Year: 2019

Orizaba, Mexico, May 30, 2019 / 05:19 pm (CNA).- Bishops in Mexico are mourning those dead and injured from an accident Wednesday involving a cargo truck and a bus carrying pilgrims who had visited the Basilica of Our Lady of Guadalupe.

At least 21 people died May 29 when seemingly the cargo truck’s brakes failed and it crashed into a bus carrying pilgrims on a highway near Maltrata, fewer than 20 miles west of Orizaba in Veracruz. Another 30 were injured.

The pilgrims were from Saints Peter and Paul parish in Tuxtla Gutiérrez in Chiapas.

The Archdiocese of Tuxtla Gutiérrez lamented the death of the pilgrims and asked God to strengthen the spirit of their families.

“At the same time we express our solidarity with the injured, to whom we offer the efforts at our disposal to help them return to their homes as soon as possible,” the local Church stated.

Archbishop Rogelio Cabrera López of Monterrey, president of the Mexican bishops’ conference, said that “I join the grief and the prayers for the faithful of the parish of San Pedro and San Pablo de Tuxtla Gutiérrez in Chiapas who suffered the accident on their return from the pilgrimage to Tepeyac. Blessings for all.”

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Santiago, Chile, May 30, 2019 / 02:19 pm (CNA).- Fr. Carlos Eugenio Irarrázaval Errazuriz, who was appointed auxiliary bishop of Santiago this month, has apologized to the Jewish community after having made some controversial statements.

Fr. Irarrázaval, a priest of the Archdiocese of Santiago, was appointed an auxiliary bishop of the same local Church May 22. In an interview with CNN Chile the following day, when asked about the role of women in the Church, he said that “we all have to ensure that they can do what they may want to do. Obviously, Jesus Christ marked out for us certain guidelines, and if we want to be the Church of Jesus Christ, we have to be faithful to Jesus Christ.”

“Jewish culture is a male dominated culture to this day,” he continued. “If you see a Jew walking down the street, the woman goes ten steps behind. But Jesus Christ breaks with that pattern. Jesus Christ converses with women, converses with the adulteress, with the Samaritan woman. Jesus Christ let women care for him.”

“It is true that at the Last Supper there was no woman seated at the table, and we also have to respect that. Jesus Christ made choices and he didn’t do it ideologically,” he said.

On May 28, Fr. Irarrázaval expressed his apologies to the Jewish community during a meeting held at the archdiocesan offices with Jewish representatives.

Also present at the meeting were Bishop Celestino Aós Braco, apostolic administrator of Santiago; Bishop Cristián Carlos Roncagliolo Pacheco, a Santiago auxiliary; Fr. José Manuel Arenas; and the rabbis Alejandro Bloch, Samuel Szteinhendler, and Daniel Zang.

The apologies “were received in a spirit of fraternity by the Jewish religious authorities,” a statement from the Archdiocese of Santiago said.

“The encounter allowed us to establish ties of brotherhood with a view to setting out on a path of working together, inspired by the task that, since the promulgation of the Conciliar Declaration Nostra aetate, we carry forward between Jews and the Catholic Church,” the text added.

“Both communities share a biblical heritage that details the relationship of God with men, we have expressed our will to foster a culture of encounter with the intention and the commitment to work together to promote ethical and moral values that inspire that heritage, thus seeking a greater awareness of the presence of God in the world and in our society,” the statement says.

The meeting participants also agreed to establish a joint forum with a view to realizing a collaborative work, in order to grow in friendship and to deepen knowledge of the two communities.

Fr. Irarrázaval also apologized May 29 for using “expressions which troubled and even pained many people.”

“I would like to sincerely ask forgiveness for the suffering and bewilderment that my statements may have caused,” he said in a letter.

“I am committed with the Lord to work for communion in the Church, knowing that synodally we are all builders – women and men – with the richness of our differences, of a more welcoming and inclusive Church,” he concluded.

Fr. Irarrázaval will be consecrated a bishop July 16.

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Ottawa, Canada, May 30, 2019 / 01:00 pm (CNA).- Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has said he intends to raise the subject of American abortion policy with Vice President Mike Pence during meetings in Ottawa.

Pence arrived in the Canadian capital Thursday to discuss the ongoing negotiations for a tri-lateral trade agreement between the United States, Canada, and Mexico.

Trudeau said he is “very concerned with the situation around the backsliding of women’s rights that we’re seeing from conservative movements here in Canada, in the United States and around the world. I will have a broad conversation with the Vice President in which of course that will come up.”

Pence has a long and vocal history of supporting pro-life legislation and executive policy. He has frequently insisted that abortion is a significant policy priority for the current administration.  

In 2014, Justin Trudeau made it a requirement that all candidates from his party, the Liberal Party, vocally support abortion rights.

Last summer, Trudeau introduced a new requirement that excluded any organization with pro-life views from receiving government funding for a summer jobs program–even if the organization did no actual pro-life work. That measure was scrapped after considerable public opposition.

Speaking to CNA earlier in the month, Member of Parliament Rachel Harder said that “Prime Minister [Justin] Trudeau has made it really clear that his way of thinking is perceived to be the right way.”

“If MPs don’t fit within his framework of values, then he has no use for them and no appreciation and really, him and his caucus show little to no respect of them,” Harder said.

Since abortion began in Canada fifty years ago, approximately six million Canadians have died by abortion, and an estimated 300 unborn babies are killed each day.

Abortion was illegal in Canada until the government of Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau passed the Criminal Law Amendment Act of 1968-1969, which allowed for abortion under limited circumstances after approval from a “Therapeutic Abortion Committee.” Pierre Trudeau is the father of the current prime minister.

In 1988, the Canadian Supreme Court ruled in the decision R v Morgentaler that the Therapeutic Abortion Committee requirement was unconstitutional, and ordered Parliament to write a law regarding abortion. Despite that ruling, no law has been passed and abortion is freely available without restrictions under Canada’s national healthcare system.

On the occasion of Canada’s March for Life earlier this month, Conservative Member of Parliament David Anderson told CAN that the legal situation was not widely appreciated by voters.

“When you tell Canadians that there actually is no abortion law in Canada, their initial response is they actually don’t believe that,” Anderson said, noting that unrestricted access to abortion had come about “by default.”

Trudeau’s premiership is currently mired in domestic scandal after a former justice minister said she had been pressured to settle out of court the prosecution a Canadian construction company.

Trudeau has denied allegations that his government applied pressure on behalf of the firm, which holds several important government contracts. The affair triggered several high-profile resignations, including by a top aid to the Prime Minister and by the Treasury Board president.

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Mexico City, Mexico, May 30, 2019 / 11:18 am (CNA).- With violence in Mexico on the rise, the Catholic Church has a role to play in achieving lasting peace, said a priest of Mexico City.

In his recent column entitled “Children and Young People without a Future,” published in the Mexican ContraRéplica newspaper, Fr. Hugo Valdemar addressed the subject.

“Federal and state governments have been totally overwhelmed by the violence which like a horseman from the Apocalypse has been unleashed in the country,” said the priest, who is the canon penitentiary of the archdiocese.

“It won’t be possible to combat this evil except by uniting the forces of government, the Church and civil society.”

The priest noted that more than half of Mexicans under the age of 18 live in poverty, and 1.1 million young people ages 16-17 don’t attend school.

“This data serves as a preamble to create awareness of an extremely serious problem which like a cancer is devastating our homeland: the recruitment of young people into organized crime and the killing of children and adolescents which, according to the Network for the Rights of Children, in the last 13 years has reached the chilling sum of 17,600 minors killed, an average of 1,284 a year and in the last year an average of 8 murders a day.”

He added that in the last 12 years, more than 6,400 children have been reported missing.

Poverty and lack of schooling leave children exposed to organized crime, Fr. Valdemar said. However, “it’s also true that underlying this, there is a tremendous disintegration of the social fabric, a lack of attention by parents for their children, and a void of moral and Christian formation.”

The Mexican priest, who for 15 years was the director of communications for the Archdiocese of Mexico City, said that the Church throughout history has been able to meet challenges similar to those facing current generations.

The Church accomplished this, he said, through solid Christian formation, education, and work.

“Let’s think of examples of true fathers to youth such as Saint Joseph Calasanz, Saint Jean Baptiste de la Salle, or Saint John Bosco,” he said.

These saints, he reflected, “aware of the grave dangers that the young people of their times were exposed to, were able to find the appropriate responses and dedicated themselves in body and soul to helping children and young people.”

This article was originally published by our sister agency, ACI Prensa. It has been translated and adapted by CNA.

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