Washington D.C., Sep 18, 2018 / 01:18 pm (CNA/EWTN News).- Catholic leaders have criticized an announcement that the United States will be reducing its refugee cap to historic lows, while global rates of refugees and forcibly displaced persons are at an all-time high.
“To cut off protection for many who are fleeing persecution, at a time of unprecedented global humanitarian need, contradicts who we are as a nation,” said Bishop Joe Vásquez of Austin, Texas, chair of the U.S. bishops’ migration committee.
He said the lowered refugee limit “is deeply disturbing and leaves many human lives in danger.”
On Sept. 17, the Trump administration announced its intention to cap U.S. refugee resettlement at 30,000 next year, the lowest cap since the nation’s refugee program began in 1980.
The announcement comes as the world continues to witness its highest recorded number of forcibly displaced persons – more than 65 million across the globe, according to the United Nations. The number of refugees is also at its highest recorded level at over 22 million, more than half of whom are under age 18.
The lowering of the refugee cap for the 2019 Fiscal Year comes after the Trump administration previously lowered the cap to 45,000 for 2018, although fewer than half that many refugees have been resettled as the fiscal year comes to a close. In the final year of the Obama administration, the U.S. settled nearly 85,000 refugees.
In announcing the change, U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo cited the importance of screening for national security, and emphasized that refugee admissions are only one part of the United States’ global humanitarian assistance efforts, which will also include processing a back-logged system of asylum-seekers and providing foreign aid to refugees overseas.
Responding in a Sept. 18 statement, Bishop Vásquez stressed that the United States is a nation built upon a commitment to welcoming those fleeing violence and persecution, and has the resources to continue doing so.
“In the coming days, we pray that Congress will have the opportunity to engage in the formal consultation process with the Administration that is required by law,” the bishop said. “Congress should strongly urge the Administration to return to a refugee admission level that reflects the local community response and support of refugees, global refugee protection needs, and our long history of compassionately welcoming refugees.”
Jesuit Refugee Service / USA, an organization that works with and advocates for refugees, also criticized the announcement.
“With the world’s refugee population at its highest in recorded history, now is not the time to abandon the U.S. resettlement program,” said Giulia McPherson, director of advocacy and operations for Jesuit Refugee Service / USA.
The organization said in a Sept. 18 statement that “lowering the level of admissions to the U.S. will not only have a detrimental effect on thousands of individuals and families, but will also continue to weaken the leadership role that the U.S. has maintained in meeting the needs of suffering people around the world.”
It called on Congress and the Trump administration to work toward a new goal of at least 75,000 in the coming Fiscal Year.
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“What’s the Eucharist?” Kent Shi, a 25-year-old Harvard graduate student, asked that question when he attended eucharistic adoration for the first time. The answer put him on a path to conversion. / Julia Monaco | CNA
Cambridge, Massachusetts, Apr 16, 2022 / 09:03 am (CNA).
One convert’s journey to Catholicism began with an invitation to an ice-cream social.
Another says he instantly believed in the Real Presence the moment someone explained what the round object was that everyone was staring at during eucharistic adoration.
For a third, the poems of T.S. Eliot — and a seemingly random encounter with a priest on a public street — led to deeper questions about truth and faith.
Their paths differed but led them to the same destination: St. Paul’s Catholic Church in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where they are among 31 people set to be fully initiated into the Catholic Church during the Easter vigil Mass on Saturday, April 16.
That number of initiates is a record high for St. Paul’s, a nearly century-old Romanesque-style brick church whose bell tower looms over Harvard Square.
A scheduling backlog caused by the COVID-19 pandemic is partly responsible for the size of this year’s group of catechumens (non-baptized) and candidates (baptized non-Catholics.) But Father Patrick J. Fiorillo, the parochial vicar at St. Paul’s, believes there’s more to it than that.
“There’s definitely a significant segment of people who started thinking more deeply about their lives and faith during COVID-19,” Fiorillo said. “So, coming out of Covid has given them the occasion to take the next step and move forward.”
Fiorillo is the undergraduate chaplain for the Harvard Catholic Center, a chaplaincy based at St. Paul’s for undergraduate and graduate students at Harvard University and other academic institutions in the area. This year, 17 of the 31 initiates are Harvard students.
“Everybody assumes that, because this is the Harvard Catholic Center, that everybody here is very smart and therefore has a very highly intellectual orientation towards their faith,” Fiorillo told CNA.
“That is definitely true of some people. But I would say the majority are not here because of intellectually thinking their way into the faith. Some are. But the majority are just kind of ordinary life circumstances, just seeking, questioning the ways of the world, and just trying to get in touch with this desire on their heart for something more,” he said.
Fiorillo says welcoming converts into the Church at the Easter vigil is one of the highlights of his ministry.
“It’s an honor. It gives me hope just seeing all this new life and new faith here. So much in one place,” he said.
“When I tell other people about it, it gives them hope to hear that many young people are still converting to Catholicism, and they’re doing it in a place as secular as Cambridge.”
Prior to the Easter vigil, CNA spoke with five of St. Paul’s newest converts. Here are their stories:
‘This is what I’ve been looking for’
Katie Cabrera, a 19-year-old Harvard freshman, told CNA that she was excited to experience the “transformative power of Christ through his body and blood” at Mass for the first time at the Easter vigil.
A native of Dorchester, Massachusetts, she said she was baptized as a child and comes from a family of Dominican immigrants. Her father, who grew up in an extremely impoverished area, lacked a formal education, but always kept the traditions of the Catholic faith close to him in order to persevere in difficult times.
Her father’s love for her and his Catholic faith deeply inspired Cabrera, and served as an anchor for her faith throughout her life.
Growing up, however, Cabrera attended a non-denominational church with her mother. Because she felt the church’s teachings lacked an emphasis on God’s love and mercy, Cabrera eventually left.
“Even though I Ieft, I always knew that I believed in God,” Cabrera said. “So, I was at a place where I felt kind of lost, because I always had that faith, but I didn’t know what to do with it.”
“There was a void that existed in my heart,” says Katie Cabrera, a Harvard undergraduate student. She discovered what was missing when she started to get involved with the Harvard Catholic Center. Courtesy of Katie Cabrera
After she arrived at Harvard, she accepted a friend’s invitation to attend an ice-cream social at the Harvard Catholic Center — “and that was like, sort of, how it all started,” she told CNA.
Once she was added to the email list for the center’s events, she felt a “calling” that she “really wanted to officially become Catholic” after many difficult years without a faith community.
Catholic doctrine about the sacraments was no hurdle for Cabrera, as she credits Fiorillo with explaining the faith well.
“There was a void that existed in my heart,” she said. “As soon as Father Patrick started teaching about marriage and family, theology of the body, and the sacraments, I was like, ‘This is what I’ve been looking for my whole life.’”
‘What’s the Eucharist?’
“What is that thing on the thing?”
Kent Shi laughs when he recalls how perplexed he was the first time he attended eucharistic adoration at St. Mary’s of the Assumption in Cambridge.
Someone helpfully explained that what Shi was looking at was the Eucharist displayed inside a monstrance.
“What’s the Eucharist?” he wanted to know.
For many non-Catholics considering entering the Catholic Church, the Real Presence can be a major obstacle. But Kent Shi, a Harvard graduate student, says that once the Eucharist was explained to him, he instantly believed. Julia Monaco | CNA
For many non-Catholics considering entering the Catholic Church, the Real Presence can be a major obstacle.
Not Shi. He says that once the Eucharist was explained to him that day, he instantly believed.
Shi, 25, told CNA that he considered himself an agnostic for most of his life, meaning he neither believed nor disbelieved in God.
Between his first and second years as a graduate student in Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, however, he accepted Christ and started attending services at a Presbyterian church.
One day in the summer of 2021, a crucifix outside St. Paul’s that Shi says he “must have passed multiple times a week for months and never noticed” caught his eye, and deeply moved him.
Shortly after, he accepted a friend’s invitation to attend eucharistic adoration at St. Mary’s even though he “didn’t know what adoration meant.” Unaware of what he was about to walk into, Shi asked a friend what the dress code was for adoration. His friend replied, “Respectful.”
And so, respectfully dressed in a button-down shirt and slacks, Shi sat in the front row with his friend, only a few feet from the monstrance. That’s when the questions began.
It wasn’t long after that encounter that Shi began attending Mass at St. Paul’s and the parish’s RCIA (Rite of Christian Initiation for Adults) program. Shi asked CNA readers to pray for him and his fellow RCIA classmates.
“There’s a lot of prodigal sons and daughters here, so we would very much appreciate that,” he said, “especially me.”
Poetry and art opened the door
For Loren Brown, choosing to attend a secular university like Harvard proved to be “providential.”
The 25-year-old junior from La Center, Washington, said he comes from a “lapsed” Catholic family and wasn’t baptized.
He didn’t think much about the faith until the spring semester of his freshman year, when, he says, Catholic friends of his “began to question my lack of commitment to faith.”
Later, when students were sent home to take classes virtually due to the pandemic, he had time to reflect and began to read some of the books they’d recommended to him. The poetry of T.S. Eliot (his favorite set of poems being “Four Quartets”) and the “Confessions” by St. Augustine, in particular, “pulled me towards the faith,” he said.
Brown describes his conversion as a “gradual process” which backed him into a “logical corner.” But a chance meeting with a priest also played a pivotal role.
One day in the summer of 2021 while walking back to his dormitory he encountered a man wearing a priestly collar outside St. Paul’s Church on busy Mount Auburn Street.
It was Father George Salzmann, O.S.F.S., graduate chaplain of the Harvard Catholic Center.
“He asked me how I was doing, what I was studying, and we immediately found a common interest in St. Augustine,” Brown told CNA.
“You know, there’s this great window of St. Augustine inside St. Paul’s and you should come see it,” Brown remembers the gregarious priest telling him. Salzmann wound up giving Brown a brief tour of the church, which was completed in 1923.
Harvard undergraduate student Loren Brown describes his conversion to Catholicism as a “gradual process” which backed him into a “logical corner.” But a chance meeting with a priest also played a pivotal role. Courtesy of Loren Brown
The next week, Brown found himself sitting in a pew for his first Sunday Mass at St. Paul’s. He hasn’t missed a Sunday since, a routine that ultimately led him to join the RCIA program that fall.
Brown says he now realizes that coming to Harvard was about more than majoring in education.
“What I wanted out of Harvard has completely changed,” he said. “Instead of an education that prepares me for a job or a career, I want one that forms me as a moral being and a human.”
‘I can’t do this alone. Please help me.’
Verena Kaynig-Fittkau, 42, is a German immigrant who came to the U.S. 10 years ago with her husband to do her post-doctoral research in biomedical image processing at Harvard’s engineering school.
The couple settled in Cambridge, where they had their first child. Two subsequent pregnancies ended in miscarriage, however. That second loss was overwhelming for Kaynig-Fittkau, who says she was raised as a “secular Lutheran” without any strong faith.
“It broke me and a lot of my pride and made me realize that I can’t do things by myself,” she told CNA.
She found herself on knees one Thanksgiving, pleading with God. “I can’t do this alone,” she said. “Please help me.”
She says God answered her prayer by introducing her to another mother, who she met at a playground. She was a Christian who later invited Kaynig-Fittkau to attend services at a Presbyterian church in Somerville, Massachusetts.
In that church, there was a lot of emphasis on “faith alone,” she said. But Kaynig-Fittkau, who now works for Adobe and is the mother of two girls, kept questioning if her faith was deep enough.
A YouTube video about the Eucharist by Father Mike Schmitz sent Verena Kaynig-Fittkau on a path toward converting to Catholicism. Courtesy of Verena Kaynig-Fittkau
Then one day she stumbled upon a YouTube video titled “The hour that will change your life,” in which Father Mike Schmitz, a Catholic priest from the Diocese of Duluth, Minnesota, known for his “Bible in a Year” podcast, speaks about the Eucharist.
Intrigued, she began watching similar videos by other Catholic speakers, including Father Casey Cole, O.F.M., Bishop Robert Barron, Matt Fradd, and Scott Hahn, each of whom drew her closer and closer to the Catholic faith.
Familiar with St. Paul’s from her days as a Harvard researcher and lecturer, she decided to attend Mass there one day, and made an appointment before she left to meet with Fiorillo.
When they met, Fiorillo answered all of her questions from what she calls “a list of Protestant problems with Catholicism.” She entered the RCIA program three weeks later.
Recalling her first experience attending eucharistic adoration, she said it felt “utterly weird” to be worshiping what she describes as “this golden sun.”
A conversation with a local Jesuit priest helped her better understand the Eucharist, however. Now she finds that spending time before the Blessed Sacrament is “amazing.”
“I am really, really, really excited for the Easter vigil,” Kaynig-Fittkau said. “I can’t wait, I have a big smile on my face just thinking about it.”
The rosary brought him peace
Another catechumen at St. Paul’s this year is Kyle Richard, 37, who lives in the Beacon Hill neighborhood of Boston and works in a technology startup company downtown.
Although he grew up in a culturally Catholic hub in Louisiana, his parents left the Catholic faith and joined a Full Gospel church. Richard said he found the church “intimidating,” which led him eventually to leave Christianity altogether.
When Richard was in his mid-twenties, his father battled pancreatic cancer. Before he died, he expressed a wish to rejoin the Catholic Church. He never did confess his sins to a priest or receive the Anointing of the Sick, Richard recalls sadly. But years later, his non-believing son would remember his father’s yearning to return to the Church.
“I kind of filed that away for a while, but I never really let it go,” he said.
While Kyle Richard’s father was dying from pancreatic cancer, he returned to the Catholic faith, which made a lasting impression on his non-believing son. Courtesy of Kyle Richard
Initially, Richard moved even farther away from the Church. He said he became an atheist who thought that Christianity was simply “something that people used to just soothe themselves.”
Years later, while going through a divorce, he had a change of heart.
Feeling he ought to give Christianity “a fair shot,” he began saying the rosary in hopes of settling his anxiety. The prayer brought him peace, and became a gateway to the Catholic faith.
Before long, he was reading the Bible on the Vatican’s website, downloading prayer apps, and meditating on scripture.
A Google search brought him to St. Paul’s. Joining the RCIA program, he feels, was a continuation of his father’s expressed desire on his deathbed more than a decade ago.
“I think he would be proud, especially because he was born on April 16th and that is the date of the Easter vigil,” he said.
Washington D.C., Feb 6, 2018 / 04:38 pm (CNA).- White House Chief of Staff John Kelly said on Tuesday that even if existing protections for “Dreamers” expire and Congress is unable to come up with a solution, they would not be targeted for … […]
4 Comments
“Deeply disturbing” to Bishop Joe Vásquez, chair of the USCCB migration committee? Not to me and the 63 million who voted for President Trump, including tens of millions of hard-working, tax-paying, law-abiding Catholics who are American citizens who oppose open-borders immigration that “Bishop” Joe and the USCCB have been demanding for years as they have fed on the $2 billion in federal grants that they got every year from alt-left socialist Obama Democrats fort “refugee resettlement”. The 30,000 cap is actually too high this year; it should be -0- next year. Perhaps “Bishop” Joe will have something useful to do after the mid-term elections once the Department of Justice initiates a RICO action against the whole crowd of cowardly, lying, thieving Judas bishops who have spent decades protecting the 50% to 70% of their priests who are homosexual and hideous crimes they have committed.
Times have changed bishop. “Who we are as a people” won’t cut it any more. The statistics on refugees are almost certainly falsified (like everything else reported in the “media”) to support a leftist agenda. The refugee/asylum process has been completely hijacked by leftist political causes. The vast majority of asylum seekers referred to law firms’ pro bono departments by left-wing referral agencies are homosexuals, gender dysphorics and muslims with no particular love for America. Persecuted Christians, or victims of socialist tyranny and other unfashionable victims of actual persecution rarely get referred. The system is a sham, and a scam. What is “deeply troubling” is not a country trying to resist the consequences of what has become a thoroughly corrupted process, whereby the former good of immigration to America is being used as a weapon to destroy her. The Dalai Lama even recognizes this has become a problem for Europe. Should we take no warning whatsoever from Europe’s experience? Are we really supposed to just bury our heads in the sand like a bunch of idiots based on some vacuous and inane platitudes about “who we are as a nation”? No, what’s really “deeply troubling” is that our so-called church leaders keep spouting this tiresome sjw nonsense while the church hierarchy sinks deeper and deeper into a morass of sexual perversion and moral and spiritual irrelevancy. I’m afraid no one’s listening to this bs any more. If you care about refugees, help them build up their own countries into places where people can live in peace. If you really care about refugees, help defeat the socialist and islamist tyrannies that are causing 90% of the world’s suffering. If you really want to help refugees, preach Christ crucified and risen. But please stop accusing us of being unChristian.
Syrians can’t get in because our Bishops have helped millions of illegals move into lethal neighborhoods in the poorest areas of our cities. I recently could not get in an Ecuadorian enclave in Newark which, because of a murder by a black of an Ecuadorian, had all window shades down and a steel wall with several padlocks keeping even a mailman out. They must do mail by po box. I fought a black criminal several years ago on the street…and I was more scared standing at that enclave than then because I could read the fear in that area where a boy saw his dad get shot in the face…thanks to coming to a part of America which has a murder rate four times that of Ecuador. I’m 6’3″ 217 and I saw a rasta with dreads in that area about 6’7″ get out of a fly Chrysler 300 and leave the door unlocked and window down and walk away from it like the block knew not to touch it because he was carrying…strapped as they say.
What the USA should do is help dysfunctional Catholic countries like El Salvador and Honduras ( 1 and 2 in world murder rates…no death penalty of course ) develop economically and in terms of martial law in the streets so that they don’t have to risk rape etc in coming here. The rich of the world like Bezos of Amazon could renovate such small countries economically by funding factories but usa military needs to advise them on making gangs extinct.
Trump knows the Bishops helped illegals and might know the Jesuits went bankrupt twice in the north west from sex abuse claims even against the Eskimos…who in the world molests Eskimos?…well apparently a few Jesuits did and a few is enough if the victims are high in numbers. So no…Trump is not hearing Bishops or Jesuits…even if some are very sincere.
“Deeply disturbing” to Bishop Joe Vásquez, chair of the USCCB migration committee? Not to me and the 63 million who voted for President Trump, including tens of millions of hard-working, tax-paying, law-abiding Catholics who are American citizens who oppose open-borders immigration that “Bishop” Joe and the USCCB have been demanding for years as they have fed on the $2 billion in federal grants that they got every year from alt-left socialist Obama Democrats fort “refugee resettlement”. The 30,000 cap is actually too high this year; it should be -0- next year. Perhaps “Bishop” Joe will have something useful to do after the mid-term elections once the Department of Justice initiates a RICO action against the whole crowd of cowardly, lying, thieving Judas bishops who have spent decades protecting the 50% to 70% of their priests who are homosexual and hideous crimes they have committed.
Times have changed bishop. “Who we are as a people” won’t cut it any more. The statistics on refugees are almost certainly falsified (like everything else reported in the “media”) to support a leftist agenda. The refugee/asylum process has been completely hijacked by leftist political causes. The vast majority of asylum seekers referred to law firms’ pro bono departments by left-wing referral agencies are homosexuals, gender dysphorics and muslims with no particular love for America. Persecuted Christians, or victims of socialist tyranny and other unfashionable victims of actual persecution rarely get referred. The system is a sham, and a scam. What is “deeply troubling” is not a country trying to resist the consequences of what has become a thoroughly corrupted process, whereby the former good of immigration to America is being used as a weapon to destroy her. The Dalai Lama even recognizes this has become a problem for Europe. Should we take no warning whatsoever from Europe’s experience? Are we really supposed to just bury our heads in the sand like a bunch of idiots based on some vacuous and inane platitudes about “who we are as a nation”? No, what’s really “deeply troubling” is that our so-called church leaders keep spouting this tiresome sjw nonsense while the church hierarchy sinks deeper and deeper into a morass of sexual perversion and moral and spiritual irrelevancy. I’m afraid no one’s listening to this bs any more. If you care about refugees, help them build up their own countries into places where people can live in peace. If you really care about refugees, help defeat the socialist and islamist tyrannies that are causing 90% of the world’s suffering. If you really want to help refugees, preach Christ crucified and risen. But please stop accusing us of being unChristian.
Syrians can’t get in because our Bishops have helped millions of illegals move into lethal neighborhoods in the poorest areas of our cities. I recently could not get in an Ecuadorian enclave in Newark which, because of a murder by a black of an Ecuadorian, had all window shades down and a steel wall with several padlocks keeping even a mailman out. They must do mail by po box. I fought a black criminal several years ago on the street…and I was more scared standing at that enclave than then because I could read the fear in that area where a boy saw his dad get shot in the face…thanks to coming to a part of America which has a murder rate four times that of Ecuador. I’m 6’3″ 217 and I saw a rasta with dreads in that area about 6’7″ get out of a fly Chrysler 300 and leave the door unlocked and window down and walk away from it like the block knew not to touch it because he was carrying…strapped as they say.
What the USA should do is help dysfunctional Catholic countries like El Salvador and Honduras ( 1 and 2 in world murder rates…no death penalty of course ) develop economically and in terms of martial law in the streets so that they don’t have to risk rape etc in coming here. The rich of the world like Bezos of Amazon could renovate such small countries economically by funding factories but usa military needs to advise them on making gangs extinct.
Trump knows the Bishops helped illegals and might know the Jesuits went bankrupt twice in the north west from sex abuse claims even against the Eskimos…who in the world molests Eskimos?…well apparently a few Jesuits did and a few is enough if the victims are high in numbers. So no…Trump is not hearing Bishops or Jesuits…even if some are very sincere.
I remember the days when whenever I heard the word ‘Bishop’ I automatically acceded the man respect.
Now those days are gone, and those who bear that title today don’t seem to realize it – but it’s true.
And whose fault is that?