CNA Staff, Sep 2, 2020 / 11:05 am (CNA).- Nearly two dozen senators are urging the Trump administration to remove the abortion pill from the market as advocates for the drug push for its wider availability.
Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) led a grou… […]
Vatican City, Sep 2, 2020 / 08:00 am (CNA).- At the end of his general audience Wednesday, Pope Francis made a lengthy appeal for peace and harmony in Lebanon, asking people around the world to spend a day in prayer and fasting for the Middle Eastern country.
“For over a hundred years, Lebanon has been a country of hope. Even during the darkest periods of its history, the Lebanese have kept their faith in God and demonstrated the ability to make their land a place of tolerance, respect and coexistence unique in the region,” he said.
“For the good of the country itself, but also of the world, we cannot allow this heritage to be lost.”
Francis said that he wanted Friday, Sept. 4, to be a universal day of prayer and fasting for Lebanon, and invited people of all religions to join in.
He also said he would be sending Cardinal Pietro Parolin, the Vatican Secretary of State, to Lebanon Sept. 4 as his representative, “to express my closeness and solidarity.”
“We offer our prayers for all of Lebanon and for Beirut,” he said. He closed by asking everyone to stand for a moment of silent prayer.
The pope made his appeal at his first public general audience since the outbreak of coronavirus in Italy over six months ago. The meeting was held with additional security measures in the San Damaso Courtyard inside the Vatican. More than 500 pilgrims were present.
Pope Francis greeted people as he entered the courtyard, and kissed a Lebanese flag held by a priest.
Later, the pope asked the Lebanese priest, Fr. Georges Breidi, to join him on the platform while he gave his nearly 700-word appeal. Afterward, Breidi thanked Pope Francis for his words, saying “we very much need your support and the support of the universal Church.”
“We cannot continue to live like this in Lebanon,” he added, noting, with emotion in his voice, the large number of Christians who are leaving the country.
“We need your prayers, your support, and your fraternal love. And we await you to bless our beloved land,” the priest told Pope Francis, before embracing him.
Breidi spoke to CNA about his experience immediately afterward: “I really can’t find the right words to say, however, I thank God for this great grace he gave me today.”
“[The pope] asked me if I wanted to say a word of thanks, that which I gave at the end. I hadn’t prepared in advance — I don’t know what I said.”
Sept. 1 marked 100 years since the creation of the State of Greater Lebanon. The country is almost evenly divided between Sunni Muslims, Shia Muslims, and Christians, most of whom are Maronite Catholics. Lebanon also has a small Jewish population, as well as Druze and other religious communities.
Lebanon’s capital city, Beirut, experienced a large explosion in its port area Aug. 4. The blast, caused by the detonation of a large amount of ammonium nitrate, killed nearly 200 people and injured thousands. It also caused extensive damage to homes and businesses around the area.
“In particular, I address the inhabitants of Beirut, severely tested by the explosion: take courage, brothers! Faith and prayer be your strength. Do not abandon your homes and your heritage, do not let the dreams of those who have believed in the future of a beautiful and prosperous country fall,” Pope Francis said.
He also urged priests and bishops in Lebanon to accompany their faithful, asking bishops especially to have “apostolic zeal” and to live in “poverty with your poor people who are suffering.”
“Help your faithful and your people to stand up and be protagonists of a new rebirth,” he added.
The pope emphasized the importance of peace, harmony, and brotherhood as a foundation for ensuring the continued presence of Christians in Lebanon and throughout the Middle East.
He quoted St. Pope John Paul II’s 1989 letter to bishops on the situation in Lebanon, which said, “faced with the repeated tragedies that each of the inhabitants of this land knows, we become aware of the extreme danger that threatens the very existence of the country. Lebanon cannot be abandoned in its solitude.”
Francis urged political and religious leaders to commit to reconstruction work in Beirut with transparency and with the common good in mind. He also asked the international community to continue its support.
“I ask you to entrust our anxieties and hopes to Mary, Our Lady of Harissa. May she support those who mourn their loved ones and instill courage in all those who have lost their homes and part of their lives with them,” he prayed.
“May she intercede with the Lord Jesus, so that the Land of the Cedars may flourish again and spread the perfume of living together throughout the Middle East region,” he said.
Vatican City, Sep 2, 2020 / 05:50 am (CNA).- Tourists in Rome had an unexpected chance to see Pope Francis at his first public audience for almost six months.
People from all over the world expressed their happiness and surprise Wednesday at having the opportunity to be present at Francis’ first in-person audience since the start of the coronavirus outbreak.
“We were surprised because we thought there were no audiences,” Belen and her friend, both from Argentina, told CNA. Belen is visiting Rome from Spain where she lives.
“We love the pope. He’s from Argentina too and we feel very close to him,” she said.
Pope Francis has been livestreaming his Wednesday general audience from his library since March, when the coronavirus pandemic led Italy and other countries to impose lockdown to slow down the virus’ spread.
The Sept. 2 audience was held in the San Damaso Courtyard on the interior of the Vatican’s apostolic palace, with a capacity of around 500 people.
The announcement that Francis would resume public audiences — albeit in a different location than usual and with limited numbers — was made Aug. 26. Many of the people who attended Wednesday said they just happened to be in the right place at the right time.
One family from Poland told CNA they found out about the audience just 20 minutes beforehand. Seven-year-old Franek, whose name is the Polish version of Francis, was excited he got to tell the pope about their common name.
Beaming, Franek said he was “very happy.”
Sandra, a Catholic visiting Rome from India with her parents, sister, and family friend, said “it feels great. We never thought we could see him, now we are going to.”
They found out about the audience two days before, she said, and decided to go. “We just wanted to see him and have his blessings.”
Pope Francis, not wearing a face mask, took the time to greet pilgrims as he entered and exited the courtyard, taking a moment to exchange a few words or to do a traditional zucchetto exchange.
He also stopped to kiss a Lebanese flag brought to the audience by Fr. Georges Breidi, a Lebanese priest studying at the Gregorian University in Rome.
At the end of his catechesis, the pope brought the priest up to the podium with him while he gave an appeal for Lebanon, announcing a day of prayer and fasting for the country on Friday, Sept. 4, after Beirut experienced a devastating blast Aug. 4.
Breidi spoke with CNA immediately after the experience. He said: “I really can’t find the right words to say, however, I thank God for the grace he gave me today.”
Belen also had the chance to exchange a quick greeting with the pope. She said she is part of the Fraternidad de Agrupaciones Santo Tomás de Aquino (FASTA), a lay association which follows the spirituality of the Dominicans.
She said that she introduced herself, and Pope Francis asked her how the founder of FASTA is doing. The pope knew Fr. Aníbal Ernesto Fosbery, O.P., when he was a priest in Argentina.
“We didn’t know what to say in that moment but it was amazing,” Belen said.
An older Italian couple from Turin traveled to Rome specifically to see the pope when they heard about the public audience. “We came and it was a magnificent experience,” they said.
A family visiting from the U.K. was also excited to be at the audience. Parents Chris and Helen Gray, together with their boys, Alphie, 9, and Charles and Leonardo, 6, are three weeks into a 12-month family journey.
Rome was the second stop, Chris said, noting that the chance for their boys to see the pope was a “once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.”
Helen is Catholic and they are raising their boys in the Catholic Church, Chris said.
“Fantastic opportunity, how do I describe it?” he added. “Just an opportunity to refocus, especially in times like today with everything so uncertain, it’s great to hear words about certainty and community. It gives you a bit more hope and faith for the future.”
Vatican City, Sep 2, 2020 / 04:50 am (CNA).- In his first Wednesday audience with pilgrims since Italy’s lockdown, Pope Francis called for solidarity to reawaken unity and bring God’s love to a suffering world.
“In the midst of… […]
Washington, D.C. Newsroom, Sep 2, 2020 / 04:00 am (CNA).- A pro-life Tennessee state representative is running as an independent after was ousted from the Democratic Party for his views on life and marriage. He told CNA that he is not giving up what he sees as a ministry.
In April, Rep. John DeBerry—a Tennessee state legislator since 1994 who represents the Memphis-based 90th district—was removed from the Democratic ballot for the 2020 election by the state party’s executive committee. But, he told CNA on Monday, he does not regret his defense of life.
“My work in Nashville as a legislator is nothing more than an extension of my work as a child of God, as a Christian,” DeBerry told CNA.
“And I take to heart Ephesians chapter 6, ‘We wrestle not against flesh and blood’—people are not the enemy,” he said, but “there are those who make laws that are blasphemous of God’s law.”
“I have always made my focus staying in accordance to the laws of God, even when my votes are made,” said DeBerry, who is also a minister in the Church of Christ.
DeBerry said that after his removal from the ticket by the Democratic Party, he gathered the necessary signatures to be placed on the ballot by the deadline, but that party officials waited until after the deadline to remove him, “until I had no recourse.”
“They said I do not represent the values of the Democratic Party,” he told CNA.
DeBerry supported the state’s fetal heartbeat bill, which would ban abortions after detection of a fetal heartbeat, usually when an unborn baby is around six to eight weeks old. He says he opposes the redefinition of marriage, and supports the “right” and responsibility of parents to educate their children and make choices for them.
He told CNA his views on abortion and marriage are no secret, as he campaigned on them decades ago.
“So for them to say that folks don’t know where I stand, they actually said that the people in my district don’t have sense enough to elect their representative,” he said of his removal.
In addition to his pro-life stance, DeBerry also broke with his party in support of school vouchers and voted for a Republican for House Speaker, according to the Tennessean, and has been accused of taking money from political action committees that are seen to align with Republicans.
In addition to DeBerry’s pro-life position, he is also a life-long civil rights activist.
As a child, he attended civil rights marches with his father. In a passionate speech on the Tennessee House Floor in August, during the second extraordinary session of the state’s general assembly, DeBerry contrasted the peaceful nature of the protests he witnessed and participated in as a youth with riots in U.S. cities in the last few months.
“I am one of those individuals who walked in back doors because the law said I had to,” he said in his speech Aug. 12, while recalling the bravery and dignity of the civil rights movement.
“I saw men and women stand with courage and integrity and class, and they changed the world,” he said. “They marched peacefully, and Dr. King stood for that which was peaceful.”
“They didn’t beg for anything. They didn’t beg for citizenship–they demanded it,” he said. “They did it by standing like men and women of integrity.”
In the wake of civil unrest in many U.S. cities, DeBerry condemned what he called defenses of rioting, looting, and violence in the name of anti-racism during his August speech.
“You’re telling me that somebody has the right to throw feces and urine in the faces of those that we as taxpayers pay to protect us? And that’s okay?” he asked. “What has happened to us?!”
DeBerry says he is running as an independent in the November election. Although the deadline to do so had already passed by when he was removed from the Democratic ticket, fellow legislators passed a measure to allow him to be listed on ballots as a political independent and not have to resort to a write-in campaign.
He was one of more than 100 Democrats at the federal, state, and local levels who recently asked the platform committee of the Democratic National Convention to moderate the abortion language in the party’s platform.
The 2020 draft platform of the party calls for taxpayer-funded abortion and restoring federal funding of Planned Parenthood.
Although Trump promised to defund Planned Parenthood, the nation’s largest abortion provider, Congress failed to pass legislation doing so. Planned Parenthood did voluntarily withdraw from the federal Title X family planning program after the Trump administration tightened regulations that barred recipients from referring for abortions or being co-located with abortion clinics.
In their August 14 letter, DeBerry and other Democratic officials said the party’s support for late-term abortion will “push many voters into the arms of the Republican Party.”
All 2020 Democratic presidential candidates supported taxpayer-funded abortion. Several candidates said that women should be able to choose abortion up until the point of birth, and that there was not room in the party for pro-lifers.
DeBerry said that the leadership in the Democratic Party is excluding pro-lifers to the party’s detriment.
“It’s a shame that they have handed all the moral, spiritual, social, and conservative issues on a silver platter over to the Republicans and said we don’t want to have nothing to do with them,” he told CNA.
“How are you enlarging the tent when you’re throwing people out when they don’t walk the chalk line? When they don’t do exactly as they’re told?” DeBerry told CNA. “And that’s where the Democrats are right now.”
“I think that the candidate at the top of the ticket who said if you don’t vote Democrat, then you’re not Black—I think that goes to the heart of the issue,” he said.
In May, Joe Biden told the radio show The Breakfast Club that “If you have a problem figuring out whether you’re for me or Trump then you ain’t black.” Biden later said of his remarks that he “shouldn’t have been such a wise guy.”
Conversations with Father Robert Imbelli have been a great blessing in recent years. I have rarely met a more even-tempered and gracious man: a true churchman who, in retirement after years of teaching theology at […]
In 1999, Harvard University Press published The Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression, revealing a “tragedy of planetary dimensions.” It documented the untold atrocities of communism and all the people whose lives and livelihood […]
CNA Staff, Sep 1, 2020 / 05:02 pm (CNA).- Archbishop Tadeusz Kondrusiewicz of Minsk-Mohilev, who has been blocked from returning to Belarus, said Tuesday that he was “very much surprised” by being stopped at the Polish border.
“I have been traveling often … so I was surprised very much yesterday when I was stopped at the border when I was coming back home from Poland,” the archbishop told CNA Sept. 1.
He added that such things “never happened”.
Belarus has seen widespread protests in recent weeks following a disputed presidential election. Protests began Aug. 9 after president Alexander Lukashenko was declared to have won that day’s election with 80% of the vote. Lukashenko has been president of Belarus since the position was created in 1994.
Archbishop Kondrusiewicz, who has been visiting Poland, was stopped by Belarusian border guards at the crossing between Kuźnica and Bruzgi Aug. 31.
In a message to the Catholics of Belarus, the archbishop said the decision to deny him entry to Belarus was “absolutely incomprehensible”, “unreasonable and illegal”.
According to the state-owned Belarusian Telegraph Agency, Lukashenko addressed the incident involving Kondrusiewicz Sept. 1, saying that he did not possess full information about the event. He suggested that the archbishop might be a citizen of more than one country.
“We are looking into the matter. I do not claim it. We want to study the issue. If everything is according to the law, we will act accordingly. It does not matter whether he is the main Catholic, the main Orthodox, or the main Muslim. He has to live by the law. If you mix church and politics and call for believers, Catholics, who are wonderful people, there is double responsibility for that,” Belta quoted him as saying.
Bishop Yury Kasabutski, an auxiliary to Archbishop Kondrusiewicz, said the archbishop’s citizenship status was clear.
“Archbishop Tadeusz Kondrusiewicz has only one citizenship — Belarusian, and according to the law, his right to enter cannot be restricted in any way,” Bishop Kasabutski stated.
The archbishop was born in 1946 in Odelsk, in what was then the Byelorussian Soviet Socialist Republic (part of the USSR), to an ethnic Polish family. The Byelorussian SSR was succeeded in 1991 by the Republic of Belarus.
Archbishop Kondrusiewicz told CNA that “In Belarusian law, a citizen of Belarus has a right to travel, has a right to leave the country and to come back. About leaving, it’s written they can stop sometimes, but to come back is a right without any restrictions. So I don’t know what happened.”
He added, “today I was accused that I received from Warsaw some instructions, or something, but I didn’t visit Warsaw.”
The archbishop said he visited eastern Poland to celebrate the First Communion of a relative; he is now in Białystok.
Archbishop Kondrusiewicz wrote an email to Belarus’ special border committee Sept. 1 asking for an explanation of his refused entry, and is awaiting a reply.
The archbishop has spoken in defense of protests following last month’s presidential election.
He demanded an investigation last week into reports that riot police blocked the doors of a Catholic church in Minsk while clearing away protesters from a nearby square.
He met with Interior Minister Yuri Karaev Aug. 21 to express his concerns about the government’s heavy-handed response to the protests.
He prayed outside a prison Aug. 19 where detained protesters were reported to have been tortured.
Protests have taken place across Belarus since the August election, and thousands of protesters have been detained. According to the BBC, at least four people have died in the unrest.
US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has said the election “was not free and fair,” citing “severe restrictions on ballot access for candidates, prohibition of local independent observers at polling stations, intimidation tactics employed against opposition candidates, and the detentions of peaceful protesters and journalists.”
Electoral officials said that the opposition candidate, Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya, earned 10% of the vote. She was detained for several hours after complaining to the electoral committee, and has fled to Lithuania.
Archbishop Kondrusiewicz told CNA that “at the present time, we are asking for prayer, not only for the Catholic Church, but for a peaceful solution for the situation in Belarus because I’m very much afraid of civil war. The situation is very, very difficult, very critical.”
He expressed appreciation “to Catholics around the world for their solidarity, for their prayers, for their moral support in this very critical time for my nation.”
Luke Coppen contributed to this report.
The story only broke a few days ago, but it is already familiar to many: a priest had recently watched a video of his baptism and was surprised by what he saw. The Vatican in […]
Washington, D.C. Newsroom, Sep 1, 2020 / 02:10 pm (CNA).- The leader of the Diocese of Hong Kong has written to all the clergy telling them to avoid politics in homilies and admonishing them for “offensive” and “provocative” pre… […]
© Catholic World Report