Year: 2020

Denver, Colo., Apr 10, 2020 / 12:46 pm (CNA).- Isolated in their homes on a Good Friday unlike any other, Catholics across America tuned in April 10 for a litany to the Sacred Heart of Jesus, led by the president of the U.S. bishops’ conference, who himself stood nearly alone in a cathedral built to welcome thousands.

Archbishop Jose Gomez of Los Angeles said Friday that amid the questions raised by Christ’s death, and by the global pandemic, the most important answer is God’s love.

“We stand today at the foot of the cross with Mary, our Blessed Mother, and we look upon her Son, crucified. And we ask God: Why did he have to die? Couldn’t there be some other way?”

“Today we are also asking God: Why this coronavirus? Why have you allowed this disease and death to descend on our world?”

“We know that Jesus on the cross is the only answer,” Gomez said, in a homily he preached both in English and Spanish, while at least 10,000 people tuned in to a livestreamed broadcast of a liturgy of the Word, and a moment of prayer to the Sacred Heart of Jesus Christ.

“In the heart of Christ — wounded by the soldier’s spear, pierced by our sins — we see how much God loves the world. We see how precious we are in our Father’s eyes,” Gomez said.

“Jesus has opened his heart for us. He has given his life out of love for us. Now he calls us to entrust our lives to him — our whole heart, our whole mind; all our feelings and thoughts, our words and actions.”

“In this moment, Jesus is inviting every one of us in the Church to take up our cross and to follow him along the path of humble love, the path of reverence for God and service to our neighbors,” the archbishop added.

After his homily, Gomez led a litany, in which Catholics expressed their faith in the mercy of God. “Jesus, I trust in you,” Archbishop Gomez repeated, “¡Sagrado Corazón de Jesús, en ti confío!”

In Wilmington, Delaware, Colin Stapleton-Bradley, 26, was consoled by the archbishop’s words.

“I thought that the litany helped me deal with the uncertainty of suffering, especially in light of the coronavirus, why it happens, and how we can use our own suffering to, in some small way, relate to Christ’s passion,” he told CNA.

Robert and Jess Nayden watched the archbishop’s litany while their children, ages 3 and 1, ate lunch in Bridgeport, Connecticut.

“I really appreciated that Archbishop Gomez organized this. It was simple and prayerful, and his homily about trusting the Sacred Heart of Jesus spoke to a lot of what I’ve been praying about recently,” Robert told CNA.

“We’ve also struggled to get into live-streamed liturgies these past few weeks, but this was a moment where I felt united in prayer with people across the country,” he added.

Seminarian Ryan Mau of San Jose expressed a similar sentiment. 

“I was very happy to join other American Catholics in this,” he told CNA.

“I haven’t been able to attend Mass since I was sent home from the seminary so to join in on a service like this reminds me how much I miss community and we can still be unified by prayer, even though most of us are not physically able to,” Mau said.

The seminarian mentioned gratitude for the witness of Gomez.

“I felt a sense of leadership and the guidance that really only a father can give me. I felt like he has been a great example especially in this odd time that we are all currently experiencing.”

Of a liturgy that switched between English and Spanish, Mau expressed support. “We need to reach out to all of God’s children and need to be able to speak the languages necessary to do it,” he said.

Bo Bonner of Des Moines, Iowa watched the litany with his five children. He said he had a bit of difficulty with the livestream, and he wasn’t sure what he needed to do to obtain the plenary indulgence attached to the litany. But, he said, “I thought the recitation by the archbishop was good and that is most important, and his words were timely and appreciated.”

While he said he appreciated more the optics of the Urbi et Orbi blessing offered by Pope Francis March 27 than those of LA’s cathedral, “I am very glad we did it as a nation.” 

“I appreciate the opportunity to earn an indulgence during such a singular Good Friday,” he added.

Claire Breux of Washington, DC, also watched online. Family members in Louisiana and Salt Lake City alo tuned in, while they met together in a Zoom meeting to pray as a family, along with the archbishop.

Breux said praying with her family over Zoom has been edifying in a time of difficulty.

“We’ve done night prayer together this way a couple times already.  We all agree it gives the prayers an added richness- we feel closer to each other and more united and encouraged in growing in holiness while we are apart,” she told CNA.

“My whole prayer through this weird time has been for an outpouring of grace for holiness, that we see how much we need God- which of course is easier to miss when life is good- and that [God] has already provided everything we need.”

“Certainly on Good Friday I look at the cross and see that it’s all been accomplished for us,” she added.

In LA, Gomez, too, looked to the cross.

“Let us love one another, joining our sufferings to the heart of Christ, open for us on the cross. Let us sacrifice for one another, take care of one another, forgive one another,” the archbishop said at the conclusion of his homily.

“May our Blessed Mother Mary intercede for us in her sorrows today.”

“May she help us to be meek and humble of heart, and to persevere in this Good Friday of disease and death, to hasten to the Easter morning of the resurrection.”

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Pittsburgh, Pa., Apr 10, 2020 / 09:00 am (CNA).- Nestled in a sleepy neighborhood in the hills rising over Pittsburgh lies a small chapel. Inside St. Anthony’s Chapel lies a piece from the Crown of Thorns, a tooth of St. Anthony of Padua, and more than 5,000 other verified relics, or remains, of saints from around the world.

Indeed for the fragments from the bodies and scraps of the belongings of countless saints, these relics continued to have earthly adventures long after the saints’ deaths. Many of the relics traveled across the world to escape war, confiscation, and desecration to make it into the safe hands of a Belgian-born physician and priest, Fr. Suitbert Mollinger, who founded the chapel.

The chapel now holds the largest collection of relics outside of Rome.

“Fr. Stewart Mollinger, well, he had an unusual hobby in which he liked to acquire relics of the saints,” Carole Brueckner, chairperson of the committee for St. Anthony’s Chapel, explained to CNA.

But in the midst of the political and social turmoil which Europe experienced at the end of the 19th century, this curious hobby was crucial to saving relics from across the continent.

Since the second century, Catholics have honored the relics of saints- either pieces of body parts or cherished belongings of holy men and women. While theologians and Church documents clarify that relics are not to be worshiped, nor do they hold magical powers, the teaching adds that relics must be treated with respect, as they belong to persons now in heaven. While relics do not have power in and of themselves, God can continue to work miracles in the presence of the saint’s body even after death, the Church teaches. Relics are present in, or below, many Catholic altars.

Because of their important place in Catholic devotion as well as their presence at Mass, relics became a target of anti-Catholic persecution in Europe.  

“It was a very chaotic time, in a sense, for Catholics, because people were fighting for territories and countries,” Brueckner said. During the mid- to late- 19th century the political boundaries – and also religious identities – of regions across Europe shifted as the modern nation-states of Germany, Italy, France, and Belgium formed, the power of the nobility and the Church ebbed, and secular governments arose.

Many nobles and religious “were afraid that their governments or the monarchies under which they lived would commit and confiscate the relics from them,” she explained. In some regions, Brueckner continued, authorities even “desecrated the relics and on occasion they would put someone in prison for having a relic in their possession.”

“Due to what was happening in Europe, this was an opportune time for Father to enrich upon his own personal collection of relics of the saints,” she elaborated. While it is forbidden for Catholics to sell or purchase relics, Fr. Mollinger was loaned or granted relics from friends in his home country of Belgium, as well as from his travels in the Netherlands, Italy, and elsewhere.

“Many times, his friends, who are also religious, would write and ask him if he could take some of their relics and keep them in safekeeping, until their countries or monarchies became stable, and Father always responded ‘yes’,” she explained. “Father also had agents that he had throughout Europe that were looking for the relics, because in essence, he would try to rescue them from being destroyed by governments and monarchies that existed in Europe at this time.”

Initially, Fr. Mollinger kept the growing relic collection in his rectory. Medical patients as well as faithful Catholics would visit the doctor-priest for both spiritual and physical treatment, and “they had the opportunity to venerate them those relics when they were there.”

Many pilgrims, Brueckner said, “were cured of their anomaly or disability” after receiving physical or spiritual aid in the presence of the relics. As a result, “Father was gaining the reputation as a priest-physician-healer,” she elaborated. Records of local Pittsburgh newspapers of the time documented Fr. Mollinger’s treatments, as well as the thousands of people who traveled to venerate the relics.

Fr. Mollinger, however, “thought they belonged in a beautiful church so that everybody could visit and venerate the relics,” and thus built with his own funds a chapel to house them.

The first section of the chapel was completed on the feast of St. Anthony in 1883, and houses the thousands of relics collected by Fr. Mollinger at the time. The second section was also completed on the feast of St. Anthony, nine years later in 1892, and contains the Stations of the Cross and relics collected after the chapel’s completion. Fr. Mollinger died two days after the last section of the chapel was completed.

Among the relics the chapel currently claims are splinters from the True Cross and the Column of Flagellation; stone from the Garden of Gethsemane; a nail that held Christ to the Cross; material from Jesus, Mary and Joseph’s clothing; a “piece of bone from all of the apostles”; and relics from St Therese of Liseux, St. Rose of Lima, St. Faustina, St. Kateri Tekawitha.

“If I had to name all the saints, we’d be here forever,” Brueckner exclaimed.

Nearly all these relics have been verified, as well.  

“When a relic is placed within that reliquary, it is sealed and it can never be opened again,” Brueckner said, explaining that the Church’s strict rules guard against tampering and forgery of relics. “For a relic to be venerated, you do need to have a document, and the document comes from the hierarchy in the Church. That document will tell you who the saint is, what the relic is, and it is saying that the Catholic Church has done their research and we can say what the relic is.”

“We do have the certificates of authenticity for almost all of our relics here within the chapel.”

While belief in the authenticity of the relics relies on a trust that “the Catholic Church has done their research, and I’m going to believe what the Catholic Church is saying,” Brueckner said, visitors still experience the same presence documented by the first pilgrims to the collection of saintly relics. “Many times when people come into the chapel they will say that they actually feel a presence.”

“I say that it’s like stepping into a little piece of heaven, because you are surrounded by so many people that our Church tells us are in heaven,” she remarked.

This story was originally published on CNA Aug. 20, 2015.

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