Vatican City, Mar 26, 2020 / 09:00 am (CNA).- Pope Francis urged Catholics to cling to Christ and pray for the courage to say “yes” to God in his call for vocations. Acknowledging that discerning God’s plan is a daunting task, the pop… […]
Vatican City, Mar 26, 2020 / 04:04 am (CNA).- Pope Francis Thursday prayed for everyone who is fearful of the future because of the coronavirus outbreak, asking the Lord for help in bearing these worries.
“In these days of so much suffering, the… […]
Washington D.C., Mar 26, 2020 / 03:01 am (CNA).- Despite the closure of churches and lockdowns in place in many areas of the United States due to the coronavirus (COVID-19) outbreak, many social service agencies are ramping up their efforts to feed the poor, while at the same time taking unprecedented precautions to avoid getting their guests sick.
“The neighbors are mostly just thankful that we have not shut down. Many, many pantries have shut down,” Sister Stephanie Baliga of the Mission of Our Lady of the Angels in Chicago told CNA.
“In good news, most of the pantries that are associated with either a Catholic or Protestant church have not shut down.”
The Mission normally serves around 1,000 families a month, and each month processes around 70,000 pounds of food. The food pantry is set up like a grocery store to allow guests to “shop” for the items they need.
Now, to reduce the potential for contamination, the Mission has switched to a bag-based to-go pantry, distributed outside.
Sister Stephanie said they served 260 families last Tuesday, with the local police delivering boxed food to homebound seniors.
“We weren’t spending a lot of time talking to people, as you might guess. We were kind of just like: ‘Here’s your food, I wish we could spend time with you!’ It was kind of a very fast ‘Here’s your food, thanks be to God,'” Sister Stephanie laughed.
Sister Stephanie said her community is blessed to be able to continue to attend Mass and is praying for all those who cannot currently do so.
Volunteers harder to come by
Many food pantries depend on seniors as their most reliable volunteers. But since the eldery are more susceptible to COVID-19, most are staying home.
The Father McKenna Center, a Catholic day shelter for homeless men in Washington DC, normally acts as a drop in center for homeless men where they can get a meal, do laundry, and avail themselves of case management and other aid.
The center normally has 55 regularly scheduled volunteers from the community, but none are now able to come. Besides a small staff, a Jesuit Volunteer Corps volunteer and a Franciscan Missions volunteer are all who remain.
“This is not what they signed up for, but they’re jumping in,” Kim Cox, president of the center, told CNA.
Following guidelines from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Department of Health and Human Services, the FMC has had to suspend its case management and ask most of the men who come to the center to go elsewhere.
DC’s homeless shelters that house people at night have changed their hours to be open all day, so the homeless can remain there and shelter in place.
The only homeless men that are left at the McKenna Center are a group of ten men who sleep at the center during the hypothermia season, which is coming to a close as spring arrives.
“I think that this is actually a really good opportunity. These guys are more than happy to help us,” Cox said.
In addition to scrubbing and deep cleaning the center’s kitchen, the homeless men have been helping to make masks out of fabric to help stem the spread of COVID-19.
“And they felt good about that…these guys that are currently homeless, it really enhances their dignity for them to do something constructive.”
There are about 120 low-income seniors who live within five blocks of the center, Cox said. The homeless men in the hypothermia program are helping to bag groceries to distribute to the center’s neighbors.
The Capital Area Food Bank asked the McKenna Center to ramp up its food distribution by becoming a community hub, handing pre-made bags of groceries to DC residents who show up, with appropriate precautions taken for social distancing.
“To prepare the first 100 bags of groceries…the men in our hypothermia program helped make that happen,” Cox said.
“They helped to bag the groceries and move them where we need them…it’s terrific that they have this desire to help other people, and that we have this opportunity to give them something to do.”
“We’ve ramped up our services tremendously”
Walter Ritz, director of HOPE Community Services in New Rochelle, New York, told CNA that the center typically runs a soup kitchen, almost five days a week, and food pantry open every other week.
That was until New Rochelle became a relatively early epicenter of the virus in the United States. Most churches in the area had to suspend services nearly three weeks ago when Governor Andrew Cuomo on March 10 instituted a one-mile radius “containment zone” to try to stop the spread of the virus beyond a local synagogue.
Though the number of new COVID-19 cases has slowed since the restrictions were implemented, like in most parts of the country, places of worship— which typically provide many volunteers and donations for HOPE— remain shuttered.
“One of the biggest changes we’ve done is ramp up our services tenfold, in terms of our food pantry,” Ritz said.
“We went from serving every other week to serving three times a week so that people have much more opportunity to come to us in this time of great need….Food insecurity is a major concern, and it’s the last thing people need to be concerned about at this moment.”
Instead of operating the food pantry once a day, like usual, HOPE is now serving every weekday, because other soup kitchens in the area had to close down.
“We’ve ramped up our services tremendously…we’re fortunate to have the national guard here to help out, but it’s just been a tremendous change for us.”
The second drastic change has been doing everything outdoors. The pantry and the kitchen are both outside, serving in to-go containers.
“HOPE’s volunteer base has always been seniors. A large portion of our volunteers are seniors, and we made a call a while back when this started hitting New Rochelle that for the safety of our volunteers, we asked that anyone who was in the high-risk category, for their own safety, not to come into HOPE,” Ritz said.
“So that, right off the bat, reduced our ability to have as much help as we normally do. Even our pantry manager, who typically coordinates how our pantry restocks and goes out, we haven’t been able to have her in. So this has all been done with a skeleton crew here, and we’re certainly feeling the pinch. It’s been very difficult to support the community, but we are still committed to doing it for as long as we can.”
“We certainly don’t have enough to sustain the level of giving that we have been doing. And we feel that we are going to have to ramp it down very shortly,”
At this time, what HOPE needs most are donations, Ritz said. One major impact on their organization— and on other nonprofits— is that their annual gala, which is a major fundraiser for them each year, has been pushed back to October.
“It’s cost us a fairly dependable revenue stream that we’ve always been able to utilize during the spring and summer,” Ritz said.
“We are working more, with less, at the moment. We’re committed to our community, and again, we are going to be here as long as we can.”
In the age of COVID-19, death has become a daily subject around the dinner table, in the grocery store, and at a social distance even at the gas station. We are now constantly reminded in […]
CNA Staff, Mar 25, 2020 / 07:11 pm (CNA).- The Italian bishop of a missionary region of Ethiopia is the first Catholic bishop known to have died of the global coronavirus pandemic. He died March 25.
Bishop Angelo Moreschi, 67, was the leader of Ethiopia’s Apostolic Vicariate of Gambella, a missionary region of 25,000 Catholics in the western part of the country. He died Wednesday in the Italian city of Brescia, in the Lombardy region that has become the European epicenter of the pandemic.
A member of the Salesians of Don Bosco religious order, Moreschi had been a missionary in Ethiopia since 1991. He was ordained a bishop in January 2010.
“The Salesian community mourns the death of the Apostolic Vicar of Gambella (Ethiopia), namely Msgr. Angelo Moreschi, SDB, who died today, March 25, in Brescia (Italy) due to the coronavirus,” the Salesians of Don Bosco said in a statement released through the order’s information bureau.
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The secretary general of Ethiopia’s bishops’ conference announced the news in the country, announced conveying “deep condolences to the Clergy, religious, bereaved family and the lay faithful in the Apostolic Vicariate of Gambella.”
To the mourning people of the Gambella vicariate, the country’s bishops pledged the “closeness and prayers of members of the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of Ethiopia and the entire Catholic Church in Ethiopia. May his soul rest in peace.”
Bishop Moreschi was renowned in Ethiopia for his pastoral ministry to the service of young people and the poor. In the local dialect, he was afforded the title “Abba,” meaning “Father.”
“In his mission as prefect and then as apostolic vicar, he continued to embody the Salesian focus in helping children, accompanying them by his practical spirit and his strong apostolic zeal,” the Salesians of Don Bosco stated.
“In his visits to the villages, they still remember when the Salesian arrived with a battered SUV – or by motorboat in the villages along the Baro river when the roads were flooded – and he immediately began to distribute multi-vitamin biscuits to malnourished children.”
Bishop Moreschi died “after serving the young, the poor and his flock of souls as a Salesian for 46 years, as a priest for 38, and as a bishop for over 10,” the Salesians said.
More than 60 priests have died in the ongoing coronavirus pandemic, which has claimed more than 21,000 lives globally. Several bishops have contracted the virus.
This story was first reported by ACI Africa, CNA’s African news partner. It has been adapted by CNA.
CNA Staff, Mar 25, 2020 / 06:19 pm (CNA).- While the U.K. government has quickly backed away from rules allowing women to complete a medical abortion at home during the coronavirus pandemic, some groups are lobbying to expand legal access to emergency contraception, which can have abortion-causing effects.
The Faculty of Sexual and Reproductive Healthcare of the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists has said consultations for emergency contraception should take place by telephone or video. The drugs are sometimes informally known as the “morning after pill.”
They advise the same consultation practices for contraception prescriptions and for counseling for intrauterine contraceptives and contraceptive implants, the Scottish newspaper The National reports. The faculty, which sets standards in family planning, has also advocated that online contraceptive services be expanded around the U.K.
Catholic ethics reject the use of the “morning after pill” to avoid conception following consensual sexual relations, and strongly reject the use of drugs that can kill any newly conceived embryo.
Dr. Anne Lashford, vice president of the Faculty of Sexual and Reproductive Healthcare, said doctors, nurses, and other clinicians in her specialty are being redeployed to help respond to the coronavirus outbreak. She said sexual and reproductive healthcare services were “already operating beyond capacity.”
“It is crucial that we ensure women of all ages can continue to access effective contraception during the crisis, avoiding unplanned pregnancies which will likely lead to added strain on both maternity and abortion services,” Lashford said.
Pro-abortion rights advocates have argued for looser abortion restrictions during the pandemic. Otherwise women “may resort to illegal methods or be compelled to carry unwanted pregnancies to term,” a spokeswoman for the British Pregnancy Advisory Service said.
The U.K.’s Department for Health initially made changes to England’s abortion laws that would have allowed women to complete a chemical abortion at home, without going to a hospital or clinic first. The changes were retracted March 24 just hours after they were published.
British Members of Parliament questioned Health Secretary Matt Hancock in the House of Commons March 25 about the changes.
Hancock reiterated that the government has no plans to change abortion regulations during the COVID-19 pandemic. Prime Minister Boris Johnson has issued lock down orders for the U.K. with strict social distancing measures enforced.
A medical abortion, sometimes called a chemical abortion, is a two-step process that involves the ingestion of two drugs: mifepristone and misoprostol. The first drug, mifepristone, effectively starves the unborn baby by blocking the effects of the progesterone hormone, inducing a miscarriage. The second drug, misoprostol, is taken up to two days later and induces labor.
Women in the U.K. are already allowed to take the second drug at home, after taking the first at a medical clinic and after obtaining the approval of two doctors, as required by law.
The retracted changes would have allowed women to take both pills at home after consulting with a doctor via video link or by phone.
John Smeaton, Chief Executive of the Society for the Protection of Unborn Children UK, said the proposed policy was “radical and most disturbing” and would have “placed more women at risk.”
“The removal of any direct medical supervision overseeing the use of both abortion pills could have seen a rise of physical and physiological complications experienced by women.”
The Society for the Protection of Unborn Children UK, a pro-life group, has launched a national and international campaign calling for abortions to be halted during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Ross Douthat made this remark recently while discussing his new book The Decadent Society: How We Became Victims of Our Own Success: But if you look at how many kids they’re having, our birth rate […]
CNA Staff, Mar 25, 2020 / 05:25 pm (CNA).- Twenty-four countries on Wednesday were consecrated to the Sacred Heart of Jesus and the Immaculate Heart of Mary at the Shrine of Our Lady of Fatima in Fatima, Portugal.
In a March 25 ceremony that included … […]
CNA Staff, Mar 25, 2020 / 05:00 pm (CNA).- The funeral of the former head of the United States bishops’ conference and archbishop emeritus of Cleveland will take place behind closed doors. A Mass of Christian burial will be said for Archbishop Daniel E. Pilarczyk in Cincinnati’s Cathedral of St. Peter in Chains on Friday.
The funeral arrangements were announced by the Archdiocese of Cincinnati on Wednesday, and the Mass will be celebrated by Archbishop Dennis Schnurr on March 27 at 11 am.
“Due to the current pandemic, the Mass will be private,” a statement from the archdiocese said. “However the clergy and faithful of the archdiocese are encouraged to join in prayer for Archbishop Pilarczyk by joining in the Mass that will be live-streamed to the Archdiocese of Cincinnati website. A memorial Mass open to the clergy and faithful of the Archdiocese will be held at a later date.”
A spokesperson for the Archdiocese of Cincinnati told CNA on Wednesday that the burial would take place privately and the archbishop would not be interred at the cathedral.
Washington Archbishop Wilton Gregory said on Monday that he was deeply disappointed that the current pandemic conditions prevented him from attending the Mass.
“If this were an ordinary moment, I would plan to attend Archbishop Pilarczyk’s funeral in Cincinnati,” Gregory said via Twitter.
“He was a dear friend & mentor for me. His wit and wisdom were legendary and will be missed. Alas his funeral liturgy will be private. I pray the Lord reward him with peace.”
Pilarczyk died on Sunday at the age of 85. Ordained a priest in 1959, Pilarczyk was consecrated auxiliary bishop of Cincinnati in 1974, serving also as the vicar general for the archdiocese.
In 1982, he became the archbishop of Cincinnati, succeeding Joseph Bernardin, who was appointed Archbishop of Chicago. At the time of his retirement in 2009, Pilarczyk was then the longest-tenured archbishop in the U.S., having served for 27 years.
During that time, he also served as vice president of the National Conference of Catholic Bishops, now the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, from 1986 until 1989. That was followed by a three-year term as president of the conference until 1992, as the U.S. prepared to host its first World Youth Day in Denver in the summer of 1993.
While archbishop, Pilarczyk was also rector of Mount St. Mary’s Seminary and School of Theology, also called the Athenaeum of Ohio.
On Sunday, Archbishop Schnurr said that Pilarczyk would be remembered as a “teacher.”
“Some seminarians told me they thought he was stern, but I explained he never forgot to be the teacher, always in control, tolerating no nonsense and always ready to correct,” Schnurr said.
“He was regarded by his fellow bishops as an intellectual, a scholar. He was one of the few bishops who could carry on a conversation in Latin,” said Schnurr.
St. Louis, Mo., Mar 25, 2020 / 01:30 pm (CNA).- In the basement of St. Francis Xavier College Church on the campus of Saint Louis University stands a statue of the Blessed Mother and the […]
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