Philadelphia archdiocese warning parishes about series of thefts

South Bend, Ind., Nov 12, 2019 / 02:48 am (CNA).- Are the times these days good or bad?

That depends, in part, on how one reads the times.

On the one hand, technological advances have brought illiteracy levels throughout the world from 90% to only 10%. Advances in science and medicine are allowing people to live longer and healthier lives.

“These are some of the good things that are happening. I think a lot of it is done out of friendship, out of good intention,” Archbishop Borys Gudziak, the Ukrainian Catholic Archeparch of Philadelphia, and the Metropolitan for the Ukrainian Catholic Church in the U.S., said November 7. Gudziak was one of the keynote speakers for the Notre Dame Center for Ethics and Culture 21st annual fall conference, which this year had the theme: “I have called you friends.”

“I don’t canonize our times and I don’t canonize longevity, but we do appreciate these things,” he said.

“And yet the times are not so good,” Gudziak added.

“In fact, they’re similar to…what it was in 1914 when the Western world was convinced that progress would lead us to great happiness. Then the massacres began. World wars. The genocides,” Gudziak said.

He noted that for all of our technological and social progress, Americans are lonelier, more depressed and more stressed than ever. In Pennsylvania, one of the states where he serves, the opioid crisis has left people sick, dying, lonely and without hope.

“It’s important to focus on friendship because no amount of material, educational, technological, industrial welfare can compensate for the relationships that we are called to,” he said.

Gudziak said some of the most profound friendships he’s seen are those he witnessed in Soviet Russia before it fell, and those he continues to witness in countries controlled by communism, although these friendships are not easy or without cost.

“In all of these countries that were or continue to be communist, where millions of people were killed, where the system killed systematically, people over generations developed a reflex to put on a mask, put up a facade, build a wall because the outside world is dangerous,” Gudziak said.

Families are encouraged to inform authorities against each other in communist countries, “so people in the family don’t say things, because you can’t trust. It becomes like a radiation.”

“You can’t taste it, has no smell, no color, but it mutates the genes. There’s an extra fear chromosome. It’s a reflex. You can’t control it. Two billion people have an added obstacle to cultivate profound friendship.”

And yet it was in these oppressive conditions in Soviet Russia that the Ukrainian Catholic Church, while it lost many members, grew deep roots and bonds of friendship among those that remained.

“(T)he Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church, which had about 4 million members in 1939, with 3,000 priests, was totally – on a visible level – liquidated,” Gudziak said.

“In 1945-46 all the bishops were arrested, hundreds of priests with their families were deported to Siberia. The church was rendered illegal and it remained the biggest illegal church in the world for 43 years until 1989. And it was very reduced. By 1989 there were only 300 priests left,” he said.

“But what a community it was! Forged in that fire of persecution,” he added.

When he met the underground Church, Gudziak said everything was stripped to the bare minimum – bishops had jobs as ambulance drivers or coal workers, there were no schools or churches or official institutions of any kind. The bishops didn’t even know one another’s names, because it was too dangerous to tell someone your name in underground seminary.

“And yet they were profoundly friends of Christ, and it was an incredible, intense relationship of those in the underground,” Gudziak said.

“The friendship was not just kind of a nice thing, it cost profoundly to be a friend of Christ in an atheist totalitarian system,” he said. “It cost to pass down the faith to your children. But the fruits are amazing.”

The Ukranian Catholic Church now again has 3,000 priests, 5 million members and 800 seminarians.

The story of the Ukranian Catholic Church is important because “it’s the story of the cross,” Gudziak told CNA in an interview.

“I think the story of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church, its persecution, its underground life, its survival…it’s not a philosophy, it’s a story of human faithfulness to God…the faithfulness of concrete people to God and to each other.”

From the beginning of humanity, God has been teaching human beings about true friendship, Gudziak noted in his talk.

“From the scriptures we know from our faith, we experience that the Lord so yearns to make us his friends. Moses had a special privilege to see face-to-face. Abraham was called a friend. The value of friendship was modeled by David and Jonathan,” he said.

“Then, Jesus came to us. Our faith, our church, our theology, our civilization is based on this incredible gesture that God comes to be close, to convey his divinity. He sits next to us,” he said.

“What a God, what a Lord, and what is He conveying? He’s conveying the divine life shared by the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Friendship…motivates the Father to send his Son into (the world’s) grime, into our anxiety, our sin, the pitch blackness that we can create, into our hell, into our death, to create relationship, to create trust, intimacy, to establish an alliance.”

“Friendship,” he said, “is the school of the spiritual life which reflects the gift of relationship that we have, by virtue of being created in the image and likeness of God. God is triune. He’s personal and there’s relationship. We as persons are called to relationship. We’re called to friendship.”

Besides his appointments in the U.S., Gudziak also serves as the president of the Ukrainian Catholic University in Lviv, Ukraine. In striving to teach their students about true friendship, the university invites academics as well as students with disabilities into its classes and campus, he said.

“Not because they need us, because they need our social handout, but because the children of God with special needs have special gifts. They don’t care where you got your Ph.D. or how many publications you have. They don’t notice how rich or poor you are or, which title you carry,” he said.

“They have one basic question: Can you love?…There’s no more important pedagogical question.”

In a world increasingly divided along political, religious and other ideological lines, Gudziak told CNA it is all the more important that Christians reflect on God’s friendship to us, and in turn our friendship with him and with others.

“I think ever since The Enlightenment, when we’ve really been focusing a lot on ideas, there’s a tendency for ideas to become ideologies. And our consciousness in the Western world is very intellectualized, and our relationships can become abstract. They can be categorized according to different positions, world views, and they’re in our head,” he said.

“If we look carefully at the Gospels and listen to Jesus, he doesn’t speak about grand ideas. He talks about the Father, the Holy Spirit. He talks about relationships,” he added. “He talks about persons and interaction among persons, and he uses very personal, very concrete examples and stories to teach about life. He doesn’t start from ideas and systems and ideologies and systems.”

In his talk at the conference, Gudziak noted that Jesus became friends with “very concrete people, Peter and John and Nathaniel. It’s not an ideology, it’s not a system. There weren’t too many buildings there in Jesus’s time, nor in Paul’s or for 300 years.”

“So maybe if we lose the buildings and the endowments and the properties, maybe that’s not the end of things, if we can recover or develop more profoundly our friendship.”

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Denver, Colo., May 15, 2020 / 11:01 am (CNA).- A coalition of volunteers in Colorado hopes to gather enough signatures in the next two weeks on a petition to put a late-term abortion ban on the November ballot – an effort complicated by restrictions related to the coronavirus pandemic.

The Coalition for Women and Children, a Christian group led by Giuliana Day, filed the petition during July 2019 with the Colorado Secretary of State. The initiative would ban abortions in the state after 22 weeks, with an exception to save the life of the mother.

Colorado remains one of the only states where late-term abortion is not, under law, explicitly protected or restricted. As a result, abortions can take place up until birth. Notably, the Boulder Abortion Clinic is one of just a handful of clinics in the U.S. that publicly accept patients seeking late-term abortions from anywhere in the world.

The organization of volunteers supporting the petition – known as Due Date Too Late – was originally tasked with collecting nearly 125,000 signatures within a six-month time limit in order to have the question appear on the ballot in November 2020.

The original deadline to submit the signatures was March 4. When the Colorado Secretary of State’s office counted the 137,624 signatures that the group submitted, it ruled only 114,647 of them valid— about 10,000 too few for the initiative to make it onto the ballot.

Now, the volunteers have two weeks, what is known as a “cure period,” to make up the signature deficit by gathering new signatures and encouraging those whose signatures were ruled invalid to re-sign.

The Archdiocese of Denver is encouraging Catholics to sign the petition.

“Our efforts are really focused on getting new signatures, and then whatever can be ruled valid that was previously invalid is going to be helpful, but we don’t want to count on that. So we want to make sure we get the new ones,” Deacon Geoff Bennett, vice president of parish and community relations for Catholic Charities of Denver, told CNA.

The cure period was originally set to begin April 27, but a district court judge granted Due Date Too Late a delay until May 15 because of the continued restrictions related to the coronavirus.

Governor Jared Polis’ statewide stay-at-home order ended April 26, but the state remains under a “safer-at-home” policy, whereby all are encouraged to stay at home and avoid unnecessary interactions whenever possible, and to comply with social distancing requirements.

Beginning May 15, there will be approximately 100 signing locations throughout the state staffed by over 400 volunteers from Due Date Too Late. Many of the original signers of the petition were Catholic or Evangelical Christian, and as a result most of the signing locations are places of worship.

Because Colorado is a large state and coronavirus restrictions and recommendations vary, the organizers are asking all signature collectors to check on the most current social distancing guidelines with their county, rather than issuing their own guidelines.

The organizers have, however, offered suggestions to volunteers such as offering a new, clean pen to every signer, as well as offering hand sanitizer to each signer.

All public and private gatherings remain limited, by the governor’s order, to no more than ten people.

The organizers used geomapping based on the data they collected about the original signers of the petition to determine the best locations to send volunteers to collect signatures.

The group will be collecting signatures through May 28, since the signatures need to be submitted by May 29. The plan is to collect about 15,000 signatures in the next two weeks.

In an April 24 statement, Due Date Too Late stated that a sample of 40,000 signees showed “broad-based, bipartisan support,” with 40% of those sampled members of the Democratic Party or unaffiliated.

Bennett encouraged anyone who has already signed the petition to check whether their signature was accepted; the Secretary of State rejected many of the signatures, he said, because the signers’ information did not exactly match their voter registration.

There are other potential issues other than voter registration mismatches. For example, the petition circulator may have filled out their affidavit incorrectly, which in some cases invalidated entire packets of signatures.

While signers whose signatures were previously ruled invalid will have the opportunity to re-sign, new signatures are preferable, organizers have told CNA.

If the late-term abortion ban passes in November, it would mark the first time since 1967 that Colorado would impose voter-approved restrictions on abortion.

Lauren Castillo, director of church relations for Students for Life of America and spokesperson for Due Date Too Late, told the press in February that in Colorado in 2019, at least 323 abortions were performed on babies after 21 weeks gestation.

“The vast majority of these late term abortions are done on babies without adverse late-term fetal diagnoses, or serious health risks in the pregnancy, and without life threatening circumstances for the mother,” Castillo said.

“They’re done electively, and are not necessary. And in an emergency situation that would be life threatening to the mother, a c-section is a far safe procedure than a late-term abortion.”

Bennett noted that abortion-rights groups in Colorado touted the fact that for a time during the pandemic, many women from other states were traveling to Colorado to take advantage of the state’s permissive abortion laws.

Abortion clinics in states like Colorado, Nevada, and New Mexico, which did not introduce any pandemic-related restrictions on abortion, saw increases in patients traveling from other states, such as Texas, to undergo the procedure.

“We want to encourage people to make a stand for life, especially in the environment that we’re in [the pandemic] where we’re so concerned about life,” Bennett said.

Colorado was the first state in the nation to decriminalize abortion. The initial legislation, signed into law April 25, 1967, allowed abortion in certain limited cases: rape, incest, or a prediction of permanent mental or physical disability of either the child or mother. Six years later, the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling in Roe v. Wade declared abortion a constitutional right nationwide.

[…]

CNA Staff, Nov 7, 2020 / 04:08 am (CNA).- The Knights of Peter Claver, the largest historically African-American Catholic lay organization in the U.S., is marking the anniversary of its founding with a Founder’s Day Mass to be livestreamed to the internet on Saturday.

“Join us as we celebrate 111 years of spreading faith, hope and love through friendship, unity and Christian charity,” the Knights of Peter Claver said.

The Mass was set to be livecast Saturday, Nov. 7 at 4 p.m. Central Time at the Facebook page of the Knights of Peter Claver and Ladies Auxiliary and at the Knights of Peter Claver website. Auxiliary Bishop Fernand Cheri of New Orleans will be the celebrant.

The Knights of Peter Claver were founded Nov. 7, 1909 in Mobile, Alabama by four priests of the Josephite Fathers and three laymen as a fraternal organization of black Catholics, dedicated to the principles of Friendship, Unity and Christian Charity. One of its founders, the Baltimore-born Father John H. Dorsey, SSJ, was the second African-American Catholic priest to be educated and ordained in the U.S., the Knights of Peter Claver said.

The Knights of Peter Claver take their name from St. Peter Claver, a Spanish Jesuit who ministered to African slaves in 17th century Cartagena, Colombia, a major port in the slave trade.

The organization, now headquartered in New Orleans, has more than 18,000 members and affiliates worldwide, with over 400 units in 72 dioceses in the U.S. and South America. The organization has a Ladies’ Auxiliary and separate junior divisions for boys and girls.

The Knights of Peter Claver support various parish, diocesan and community efforts, including serving the poor, creating Catholic community and forming youth. They have worked alongside the National Urban League and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People for the advancement of civil rights.

Membership is open to practicing Catholics of all races and ethnicities.

One of its members is Cardinal-designate Wilton Gregory of Washington, who will become the first African-American cardinal at a Nov. 28 consistory in Rome.

“Archbishop Gregory is a long-time member of the Knights of Peter Claver who has been an ardent supporter of our causes over the years,” the Knights of Peter Claver said Oct. 25. “We are particularly proud of the leadership he has provided to the American Catholic Church on issues of race and the dignity of human life.”

They noted Gregory’s archdiocesan initiative “Made in God’s Image: Pray and Work to End the Sin of Racism,” which will promote pastoral activities and outreach, including prayer, faith formation and social justice work.

Following the protests and controversy surrounding the death of George Floyd this summer, the Knights of Peter Claver hosted webinars on the dignity of black lives, racism, domestic violence, human trafficking, and criminal justice reform.

[…]