Jinan, China, Aug 4, 2018 / 12:00 am (CNA).- A Catholic church in Jinan province, China, has been demolished by government agents, the latest in a series of church demolitions in China.
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Washington D.C., Aug 3, 2018 / 06:02 pm (CNA/EWTN News).- Bishops across the US have welcomed the modification made to the Catechism of the Catholic Church saying the Church teaches that capital punishment is “inadmissible.”
Archbishop José Gomez of Los Angeles welcomed the changes, stating Aug. 3: “I am grateful for Pope Francis’ leadership in working for an end to judicial executions worldwide.”
He said the revisions “reflect an authentic development of the Church’s doctrine that started with St. John Paul II and has continued under emeritus Pope Benedict XVI and now Pope Francis.”
“The Scriptures, along with saints and teachers in the Church’s tradition, justify the death penalty as a fitting punishment for those who commit evil or take another person’s life,” Archbishop Gomez wrote.
“And the Church has always recognized that governments and civil authorities have the right to carry out executions in order to protect their citizens’ lives and punish those guilty of the gravest crimes against human life and the stability of the social order.”
He also noted that “in recent decades, there has been a growing consensus — among bishops’ conferences around the world and in the teachings of the Popes and the Catechism — that use of the death penalty can no longer be accepted.”
“The Church has come to understand that from a practical standpoint, governments now have the ability to protect society and punish criminals without executing violent offenders. The Church now believes that the traditional purposes of punishment — defending society, deterring criminal acts, rehabilitating criminals and penalizing them for their actions — can be better achieved by nonviolent means,” the Archbishop of Los Angeles said.
“The Catechism now says the death penalty is ‘inadmissible’ — it should not be used — because it violates the dignity of the person and because ‘more effective systems of detention have been developed, which ensure the due protection of citizens but, at the same time, do not definitively deprive the guilty of the possibility of redemption.’”
Archbishop Gomez added that the revision “is not equating capital punishment with the evils of abortion and euthanasia. Those crimes involve the direct killing of innocent life and they are always gravely immoral. By definition, the lives of almost all those on death row are not ‘innocent.’”
He said that “I do not believe that public executions serve to advance that message in our secular society.”
“Showing mercy to those who do not ‘deserve’ it, seeking redemption for persons who have committed evil, working for a society where every human life is considered sacred and protected — this is how we are called to follow Jesus Christ and proclaim his Gospel of life in these times and in this culture.”
Bishop Frank Dewane of Venice in Florida, chairman of the US Conference of Catholic Bishops’ Committee on Domestic Justice and Human Development, said Aug. 2 that “we welcome the Holy Father’s decision to revise the Catechism and its explanation of the Church’s teaching on the death penalty. All human beings are created in the image and likeness of God, and the dignity bestowed on them by the Creator cannot be extinguished, even by grave sin, such that all persons, from conception until natural death possess inalienable dignity and value that points to their origin as sons and daughters of God.”
“The new section in the Catechism is consistent with the statements of Pope Francis’ teaching on the death penalty, including his 2015 address to the U.S. Congress, as well as the statements of his predecessors,” Bishop Dewane said.
The Venice bishop noted that “Benedict the XVI urged ‘the attention of society’s leaders to the need to make every effort to eliminate the death penalty,’ and Pope St. John Paul II observed that ‘Not even a murderer loses his personal dignity, and God himself pledges to guarantee this.””
He added that “For decades, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops has called for the end of the death penalty in the United States.”
The same day, the Nebraska Catholic Conference issued a statement in the names of Archbishop George Lucas of Omaha, Bishop James Conley of Lincoln, and Bishop Joseph Hanefeldt of Grand Island, saying Pope Francis had “issued an important clarification on the Church’s teaching regarding the death penalty. The Holy Father’s declaration that the death penalty is no longer admissible under any circumstances is an answer to our prayers and welcome news, especially for those of us living in Nebraska.”
The change to the Catechism “rightly upholds the inviolability of the human person,” the bishops of Nebraska said, “whose life is worthy of protection from the moment of conception to natural death, and ought to be treated with the respect and dignity given by God Himself.”
“As the Catholic Bishops of Nebraska, we join Pope Francis in calling for the ‘elimination of the death penalty where it is still in effect,’ since it is not necessary to protect public safety from an unjust aggressor. In particular, as we have publicly expressed on numerous occasions over the last two decades, Nebraska is fortunate to have a competent judicial system, modern correctional facilities and decades of law enforcement advances. Simply put, the death penalty is no longer needed or morally justified in Nebraska.”
Ars, France, Aug 3, 2018 / 05:04 pm (CNA).- The patron saint of priests, St. John Vianney, died Aug. 4, 1859. A century later, Pope John XXIII reflected on the life of the saint, and what it means to be a holy priest.
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Washington D.C., Aug 3, 2018 / 04:56 pm (CNA).- Cardinal Donald Wuerl said Friday that the Church must confirm its commitment to support the survivors of clerical sexual abuse in the aftermath of a sexual abuse scandal involving Archbishop Theodore McC… […]
Naypyitaw, Burma, Aug 3, 2018 / 03:49 pm (CNA/EWTN News).- The Rohingya, a long-suffering Muslim minority in Burma, are allegedly peacefully returning to their country from Bangladesh, where thousands fled last year after a surge of violence against them last year that the United Nations said might qualify as genocide.
At least, that is the story that the Burmese government would like the world to believe.
But a recent government-sponsored trip to Burma by New York Times journalist Hannah Beech and photographer Adam Dean revealed numerous holes in the official narrative of the Burmese government.
Burma is also known as Myanmar, a name which the U.S. government and many democracy activists oppose, because they say it was illegally imposed on the country by its military dictatorship.
While the Burmese government told journalists on the trip that the groups of people they were seeing were Rohingya peacefully returning to Burma after their exodus, hushed conversations with locals revealed that that was not the case.
“The men at one of the country’s three repatriation centers shook their heads when asked if they had peacefully come back to Myanmar from Bangladesh,” Beech wrote.
“They said they had not been repatriated at all. In fact, they said, they had never even left this waterlogged stretch of marsh and mountain in Myanmar, and had been swept up in the government’s broad repression of the Rohingya minority.”
“One day, last year, three of the men said, soldiers had arrested them in their village in northern Rakhine State. Five and a half months later, they were released and charged with illegal immigration,” Beech reported.
Until they were driven out by violence and the burning of their villages, the Rohingya had mostly occupied Burma’s Rakhine state. Conversations with locals in the area revealed more cracks in the government’s storyline, which maintains that the Rohingya are terrorists who burned their own villages to create a ruse.
“…a girl, who would be in danger if her name were revealed, said she missed a Muslim friend who had lived a few houses down. ‘The Rakhine burned their houses down,’ she said, referring to civilians from the Buddhist ethnic group that gives Rakhine State its name. ‘My friend is gone forever,’” Beech reported.
“A man corrected her quickly. ‘You’re supposed to say the reverse,’ he admonished. ‘You should say they burned their own houses down.’”
Another boy confirmed to the Times journalists that he had seen government forces burning Rohingya villages.
“Who would burn down their own houses?” the boy told the journalists. ‘That’s stupid.”
Despite widespread use of the word Rohingya in the international community, the term is controversial within Burma. The Burmese government refuses to use the term, and considers them illegal immigrants from Bangladesh. They have been denied citizenship and numerous other rights since a controversial law was enacted in 1982.
Last year the Rohingya faced a sharp increase in state-sponsored violence in their homeland, which reached levels that led the United Nations to declare the crisis “a textbook example of ethnic cleansing.”
More than 600,000 Rohingya have fled across the border to Bangladesh, and are living in refugee camps, many of which are located in a swampy sort of “buffer zone” along the border between the two countries.
When asked, government officials were not able to provide the New York Times journalists an official death count, broken down by ethnicity, from the surges of violence last year.
In a 2017 trip to Bangladesh, Pope Francis met with a group of Rohingya and offered them his prayers and condolences for what they had endured.
“In the name of all who have persecuted you and persecute you, that have done you harm, above all, the world’s indifference, I ask for forgiveness. Forgiveness,” the Pope said in a Dec. 1, 2017 meeting with Rohingya.
After greeting them individually and hearing brief explanations of their stories, Pope Francis told them that “we are very close to you.”
Although there’s “little we can do because your tragedy is very hard and great,” he told them “we give you space in the heart.”
He explained that according to the Judeo-Christian tradition, God created man in his image and likeness.
“All of us are in this image, also these brothers and sisters, they too are in the image of God,” he said.
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