“The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.” — John 1:5 “While I am in the world, I am the light of the world.” — John 9:5 “Live as children […]
Washington D.C., Mar 22, 2020 / 04:00 am (CNA).- The Syrian civil war has led to one of the largest refugee crises of modern times, and presented unique problems for Syria’s ancient Christian communities. Marginalized […]
Vatican City, Mar 22, 2020 / 11:30 am (CNA).- Pope Francis announced Sunday that he will give an extraordinary Urbi et Orbi blessing this week with the opportunity for Catholics to receive a plenary indulgence by tuning in via media.
“This Friday, March 27 at 6 p.m., I will preside over a moment of prayer outside of St. Peter’s Basilica with the square empty. As now, I invite everyone to participate spiritually through the media,” Pope Francis said March 22 in his livestreamed Angelus address.
“Urbi et Orbi” means “To the City [of Rome] and to the World.” It is a special apostolic blessing given by the pope from the balcony of St. Peter’s Basilica every year on Easter Sunday, Christmas, and other special occasions.
Pope Francis said the March 27 prayer broadcast for those suffering from the coronavirus pandemic will include listening to the Word of God and Eucharistic Adoration.
More than 300,000 people have contracted COVID-19 as of March 22, according to Johns Hopkins University Coronavirus Resource Center. The respiratory disease, which originated in Wuhan, China, has spread to 157 countries, and has led to the deaths of 13,672 people worldwide.
“We want to respond to the pandemic of the virus with the universality of prayer, compassion, tenderness. Let us stay united,” Pope Francis said.
“All those who spiritually join this moment of prayer through the media will be granted the plenary indulgence according to the conditions provided for in the recent decree of the Apostolic Penitentiary,” Holy See Press Office Director Matteo Bruni told journalists following the pope’s announcement.
The Vatican’s Apostolic Penitentiary has granted a plenary indulgence for people who pray for an end to the pandemic, healing for the sick, and the eternal repose of the dead. Plenary indulgences, which remit all temporal punishment due to sin, must be accompanied by full detachment from sin.
In this case, the person must also fulfill the ordinary conditions of an indulgence, which are sacramental confession, reception of the Eucharist, and prayer for the intentions of the pope, by having the will to satisfy the conditions as soon as possible for them.
To receive the indulgence, a person may offer at least a half hour of adoration before the Blessed Sacrament or a half hour of prayer with scripture, or the recitation of the rosary or chaplet of divine mercy “to implore from the Almighty God an end to the epidemic, relief for those who are suffering, and eternal salvation of those whom the Lord has called to himself.”
Pope Francis asked people to pray for the lonely, the elderly, doctors, nurses, healthcare workers, government authorities and the police. The pope also stressed the importance of praying for the dead during his Sunday morning Mass livestreamed from his residence in Vatican City.
“These days we are hearing the news of so many people who are dying, men and women who are dying alone without being able to say goodbye to their loved ones. Let us think about them and pray for them,” Pope Francis said.
“For families as well, who cannot accompany their loved ones on that journey, we pray in a special way for the dying and for their families,” the pope said.
Vatican City, Mar 22, 2020 / 07:05 am (CNA).- Pope Francis has asked Christians around the world to unite in praying the Our Father prayer at noon on March 25 in response to the coronavirus pandemic.
“In these days of trial, while humanity trembles at the threat of the pandemic, I would like to propose to all Christians to unite their voices to heaven,” Pope Francis said March 22.
“I invite … the leaders of all Christian communities, together with all Christians of various confessions, to invoke the Most High, Almighty God, while simultaneously reciting the prayer that Jesus Our Lord has taught us,” he said following the Angelus prayer.
March 25 is the Solemnity of the Annunciation, the date “when many Christians remember the Archangel Gabriel’s announcement to the Virgin Mary of the Incarnation of the Word,” the pope said.
“May the Lord hear the unanimous prayer of all his disciples who are preparing to celebrate the victory of the Risen Christ,” he said.
More than 311,900 people have contracted COVID-19 as of March 22, according to Johns Hopkins University. The respiratory disease, which originated in Wuhan, China, has spread to 157 countries, and has led to the deaths of 13,407 people worldwide.
Pope Francis announced on Sunday that he will also preside over a moment of prayer with Eucharistic Adoration in an empty St. Peter’s Square on Friday, March 27 at 6pm in Rome in which he will give the Urbi et Orbi blessing, usually preserved for Christmas, Easter, or other special occasions.
He invited all Catholics to participate spiritually through the media and noted that all who join in this prayer will have the possibility of receiving a plenary indulgence if they meet the obligations laid out in the decree issued March 20.
The Vatican’s Apostolic Penitentiary has granted a plenary indulgence for people who pray for an end to the pandemic, healing for the sick, and the eternal repose of the dead. Plenary indulgences, which remit all temporal punishment due to sin, must be accompanied by full detachment from sin.
In this case, the person must also fulfill the ordinary conditions of an indulgence, which are sacramental confession, reception of the Eucharist, and prayer for the intentions of the pope, by having the will to satisfy the conditions as soon as possible for them.
To receive the indulgence, may offer at least a half hour of adoration before the Blessed Sacrament or a half hour of prayer with scripture, or the recitation of the rosary or chaplet of divine mercy “to implore from the Almighty God an end to the epidemic, relief for those who are suffering, and eternal salvation of those whom the Lord has called to himself.”
“We want to respond to the pandemic of the virus with the universality of prayer, compassion, tenderness. Let us stay united,” Pope Francis said in his Angelus broadcast on March 22.
Reminding people to pray for the lonely, the elderly, doctors, nurses, and healthcare workers, the pope said it is also important to pray for government authorities and the police, who are trying to maintain order.
Pope Francis said he would like all Catholics to take time today to meditate on Sunday’s Gospel reading from chapter nine of the Gospel of John.
“At the heart of the liturgy of this fourth Sunday of Lent is the theme of light. The Gospel tells the episode of the blind man from birth, to whom Jesus gives the sight. This miraculous sign is the confirmation of Jesus’s claim about himself: ‘I am the light of the world,’ the light that illuminates our darkness,” Pope Francis said.
The beggar’s healing is a metaphor for the liberation from sin that Christ offers, he explained.
“Sin is like a dark veil that covers our face and prevents us from seeing ourselves and the world clearly. The forgiveness of the Lord removes this veil of shadow and darkness, and gives us new light. The Lent that we are living is an opportune and precious time to approach the Lord, asking for his mercy, in the different forms that Mother Church offers us,” Francis said.
“Most Holy Mary help us to imitate the blind man of the Gospel, so that we can be flooded with the light of Christ and walk with him on the path of salvation,” Pope Francis prayed.
Washington D.C., Mar 21, 2020 / 04:07 pm (CNA).- A Franciscan friar is the first person known to have died as a result of coronavirus (COVID-19) in the District of Columbia.
Br. John-Sebastian Laird-Hammond, OFM, was hospitalized with the virus last week, and died Friday, the Washington Post reported.
The friar had been in residence at the Franciscan Monastery of the Holy Land in America since the 1980s, Father Larry Dunham, superior of the monastery, told the Post March 21. Laird-Hammond, 59, had been battling leukemia for years, Dunham added.
DC Mayor Muriel Bowser had announced the District’s first death related to the virus on Friday but did not reveal the person’s identity.
Laird-Hammond was Secretariat of the monastery’s board of directors, according to the monastery’s website. The friar had been running the monastery’s day-to-day operations as business manager for the past 14 years, Dunham told the Post.
The friar had recently been approved for a transfer to an order in New York, where he was going to be involved in fundraising efforts for missions in Central America, according to the Washington Post.
“It was going to be like a whole new focus and life for him,” Dunham told the Post.
“That was to be his new assignment that never quite materialized.”
The monastery, which is a national shrine, has not yet been reached by CNA for comment.
A priory of the Order of Friars Minor, the Franciscans, has had a mission to support Christians in the Holy Land, and to serve as custodians, or guardians, of the sacred sites of the Holy Land since 1342. The Franciscan Monastery in Washington, DC is affiliated directly with that mission.
Washington D.C. had 72 confirmed cases of COVID-19 as of March 20. In the greater Washington area, which includes parts of Maryland and Virginia, the talley stood at 338 confirmed cases as of March 20.
A priest in the Diocese of Yakima, Washington was the first U.S. priest known to be diagnosed with COVID-19 on March 15. A second U.S. priest, Fr. Stephen Planning, SJ, president of DC’s Gonzaga College High School, announced this week he also has the virus. In Italy, at least 30 priests so far have died of the coronavirus.
The global tally of confirmed cases of the COVID-19 coronavirus worldwide is now over 300,000.
This is the first installment in our series on the evangelizing power of beauty. In this series, we are looking at how beauty can bring us to God, convey a sense of the sacred, point […]
Washington D.C., Mar 21, 2020 / 02:00 pm (CNA).- Catholic author and commentator Ross Douthat said that a “decadent society” plays a role in declining birth rates, as cultures and couples lose a sense of hope in the future.
Discussing his new book, “The Decadent Society: How We Became Victims of Our Own Success,” the New York Times columnist said, in an interview Thursday on EWTN Pro-Life Weekly, that a “decadent” society is marked by “stagnation, repetition, and sterility,” but also “a high level of wealth and technological development.”
Douthat argued that the United States and parts of Europe are experiencing “a sort of loss of the sense of possibility, hope for the future,” and that this shows itself in slowing economies, gridlocked politics, and declining birth rates.
In his book, Douthat wrote that “amid all of our society’s material plenty, one resource is conspicuously scarce. That resource is babies.”
During the interview, Douthat said that some factors, such as a shift away from an agrarian economy and lower infant mortality rates, can help explain declining birth rates but cannot account for why birthrates have fallen below the replacement rate.
“If you ask people how many kids they would like to have, even in a secular society where most people don’t have Humanae Vitae on the shelf, people still say they want between two and three kids,” Douthat said.
“But if you look at how many kids they’re having, our birth rate is at 1.6, 1.7, in places like South Korea it’s at one—that has the potential to cut your population in half without immigration over a couple generations.”
Increasing secularization alone, Douthat said, does not explain the shift, because parents in some secular countries, like Sweden, have more children than some religious ones, like Poland, but that broadly “there is something about the idea that you are embedded in a story that extends beyond yourself and your own moment, to the next chapter and next development, that makes people more likely to start families and so it helps to think that your story has a capital A author.”
Thinning family trees present a host of socioeconomic consequences, he said, creating a society that is older, more resistant to change. It also creates families with fewer members, and children experience experience fewer interpersonal relationships with siblings and cousins.
“Large families, they toughen kids up in interesting ways,” Douthat said.
“Like if you’re a four-year-old in a family with a six-year-old and an eight-year-old, you can’t afford to be too special of a snowflake and you get used to sort of managing interpersonal tensions, you know, if the family is healthy.”
Douthat noted the similarity between his own arguments about a decadent society and Pope Francis’ criticisms of a “throwaway culture.”
“It’s a society that doesn’t have a strong idea of the future or of the past,” Douthat said. “So it’s sort of lost faith, it thinks that the past was bad and unprogressive and corrupt, but it doesn’t have a lot of confidence about the future, so it does, I think, tend towards very disposable forms of culture.”
“You don’t get people, building the great cathedrals, and writing the great operas,” in a decadent or throwaway culture, he said, “not that I attend opera all the time, I mean, I myself am decadent too.”
Kate Scanlon is a producer for EWTN Pro-Life Weekly.
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Augsburg, Germany, Mar 21, 2020 / 09:00 am (CNA).- Most of the community at the European seminary of the Priestly Fraternity of Saint Peter are sick from coronavirus, and the community is relying on providence and uniting itself with the sick throughout the world.
“The virus did its work in the seminary, and now the better part of the priests and half of the seminarians are sick. But all are abandoned to the Providence of God,” the Seminary of Saint Peter wrote in a March 19 update. The seminary is located in Wigratzbad, Germany, about 90 miles southwest of Augsburg.
“At the time of the so unexpected trial, each one measures the grace which is given to us to live these difficult times as true Christians. As the Lord permits evil only for a greater good, we trust that there will be many returns to God, the only one capable of giving meaning to our ephemeral existence on this earth.”
The seminary had earlier said that coronavirus had been carried to the seminary by an Italian confrere. On March 14 it indicated it had been in strict confinement for a week, and that the disease was rapidly spreading through the seminary.
While the seminary has had to reorganize and do everything themselves, “everyone is generous and adapts without difficulty.”
“The quarantine of Lent doubles as a health quarantine, and since ‘all is grace’ we see in it the opportunity for a salutary meditation on the meaning of life. Life is brief and fragile, and if one is worried about one’s health, one must be even more concerned with one’s salvation. The invisible malice of malady invites us to have more confidence in God, and to further augment our prayers and our penances.”
In its March 19 update, the seminary indicated that “in a few days, the first to heal will be able to take over from the newly sick to maintain the spiritual and material life of the house.”
“Of course we assure you all, especially the sick and health care staff, of our proximity and our wishes of good health. May God keep you, sursum corda! Adjutorium nostrum in nomine Domini.”
St. Peter Seminary was founded in 1988, and it serves around 60 French- and German-speaking seminarians of the FSSP.
The FSSP is a society of apostolic life which celebrates the extraordinary form of the Roman rite. It was founded in 1988 by 12 priests of the Society of St. Pius X. The founders left the SSPX to establish the FSSP after the society’s leader, Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre, consecrated four bishops without the permission of St. John Paul II.
There are currently almost 287 priests and 150 seminarians in the fraternity. It has parishes and chapels in North America, Europe, Oceania, Nigeria, and Colombia.
Fr. Bernhard Gerstle, superior of the fraternity’s German-speaking district, wrote in a March 18 message that “the ‘corona crisis’ shows us how fragile our lives are and how even our highly developed medicine is facing an enormous challenge. In this difficult situation, you should know that we are particularly close to you and your families.”
He added that all the district’s priests, health permitting, are saying Mass in private and offering the graces to the people. “We are of course also available to you in pastoral matters, whereby all participants (especially our priests) are required carefully to observe the hygienic precautionary measures.”
“We hope and pray that as far as possible none of our confreres and believers will be permanently harmed and that the painful limitations of church life will not last long,” Fr. Gerstle wrote. “Let us also see the current test as an opportunity to set the right priorities in our lives even more than before and to strengthen and deepen our relationship with God.”
© Catholic World Report