mississippi, Sep 5, 2019 / 03:05 am (CNA).- After a wedding venue employee in Mississippi cited her Christian beliefs in refusing to host the wedding of a mixed-race couple, a Catholic scholar clarified that “marriage is a colorblind institution.”

“A man and a woman, regardless of their race, can unite as one-flesh as husband and wife, and that marital union can give rise to new life and connect that life with his or her mother and father,” said Ryan T. Anderson, the John Paul II Teaching Fellow at the University of Dallas and a co-author of “What Is Marriage?: Man and Woman: A Defense.”

Anderson told CNA that race is not relevant to the nature of marriage, and the race of a person does not negate any of the requirements of a valid marriage.

His comments come after a woman in charge of a wedding event venue in Mississippi apologized for declining to host the wedding of a mixed-race couple, something she had claimed violated her “Christian belief.”

According to the Washington Post, a black groom-to-be and a white bride-to-be had scheduled their wedding celebration to be held at Boone’s Camp Event Hall in Booneville, Mississippi. They were finalizing plans when they were informed that the venue retroactively declined to host their celebration because the wedding would violate the owner’s Christian beliefs.

The groom’s mother and his sister, LaKambria S. Welch, drove to the venue to demand answers. In a filmed exchange first posted by the website Deep South Voice, Welch can be heard calmly asking a woman in a gray shirt about the cancellation.

“Well we don’t do gay weddings or mixed race,” the woman in the video said. “Because of our Christian race – I mean our Christian belief.”

Welch told the woman that she, too, is a Christian, and asked the woman from where in the Bible her belief came.

“Well, I don’t want to argue my faith,” the woman responded. “We just don’t participate. We just choose not to.”

“Ok. So that’s your Christian belief, right?” Welch said.

“Yes ma’am,” the woman replied.

After the video spread on social media, the venue issued an apology that has apparently since been deleted. According to The Washington Post, the apology was reportedly written by the woman in the video, who said she did not know that the Bible did not condemn mixed-race marriages.

“As my bible reads, there are 2 requirements for marriage and race has nothing to do with either!” the apology post said, according to the Washington Post. “All of my years I had ‘assumed’ in my mind that I was correct, but have never taken the opportunity to research and find whether this was correct or incorrect until now.”

The incident drew intense criticism on social media as well as from Booneville city officials, who said on Facebook that they were “aware of the comments recently made by a privately owned business located within the city of Booneville. The City of Booneville, Mayor, and Board of Aldermen do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, gender, age, national origin, disability, marital status, sexual orientation, or military status. Furthermore, the City of Booneville, Mayor, and Board of Aldermen do not condone or approve these types of discriminatory policies.”

The Catechism of the Catholic Church does not object to interracial marriages. In fact, when the Catechism speaks about “mixed marriages,” it is in reference to couples of mixed creeds who marry – for example, a Catholic marrying a Protestant (or other baptized non-Catholic).

“Difference of confession between the spouses does not constitute an insurmountable obstacle for marriage, when they succeed in placing in common what they have received from their respective communities, and learn from each other the way in which each lives in fidelity to Christ,” the Catechism states.

“But the difficulties of mixed marriages must not be underestimated. They arise from the fact that the separation of Christians has not yet been overcome. The spouses risk experiencing the tragedy of Christian disunity even in the heart of their own home,” it adds.

The Catechism, and other Catholic documents, do not mention interracial marriages as immoral for any reason.

The Catholic Church does teach, however, that the sacrament of marriage must be between one man and one woman: “The matrimonial covenant, by which a man and a woman establish between themselves a partnership of the whole of life, is by its nature ordered toward the good of the spouses and the procreation and education of offspring; this covenant between baptized persons has been raised by Christ the Lord to the dignity of a sacrament.”

The Catechism adds that men and women must give themselves to each other in marriage freely, totally, and fruitfully, meaning that the couple must be open to life. The sacrament of marriage also “requires the inviolable fidelity of the spouses.”

For a same-sex couple, marriage is impossible according to the teachings of the Catholic Church, because sexual acts between same-sex couples are “contrary to the natural law. They close the sexual act to the gift of life. They do not proceed from a genuine affective and sexual complementarity. Under no circumstances can they be approved,” the Catechism states.

Instead, people with same-sex attractions “must be accepted with respect, compassion, and sensitivity” and are “called to chastity,” the Catechism states.

Anderson clarified that interracial marriage differs from same-sex marriage, because the biological sex of the individuals involved is directly relevant to the nature of marriage, unlike their race.

Because the Catholic Church is concerned for the good of spouses, children, and the greater society, Anderson said, it teaches that marriage must be between a man and a woman.

“While marriage must be a colorblind institution, it can’t be sex-blind. Only a man and a woman can unite as one-flesh, and every child has a mother and a father,” he said.

“So it’s for good reason that marriage is about uniting the two halves of humanity–male and female–for a common good they participate in that, in turn, benefits the general common good.”

[…]