Indianapolis, Ind., Jan 4, 2019 / 04:30 pm (CNA).- Fellowship of Catholic University Students (FOCUS) founder Curtis Martin encouraged members to recall the real purpose of their lives while speaking at the organization’s annual conference.
&nbs… […]
Hong Kong, China, Jan 4, 2019 / 02:33 pm (CNA/EWTN News).- Bishop Michael Yeung Ming-cheung of Hong Kong died in hospital Thursday at the age of 73, after suffering liver failure due to cirrhosis.
He had been admitted to Canossa (Caritas) Hospital Dec. 27, and died the afternoon of Jan. 3.
A board of eight senior members of Hong Kong’s Church administration met Jan. 4 to discuss the diocese’ future leadership, and decided to hold off on choosing an acting bishop as interim leader of the diocese until after Yeung’s funeral, the South China Morning News reports.
Auxiliary Bishop Joseph Ha Chi-shing of Hong Kong reportedly told the media that the diocese was particularly saddened by Bishop Yeung’s death, because his condition had been described as stable only a few hours before his death, though he had evidently been facing health problems for several years.
The bishop’s funeral Mass will be said Jan. 11.
Bishop Yeung was born Dec. 1, 1945 in Shanghai, and ordained a priest of the Hong Kong diocese in 1978 after studying at a pontifical Roman university.
He then earned a master’s degree in communications from Syracuse University in 1982, and later a master’s degree in education from Harvard University in 1990.
Since August 2003 he had served as the head of Caritas Hong Kong, and was vicar general from 2009.
He was appointed auxiliary bishop of Hong Kong in 2014, and coadjutor bishop in 2016. He succeeded Cardinal John Tong Hon Aug. 1, 2017.
From the very first homily after his installation, Bishop Yeung talked about serving the poor, the sick, and the needy, because, in his words, “the well-being of society requires the fostering of genuine ecology and unceasing efforts to bring about integral human development,” and said that “the Chinese government has generally encouraged the religious sector to participate more in social and charitable services.”
The Caritas Institute of Higher Education, of which Yeung was chair, held a Requiem Mass for the bishop’s soul Jan. 4. The school is seeking to be recognized as a university and change its name to “St. Francis University,” the organization announced in 2014.
As a special administrative region, Hong Kong has a large degree of autonomy from mainland China, with its own political and economic system. The territory was a British colony from 1842 until 1997.
There are some 581,000 Catholics in Hong Kong, or about eight percent of the population.
Bishop Yeung previously told CNA in an interview that the Catholic Church “mustn’t compete with the communist party for power and authority in this world. The Lord Jesus never told the disciples to compete with the Roman empire…the Church has, however, her role to play. She is called to have a good attitude to dialogue, and at the same time she is called to tell the truth, and to speak out against social injustice, when the latter happens.”
Yeung’s death comes at a time of rapprochement between the Vatican and the Chinese government. Last month, two bishops of the Vatican-approved underground Catholic Church in China agreed to step aside in favor of bishops of the communist-supported Chinese Patriotic Catholic Association, in the wake of a September 2018 deal signed between the Holy See and the Chinese government.
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Washington D.C., Jan 4, 2019 / 12:00 pm (CNA).- This week the U.S. bishops gathered at Mundelein Seminary in the Archdiocese of Chicago for a weeklong retreat, held at the urging of Pope Francis. Under the guidance of the preacher to the papal household, Fr. Raniero Cantalamessa, they will spend a week “pausing in prayer” to “reflect on the signs of the times.”
Although recent scandals loom large over the meeting, the pope has asked the bishops to focus on their own conversion, before further discussion about new systems or structures to address the sexual abuse crisis.
In a letter sent to the American bishops ahead of their retreat, Pope Francis underscored that the recent crisis has “severely undercut and diminished” the Church’s credibility. Only response grounded in unity and communion, the pope wrote, has the power to restore the Church’s authority and authenticity.
The pope warned the bishops to avoid temptations to seek either the “relative calm resulting from compromise, or from a democratic vote where some emerge as ‘winners’ and others not.”
These temptations remain strong. One of the great frustrations for many of them during the Baltimore assembly was what they saw as a missed opportunity to produce “a solution,” in whatever form.
Whatever model bishops supported in November: the proposed lay-led national commission or the so-called metropolitan model, at least some seemed to be looking for a silver bullet, a powerful “fix” that would restore confidence now and prevent scandals from repeating.
Many American Catholics, too, seemed to expect a cure-all structural reform, and are now hoping that at the global summit on abuse in February, Rome will produce the reforms the U.S. Church could not.
But expectations that there can be one practical solution to solve the crisis are likely to prove false hopes. It has become obvious to most observers that no new policy, structure, or process can answer or prevent what is essentially a crisis of sin.
In his letter, Francis called administrative reforms “necessary yet insufficient” as they “ultimately risk reducing everything to an organizational problem.” The pope called the bishops to recognize their “sinfulness and limitations” and to preach to each other the need for conversion.
The pope’s diagnosis seems to be rooted in the evidence of recent months.
The current crisis is really better understood as a web of intersecting crises. The sexual abuse of minors is rightly seen as the most scandalous among them, but it has festered – as the pope has observed – among other illnesses in the body of the Church.
Clericalism, sexual permissiveness, moral indifference, and administrative negligence are themselves serious problems that require answers of their own.
But, if recent history is any guide, those answers are unlikely to come from any canonical or structural reform, however dramatic or well-intended.
As Cardinal Blase Cupich noted in November, there have been structures and commitments of various kinds in place in since 2002. The Statement of Episcopal Commitment was designed to ensure Church law was always followed when allegations were made, no matter who was being accused. And in 2016, Pope Francis issued the motu proprio Come una madre amorivole, which established – or was meant to – an entirely new canonical procedure for investigating and triying allegations against a bishop.
But even with those those policies and promises, Church officials have not seemed to consider themselves bound to any uniform procedure for handling allegations against bishops. Meanwhile, Francis has withdrawn the reforms of Come una madre before they were ever tested.
Many are now realizing that the problems facing the Church have never been the result of a lack of procedures. Instead, attention is beginning to shift to an enduring lack of will in the Church to employ its policies consistently and with rigor.
Absent a moral commitment to see them applied unsparingly, no reform measures – however systematic – can prevent the worst from happening.
As a case in point: last month it emerged that the Archdiocese of New York, which has some of the clearest, best-established abuse policies of any U.S. diocese, left a priest in ministry even after its own independent commission offered compensation to several of his alleged victims.
As recently as last month, the office of clergy personnel issued a letter of good standing stating “without qualification” that no accusation had ever been made against him; this despite an ongoing investigation by the archdiocese’s own review board.
The failures in New York were not caused by a lack of policies and procedures. Instead, they appear to have been truly human failures.
This may be the reason the pope appears skeptical that another policy or structure could yield different results, at any level of the Church, without personal conversion by the people charged with implementing them.
In August of last year, at the height of the Church’s summer of scandal, the USCCB’s own lay-led National Review Board agreed, issuing a statement that ruled out further structural reforms as a solution.
“The evil of the crimes that have been perpetrated reaching into the highest levels of the hierarchy will not be stemmed simply by the creation of new committees, policies, or procedures,” the review board wrote.
“What needs to happen is a genuine change in the Church’s culture, specifically among the bishops themselves. This evil has resulted from a loss of moral leadership and an abuse of power that led to a culture of silence that enabled these incidents to occur.”
Moral leadership, as the pope has told the U.S. bishops in no uncertain terms, cannot be effected by a vote. It requires a personal conversion in the face of failure and sin. Real change will require a totally new mindset among bishops, and the Curia.
The 19th century British Prime Minister George Canning ridiculed what he called “the idle supposition that it is the harness and not the horses that draw the carriage.”
“Men are everything,” Canning said, “measures comparatively nothing.”
Pope Francis echoed this sentiment in his letter to the bishops, warning them that the Church’s lost credibility “cannot be regained by issuing stern decrees or by simply creating new committees or improving flow charts.”
Instead, the pope wrote, the Church will only regain her credibility by “acknowledging its sinfulness and limitation” while at the same time “preaching the need for conversion.”
After the scandals of 2002, many bishops and officials treated the new measures and standards as a hardship to be endured, rather than a new reality of ecclesiastical life to be internalized. The “cultural change” called for by the national review board and the pope may prove to be the only means of breaking what has begun to resemble a cycle of scandal.
By warning the American bishops against measures aimed at recovering their reputations rather than amending their ways, the pope may have set the bar by which his own February summit will be measured. In his letter, Francis has called for a “shared project that is at once broad, unassuming, sober, and transparent.” Such a project, it seems, would bear little resemblance to past attempts to respond to the sexual abuse crisis.
As the bishops pray in Mundelein and the pope’s advisers prepare for February’s meeting in Rome, many Catholics begin 2019 wondering if a hierarchy beset by scandal can truly convert, or merely reform – again.
Vatican City, Jan 4, 2019 / 10:40 am (CNA/EWTN News).- Bishop Gustavo Oscar Zanchetta, an Argentine native appointed to the Administration of the Patrimony of the Apostolic See in 2017, was accused last autumn of sexual abuse, the Holy See announced Friday.
Bishop Zanchetta had resigned as Bishop of Orán Aug. 1, 2017, slightly more than four years after his appointment there.
Alessandro Gisotti, interim Holy See press officer, said Jan. 4 that “at the time of his resignation there had been against [Bishop Zanchetta] accusations of authoritarianism, but there had been against him no accusation of sexual abuse … the accusations of sexual abuse date to this autumn.”
Bishop Zanchetta, 54, was ordained a priest of the Diocese of Quilmes in 1991. He remained there until his 2013 appointment by Pope Francis as Bishop of Orán.
Gisotti noted that the bishop was not removed from Orán, but that he himself chose to resign, saying the decision was “linked to his difficulty in managing relations with the diocesan clergy and in very tense relations with the priests of the diocese,” and that he had “an incapacity to govern the clergy.”
In announcing his resignation, Bishop Zanchetta had cited “a problem of health”.
Between his resignation and his appointment to APSA nearly four months later, Bishop Zanchetta spent some time in Spain, Gisotti reported.
“After the period in Spain, in consideration of his capacity for administrative management, he was nominated as assessor of APSA.”
APSA manages the Holy See’s assets and real estate holdings.
Gisotti also noted that when the bishop was appointed to APSA, the accusations of sexual abuse had not yet come to light.
“On the basis of these accusations and of the news which recently emerged in the media, the Bishop of Orán has already collected some testimonies, which have yet to arrive to the Congregation for Bishops. If the elements needed to proceed are confirmed, the case will be referred to the special commission for bishops.”
The accusations of abuse against the bishop have apparently been levied by priests and seminarians.
While the investigation is ongoing, Gisotti stated, Bishop Zanchetta will not be working in his capacity as assessor.
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