Washington D.C., May 4, 2018 / 04:31 pm (CNA/EWTN News).- The U.S. bishops’ Ad Hoc Committee Against Racism will have a new chairman, following Bishop George Murry’s resignation from the position after being diagnosed with acute leukemia.
“Our most heartfelt prayers are with Bishop Murry and his loved ones,” said Cardinal Daniel N. DiNardo of Galveston-Houston, president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops. “We ask all people of faith to join us in praying for his full recovery.”
The cardinal has named Bishop Shelton J. Fabre of Houma-Thibodaux, La. to serve as the chairman until the end of the term, the U.S. bishops’ conference website reports.
“I am grateful to Bishop Fabre for his dedication and commitment to now lead the work of the Ad Hoc Committee,” Cardinal DiNardo said.
The ad hoc committee was established in August 2017 in the wake of increasing racial tensions and white nationalist activism. Its work has included a press conference last fall at the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial in Washington, D.C., and the creation of resources for the Sept. 9 Feast Day of St. Peter Claver as an annual day of prayer for peace within communities.
The committee also promotes education, resources, communications strategies, and care for victims of racism. A pastoral letter from the committee is expected to be released later this year.
On Monday the Diocese of Youngstown, Ohio announced that Bishop Murry has been admitted to the Cleveland Clinic.
“He will undergo intensive chemotherapy for the next four weeks,” said the diocese’s statement, which called for prayer.
Murry also chairs the U.S. bishops’ Committee on Catholic Education, which provides guidance for all Catholic educational institutions in the country.
CNA contacted the U.S. bishops’ conference seeking information about whether the bishop would remain on this committee but did not receive a response by deadline.
Bishop Shelton Fabre was born October 25, 1963 in New Roads, La. He was ordained a priest in 1989 and became an auxiliary bishop of New Orleans in February 2007. In September 2013 he became Bishop of Houma-Thibodaux in southern Louisiana.
He is current chairman of the U.S. bishops’ Subcommittee on African American Affairs, on which he has served since 2010. Since 2013, he has served as a member of the Committee on Cultural Diversity in the Church.
The bishop is a Fourth Degree member of the Knights of Peter Claver, a historically African-American Catholic fraternal organization which he serves as national chaplain. He is also a Fourth Degree member of the Knights of Columbus.
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Denver Newsroom, Apr 25, 2020 / 04:00 am (CNA).- On May 4, the parish community of Holy Cross Catholic Church in Madill, Oklahoma would have celebrated the first anniversary of their new church building.
But on April 22, an EF2 tornado pummeled the small-town church, blowing out most of the stained glass windows and tearing off half the roof. It completely destroyed the parish rectory.
One thing spared though, was a stained-glass window of an Oklahoma native son, Blessed Stanley Rother, a priest of Oklahoma City who was beatified in 2017.
Fr. Oby, Fr. Don Wolf and Archbishop Coakley stand with the stained glass piece of Blessed Stanley Rother, which was undamaged.
Holy Cross Pastor Fr. Oby Zunmas told CNA that around 4:30 p.m. Wednesday he returned to his rectory after delivering a rosary to an elderly patient at the hospital. As he arrived, he heard the tornado sirens and started getting weather alerts on his phone.
Zunmas went to turn on his T.V. to get a better idea of the path of the storm, but it wasn’t working.
“As I was going towards the kitchen to see if I have a spare battery or something, then I looked up from my back door and windows in the back and saw how the trees were moving violently. So I knew that that was not normal,” he said.
Zunmas said he immediately ran to the safest room of his house – an interior laundry room. Once inside, he heard a loud bang and the sound of the glass of his windows shattering. When everything was quiet, he came out.
“The first thing I noticed – there was no roof,” he said. The house’s back wall had collapsed on his breakfast table; his three-car garage was compressed, and leaning on his bedroom closet.
The church, he said, looked like someone “took something and scratched it all off.” Most of the windows were blown out; part of the roof was gone. The priest said he’s still not sure if the $4 million new building sustained any structural damage.
“And then the house is almost a $400,000 home, and it’s a total write-off,” he added.
But that wasn’t what went through his mind as he first emerged from his laundry room.
“My first prayer was a prayer of thanksgiving. I thanked God that I was alive,” he said. Since hearing of the two deaths from the storm, Zunmas added, he has also been praying for their souls.
After the storm, Zunmas said, he received calls and texts from concerned parishioners who saw the tornado heading for the church.
Among them were Paul and Kathie Westerman, parishioners of Holy Cross for about eight years. The Westermans live about 15 miles south of town, and they worried as they saw the tornado form and head toward the church. They called Father Zunmas immediately after it stopped.
“We called to see how he was, and his first words were, ‘I’m alive,’” Paul told CNA.
The Westermans said they could not drive to the church that night – all surrounding roads were blocked due to downed power lines. But they came two days in a row to help out and to support their pastor.
“We just ran over and gave him a big hug and said, ‘Thank God, he’s alive,’” Kathie said.
A hug “in the time of coronavirus!” Fr. Zumnas added.
“I don’t care, he’s alive,” Kathie said.
On Friday, the Westermans and other clean-up crews were helping to clean out the debris, salvage furniture from the rectory, and cover the part of the church where the roof was torn off to prevent it from getting wet in the next storm.
The Westermans said they were “very heartbroken” when they saw the damage to their church, but there was one thing that gave them hope.
“The best thing that ever happened was (a stained glass window of) Stanley Rother was still there. He was undamaged,” Kathie said. “Something went through the window right beside him, but his stained glass is still there.”
Blessed Fr. Stanley Rother, a native Oklahoma farm boy turned priest and missionary to Guatemala, was beatified in Oklahoma City in 2017.
Zunmas said he has felt supported by the parish and by the Catholic community, including Archbishop Paul Coakley of Oklahoma City, who drove to the parish the day after the tornado.
“People have been very, very supportive,” Zunmas said. “My bishop came down yesterday and then my mentor, my first pastor, Father Tom Wolf. And so many people from the community, our parishioners and members and pastors, everybody came by to help out.”
“I toured the tornado destruction in Madill today with Fr. Oby Zunmas whose rectory was destroyed while he took shelter in a safe room. Holy Cross Catholic Church sustained damage, but is repairable. Please keep them in your prayers,” Coakley said Thursday on Twitter.
Zunmas said he is grateful to God he is alive and the damage wasn’t worse, and that he has been encouraged by the goodness of people at this time.
“We do have generous people who are willing to help. Maybe sometimes they don’t think about it, but when something happens, they want to come together. They want to make sure you’re okay,” Zunmas said.
“And as a pastor, I see that more often maybe than regular people, but I wish that people would know that there’s a lot of good people in this world. I think we know that, but sometimes we just don’t act like we do because we’re so suspicious of everybody. But I think there’s a lot of nice people in this world, and I want people to know that.”
On a more practical note, the priest added, if anyone is building a home in tornado alley, “they need to consider having a safe place. It might be your closet. It might be your bathroom. It might be your safe room, which my safe room is my laundry room…I recommend that people think about not just a pretty home, but a home that is safe.”
Lent is supposed to be a time of penance in the Catholic Church. This year, it’s a time when priests in the confessional will use a revised translation of the sacrament of penance and reconciliation to forgive the sins of Catholic penitents.
The changes are noticeable in the formula of absolution, when the priest speaks in the person of Jesus Christ to absolve a Catholic from his or her sins. The “essential words” of the priest’s absolution formula have not been changed, but there are “two minor modifications to the preliminary part of the prayer,” according to the April 2022 newsletter of the Committee on Divine Worship of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB).
Here’s the new approved text, with changes in bold:
God, the Father of mercies,
through the Death and Resurrection of his Son
has reconciled the world to himself
and poured outthe Holy Spirit for the forgiveness of sins;
through the ministry of the Church may God grant you pardon and peace,
and I absolve you from your sins
in the name of the Father, and of the Son, [sign of the cross]
and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
The line “poured out the Holy Spirit” previously read “sent the Holy Spirit among us.” The phrase “may God grant you pardon and peace” is only a one-word change: It previously read “may God give you pardon and peace.”
The changes add “a little bit more richness to the language,” according to Monsignor Richard Hilgartner, a former executive director of the USCCB’s Secretariat of Divine Worship who is now pastor of St. Joseph Parish in Cockeysville, Maryland.
“God’s granting something that we don’t deserve, and that’s what forgiveness is. It’s something that we don’t earn or deserve,” Hilgartner told the Archdiocese of Baltimore newspaper The Catholic Review.
The sacrament of penance, also called reconciliation or confession, is the means through which God grants pardon for sins through the priest’s ministry. In the sacrament, the contrite penitent discloses his or her sins to a Catholic priest who grants sacramental absolution. The penitent makes an act of contrition in which he or she resolves to not sin again. The priest generally instructs the penitent to perform an act of satisfaction, usually called a penance. This can take the form of prayer, such as praying three Hail Marys, for example.
The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops’ 2021 fall general assembly voted in favor of the new translation of the prayer, with 182 votes in favor, 6 against, and 2 abstentions. The Vatican’s Dicastery for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments approved the translation in April 2022.
The new language for the priest’s absolution is allowed as of Ash Wednesday, the start of Lent. Priests must use the new language starting on Divine Mercy Sunday, April 16, the first Sunday after Easter 2023.
Hilgartner noted that the liturgical season of Lent is a penitential time when many Catholics especially seek out the sacrament of reconciliation. He told the Catholic Review that many Catholics feel peace and relief after going to confession, especially if they have been away from the sacrament for a long time.
“Inevitably, people say, ‘I feel so much better. I feel like a burden has been lifted,’ because that’s what’s happening. God is casting behind his back all our sins, taking them away from us in a way that we don’t know how to do for ourselves,” he said. “I hear often about how people feel literally unburdened by this happening. And it’s the great gift — that the Lord’s taking this upon himself. For us, this is what the cross is all about, that he takes all of our sins to the cross so that we don’t have to.”
Under Church law, every Catholic has the right to an anonymous sacramental confession. In practice, priests often do not even know the identity of a penitent. In the Catholic understanding of the “seal of confession,” the contents are “inviolable.” Any priest who discloses the contents of a confession faces among the harshest penalties of the Church, an automatic excommunication.
Pope Francis has frequently encouraged Catholics to receive God’s forgiveness in the sacrament of penance.
Legatus President Stephen Henley is pictured here speaking at the organization’s 2025 annual conference last month in Naples, Florida. / Credit: Courtesy of Legatus
Miami, Fla., Mar 13, 2025 / 07:20 am (CNA).
In today’s culture, often hostile to expressions of faith, many Catholics struggle with how to hold true to their values within the workplace. That’s why, in 1987, Domino’s Pizza founder Tom Monaghan started the Catholic organization Legatus.
From the Latin word for “ambassador,” Legatus aims to empower Catholic presidents, CEOs, and managing partners to become what St. Paul coined “ambassadors for Christ,” explained Stephen Henley, president of Legatus.
Offering peer support groups, networking, speakers, pilgrimages, and an annual international summit, Legatus’s goal is to “inspire members to live out their faith in all aspects of their life.” There are currently about 90 Legatus chapters in North America.
Chapter meetings are held once a month, providing the opportunity for members and their spouses to participate in confession and Mass, the recitation of the rosary, a cocktail reception dinner, and a speaker’s presentation.
“All of this is to help fortify the members’ marriage, the peer support group, the networking of this group, and then embolden them to go out and live their faith,” said Henley. “Tom felt that if we can bring together these Catholic CEOs, how much more can we change society with these people that have high impact and high influence?”
In interviews with Catholic News Agency, Hawkins, Dean Abela, and Henley covered three tips for bringing the Catholic worldview into the workplace.
Commit to your priorities
Dean Andrew Abela’s Catholic faith wasn’t always as important to him as it is now. As a teenager, he even stopped practicing.
“I came back in my mid-20s, funnily enough, while I was in business school,” he recalled. As a student in 1991, he encountered Pope John Paul II’s new encyclical letter Centesimus Annus, and the pope’s reflection on economics changed the trajectory of his life.
“Just a few months after, I returned to the Church,” he said. “When I reverted to the faith, I wanted to know what my newly rediscovered Catholic faith meant for a life in business.”
Andrew Abela is dean of the Busch School of Business at The Catholic University of America. Credit: Legatus
After working for companies including Procter & Gamble, McKinsey & Company, and the Corporate Executive Board, in 2002 Dean Abela eventually began teaching at the Catholic University of America. He is also a consultant to Fortune 100 corporations.
“The reason I left business and switched to academia was that I wanted to dedicate myself full-time to studying questions about what it means to be a faithful Catholic in the workplace,” he explained.
A member of Legatus since 2000, Dean Abela mentioned that members can follow what the organization terms a “spiritual plan” to attend daily Mass, recite the rosary daily, and do monthly confession.
Known as Tres Magna, or the “Big Three,” this plan was inspired by Miami Dolphins head coach Don Shula, who “attributed the perfect season to him going to daily Mass,” explained Stephen Henley. “Tom [Monaghan] thought, well, if he can go, there’s no reason why I can’t go.”
“Daily Mass, daily rosary, and monthly confession will align your life and priorities,” added Henley.
Find a supportive community
When Kristan Hawkins first encountered Legatus, she was not a Catholic. Hawkins was raised an Evangelical. After Students for Life’s 2006 launch, she began speaking at Legatus events.
In 2014, Hawkins decided to visit the Basilica of Our Lady of Guadalupe in Mexico City, “a pilgrimage Legatus had sponsored.” “I was the only Protestant there,” she recalled. “I decided there that I was going to enter RCIA.”
She became a full-fledged member of Legatus soon after becoming Catholic.
“As a pro-life activist who starts a pro-life organization, I want to save babies, I want to end abortion, I want to help as many families and women. You don’t start a non-profit because you’re necessarily a great business leader or have all these skills. You started this non-profit, this mission, because you want to see this mission accomplished,” Hawkins said. “For me, that’s one of the powerful benefits of being in Legatus, is having friends and mentors who were successful in the for-profit world who I can call on and ask questions.”
Students for Life of America President Kristan Hawkins. Credit: Legatus
“It’s very powerful and important to have those relationships. For me, in the work I’m doing, it’s a constant spiritual attack,” she added. “One of the best things about Legatus is I can call any of my Legatus friends at any moment, and they’ll be there for you. They know the power of the work we do and the resistance we face.”
Dean Abela also finds a sense of community in Legatus and also strives to build a supportive Catholic community at the Catholic University of America.
“We share with students the principles of Catholic social doctrine, things like human dignity and solidarity, and try to embed these principles into all of our classes,” he explained. “We’re also increasingly trying to give them opportunities to practice different virtues as part of their studies and schoolwork.”
For instance, Dean Abela explained, “To teach graduate students about decision-making, we go through a couple of survivor simulations, where you crash land in the north of Canada and you have to decide what you’re going to do. We have them go through decision-making exercises explicitly practicing the virtue of prudence or practical wisdom, the habit of making wise decisions. We break apart the components of practical wisdom, which include things like alertness, preparedness, and reasoning, and we have them try to exercise those as part of the decision-making process.”
These skills built in the classroom can be applied not only in business, but also in students’ personal lives.
Model the behavior you expect from others and celebrate your co-workers’ integrity
For Henley, giving authentic witness to the Catholic faith in the workplace can start with a simple “hello.”
“First, live the golden rule,” he said. “When you’re walking down the hall, say hello to the janitor, to the executive, and to everyone in between. It matters a lot.”
He added: “Another practical thing: take the opportunity to pray before meals. If you’re going on business lunches, you’ll be surprised at how many people say, ‘Yeah of course, let’s pray.’ It’s more common than not for people to pray before meals. The fact that you’re doing it shows that you’re a bold leader and that you’re spiritual.”
Dean Abela agrees that these types of habits make all the difference, and were the subject of the presentation he made of his book Superhabits: The Universal System for a Successful Life last month during the 2025 Legatus Summit.
“The main focus of the book is understanding that things like diligence, honesty, and resilience are not genetic characteristics. They are habits that anyone can acquire through practice,” Dean Abela explained. “Companies can focus on one of the most important virtues and give employees opportunities to practice those virtues.”
For instance, Dean Abela explained the GrowVirtue App, an AI-driven app “based on the work of the book,” which organizations can use to evaluate which virtues their company has already made a habit of, which virtues they might target, and tips for how to make progress.
“The important thing is that the company would choose a virtue that they think would be directly beneficial to the company right now,” said Dean Abela. “Although personal results are private, the whole company can see what employees as a whole are weakest in. So, if you’re trying to grow in customer service, you might encourage the virtue of friendship or friendliness.”
Dean Abela discussed the value of recognizing virtue both inside and outside the company.
“See examples in action or read about examples,” he suggested. “You can have employees watch videos or you can share articles that demonstrate examples of a particular virtue in action. And you can make sure senior folks are role models for junior employees.”
“Most importantly, give the employees the opportunity to practice the virtues, and give feedback,” he added. “When companies give awards, they tend to do this more with core values. They should shift to core virtues and give it to people who are exemplars of that virtue.”
Ultimately, the goal for Catholics is to live authentic lives that draw others to Christ.
“Stay true to who you are, don’t give in,” said Hawkins. “They’ll know you by your fruits. I think that’s very important. You don’t have to work in the pro-life movement or specifically in an apostolate to be a good Catholic, a faithful Christian in the workplace. You can do that in any job, in any position you have – in McDonald’s or in a Fortune 500 company.”
” a historically African-American Catholic fraternal organization”
Just like BTN! really, when will this nonsense stop? in Christ there is supposed to be no east or west, black or white… but let’s have historically African-American fraternities, and committees on race, and… Actually, I’ll be fine with it all if we can live to see a prudent guy like Cardinal Sarah accorded respect in Rome.
“anti-racism committee.” yes, this is just what we need right now. Catholic bishops dealing with racism. I cannot even…
” a historically African-American Catholic fraternal organization”
Just like BTN! really, when will this nonsense stop? in Christ there is supposed to be no east or west, black or white… but let’s have historically African-American fraternities, and committees on race, and… Actually, I’ll be fine with it all if we can live to see a prudent guy like Cardinal Sarah accorded respect in Rome.