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La Paz, Bolivia, Feb 17, 2018 / 12:00 am (CNA/EWTN News).- The General Secretariat of the Bolivian Bishops’ Conference called on civil authorities to conduct a “thorough investigation” of recent explosions in the city of Oruro that have left 12 dead and at least 60 injured.
“We lift up our prayers for the victims and express our solidarity with relatives of those who have died in the two explosions in Oruro during the carnival festivities. We call on the authorities to conduct a thorough and transparent investigation and to take measures to prevent these lamentable incidents,” the bishop said in their Feb. 14 statement.
The first explosion occurred Saturday Feb. 10 during a procession honoring the Blessed Virgin Mary. Eight people died and 40 were injured.
According to police reports, the cause was an exploding gasoline container. Bolivian official Carlos Romero informed local media that there was no evidence that dynamite or some other explosive was the cause.
Another explosion took place Feb. 13, one block from the previous one.
This time the police ruled out a gasoline leak and reported that the explosion was caused by six pounds of dynamite and ANFO (ammonium nitrate-fuel oil), a highly volatile explosive.
The explosion left four dead.
The Archbishop of Sucre Jesús Juárez said it is the task of the civil authorities to discover the reasons and the truth behind the incidents. “May truth ever triumph over the darkness of lies,” the prelate said, according to the Bolivian bishops’ communications office.
Bolivia’s Secretary of Defense, Javier Zavaleta, told Red Bolivisión reporters that three people have been arrested on “suspicion” in the last incident.
Zavaleta said that “the possibility that the two events may be coordinated” has not been ruled out, and although the police maintain that the first explosion was accidental, the secretary noted that there still remain “loose ends” in the investigation.
He pointed out that dissemination on social media of “edited audios, not spontaneous, with special effects in the background,” along with testimonies of supposed witnesses, creates suspicion of an organized “operation.”
The Secretary of Defense also called for calm, noting that a contingent of Bolivian police are deployed in the affected city.
Meanwhile, experts from the Institute for Forensic Investigations from Cochabamba and La Paz and from the Institute for Technical Scientific Investigations of the Police Academy, along with prosecutors, are working on gathering evidence to determine the facts.
This article was originally published by our sister agency, ACI Prensa. It has been translated and adapted by CNA.
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Bismarck, N.D., Feb 16, 2018 / 12:01 pm (CNA/EWTN News).- Dr. Don Briel, who held a chair in liberal arts at the University of Mary and who had founded the first Catholic Studies program, at the University of St. Thomas in Minnesota, died Thursday night.
The University of Mary has confirmed to CNA the news of Briel’s Feb. 15 death.
Briel was 71, and had been diagnosed with two untreatable acute leukemias Jan. 19. He had been in hospice care at his home.
In recent weeks he has been the subject of tributes for his contribution to the renewal of Catholic higher education in the US, most notably through this founding, in 1993, of the Catholic Studies Program at the University of St. Thomas in St. Paul-Minneapolis, Minn. That program was the inspiration for similar programs at both Catholic and public universities across the country.
Briel remained at the University of St. Thomas for 20 years, and in 2014 he was given the Blessed John Henry Newman Chair of Liberal Arts at the University of Mary in Bismarck, N.D.
At the University of Mary, he helped develop a Catholic Studies program, developed its Gregorian Scholars Honors Program, and taught at its Rome campus.
Briel’s doctoral work focused on Bl. John Henry Newman, “whose vision of university education had a profound impact on my vision of what was necessary in our own time, [through] his insistence that the purpose of university was to form the mind and habit of students, which enables them to see things in relation and make judgments about reality,” as he told The Catholic Spirit in the weeks preceding his death.
In a Jan. 24 homage to Briel at First Things, George Weigel included his founding the Catholic Studies program among the three seminal moments for Catholic higher education in the US since World War II.
Weigel described Briel’s work as, in part, an effort “to repair the damage that was done to institutions of Catholic higher learning in the aftermath of Land O’ Lakes.”
At the Land O’Lake conference in 1967, Catholic universities also began to distance themselves from the hierarchy of the Church, insisting on their “true autonomy and academic freedom in the face of authority of any kind, lay or clerical.”
“But there was, and is, far more to Don Briel’s vision, and achievement, than damage-repair,” Weigel wrote. “Nourished intellectually by John Henry Newman and Christopher Dawson, Briel has aimed at nothing less than creating, in twenty-first-century circumstances, the ‘idea of a university’ that animated his two English intellectual and spiritual heroes.”
Weigel characterized conversion “to the truth of Christ and the love of Christ as manifest in the Catholic Church,” and thereby the conversion of culture, as what “Don Briel’s life-project [is] all about.”
John and Madelyn Dinkel, who studied under Briel in Rome, wrote to him after his illness that “Your course taught us that following Christ through truth, beauty, and goodness is something always to strive for. You taught us that being a saint will not be easy, but that it truly is the only way worth living. Dr. Briel, your course did teach us this, but most importantly, your character, your virtue, and your Holy Christian example, taught us this during our time abroad.”
Briel is the subject of a recently published festschrift, Renewal of Catholic Higher Education: Essays on Catholic Studies in Honor of Don J. Briel. Edited by Matthew Gerlach, the book includes reflections from Catholic Studies professors, alumni, and scholars.
In the weeks preceding his death, Briel exhibited a profound peace and a sense of gratitude.
In an interview with Maria Weiring of The Catholic Spirit conducted Feb. 8, he said that when told he had a month to live, “I felt great peace about this. I had always prayed that I would have some advance knowledge of dying, and my ideal time frame was actually one month. It’s time enough to focus on the reality of death; it’s not too short, and it’s not too long.”
“The thing is, that if I hadn’t had this incidental appointment with this surgeon, I wouldn’t have known, and therefore I wouldn’t have had this knowledge, which I had always prayed for. So there seems to be providence in it, on every aspect of the diagnosis and my experience of it.”
He characterized his time as spent primarily in prayer and in greeting friends: “I do read, but it’s more [a] time of this combination of prayer – an intensification of prayer – and seeing so many former students and colleagues.”
“I have to say that I look forward to death, not with a sense a great success, but a sense of the privilege, again, of having been invited into the work that has had these remarkable results … This is not my work, it’s not our work, it’s God’s work, and to have been given this possibility to assist in realizing this great educational vision has been the great privilege of my life.”
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