Fort Worth, Texas, Jul 7, 2018 / 03:22 am (CNA/EWTN News).- The Diocese of Fort Worth is removing signs notifying people that concealed and open carry of firearms are both banned on church property – but the policy against guns has not changed.
Removal of the signs was recommended by a security team whom the diocese hired as consultants after a mass shooting at a Baptist church in Sutherland Springs last November, NBC reported.
Tony Perez, a parishioner at St. Patrick’s Cathedral, has a license to carry firearms, but had been advocating for the removal of the signs.
He told Dallas-Fort Worth’s NBC affiliate that the signs were “effectively advertising a gun-free zone,” which notified individuals seeking to do harm that the location was vulnerable.
Instead of posting signs near the entrances of churches throughout the diocese, notification of the gun ban will be included in weekly Sunday bulletins, NBC said.
Additional security measures – such as congregation training, cameras, fences, and hiring off-duty police officers – are being left up to the discretion of individual parishes within Fort Worth.
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Denver, Colo., Mar 31, 2020 / 04:00 pm (CNA).- The coronavirus pandemic has led colleges across the country to close their dorms, and offer classes online. As students return home with time on their hands, Catholics involved in campus ministry have offered advice on how to spend this time wisely.
Father John Ignatius, SJC, who served as chaplain at the University of Denver, and Peter Nguyen, a FOCUS missionary for Harvard University, have emphasized the important role of community, spiritual life, and charitable actions amidst quarantine.
Ignatius, who also leads the Servants of Christ Jesus religious community, told CNA that displaced students should prioritize prayer, community, and exercise, while making efforts to limit their screen time.
“It’ll be so easy to binge on episodes [on] Netflix. [They should] decrease screen time and extracurricular time to be more relational,” Fr. Ignatius said.
“College students would do well to stay in touch with each other via phones … Hopefully it’s a live conversation by phone or by Skype or FaceTime or any of the mediums you’re actually having face time with peers that are at a distance.”
Fr. Ignatius said displaced students should also make time for charity, especially by picking up the phone.
“Just consider the consolation and the blessing that a grandson or a granddaughter could give to someone who’s isolated and scared. It makes all the difference in the world to have just a 15 or 20 minute conversation with the grandparents and just think beyond one’s own interests,” he said.
The priest added that students might also consider offering virtual tutoring to children they know have been displaced from school, or, if local laws permit it, offering snacks or essentials to homeless people while taking a walk.
Fr. Ignatius emphasized that the pandemic is an opportunity to reignite a neglected prayer life. He suggested students might pray the Liturgy of the Hours, or spend time reading scripture. He also pointed to resources from groups like FOCUS, which have made spiritual resources available online.
Nguyen, the FOCUS missionary, also stressed the importance of reinvigorating a prayer life, noting that too much free-time can become its own kind distraction from prayer. He said during these difficult times, it is important to rely on the Lord.
“I think the notion of free time is a little scary because [in] school they have all these activities and they have classes and they have their sacramental life ….It’s scheduled out and so there’s a certain safety and security in order that we as Catholics know is there,” Nguyen told CNA.
“If we’re in the crucible right now with the Lord, the one thing that will help sustain us is daily conversation and prayer with him.”
Nguyen pointed to some of the virtual options the students have available for them at Harvard. He said FOCUS at the university has started online events, including Bible studies and virtual praise and worship sessions, which last Sunday drew around 200 hundreds views from students.
“We believe the word of God is so effective, especially in this trying time. I think … people are kind of longing for a sense of spiritual nourishment,” he said.
While FOCUS has launched its discipleship program online as well, he said, the most important aspect is to focus on accountability and personal investment through consistent contact with these students, Nguyen said..
“In this time, we’re still doing virtual things in order to continue to minister to our students who we encourage to their friends through the use of Zoom and in conversation on the phone, et cetera… Personal investment is probably the most important thing that we can be doing right now,” he said.
Volunteer drivers in Ukraine, working with the Vulnerable People Project evacuate vulnerable populations from war-torn areas of Ukraine. / Courtesy of Vulnerable People’s Project
Boston, Mass., Mar 10, 2022 / 06:52 am (CNA).
Jason Jones has a saying he often repeats to his staff at the humanitarian organization he founded, The Vulnerable People Project.
“The vulnerable are not weak people,” he says. “They’re strong people that have been placed in impossible situations.”
The Vulnerable People Project (VPP), which Jones describes as a Catholic apostolate animated by Catholic social teaching, was launched last year to respond to one such “impossible” situation: the humanitarian crisis that erupted after the U.S. military pulled out of Afghanistan, which quickly fell to the Taliban.
Now VPP is helping people escape another dire emergency: the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
“We’re seeing the people of Ukraine stuck between these two powerful actors, the same way the people of Afghanistan were trapped between the United States and Taliban,” Jones, a Catholic film producer, speaker, author and activist, told CNA.
VPP is still helping to evacuate Christians and other minorities from Afghanistan every week, Jones said.
Now the organization is doing similar work in Ukraine, where Jones says it has transported thousands of people away from the fighting and destruction.
Many of them have Aleksi Voronin to thank for that.
The 35-year-old native of Kyiv manages a team of drivers, himself among them, who voluntarily take residents of Kyiv and Kharkiv, major Ukrainian cities now in the crosshairs of Russian forces, to the relative safety of western Ukraine or across the border into Poland.
The drivers are mostly driving vans but some passenger vehicles, as well. With the vans, Voronin said, up to a dozen passengers can be evacuated. He told CNA he’s working on getting a bus which could evacuate 50 people.
The vans are tightly packed, but Voronin says that he tries to provide the people with blankets to at least give them “minimal comfort.” He estimates that he’s helped evacuate more than 200 people, so far.
“I cannot find the right words to explain the condition of people when I pick them up,” Voronin told CNA, fighting back tears.
Providential connections
Because of VPP’s success in Afghanistan, a Ukrainian friend of Jones asked him to help rescue some family members from the Ukraine following the invasion. As a result, VPP’s newest humanitarian effort, Hope for Ukraine, was born.
Jones doesn’t speak Ukrainian, though. So getting in touch with Ukrainians on the ground posed difficulties, he said.
But as providence would have it, one of Jones’ friends is Los Angeles comedian Irina Skaya, a Ukrainian-born American.
“Jason said, ‘Look, we’ve been working with Afghanistan, but now this is a crisis.’ So he knew that I was super connected in Ukraine on the ground and we started evacuations,” Skaya, who is leading Hope for Ukraine, told CNA.
Skaya, who speaks Russian, Ukrainian, and English fluently, has about 200 relatives in Ukraine. Through her contacts, she was put in touch with Voronin.
Skaya had a comedy show planned in Kyiv Feb. 25-26, but that was canceled due to the Russian invasion on Feb. 24. She was supposed to be the opening act for Louis C.K. a popular American comedian.
Skaya said she always thought her purpose in life was to do comedy.
“Comedy is great. I love comedy. And when this is over, I’m gonna perform in Ukraine and try to bring as many American comedians into Ukraine as I can,” she said.
But war has reordered her priorities. “My absolute life purpose now,” she said, “is to defend my country, to save my country, to save my people.”
How to help
Jones says that Hope for Ukraine has about 100 Ukrainian volunteers, with other volunteers coming from Poland, Ireland, the United States, and elsewhere.
Even a volunteer-driven humanitarian effort is expensive, however. Keeping Aleksi Voronin’s passenger vans and other vehicles on the road gets more costly by the day, due to rapidly rising fuel prices.
Jones told CNA that VPP has raised $15,000 for Hope for Ukraine, but has spent about $50,000 buying resources.
The organization’s response to the invasion will soon include an ambulance and a trauma team of four Emergency Medical Technicians, or EMTs, one critical care paramedic, and two ambulance drivers.
Leading the team will be Andrew Hamilton, 23, a Virginia resident who has worked as an EMT at a construction site and has served as a combat medic while he volunteered with Kurdish military units in northern Syria.
Hamilton, a devout Christian, told CNA his mission is to support the Ukrainian people and if a wounded person needs his care, “they’ll receive the best medical treatment possible.”
Donations to VPP’s Hope for Ukraine initiative can be made online at TheGreatCampaign.org. Jones said he has secured a $200,000 matching gift grant, if the organization can raise $200,000 on its own.
Somehow, Jones said, VPP will meet that goal. “We seek to stand with those who have been abandoned because it’s dangerous to serve them, or because it comes at a social cost,” he said. “When everyone else flees, that’s when we show up.”
Ryan and Sara Huelsing, parishoners at St. Joseph parish in Cottleville, Missouri, at a preview event put on by the Fellowship of Catholic University Students in St. Louis on Oct. 1, 2022. Ryan leads a men’s group at his parish and both hope to get involved with FOCUS’ Making Missionary Disciples track. / Jonah McKeown/CNA
St. Louis, Mo., Nov 25, 2022 / 09:00 am (CNA).
The upcoming Fellowship of Catholic University Students (FOCUS) national conference is expected to draw 20,000 people to St. Louis for talks, workshops, entertainment, prayer, and worship, with the goal of encouraging and equipping Catholics to live and share their faith. The Jan. 2–6, 2023, gathering, SEEK23, will be the first in-person national conference for FOCUS since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Eileen Piper, FOCUS’ vice president of lifelong mission, told CNA recently that a new conference track called Making Missionary Disciples aims to help adult attendees become equipped to better share their faith.
While most of FOCUS’ programming is geared toward students, the Making Missionary Disciples track is designed for priests, bishops, diocesan and parish staff, FOCUS alumni, parishioners, and benefactors who “long to see their parish, diocese, family, or community experience deep transformation in Jesus Christ and who desire to be a part of the solution,” the organization says.
“This really is a unique opportunity, and you’re going to get hands-on experience,” Piper told CNA.
“This is practical training. It’s made for you to take into your state of life — so if you are a leader in a parish, you are going to be equipped to be able to step into your work in the parish in a brand-new way.”
Piper said she, like many Catholics, has friends and family members in her life who are no longer practicing their faith. The Making Missionary Disciples track is designed for those who want to do a better job of sharing their faith, she said, not on “street corners” but primarily with people they already know and love.
“It starts to practically equip you so that you’re feeling more confident and more comfortable entering into faith conversations with those that you are already in relationship with,” she explained.
The track will feature speeches and workshops put on by nationally recognized Catholic speakers such as Father Josh Johnson, Sister Bethany Madonna, and sEdward Sri. Conference attendees will also be given time for prayer and fellowship, daily Mass, and networking opportunities, FOCUS says.
Through the workshops, “you’ll be working on your personal testimony, so you can just in a very comfortable way share your own story of how you like what Jesus means to you, and why it matters.”
Piper said as part of the conference they also hope to create opportunities for parish priests to connect “brother to brother” and discuss with one another what is working well in their parishes. She also said FOCUS will be offering a Lenten Bible study in 2023 for anyone who wants to participate, and they will be especially suggesting that SEEK23 attendees join in on it and invite others to join as well.
Since its founding in the 1990s, FOCUS has sent missionaries to college campuses across the United States and abroad to share the Catholic faith primarily through Bible studies and small groups, practicing what it calls “The Little Way of Evangelization” — winning small numbers of people to the Catholic faith at a time through authentic friendships and forming others to go out and do the same.
FOCUS has since 2015 been in the process of expanding beyond college campuses by creating a track designed to bring their relationship-based evangelization model to parishes. Almost two dozen parishes across the country, including one in the St. Louis Archdiocese, have FOCUS missionaries living and working there.
SEEK23 will be FOCUS’ first in-person conference since Indianapolis in 2019 and a smaller student leadership summit in Phoenix in the earliest days of 2020. Conferences for 2021 and 2022 were held online due to the pandemic.
Brian Miller, director of evangelization and discipleship for the Archdiocese of St. Louis, told CNA that St. Louis was chosen for SEEK in part because it is centrally located and convention-friendly, but also because the city is ripe for the kind of renewal that FOCUS aims to provide.
Beyond the young people and students who will attend SEEK, Miller said they hope to use FOCUS’ Making Missionary Disciples track as a launch pad for getting more mature Catholics excited about sharing their faith as well. He also said his office plans to host follow-up events for St. Louis Catholics to build upon what people will learn at SEEK about evangelization as well as provide them with resources to help them start Bible studies and small discipleship groups.
He said he hopes that as parishes in St. Louis “come together in their new parish realities” after an ongoing major merging and closing process, that “they have some common footing, some common training, and they have a common mission.”
SEEK23 registration is now open and costs $399 total for the full five days, regardless of whether you are a college or high school student or an adult. General passes for St. Louis residents cost $350. All registration options can be found here.
That is a wise move. If I lived in Fort Worth I would be interested in knowing just who left Catholic parishioners vulnerable with the previous foolish policy.
That is a wise move. If I lived in Fort Worth I would be interested in knowing just who left Catholic parishioners vulnerable with the previous foolish policy.