Month: January 2019

McAllen, Texas, Jan 11, 2019 / 04:46 pm (CNA).- Sister Norma Pimentel says she is “truly disappointed” that she did not get a chance to speak during a roundtable discussion with President Donald Trump Jan. 10, during the president’s v… […]

Gallup, N.M., Jan 11, 2019 / 04:44 pm (CNA/EWTN News).- Praying daily before the Eucharist with more than 250 other U.S. bishops was, for Bishop James Wall of Gallup, the highlight of a seven-day episcopal retreat held this week at Mundelein Seminary in the Archdiocese of Chicago.

“We had the talks from Fr. Cantalamessa, which were excellent, a great homily each day; but for me the highlight of the retreat was every night having the bishops gather in silence before our Lord present in the Eucharist. It was an opportunity to pour your heart out to the Lord, but even more importantly to listen to him, and to receive his direction in all of this.”

“That was where I drew a lot of strength, in the sense of renewal, recommitment, conversion, really to be the shepherd, or bishop, that our Lord wants me to be. I drew a lot from that Holy Hour every night at 7 o’clock,” Bishop Wall told CNA Jan. 10. “I loved the Holy Hour.”

The bishops of the US went on retreat Jan. 2-8 at Mundelein Seminary, in the Chicago suburbs. Fr. Raniero Cantalamessa, OFM Cap., who has been preacher to the papal household since 1980, directed the retreat. Pope Francis had asked the nation’s bishops to go on retreat together, and offered Fr. Cantalamessa for the time of prayer.

“The effect on me was very positive,” Bishop Wall said.

The retreat consisted of two conferences per day given by Fr. Cantalamessa, each nearly an hour, as well as a Mass at which the Capuchin preached. Then in the evening, the bishops gathered for a Holy Hour.

“For me, really the highlight of the whole retreat was every night at 7 o’clock we made a Holy Hour. So you have all the bishops gathering together praying before our Lord present in the Eucharist, and for me that was very positive, it had a very positive effect on me.”

The Holy Hours were inspiring for Bishop Wall, and recalled for him the day of prayer and penance at the US bishops’ autumn general assembly.

“That was one of the best days I’ve ever had with my brother bishops because there we were, all of us together, six and a half hours of Eucharistic Adoration, reflecting on the Word, hearing some powerful talks.”

The Holy Hours “reminded me of that,” he said, “because here we all were, taking the time to be on retreat with each other, ultimately to allow the Lord to speak to our heart and guide us.”

“Coming off the retreat, I have a great sense of renewal, and strengthening in my whole purpose and calling as a bishop.”

Bishop Wall described “a great respect for silence” during the retreat, and noted that “there were lots of places to find good quiet time to reflect and pray, and read … it was an excellent retreat.”

He mentioned that he had brought with him on retreat, for reading during Holy Hours, Complete My Joy, Bishop Thomas Olmsted of Phoenix’ Dec. 30, 2018 apostolic exhortation on the family. “It helped me think about how is it that I am going to speak to the family,” Bishop Wall said.

The retreat was focused on Christ’s commission of the 12 apostles, and the apostolic mandate, centred on the verse: “And he made that twelve should be with him, and that he might send them to preach.”

Bishop Wall called Fr. Cantalamessa “an amazing man, guided and inspired by the Holy Spirit.” Having been on a retreat directed by Fr. Cantalamessa before, “I knew how good he was, and I know how brutally honest he can be, too. To know that he was not only the papal household preacher currently, but for Benedict and John Paul II, I was really encouraged by it … he had some really good words for the bishops.”

In addition to mentioning the role and gift of ecclesial movements in the Church, Fr. Cantalamessa did address the sexual abuse crisis in different talks, Bishop Wall said. “And I think considering everything that’s going on in the world and the US, it was to be expected that he would.”

Addressing Pope Francis’ letter to the US bishops ahead of their retreat, Bishop Wall said, “I took it as encouragement, an assurance of prayer.”

The renewal facing the Church, the bishop said, “is not renewal in a really pretty way at all. I think it’s a painful renewal, and that’s what’s happening right now. It’s really disheartening when we come out with the Charter, we commit ourselves to the Charter, and you find instances when there hasn’t been fidelity to the Charter – because ultimately the Charter is about providing an opportunity for young people to encounter the living Christ. That’s what it’s all about.”

At the retreat “I experienced a sense of conversion,” Bishop Wall said.

“One of the things Cantalamessa talked about was a sense of reliance on the Holy Spirit, and I think sometimes we can forget that; we can try to ‘go it on our own’, so it was a reminder, a renewal, a call to conversion. That’s what I experienced, took away from that, so I would hope that everyone else would take that away, too. It’s all you can hope for.”

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San Antonio, Texas, Jan 11, 2019 / 03:01 pm (CNA).- The Archdiocese of San Antonio has collected over half of the funds for a campaign to construct new parish buildings in preparation for an expected population boom.

The “On the Way – ¡Ándale!” Capital Campaign, this is the first campaign the diocese has seen since 1955. It has raised over $40 million of the $60 million goal.

Construction on Mary, Mother of the Church parish could start as early as fall 2019. The church grounds will include a sanctuary, school, meeting hall, rectory, and sport complex.

Archbishop Gustavo García-Siller blessed the grounds of the new parish Dec. 8. The parish grounds are located in west San Antonio.

The campaign is expected to establish eight parish communities throughout the archdiocese. The plan is for the parishes to be completed within 10 years.

The construction of new churches is rare, but the archdiocese is predicting a large increase in church-goers as San Antonio plans to see an increase in nearly 1 million people by 2040.

Don Meyer, general chair of the campaign, told KENS 5 that new facilities are required to compensate for the upcoming growth and the already over-populated parishes in the area, including his own parish, Holy Trinity.

“There’s a projected 200,000 new Catholics coming in the next ten years. To faithfully serve those parishioners, we will require new parishes, new and expanded schools to educate the youth to give them a faith-based education and renovation and expansion of existing parishes,” he said.

Donna Degenhardt, an attendant at the blessing ceremony, also told KENS 5 that a need for new parish facilities was desperately needed.

“We need this church in the worst way. It is so wonderful. We’re so excited and we can’t wait until it gets built!” she said.

According to the Archdiocese of San Antonio, Father Larry Christian, pastor of St. Ann Catholic Church, spoke to the attendees of ground blessing ceremony, highlighting the importance of the project.

“The On the Way – ¡Ándale! capital campaign – in many ways – is about building up the legacy of our founders and the many people who have helped establish the Catholic parishes, missions, schools, hospitals, colleges, service programs and spirit that is reflective of our archdiocese,” he said.

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Washington D.C., Jan 11, 2019 / 01:00 pm (CNA).- Trust in the clergy has declined sharply over the last year, a new Gallup poll shows. Only 31 percent of American Catholics now rate the honesty or ethical standards of the clergy as “high” o… […]

New York City, N.Y., Jan 11, 2019 / 12:12 pm (CNA).- The 2018 Pennsylvania grand jury report on Catholic clergy sex abuse didn’t get the thorough scrutiny it deserved, and both readers and reporters have been too accepting of the “sensational charges” it made, says veteran Catholic journalist Peter Steinfels.

In a lengthy essay published this week by Commonweal, Steinfels argued that many of the report’s charges are “grossly misleading, irresponsible, inaccurate, and unjust.”
 
Steinfels told CNA he wrote the essay because “I saw it as required by vocation as a reporter and editor to get at the truth.”
 
“The report’s recounting of crimes and sins by abusing priests shocked me, as they should any sensitive person and especially a Catholic,” he said. “But they did not surprise me, having followed this story for thirty years. I was surprised by some of Catholic reaction, as though they had only now become aware of this kind of abuse and its devastating impact.”
 
Steinfels, a professor emeritus at Fordham University, is a former editor of Commonweal magazine and a former religion columnist for the New York Times.
 
In his Jan. 9 essay, “The PA Grand-Jury Report: Not What It Seems,” Steinfels considers various aspects of the report and the reaction to it.
 
He said most public reaction was based on “the heated language and awful examples of the first 12 pages” of a report that was said to contain up to 884 or 1,356 pages.
 
“And when I read those sweeping, ‘take-no-prisoners’ charges about bishops and other church officials across seven-plus decades, without distinction—that ‘all’ victims were ‘brushed aside,’ and church leaders ‘did nothing’ while ‘priests were raping little boys and girls,’ I said to myself, ‘this really deserves factchecking’.”
 
After examining the report in detail, he found that “while there were indeed real failures of church leadership over that long timespan, the report’s extreme charges were not substantiated by its own contents.”
 
The grand jury report, released Aug. 14, was authored by 23 grand jurors who spent 18 months investigating six Pennsylvania dioceses with the help of the FBI, examining half a million pages of documents in the process. The six dioceses were Allentown, Erie, Greensburg, Harrisburg, Pittsburgh, and Scranton.
 
It claimed to have identified more than 1,000 victims of 301 credibly accused priests and presented a devastating portrait of alleged efforts by Church authorities to ignore, obscure, or cover up allegations—either to protect accused priests or to spare the Church scandal.
 
Steinfels cites “the hard reality that not many people have actually read the report, let alone read it critically.” Due to the report’s length, journalists and commentators were dependent upon “established scripts of what a story is about” from church officials or victims’ advocates.
 
He focused on the charge that “all” of the abuse victims in the report “were brushed aside, in every part of the state, by church leaders who preferred to protect the abusers and their institutions above all.” The report introduction charged: “priests were raping little boys and girls, and the men of God who were responsible for them not only did nothing; they hid it all.”
 
This charge “is contradicted by material found in the report itself—if one actually reads it carefully. It is contradicted by testimony submitted to the grand jury but ignored—and, I believe, by evidence that the grand jury never pursued.”
 
The grand jury could have reached “precise, accurate, informing, and hard-hitting findings about what different church leaders did and did not do, what was regularly done in some places and some decades and not in others,” he said. “It could have confirmed and corrected much that we think we know about the causes and prevention of the sexual abuse of young people.”
 
“Instead the report chose a tack more suited to our hyperbolic, bumper-sticker, post-truth environment with its pronouncements about immigrant rapists and murderers, witch hunts, and deep-state conspiracies,” Steinfels charged, arguing that a desire for factchecking should be applied to the report’s denunciation of the Catholic dioceses just as if it came from a demagogic politician or media personality.
 
Grand juries don’t determine guilt or innocence, but whether there is sufficient grounds for an indictment and trial. They hear evidence in secret without representation from those investigated.
 
“And in practice, they operate almost completely under the direction of a local, state, or federal prosecutor, a district attorney or attorney general, whose conclusions they almost invariably rubber-stamp,” said Steinfels.
 
When grand juries release indictments, they are treated as the first step in a process, but when they release investigative reports these reports are treated as “at once an accusation and a final condemnation” whose potential damage is “incalculable,” wrote Steinfels, citing jurist Stanley H. Fuld. While many people raise “perfectly legitimate questions” about bishop accountability, many overlook questions about grand juries’ accountability.
 
He faulted the report for its lack of numerical analysis, like a failure to calculate the number of men in the priesthood in these dioceses since 1945 to add insight about the prevalence of sex abuse among Catholic priests.
 
“There are no efforts to discern statistical patterns in the ages of abusers, the rates of abuse over time, the actions of law enforcement, or changes in responses by church officials,” he said. “Nor are there comparisons to other institutions. One naturally wonders what a seventy-to-eighty-year scrutiny of sex abuse in public schools or juvenile penal facilities would find.”
 
The report’s authors seem to discount both upward and downward trends in sex abuse by Catholic clergy.
 
“If we are to believe the findings of the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, it increased in the latter 1960s, spiked in the ’70s, and declined in the ’80s,” said Steinfels.
 
The report erroneously attributed to Cardinal Donald Wuerl the phrase “circle of secrecy,” which was found scribbled on a rejected 1993 request from an offending priest seeking to return to ministry. Wuerl’s effort to correct this error before the report’s release was ignored, according to Steinfels.
 
The Catholic bishops’ efforts to address abuse, as in the 2002 Charter for the Protection of Children and Young People, are also poorly presented.
 
The report is written to “minimize or dismiss the Charter’s importance,” Steinfels wrote. It presents a “caricature” of history, failing to include any account of “the lengthy documents submitted to the grand jury by the six dioceses.”
 
“There is not the slightest indication, not the slightest, that the grand jury even sought to give serious attention to the kind of extensive, detailed testimony that the dioceses submitted regarding their current policies and programs” regarding abuse prevention and reporting.
 
Steinfels gave particular attention to the grand jury report’s treatment of the Diocese of Erie, comparing it to other in-depth reports on sexual abuse there.
 
The grand jury report claims every diocese hid sex abuse but “contains scant evidence of Erie church officials dissuading people from taking sex-abuse charges to the police, although one can assume that Catholic deference to clerical authority and the culture’s general sexual taboos once made dissuasion hardly necessary.” The report’s own profiles of accused sex abusers in the diocese indicate that the diocese had been “regularly reporting allegations of abuse” by 2002, when such reporting was officially made mandatory by the 2002 child protection charter.
 
Steinfels also questioned the wisdom of naming accused priests, citing the case of Fr. Richard D. Lynch, who died in 2000. Years later, he is still listed by the Erie diocese as “currently under investigation, and each is presumed innocent unless proven otherwise,” and was named in the grand jury report as an offender. In his own reading of the accusations, Steinfels said it could be tempting to treat Lynch’s lone accuser as “a disgruntled crank.”
 
The grand jury report’s expansive definition of criminal “hiding” of abuse, Steinfels said, makes it an “indisputable standard” to publicize the names of all credible or suspected abusers, alive or dead.
 
“If this is to be the case, it should not be unilaterally declared by a grand jury but established by statute and applied to all organizations rather than the Catholic Church alone,” he said.
 
The report comes in the context of a push to expand or create exemptions for the statutes of limitations on sex abuse for both criminal cases and civil lawsuits. The grand jury report recommended creating a retroactive two-year legal window allowing victims of child sex abuse to sue even if the statute of limitations has expired.
 
It follows after credible accusations of sex abuse of minors and seminarians against former cardinal Theodore McCarrick, as well as explosive, but difficult to confirm accusations of former papal nuncio Archbishop Carlo Maria Vigano that Pope Francis returned McCarrick to influence in Church.
 
The impact of the grand jury report on American Catholics was also a focus for Steinfels.
 
“Why the media were so amenable to uncritically echoing this story without investigation, and why Catholics in particular were so eager to seize on it to settle their internal differences, are important topics for further discussion,” he said.
 
Speaking to CNA, Steinfels had three suggestions.
 
“First, we should not let our quite understandable shame and horror at this misconduct bludgeon our critical faculties and the necessity of making distinctions, especially before and after 2002,” he said.
 
“Second, the dominant story line, that Catholic bishops, fully aware that priests posed a peril to children, knowingly reassigned them to protect the abusers and the institutions’ reputation, is just too simple to the point of falsehood,” he added. “That happened, but there were lots of other factors and actors at play, both in the church and the culture, that are essential, even if complicating, parts of the story.”
 
For bishops, “past failures and present pastoral responsibilities” limit what they can effectively say. Therefore, “it becomes incumbent on responsible Catholic lay people, perhaps joining hands across the church issues that divide us, to demand better — from the media and from legal authorities,” Steinfels said.

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