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Denver Newsroom, Oct 14, 2020 / 03:33 pm (CNA).-  

Catholics in California rallied in a peaceful demonstration Tuesday evening at the former site of a statue of St. Junipero Serra, which a group of activists defaced and pulled down earlier this week.

The riot at which the statue was destroyed took place Oct. 12 at Mission San Rafael Arcángel in San Rafael, CA, north of San Francisco Bay.

Father Kyle Faller, parochial vicar at the mission, led a rosary and addressed the crowd of 75-100 people Oct. 13, many of whom held signs saying “Free the Mass,” in reference to the city’s COVID-19 restrictions on public worship, which San Francisco’s archbishop has called unjust.

Faller also led a Litany of Reparation for the statue’s destruction, as well as the prayer to St. Michael the Archangel. Archbishop Salvatore Cordileone is set to offer exorcism prayers at the statue’s former site Oct. 17.

“Let this be a time for all of you to take courage and not be afraid, as our great Pope St. John Paul II said,” Faller told the crowd.

“This is what it means that our faith is not restricted to private life or in a church itself. Our faith is meant to be lived in the church but also on the streets, in our homes, in our workplaces.”

St. Serra, an 18th-century Franciscan priest and missionary, is viewed by some activists as a symbol of colonialism and of the abuses that many Native Americans suffered after contact with Europeans. However, historians say the missionary protested abuses and sought to fight colonial oppression.

While many Native peoples did suffer horrific abuse, activists tend to conflate the abuses the Natives suffered long after Serra’s death with the period when Serra was alive and building the missions. Pope Francis canonized Serra in 2015 during a visit to the United States.

Though Serra himself did not found Mission San Rafael, it owes its existence to Serra’s legacy, as he founded the first nine missions in what would become California.

The hourlong protest Oct. 12, organized by members of the Coast Miwok tribe, marked Indigenous People’s Day, the holiday that some cities and states – including California – have designated to replace Columbus Day.

A church maintenance worker had covered the statue in duct tape before the protest to protect it from graffiti, and boarded up windows at the mission. Numerous statues of the saint have been vandalized or destroyed this year, most of them in California.

The masked rioters peeled off the duct tape and sprayed red paint in the statue’s face. Some protestors tried to prevent local news cameras from filming the toppling, but Fox2 captured the statue’s fall on video. At least five people can be seen pulling on the statue’s head with nylon cords and ropes.

Faller said when he and the parish pastor, Father Luello Palacpac, looked out at the rioters pulling down the statue, they saw “people that need to be loved.”

Father Faller encouraged those in attendance to persevere in prayer and offered a reflection on Jesus’ forgiveness in the face of persecution.

“Let your heart not be embittered or stubborn in hate or anger,” he exhorted the crowd.

“On the cross, when Christ looked at those who were persecuting them, those who called for his death, and what did he say? He did not condemn them. He did not scream at them…He said to his Father, ‘Forgive them, for they know not what they do.’ That is the beating prayer of the cross, and that should be our prayer each and every day,” Faller said.

Police have arrested five women in connection with the incident and charged them with felony vandalism, Fox2 reported.

Father Palacpac could not be reached for further comment, but an archdiocesan spokeswoman told CNA that he believes the mission will be able to restore the statue.

The San Rafael Police Department said in an Oct. 13 statement that the five women had been issued citations and released, and that the cases had been forwarded to the district attorney’s office for prosecution.

The department said they had worked with representatives from the Archdiocese of San Francisco to develop a plan in response to the Oct. 12 protest. The protest’s organizers had announced the gathering on social media before it took place. 

“The archdiocese requested that we use de-escalation techniques and minimize interactions that could lead to the use of force against protestors. The Archdiocese supported a civil protest and stated that they wanted to prosecute any offenders who damaged or vandalized their property,” the police department said Oct. 13.

“During the planning process, it was recognized that the main priority would be to safeguard individuals from violence. A decision was made not to get directly involved in or interact with the demonstration as it was not our intention to inflame or escalate behaviors during the protest.”

Archbishop Cordileone on Tuesday decried the “mob rule” that led to the statue of the saint being “mindlessly defaced and toppled by a small, violent mob.”

“This kind of behavior has no place in any civilized society. While the police have thankfully arrested five of the perpetrators, what happens next is crucial, for if these are treated as small property crimes, it misses the point: the symbols of our faith are now under attack not only on public property, but now on our own property and even inside of our churches,” Cordileone said Oct. 13.

Cordileone noted that the protest against the statue began peacefully, but soon descended into violence. He encouraged people to learn more about Serra.

“There is no question that the indigenous peoples of our continent suffered under Europeans who came here and their descendants, especially after the mission era ended and California entered into the United States. But Fr. Serra is the wrong symbol of those who wish to address or redress this grievance,” Cordileone contended.

“Fr. Serra and his fellow Franciscans renounced all worldly pursuits to give their lives to serving the native peoples and so protected them from the abuses of their fellow Spaniards.”

A crowd of about 100 people tore down another St. Junípero Serra statue in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park the evening of June 19. Cordileone offered exorcism prayers after that incident.

The exorcism prayer Cordileone offered at Golden Gate Park, the St. Michael Prayer, invokes the intercession of the Archangel Michael against the power of Satan. It is not the same as those exorcism prayers offered by the Church if a person is believed to be the subject of demonic possession.

After rioters pulled down a statue of St. Junipero Serra in Sacramento on July 4, a local Catholic set up a makeshift shrine to Serra on the statue’s empty plinth July 5, and led other Catholics in cleaning graffiti from the site.

The vandalism in San Rafael is the latest in a series of attacks on Churches and Catholic statues across the country this year. On July 11, an arson attack gutted the 249-year-old Mission San Gabriel in Los Angeles, a mission church founded by St. Serra.

Eighty-three percent of Catholic likely voters are concerned about attacks on churches in recent months, according to a poll conducted Aug. 27 – Sept. 1 by RealClear Opinion Research in partnership with EWTN News.
 

 

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Washington, D.C. Newsroom, Jun 24, 2024 / 18:00 pm (CNA).
With Monday marking the second anniversary of the Supreme Court decision that overturned Roe v. Wade, several leading pro-abortion groups have announced plans… […]

CNA Staff, Nov 6, 2023 / 14:40 pm (CNA).

Imagine the scene: The alarm clock starts beeping and it’s 4 a.m. Basketball practice starts in an hour. It’s time for a group of bleary-eyed young men to grab their gear, meet their teammates, and begin a one-mile uphill jog in the middle of New England’s freezing weather to the basketball facility. 

Once inside the gym, the work begins: stretching, sprints, layups, scrimmaging, shooting, defensive posture, all with one goal in mind — winning.

This type of intense training is all in a day’s work for one team of men in Boston.

No, it’s not the Division I team at Boston College, Boston University, or Northeastern University.

Rather, it’s how a team of seminarians at St. John’s Seminary in Boston trains. And their goal of winning is twofold: victory in the spiritual life and a championship trophy at the national tournament for seminaries, which is held once a year.

But what does playing basketball have to do with priestly formation? Well, according to the seminarians who play for the St. John’s Eagles, quite a lot.

A ‘microcosm of the spiritual life’

When 27-year-old Deacon Marcelo Ferrari, the team’s co-captain, first entered seminary, he saw the game as more of an extracurricular activity, “a good opportunity to spend some time with close friends and maybe build some fraternity.” 

“But very quickly it became clear that the basketball team is just a microcosm of the spiritual life,” Ferrari, of Monterrey, Nuevo León, Mexico, said.

Playing the game together imitates the spiritual life in that “you experience a lot of humiliation, especially if you’re not as skilled like me,” said Ferrari, who has more experience in soccer than in basketball.

“But you also just learn a real sense of what sacrifice means,” he said. “Even practice just being at 5 in the morning is enough to demand a lot of the human heart.”

The experience of being on the team aided in Ferrari’s priestly formation in “so many ways,” he said, adding that “it became a critical space for me to recognize especially more of those subtle movements of the heart.”

“There’s nothing like team sports to bring out every part of you,” he said.

An uphill climb

Ferrari had never played organized basketball until he entered St. John’s Seminary. It wasn’t until another seminarian who established the team, now-recently ordained Father Peter Schirripa, asked him to join that he considered it. 

“He saw me playing soccer and was like, ‘Oh, this guy’s mildly athletic. Let’s see if we can get him a basketball and see what he can do,’” Ferrari said. 

This type of recruiting was par for the course for Schirripa, 30, who grew up in Lexington, Massachusetts, and had the idea for the team when he first entered seminary more than six years ago. 

But Schirripa, who had experience in basketball, track and field, and soccer, credits the founder of the media apostle Word on Fire, Bishop Robert Barron, with the conception of the idea. 

Schirripa was visiting his alma mater St. Anselm College during its 2017 graduation ceremony, the spring before his entrance to seminary, when he met Barron, who was giving the commencement address. Barron mentioned to him that there was a national basketball tournament for seminaries and encouraged Schirripa to put together a team from St. John’s.

So, Schirripa brought the idea to his superiors at the seminary and got a green light to start building a team for the national tournament. 

“The leadership was like, ‘Sure, you can do it if you can pull it off.’ But I was a first pre-theologian. I’d been there for, like, three weeks,” Schirripa said.

“And let’s just say there was not a robust athletic or even really communal culture at St. John’s at the time. And so trying to inspire guys to do this and play on the team, it was like I was just taking whatever warm body I could get,” he said. 

Eventually, enough seminarians wanted in, and Schirripa’s idea came to fruition, which culminated in St. John’s taking a squad of 15 guys to the national tournament at Mundelein Seminary in Mundelein, Illinois, and winning two games in 2018.

“We went out to it and we won two games, which is crazy because we were so bad,” he said.

He noted that the games were livestreamed and their brother seminarians were watching. 

“The whole common room was watching it and I think people couldn’t believe that we did it,” he said.

“And the rest,” Schirripa said, “is history.”

St. John’s has been sending a team to the national tournament ever since. The best they’ve done is third place in a tournament that typically consists of between 12 and 16 teams.

The future of the church

Part of St. John’s success can be attributed to their volunteer coach, Patrick Nee, 44, a practicing Catholic in the greater Boston area who was a Division I basketball player at Brown University in the 1990s.

Nee had coached on the high school level, on travel teams, and even on his young children’s teams, but what made this coaching experience different was the “shock” of being immersed in seminary culture. 

“It’s not an experience like I’d ever had before, just being in a gym with 15 seminarians, being on a bus or being on a plane with them and just realizing how good it was,” he said. “And these guys are really holy guys that are just terrific. Getting to know them all, it has just been really inspiring for me.”

Nee, a high school state champion from St. Raphael Academy in Pawtucket, Rhode Island, said that he stopped practicing his Catholic faith during his college years and didn’t come back to it until his late 20s. 

He said that when he returned to the Church it took him on “a journey.” And over the last five years, that journey has “intensified” even more, he said, adding that “this experience has played a role in that.”

Nee said that it’s overwhelming “in the best way” when he is at the tournaments and “every guy you meet is this on-fire guy who’s studying to be a priest.”

One of those men on fire for the faith is Brian Daley, a member of the St. John’s team, Ferrari said. He recalled an incident at practice one day when a newer seminarian began to indulge in “light mockery” of the other teams they would be playing in the tournament. 

Ferrari said that Daley reminded his teammate: “No, these men that we’ll be competing against are all giving their lives for Christ and they’re great examples for us.”

Ferrari called it a moment of “deep fraternity” for the team, who were all inspired by the wisdom Daley shared. 

The deacon also said that as a team that fire is seen at every practice through prayer. 

At every practice, each player is handed a sheet of prayer intentions to offer up their labor on the court so that all of their work is “done with an eye that sacrifice is fruitful.”

Seeing all of the hard work the teams put in for one weekend showed Nee that they care a lot about winning, “but they never lose track of the bigger picture.”

He said that being a part of the team has strengthened his faith and added that the whole experience inspired him to tell Schirripa that “we need to share this with people.”

“I wish other people could see this. I mean, if you know anyone who is negative about the future of the Church, it’s like, well, walk into this gym for five minutes and you’ll change your mind immediately,” he said.

Nee’s vision for sharing the experience with others became a reality five months ago when St. John’s Seminary released “Souls in the Game,” a documentary that “highlights priestly formation beyond the study of philosophy and theology.”

The 28-minute documentary follows the team’s journey from the early morning practices to the recruiting and training of the seminarians to the final tournament.

“There is no pressure at all. Go out and play. We have brought life to St. John’s Seminary. God has used this team and let’s go out there and show everyone that we love each other, we love our vocations, and we’re going to represent St. John’s,” Schirripa says to his team during a pregame speech in the documentary.

Viewers might be surprised by how competitive the games are, especially in the scene where 6-foot-4 Schirripa is shown slamming it down during the tournament, which resulted in a technical foul for the team.

Despite the penalty, the team was roaring with excitement at Schirripa’s slam dunk, a feat that not many players ever get to experience on a 10-foot hoop.

“We were ready to storm the court,” Ferrari said in excitement in the documentary. 

That documentary can be seen below.

Physical exercise such as can be had playing on a basketball team is something that every seminary should “absolutely” have, Schirripa said. 

“I think it’s absolutely essential because you need a physical outlet and you need to obviously have a healthy body, mind, and soul. But it also teaches you to work towards something that’s bigger than yourself, which ultimately is the apostolate,” he said.

“And so it’s such a great venue for formation,” he said.

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