U.S. Catholic bishops observe Martin Luther King Jr. Day

Denver Newsroom, Nov 27, 2020 / 04:00 am (CNA).-  

During the U.S. bishops’ meeting last week, Bishop Jaime Soto of Sacramento said his diocese had hosted a one-man play honoring the first African-American slave to become a Catholic priest, as part of its efforts to address racism.

The play is “Tolton: From Slave to Priest,” the work of St. Luke Productions. It has been performed in front of thousands of people since it was released three years ago.

Leonardo Defilippis, director and president of St. Luke Production, told CNA that the witness of Fr. Agustus Tolton is important at a moment of racial division, especially Tolton gives witness to Christian unity beyond racial barriers.

“We’re the only show in the whole country and it’s the only instrument like it in the Catholic Church,” he told CNA. “It’s so powerful. [It helps] you realize all men are created equal.”

Fr. Tolton is played by James Coleman – a television and film actor of almost 30 years. During the show, Tolton engages with memories of his past, meeting his mother, his friends and enemies, and the devil himself.

Since it opened in 2017, the play has been performed over 200 times at Catholic venues across the United States. The goal of the play is to bear witness to a holy man who confronts hatred and segregation with charity, said Defilippis.

He said this show provides the best example of a persecuted person who encountered trials with compassion and faith. Rather than with violence or revenge, Tolton responded to racial hatred with the virtues of a saint, Defilippis added.

Speaking of facing injustice, Defilippis said that “saints have a way of showing you how to do it.”

“You have to do it through love. You have to do it through forgiveness. You have to have faith. You have to have hope. That’s what leads us to that oneness, that unity.”

Tolton was born into slavery in Monroe County, Missouri, in 1854. During the Civil War, Tolton and his family escaped slavery.

He entered St. Peter’s Catholic School in Quincy, Illinois, when he was young. The school’s pastor, Fr. Peter McGirr eventually baptized Tolton, instructed him for his first Holy Communion, and recognized his vocation to the priesthood.

Tolton studied for the priesthood in Rome because no American seminary would accept an African-American student. When he returned to the U.S. after his ordination in 1889, he was greeted by thousands of people. A brass band played hymns, and black and white people processed together into the local church.

Tolton served for three years at a parish in Quincy before moving to Chicago to start a parish for black Catholics, St. Monica’s, where he remained until his death in 1897.

Coleman has performed as Tolton for the past two years. He said he was reluctant to audition at first because he was not interested in theater roles. But he said he’s glad for the experience.

“The experience of doing a true story [about] someone’s life and actually using the words that he said, … I started to take on a lot of the things that he experienced … I always pray before every show in rehearsal to allow Fr. Tolton to tell his story,” he told CNA.

Coleman expressed hope that the play might be a catalyst for racial healing. He said the show pushes the audience to see past the color of a person’s skin, and to see the unity of the human race.

“The goal of this show is to let people know that we are all one in the spirit, we are all one in Christ. Racism is a divide to the human family … In order to heal that divide, we have to heal our hearts as well as our minds of racism,” he said.

“It lets you know that in order for us to achieve, it’s not going to always be the people of the same race. It takes all of us to create greatness. It takes all of us to succeed.”

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Baltimore, Md., Nov 13, 2017 / 02:30 pm (CNA/EWTN News).- As the conclusion of a lengthy discussion on migration, the US Conference of Catholic Bishops decided Monday to draft a statement from their president expressing the need for humane and just immigration reform.

The Nov. 13 proposal was first floated by Archbishop Michael Sheehan, Archbishop Emeritus of Santa Fe. After debating how to go about preparing a statement, it was agreed by oral assent that Cardinal Daniel DiNardo of Galveston-Houston, president of the conference, would issue a statement with the assistance of the Committee on Migration, chaired by Bishop Joe Vasquez of Austin, assisted by Archbishop Jose Gomez of Los Angeles.

The discussion followed brief presentations from Archbishop Gomez and Bishop Vasquez. The Los Angeles archbishop outlined the principles which guide the US bishops’ work on migration, which come from Strangers No Longer, a 2003 pastoral letter issued jointly by the US and Mexican bishops’ conferences.

“This is a time when newcomers [to the US] are fleeing violence or persecution or cannot find a livelihood in their own country,” he reflected, adding that the Trump administration has taken several steps on immigration that demand a response from the Church because they “have a direct impact on our pastoral care of immigrants, refugees, and DACA youth.”

The first of these is the decision to allow only 45,000 refugees in the coming fiscal year – the lowest level since the program’s founding in 1980, and the second consecutive year in which the number of refugees admitted will be reduced.

This move, Archbishop Gomez said, “is simply inhumane, particularly when our great nation has the resources and ability to do more” for those “fleeing tyranny and persecution.”

He urged the preservation of DACA, which provides reprieve from the threat of deportation for undocumented persons who were brought to the US as minors, many of whom only know the US “and are by every social measure, American youth.”

Bishop Vasquez then spoke, saying the bishops are advocating for a solution for the DACA youth in the form of the DREAM Act, which would provide those young people with residency in the US.

He encouraged the bishops to contact their legislators to pass the DREAM Act or similar legislation as a prompt and humane solution, noting that 85 percent of Dreamers have lived in the US 10 years or longer, 89 percent have gainful employment, and 93 percent have a high school degree.

The Bishop of Austin also addressed temporary protected status, which has been extended to migrants from El Salvador, Honduras, and Haiti because of acute conditions of insecurity in their home countries.

“It is not the proper time to return 300,000 individuals” to their home countries when they remain insecure due to natural and manmade disasters, he said. These individuals have jobs and support their families, many have mortgages, and they have some 270,000 children who are US citizens.

“ A longer term legislative solution for these brothers and sisters” is necessary, he said.

The US bishops’ “vigourous opposition” to many of the administration’s actions on immigration has been taken because the Gospels “compel us to do so,” Bishop Vasquez stated.

“ Along with the right choices on refugee resettlement, DACA, and TPS, we also need comprehensive immigration reform,” he added, saying there is a need for a path to legalization and citizenship, acknowledging at the same time that “our country also has the right, and the responsibility, to secure its borders.”

Responding to the migration committee’s presentation, Bishop Jaime Soto of Sacramento maintained that “the existence of the TPS population is in a certain sense a condemnation of the inability of Congress and administrations over the past 21 years to provide comprehensive immigration reform,” saying that having held them “in this holding pattern for decades is unconscionable.”

Archbishop Gomez stated that “all of us have to have a conversion, and that’s why it’s so important to talk about this, because people don’t know what the Church teaches,” which echoed comments made by Cardinal Blase Cupich of Chicago.

The Chicago archbishop had lamented the “the poisoning rhetoric that is degrading of immigrants, and even demonizing of them,” which “is having an effect on our own people, because they pick up that language … there’s something wrong in our churches when the gospel is proclaimed but people leave parishes with that rhetoric still in their hearts.”

Archbishop Gomez commented that “it’s important for us to call people to conversion, and explain to them what is it we teach; it’s so essential for the future of our country.”

Bishop Vasquez reiterated the importance of conveying the Church’s teaching, and also of fostering personal encounters with immigrants or refugees. “Once you do that you understand the situation of persons … just like us, therefore we empathize and are in solidarity with them; that’s what brings conversion and change of mind.”

Bishop Oscar Cantu of Las Cruces raised the question of how to counter charges that immigration policy is a matter of prudential judgement, and that the faithful may therefore in good conscience come to a judgement which differs from that of the bishops.

Bishop Thomas Wenski of Miami responded that “we’re making our prudential judgement, too … in the light of Catholic teaching.” He emphasized that “immigrants are not problems, but brothers and sisters; strangers, but strangers who should be embraced as brothers and sisters. We’re offering what we think is best, not only for the immigrants, but for our society as a whole. We can make America great, but you don’t make America great by making America mean.”

Immigration reform, he maintained, must “include the common good of everyone: Americans and those who wish to be Americans.”

Bishop Soto responded that deportations do not fall under the category of prudential judgement, but rather were included by St. John Paul II in his 1995 encyclical Evangelium vitae among the sins which cry out to heaven, and so is not merely “consistent with Church teaching,” but “to discard it as a prudential judgement doesn’t reflect our tradition.”

Archbishop Salvatore Cordileone of San Francisco recommended the five principles from Strangers No Longer as a sine qua non, on which “there can be no disagreement” among Catholics. “While there’s room for prudential judgement, it’s not something that can be taken lightly” because it “involves such basic considerations of justice.”

[…]

Denver Newsroom, Feb 8, 2021 / 08:01 pm (CNA).- The US bishops’ conference last week decreed that in the translation of the conclusion of collects in the Roman Missal, “one” is to be omitted before “God”. The conclusions will now read “God, for ever and ever”.

The decision follows a letter sent in May 2020 to Anglophone episcopal conferences by Robert Cardinal Sarah, prefect of the Congregation for Divine Worship, addressing a concern about the English translation.

A Feb. 4 note from the USCCB’s Committee on Divine Worship said the correction will take effect in the dioceses of the US from Feb. 17, Ash Wednesday.

Until now, in the conclusions to collects the Latin words “Deus, per omnia sæcula sæculorum” had been rendered in English as “one God, for ever and ever”.

The committee’s note said that Cardinal Sarah had observed that “there is no mention of ‘one’ in the Latin, and ‘Deus’ in the Latin text refers to Christ … The Cardinal Prefect has pointed out the importance of affirming this Christological truth amid the religious pluralism of today’s world.”

The note added that English hand missals that preceded Vatican II “reflected the corrected translation … however, when the post-conciliar texts were published in English, the word ‘one’ was added.”

The English-Latin Sacramentary, a missal published in 1966 during the period of transition from the Traditional Latin Mass to the Novus Ordo, omitted the word ‘one’ in the conclusion of collects. The English translation found in The English-Latin Sacramentary was copyrighted by P. J. Kennedy & Sons, and had been approved by the National Conference of Bishops Sept. 3, 1965.

The USCCB committee wrote in its Feb. 4 note that it “should be noted that when the translation of the Missal currently in use was in progress, ICEL pointed out the discrepancy to the Congregation in Rome, but was told to retain the use of ‘one God’ in the new translation.”

The note said that the Latin rite bishops of the US have voted to amend the country’s version of the General Instruction of the Roman Missal to reflect the change, and that it has been confirmed by the CDW.

The most common formula, used when a collect is addressed to the Father, will read: “Through our Lord Jesus Christ your Son, who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, God, for ever and ever.”

The change is in harmony with the bishops’ conferences of England and Wales, Scotland, and Ireland, as well other English-speaking territories.

The same change was effected by the English and Welsh bishops, beginning Nov. 29, 2020.

The decree of the English and Welsh bishops’ conference said that “The addition of ‘one’ before ‘God’ in the conclusion of the Collects could be construed as mistaken and problematic. ‘Deus’ here refers to the earlier mention of ‘the Son’ and is a Christological, anti-Arian affirmation, and not directly Trinitarian in this context.”

The addition of “one” before “God” “could serve to undermine the statement of the unique dignity of the Son within the Trinity”, or “could be interpreted as saying that Jesus is ‘one God,’” an explanatory note to the English and Welsh decree stated.

“Either or both of these interpretations is injurious to the faith of the Church.”

Continuing, the note said that “one” “risks suggesting that Jesus became a god independent of the Blessed Trinity and is one god among many … what we pray needs to express what the Church believes, requiring that, in liturgical formulae, we uphold the doctrine of the Blessed Trinity.”

The Trinitarian doxology that concludes the collects “emphasises the divinity of Our Lord Jesus Christ, the Second Person of the Blessed Trinity, who as the Incarnate Son, intercedes on our behalf to the Father … thus, the Son’s role of priestly mediation is made clear.”

The explanatory note says the phrase was adopted in the fourth century “as a means to combat the Arian heresy,” which held that Jesus Christ became God, rather than having been God eternally.

Moreover, the note adds, “one” is not used in the translations of the conclusion in French, German, Italian, Spanish, or Portuguese: “The English translation has, therefore, diverged from those of other major language groups.”

The English and Welsh bishops’ explanatory note said that “since the addition of the word ‘one’” could obscure prayer and thus belief, the Congregation for Divine Worship “has ruled it should no longer be used in the translation of these texts into English.”

The USCCB has been approving new translations of components of the Liturgy of the Hours, a new translation of the Roman Missal having been adopted in 2011.

At its 2019 fall general assembly, the conference voted overwhelmingly to approve the ICEL grey book translation of the hymns of the Liturgy of the Hours.

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