Seattle, Wash., Mar 12, 2020 / 01:20 pm (CNA).- The Archdiocese of Seattle has suspended public Masses and closed some Catholic schools, but priests in the archdiocese have been encouraged to keep churches open for prayer, to continue celebrating Mass … […]
Rome, Italy, Mar 12, 2020 / 01:15 pm (CNA).- The vicar general of Rome, Cardinal Angelo De Donatis, announced Thursday the closure of all churches in the diocese through April 3.
Since March 9 public Masses have been canceled throughout the diocese, but churches had remained open for personal prayer, and some had held Eucharistic adoration or confession.
Starting from the decree’s publication March 12, entrance to the parish and other churches of Rome is forbidden to the general public and to lay Catholics.
Cardinal De Donatis said “we remember that this arrangement is for the common good. We welcome the Words of Jesus that tells us ‘where two or three are gathered in my name, I am in the midst of them.'”
“In this time, even more so, our homes are Domestic Churches,” he said.
The decree to close Rome’s churches followed one day after Italy’s Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte tightened the restrictions of a nationwide lockdown to include the closure of all restaurants, bars, and shops other than supermarkets or other food markets.
The Italy quarantine has been declared through April 3 in order to slow the spread of the coronavirus pandemic.
The quarantine restricts movement within Italy and requires people to stay in their homes except for cases of absolute necessity, which may include going to work, to the pharmacy or hospital, or to the supermarket.
In all cases, a distance of one meter must be maintained between people in public. Not following these regulations is punishable by fine or arrest.
According to the World Health Organization, Italy has 12,462 confirmed cases of coronavirus, and 827 deaths.
In Rome, Cardinal De Donatis has begun to offer a daily televised evening Mass at the Shrine of the Madonna of Divine Love, on the outskirts of the city.
Other communities in Rome are also offering livestreamed Masses.
At the Vatican, St. Peter’s Basilica and square are closed to the public, but Cardinal Angelo Comastri, archpriest of the basilica, is praying the Angelus and rosary from the basilica every day at noon on live broadcast.
Pope Francis’ daily Mass is also being livestreamed from the chapel of the Casa Santa Marta where he lives. The Masses are being offered for all those affected by coronavirus.
New York City, N.Y., Mar 12, 2020 / 11:55 am (CNA).- Places of worship in a New York City suburb are facing unprecedented measures to fend off the spread of coronavirus after the governor on Tuesday announced the creation of a 1-mile radius “containment zone” to limit the virus’ spread.
Under the rules of the containment zone in New Rochelle, which is fewer than 10 miles from the center of The Bronx, schools, houses of worship and large gathering places will be closed for two weeks beginning March 12. Gov. Andrew Cuomo said March 10 that the National Guard will be called in to help clean facilities and deliver food to people in need.
“The difficulty is the elderly [parishoners] aren’t all that computer savvy, so they’re very concerned, and we’re getting an awful lot of phone calls,” Monsignor Dennis Keane, pastor of Holy Family parish in New Rochelle, told CNA.
“I think safety is so important, especially when you’re dealing with elderly people,” he said.
Msgr. Keane said the parish’s regular scheduled Masses and Stations of the Cross will proceed as normal, but without a choir. The eldery or anyone concerned about getting sick ought to stay home, he said.
Holy Family is just outside the 1-mile containment area, but Msgr. Keane said the bulk of the parishioners live within the zone. The parish is already canceling numerous events, announcing on Facebook that all non-essential meetings, including religious education classes, have been canceled “until further notice.” As of March 13, the parish elementary school will be closed for the indefinite future.
A parish dinner dance scheduled for March 14 also has been canceled, and the parish last weekend emptied the holy water fonts and suspended the sign of peace during Mass. They also placed hand sanitizer at each entrance.
Msgr. Keane said he’s also had at least one bride call the parish office asking if her upcoming wedding can still take place at the church.
“I said, you know – we’re here, we’ll perform the wedding, it’s really your decision, as you get closer, to see how healthy it is to bring people together … things change very quickly in two weeks. But as far as the church is concerned, we’ll be open for the wedding, I’ll perform that wedding.”
He said one family, mostly of elderly members, this week decided not to have a funeral Mass at the church for a loved one who died, opting instead for a prayer service at the funeral home.
A local soup kitchen called HOPE Community Kitchen, also located outside the zone, benefits from food donations from the parish, Msgr. Keane said, and the parish will continue to cook food for the kitchen for now.
“What I’m concerned about is— parishes supply a lot of food to them. And if we have fewer people coming to church, we’ll be able to supply less food.”
HOPE Community Kitchen announced on its website that as a precautionary measure, its guests would receive take-out meals rather than gathering in its dining room until further notice.
Father Robert DeJulio, pastor of the city’s Our Lady of Perpetual Help parish, told CNA that his parish church has also done away with the holy water and is encouraging people to receive Communion in the hand.
They are also canceling the upcoming parish mission and a parish dinner – anything having to do with food preparation, he said. Fr. DeJulio said he has been contacting parishioners by email to update them on the situation.
Since Our Lady of Perpetual Help is outside the strict containment zone, the parish is continuing to hold religious education classes, and the school is still open.
In contrast, Holy Trinity Greek Orthodox Church lies just within the containment zone. Father Nicholas Anctil, the pastor, said the governor’s announcement came as a surprise, and that getting the word out to his parishioners was not the easiest of tasks.
Although he is able to contact parishioners via a “robocall,” he said he has to be sure that he records one in English and one in Greek, for his non-English speaking parishioners.
“A lot of them don’t speak English, believe it or not, still,” Fr. Nicholas said. “Or they don’t have internet.”
Holy Trinity runs a small nursery school, a Greek afternoon school, and a catechism school, and a gym that hosts various sports activities – all of which have been canceled.
The church also hosts education classes for retirees in conjunction with Iona College multiple times a week.
“They’re all senior citizens, and most of them live in the area,” Fr. Nicholas said.
“So we’ve had a lot of people in the building that actually live in the containment area as well.”
All liturgies at the parish have been canceled, said, including all the Sunday liturgies.
“Today I did my last liturgy here until March 25,” Fr. Nicholas said.
Anctil said the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, as well as the Greek Orthodox archdiocese, has asked the parishioners of Holy Trinity not to go to a different parish outside the containment zone for fear of further spreading the virus.
“I wanted to go to our sister church up the block – we have a sister church in Rye – and I am not supposed to, you know? Because we don’t know what our symptoms are going to be and we don’t know what the incubation period is, really,” he said.
Fr. Nicholas said the containment causes a lot of hardship for his parish, especially in the middle of Lent, not to be able to hold services.
In addition, the church often provides food for a local homeless shelter, and since their kitchen is locked down, they will be unable to provide those meals.
“It chokes a lot of the parish life,” he said.
The Greek Orthodox church in Rye provides a livestream of Divine Liturgy, he said, and he hopes his parishioners will take advantage of that.
Despite other congregations canceling their services – the local Lutheran church has also canceled services until March 25 – Fr. DeJulio is confident that Mass will continue in the area. He said he has not received any orders from the Archdiocese of New York to cancel Mass.
“I don’t think anybody’s going to cancel Mass,” Fr. DeJulio said.
“I don’t think we do that. I think we have Mass and tell people to talk precautions, and if they feel uncomfortable, not to come. People have to take responsibility – they’re adults. This idea that Father has to tell me not to come to church is archaic.”
He did say parishioners over 60, in particular, should consider staying home.
“That doesn’t mean I have to cancel to make that happen,” he said.
CNA contacted the Archdiocese of New York to ask whether Mass cancelations were being considered as an option to limit the spread of the virus in the area around the containment zone, and did not receive an answer by press time.
The zone centers around the Young Israel of New Rochelle synagogue, believed to be the epicenter of the outbreak near New York City.
A 50-year-old member of the synagogue last week was the second person in the state diagnosed with the disease, but is believed to have spread the virus to the synagogue community. Around 1,000 members of the synagogue community are under self-imposed quarantine.
The synagoge announced in its March 6-7 bulletin that the rabbi’s wife tested positive for the virus.
A call to the synagogue March 11 went unanswered.
A pro-life pregnancy center, The Elinor Martin Residence for Mother & Child, is located within the zone. The center is listed as an agency of Catholic Charities of the Archdiocese of New York, though a CCNY spokesperson told CNA that the center is not owned by the archdiocese.
The Elinor Martin Residence did not respond by press time to CNA’s inquiry as to whether the center was still operating during the containment period.
Though grocery stores and other businesses are allowed to remain open within the zone, CNN reported Wednesday that many small businesses in New Rochelle are planning to shut their doors for two weeks in an attempt to mitigate financial losses.
The governor confirmed 20 additional cases March 11, most emerging in New Rochelle, bringing the state total to nearly 200.
In addition, nursing homes and assisted living facilities in the area will not be permitted to accept visitors until further notice. St. Joseph’s, a nursing home in New Rochelle run by the Edmund Rice Christian Brothers, confirmed to CNA that they were not currently taking visitors.
As of yet there are no travel restrictions for residents of the area and no one is mandated to self-quarantine.
Though New York has not had any deaths from coronavirus, nearby New Jersey announced a 69-year-old man with underlying health problems died of the virus March 11.
Around the world, Catholic dioceses have responded differently to the coronavirus pandemic.
The Archdiocese of Seattle, centered around the first and largest outbreak in the United States, announced March 11 that it will indefinitely suspend public Masses.
Masses across Italy are cancelled and churches are closed, in compliance with a mandate of the Italian government. Most dioceses in Japan have canceled Masses. The president of Polish Bishops’ conference has encouraged more Masses in his country. Archbishop Stanisław Gądecki of Poznań said there should be more Sunday Masses so that services will be less crowded and parishioners will be able sit farther apart from one another.
Kentucky’s Governor Andy Beshear on Wednesday encouraged churches to cancel their services in fear of the spreading coronavirus. The archdiocese in the state does not plan to cancel Masses this Sunday.
Washington D.C., Mar 12, 2020 / 10:10 am (CNA).- A Ukrainian Catholic bishop has urged Christians not to forget their suffering brethren in that country. With global attention focused on the coronavirus outbreak, Bishop Stepan Sus said Christians in Uk… […]
Washington D.C., Mar 12, 2020 / 08:00 am (CNA).- This week the Israeli government announced that, from March 12, any foreign tourist who enters the country will be placed in a 14-day quarantine to halt the spread of COVID-19. The announcement thousands… […]
Vatican City, Mar 12, 2020 / 07:03 am (CNA).- Amid the coronavirus pandemic, Vatican City State offices and dicasteries of the Holy See will remain open and working, with additional precautions and the possibility to work from home in some cases, the Vatican said Thursday.
A March 12 statement said “it has been established that the dicasteries and entities of the Holy See and of the Vatican City State remain open to ensure essential services to the Universal Church.”
With the permission of their superior, certain employees may work remotely. Those whose work regards materials or information protected by the pontifical secret may not work from home, according to provisions distributed by the Secretariat of State, which is coordinating the Vatican’s measures during the coronavirus pandemic.
The decision to continue work was made during a special March 12 meeting of the heads of dicasteries, chaired by Secretary of State Cardinal Pietro Parolin.
The Secretariat of State’s provisions asked that offices adopt flexible hours and have employees and officials work varying shifts to avoid having many people present in the office at the same time.
“The activities of the dicasteries, of the entities of the Holy See or connected to it and of the Governorate of the Vatican City State must continue to be guaranteed,” the document states, with consideration for what are the most essential services.
The temporary provisions are in effect from March 11.
Pope Francis had a normal schedule of several one-on-one meetings in the morning March 12, including with Fr. Roberto Dotta, the abbot of the Papal Basilica of St. Paul Outside the Walls, and Cardinal Stanislaw Rylko, the archpriest of the Papal Basilica of St. Mary Major.
He also met with Cardinal Giovanni Battista Re, deacon of the College of Cardinals, Archbishop Giacomo Morandi, secretary of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, and Cardinal Francesco Coccopalmerio, president emeritus of the Pontifical Council for Legislative Texts.
The ambassador of Japan to the Holy See, Yoshio Matthew Nakamura, also had a courtesy visit with Pope Francis March 12.
Several Vatican officials told CNA earlier this week that work inside Vatican offices continues despite the coronavirus pandemic.
Employees and officials have been asked to remain one meter away from each other at all times, to restrict visits from guests, and to not gather for meetings or around the coffee machine, one official said.
Italian police closed the border with the Vatican at St. Peter’s Square March 10. St. Peter’s Basilica was also closed to tourists.
The Italian government has put Italy on a nationwide lockdown through April 3 to help contain the spread of the coronavirus, which has caused the death of more than 800 people in the country.
The quarantine prevents movement within the country and limits other travel. People are required to stay at home except to go to work, the supermarket, or the pharmacy.
Vatican City, Mar 12, 2020 / 05:15 am (CNA).- The suffering of the poor cannot be ignored during the coronavirus pandemic, Pope Francis said Thursday in his televised morning homily.
“Worried about my things, we forget the hungry children,&rdquo… […]
Omaha, Neb., Mar 12, 2020 / 04:00 am (CNA).- Pregnancy ultrasounds are often intimate moments, performed in the privacy of a doctor’s office. But pregnant volunteers, and one Nebraska group, have begun performing ultrasounds in schools: aiming to give students a live, real-time look at the miracle of life.
The organizer of the group, Heart of a Child Ministries, told CNA that ultrasounds can impact students, and their families.
“It’s an experience of the Lord speaking to a child, and then that child feeling compelled to come home and talk to his parents about it,” Nikki Schaefer, Director of Heart of a Child Ministries, told CNA.
Since 2016, volunteers with Heart of a Child have presented live ultrasound images, performed on a volunteer who is between 10 and 30 weeks pregnant, in both private and public schools in the Omaha area.
In addition to the live ultrasound, the presentation includes information about adoption, generally offered by a person with a personal experience of adoption.
Schaefer said the work started when a teacher asked her to come to her classroom to talk about pro-life ministries.
Soon after she began those presentations, Nebraskans United for Life approached her and offered the use a mobile ultrasound unit.
Now, two ultrasound technicians volunteer their time to operate the unit for the presentations. Schaefer said she also hears from many pregnant women willing to volunteer to show their babies on ultrasound.
Parents are sometimes reticent about allowing students to attend presentations, Schaefer said, with the two most common concerns being whether the presentation will feature graphic images of aborted fetuses, and whether human sexuality will be discussed with younger children.
Schaefer, who holds a Master’s in Social Work and Art Therapy, said the group’s presentation does not include either, and instead focuses on the humanity of the unborn child, as well as the importance of adoption.
The key question after the ultrasound presentation, Schaefer said, is: “What did you see that tells you that that is a human being?”
Though individual parents often express concerns and may refuse to allow their children to attend, Schaefer said, a parish in Omaha recently rescheduled the entire presentation, reportedly after complaints from parents.
Father Ralph O’Donnell, pastor at St, Margaret Mary, told CNA that parents brought forward questions because they did not know what the presentation was going to be about. He said Schaefer’s group will hold a presentation for parents later this month, to give them a sense of what her ministry brings to schools.
“Our rescheduling of the Heart of a Child Ministry [presentation] was not a rejection of the program at all, actually in doing so it provided us the opportunity to work with Nikki to allow for what we feel is an important addition; adding a step, giving us the opportunity for the parents to experience the presentation first,” he said.
The school will hold the presentation for the parents the evening of March 25, O’Donnell said.
Schaefer said the group tailors presentations to the age of students in attendance, whether they are in elementary, middle, and high school. Each presentation, regardless of the audience, begins with facts about fetal development.
Presentations have had unexpected results, Schaefer said.
On one occasion, a birth mother presented to a school group and told the story of choosing to place her child for adoption rather than choose abortion, even after she was encouraged to abort. A girl approached the speaker afterward, Schaefer said, saying “thank you so much for sharing, I was adopted and now I know how much my birth mom loved me.”
Schaefer said she is not aware of any other groups doing what Heart of a Child is doing, but she hopes to provide training to any group around the country seeking to start a similar project.
Canberra, Australia, Mar 12, 2020 / 12:05 am (CNA).- Cardinal George Pell has had his day in court, and now awaits a decision in his last possible appeal of his 2018 conviction for five counts of child sexual abuse. The proceedings took place over two days in the Australian capital of Canberra, while Pell awaited an outcome in his prison cell, nearly 500 miles away.
Prosecutors took their turn to present arguments to Australia’s High Court Thursday on the second and final day of the cardinal’s bid for special leave to appeal. The seven justice panel reserved its judgment at the close of the hearing, with no clear indication of when a decision will be released.
At issue in the appeal is whether the jury that convicted Pell in December 2018 of sexually abusing two choristers could have plausibly found Pell guilty beyond a reasonable doubt, having heard the case presented by the prosecutors and the defense mounted by Pell’s lawyers.
On March 12, the Australian state of Victoria’s chief prosecutor, Victoria Judd, was grilled by the justices, who took issue with decisions made in a prior appeal of the verdict, with the state’s handling of key pieces of evidence in the case against Pell, most especially the evidence of Monsignor Charles Portelli, an aide to Pell.
Portelli’s testimony placed the cardinal outside his Melbourne cathedral at the time he was alleged to be sexually abusing two boys in the cathedral’s sacristy, on the Sunday in 1996 when that crime is alleged to have taken place.
At one point during the hearing Thursday, Judd conceded the Portelli’s testimony undermined the allegations of the prosecution, but urged the High Court justices to look past that fact in its deliberations, citing some inconsistencies in Portelli’s recollection of the Sunday, now 24 years ago, in question.
As the High Court considers whether the jury could be certain of Pell’s guilt beyond a reasonable doubt, Judd told the justices that “just because some evidence pointed to innocence doesn’t mean the jury wasn’t entitled to convict.”
Asked more about Portelli’s testimony, Judd told justices that “I do accept that when you look at Monsignor Portelli on his own, we may not be able to negate this to the standard we need to. But in my submission, when you look at the whole of the evidence, it does.”
The justices also considered the actions of the three-judge panel of the Victoria Court of Appeals, which upheld Pell’s conviction August last year. The Victoria judges chose to watch a video of the single victim-accuser’s testimony instead of reading the transcript. Pell’s legal team argued that this made them to dispassionately weigh the “reasonableness” of the jury being able to exclude reasonable doubt on the basis of his evidence alone.
Although Judd insisted the Victoria judges had acted properly, Chief Justice Susan Kiefel said “It’s very difficult to say how [the video] affected an intermediate appellate court judge in terms of how they read the transcript.”
“That’s why you really shouldn’t do it [watch the video] … unless there is a forensic reason to do it. To what extent is this court to determine the extent to which the court of appeal was influenced by the video?” Kiefel asked.
At various points, the judges also appeared to take issue with the prosecutor’s presentation of her case, at times correcting her use of legal terms, noting as she repeatedly attributed evidence to the wrong people, and implying she was underprepared for the case.
At one point, Judd struggled to find a transcript as she referred to it and voiced her frustration at the volume of evidence. The chief justice told Judd that justices had the same frustration. “But you’re supposed to be taking us through [this] efficiently,” the chief justice observed.
Jeremy Gans, a professor of law at Melbourne Law School, tweeted during the hearing’s lunch break that the morning had been “a really bad session for the DPP [Judd],” adding that the morning had “a back foot feel for the prosecution.”
When the court reconvened for the afternoon session, Judd informed the judges that she did not feel it necessary to address several of the Crown’s points of argumentation, focusing instead on the the burden of proof, which Pell’s legal team have argued was effectively reversed during the trial, leaving the cardinal to prove his innocence beyond reasonable doubt.
Judd sought to address the defence’s charge that the place and manner of the first alleged assault, in the cathedral sacristy, were practically impossible in the busy circumstances
Referring to the defense’s presentation on Wednesday, Gans tweeted that “Pell absolutely did not have a bad day.”
On that day, Bret Walker, Pell’s lead barrister, faced questions from the justices over the course of five hours as he presented arguments in favor of Pell’s appeal, grounding his case in the findings of Victoria Justice Mark Weinberg, who made a dissenting opinion in Pell’s initial appeal, which upheld his conviction last year.
Weinberg found that the cardinal had been convicted on the evidence of a single alleged victim, despite the unchallenged exculpatory testimony of as many as 20 witnesses, and that the jury could not have found him guilty beyond reasonable doubt.
Walker outlined four different lines of argument, beginning with the logistics of Pell’s alleged 1996 sexual assault on two teenage choristers in Melbourne’s cathedral. Pell was convicted of committing acts of sexual assault on two choir boys simultaneously for five to six minutes in the cathedral sacristy, while he was fully vested after Mass. Walker suggested that would be practically impossible.
The lawyer then highlighted testimony from multiple witnesses offering an alibi for Pell during the time the assault is supposed to have taken place, and noted that the sacristy would have been a “hive of activity” at the time of the assault.
Finally, Walker pointed out changes and inconsistencies in the narrative of the sole witness-accuser to give evidence against Pell. The second alleged victim died in 2014, before the trial began; before his death he told his mother that he was not a victim of sexual abuse.
Pell’s case for appeal is that a single witness, even a highly credible one, set against the testimony of so many contradictory witnesses and the high degree of improbability that Pell could have committed the assaults as described, could not have allowed the original jury to find Pell guilty beyond reasonable doubt.
After Pell was briefed by his lawyers following Wednesday’s session, friends of the cardinal told CNA that Pell is in good spirits and that he has been told to be “cautiously optimistic.”
On Thursday, Judd attempted to dispel Walker’s arguments, but in the process appeared to concede even further grounds for doubt.
Attempting to argue against the defense that the sacristy was a “hive of activity” at the time of the alleged assault, Judd said that the timeline and circumstances were not so certain as to be open to that defense, suggesting at the same time that the prosecution’s entire narrative was itself doubtful.
Judd closed by telling the seven justices that if they found that the timeline of events showed that the assault could not have happened they would be in effect rejecting the victim’s testimony.
Walker, invited to make a closing response by the justices, rounded on Judd’s performance, saying that the prosecution was changing its case at every stage of appeal and even during the Thursday session.
“We should not have to deal with that kind of prosecution at this point,” Walker said.
Pell’s lawyer added that prosecutors convicted Pell with an “improvised and rickety construction of a Crown case,” that tried “to make something fit that will not fit.”
He urged the High Court to overturn Pell’s conviction.
Thursday’s session closed with the justices deferring their decision, inviting lawyers to submit answers within the next few days to a point raised by the judges on the defense’s request for an order quashing Pell’s convictions.
Whatever the final outcome of Pell’s criminal appeal, the cardinal will likely face a canonical proceeding, overseen by the Vatican’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, soon after the Australian case reaches a definitive resolution.
Pell has told friends he remains faithful to God’s providence and committed to living his time in prison in the spirit of a monastic retreat.
The Archdiocese of Seattle will indefinitely suspend public Masses in response to the coronavirus pandemic, which has left at least 31 dead in Washington, along with 375 people in the state who have tested positive […]
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