Pope Francis sends video message to Argentina for feast of Our Lady of Lujan

Discarded Communion hosts were found in the parking lot of St. Peter’s Roman Catholic Church in Harper’s Ferry, West Virginia, after Easter Mass on March 31, 2024. / Credit: Photo courtesy of St. James Catholic Church

Washington, D.C. Newsroom, Apr 5, 2024 / 14:45 pm (CNA).

Catholics who attended Easter Mass at a historic Harpers Ferry, West Virginia, church were met with a disturbing sight when they left the service to go back home — at least 100 Communion wafers were strewn across the parking lot and nearby street.

“[The people] were upset because they were concerned [they could be] consecrated hosts,” Father Timothy Grassi said of the incident that took place at 190-year-old St. Peter’s Roman Catholic Church.

It’s unclear who placed the wafers on the ground or what message the perpetrator was trying to convey, but the church reported the action to the National Park Service law enforcement, which is investigating the matter. Grassi told CNA he has not received any updates since the incident was reported to the police.

Whoever spread the wafers on the ground did it while the Mass was being celebrated. The wafers were not present at the start of the Mass but were there when the Mass-goers exited the church, according to the priest.

Grassi said he is certain the wafers “were not from our church [because] none were missing and they were a different size.” He also said: “I don’t know of any churches that have identified having hosts stolen [to] that degree,” suggesting that they were probably not taken from a Catholic church and probably not consecrated.

“My best guess is that [these were] not consecrated hosts,” Grassi said.

Grassi noted that unconsecrated Communion wafers can be purchased online or elsewhere, which is the most likely explanation for the large number of wafers. An unconsecrated wafer has not undergone transubstantiation — the process by which the substance of the wafer becomes the body and blood of Christ.

The priest said he suspects the action was “a way for [someone] to make a statement in some way,” although he was not certain what that statement was. He noted that some of the hosts appeared to have been intentionally placed near the driver’s side doors of the vehicles. He said it did not appear that any of the wafers were defaced in any way, apart from being spread across the ground.

According to Grassi, about 80 people attended the Easter Mass at 9:30 a.m. The parking lot, which only fits about 15 cars, was full and the nearby streets were also filled with cars.

CNA reached out to the National Park Service for comment but did not receive a response by publication time.

St. Peter’s, which was built in 1833, sits on a hill overlooking the point at which the Potomac and Shenandoah rivers meet and is situated near several other historic buildings in the popular tourist town. The church is maintained as a historic chapel by the St. James Parish in Charles Town, of which Grassi is the pastor.

The church has one Mass every Sunday at 9:30 a.m.

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Pope Benedict XVI on June 15, 2005 in Vatican City. / L’Osservatore Romano.

Vatican City, Apr 14, 2022 / 02:00 am (CNA).

Catholics around the world are being invited to congratulate Pope emeritus Benedict XVI on his 95th birthday.

The Tagespost Foundation for Catholic Journalism has created a website to collect the messages, which will then be shown to Benedict XVI.

“I know he is very happy about it,” said Archbishop Georg Gänswein, the private secretary of the pope emeritus, reported CNA Deutsch, CNA’s German-language news partner.

Benedict XVI will celebrate his 95th birthday on April 16, Holy Saturday. He was born Joseph Alois Ratzinger in 1927 in Marktl am Inn, a small Bavarian town not far from Austria, also on a Holy Saturday.

Looking back to his birth in his memoir, published before his election as pope, he wrote: “The fact that the birthday was the last day of Holy Week and the eve of Easter was always noted in the family history, because it was connected with the fact that I was baptized right on the morning of my birthday with the water that had just been consecrated in the ‘Easter Vigil’ celebrated at that time in the morning. To be the first baptized with the new water was considered a significant providential event.”

He continued: “The fact that my life was thus immersed in the Paschal Mystery from the beginning in this way has always filled me with gratitude, for this could only be a sign of blessing.”

“Admittedly — it had not been Easter Sunday, but only Holy Saturday. But the longer I think about it, the more it seems to me to be in keeping with the essence of our human life, which is still waiting for Easter, not yet in full light, but nevertheless confidently moving toward it.”

On the website of the Tagespost Foundation, originally launched by Benedict XVI, Cardinal Kurt Koch, president of the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity, wrote a congratulatory message.

“I thank God for giving us Joseph Ratzinger on Holy Saturday 1927 as a fine man, profoundly devout Christian, outstanding theologian, and kind bishop and pope. And I thank Pope emeritus Benedict XVI for his lifelong witness to the love of God and for his compelling life’s work in theology,” he said.

“For his birthday, which the honoree will again celebrate on a Holy Saturday, I wish that it be for him a day of joy and appreciation, that he — despite all the hostility from the outside, which unfortunately occurs again and again — can look back gratefully on his life and on his episcopal and theological work, and that on his last earthly pilgrimage he can walk with confidence toward the final encounter with Jesus Christ, whose face he sought throughout his life and brought close to us.”

On behalf of the faithful of his diocese, Bishop Wolfgang Ipolt of Görlitz, eastern Germany, congratulated the pope emeritus.

He wrote: “I gladly remember our meeting at the seminary in Erfurt on the occasion of your visit to eastern Germany shortly after my episcopal ordination in September 2011. I thank you from the bottom of my heart for all that you have given to the Church in your writings. I am sure that you have helped many people to find God and to know and love Christ more deeply. May the Lord reward you for this effort one day in His glory!”

Father Karl Wallner O. Cist., a monk from Heiligenkreuz Abbey, which is dear to Benedict’s heart, wrote: “From the bottom of my heart I offer my congratulations, also in my current capacity as national director of the Pontifical Mission Societies in Austria. In the Church in the Global South, I experience every day, there is a very, very great gratitude for your pontificate and your theological work.”

“It is beautiful that your birthday this year coincides with Holy Saturday, the day on which you also received your baptism at the early Easter Vigil,” said Father Maximilian Heim O. Cist., the abbot of Heiligenkreuz.

“You give us a living example of how we ourselves should live from the mystery of the Paschal Mystery. For this, we thank you and rejoice in your attachment to our monastery and its various tasks, not least to our university, which may bear your name.”

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Vatican City, Jul 6, 2018 / 03:04 am (CNA/EWTN News).- Carlo Acutis, who died of leukemia at the age of 15, offering his suffering for the pope and for the Church, was among four laypeople whose heroic virtues were recognized by the Congregation for the Causes of Saints on Thursday.

Pope Francis authorized the congregation to promulgate the decree July 5, which advances Acutis’ cause and names him Venerable.

Acutis was born in London May 3, 1991, to Italian parents who soon returned to Milan. He was a pious child, attending daily Mass, frequently praying the rosary, and making weekly confessions.

Exceptionally gifted in working with computers, Acutis developed a website which catalogued Eucharistic miracles. This website was the genesis of The Eucharistic Miracles of the World, an international exhibition which highlights such occurrences.

Acutis died of leukemia in Monza, near Milan, Oct. 12, 2006.

Acutis stated that “To always be close to Jesus, that’s my life plan. I’m happy to die because I’ve lived my life without wasting even a minute of it doing things that wouldn’t have pleased God.”

He also said that “our aim has to be the infinite and not the finite. The Infinite is our homeland. We have always been expected in Heaven,” and he called the Eucharist “my highway to heaven.”

Abbot Michelangelo Tiribilli, the then-Abbot of the Territorial Abbey of Montel Oliveto Maggiore, wrote in the foreword to a biography of Acutis that “By looking at this adolescent as one of them and as someone who was captivated by the love of Christ, which enabled him to experience pure joy, [today’s adolescents] will be in contact with an experience of life that doesn’t take anything away from the richness of their teenage years, but which actually makes them more valuable.”

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