Pipe bomb found behind Catholic church in Philadelphia

Baltimore, Md., Nov 14, 2018 / 04:38 pm (CNA/EWTN News).- The bishops of the United States resumed their open-floor discussion on the recent sexual abuse scandals facing the Church in America Wednesday morning. In addition to debating the best means of institutionally responding to the crisis, the specific case of Archbishop Theodore McCarrick was raised by several speakers.

Bishop Richard Stika of Knoxville told the conference Nov. 14 that the allegations against McCarrick, and the scandal of his rise and fall, were not just affecting long-time Catholics. Many people in the process of entering the Church found themselves having the example of McCarrick throw at them by friends and family as evidence that they were entering an institution in crisis.

Stika said McCarrick, and the letters of former nuncio Archbishop Carlo Maria Vigano, were serving as “ammunition” to discourage people from entering the Church, and that many Catholics felt that bishops were only responding to the sexual abuse crisis when they were “forced to” by the media.

Several bishops spoke in favor of the USCCB acting as a body to speak out about McCarrick.

Bishop Michael Olson of Fort Worth told the conference hall that “we end where we begin.”

“So much of the outrage we experience – and I think it’s a rightful outrage – is prompted by the injustice that our people have experienced at the hands of predators, at the treatment of our seminarians and our priests who were entrusted to the care of former cardinal McCarrick, a trust that was not only violated, but was ignored by others who were responsible for paying attention.”

Olson observed that while Pope Francis had accepted McCarrick’s resignation from the college of cardinals and sent him to a life of prayer and penance pending a canonical process, the USCCB had yet to respond as a body to the scandal caused by one of their own.

“He is an emeritus [bishop of a U.S. diocese] and as such he is supposed to be a welcome guest here. He is not welcome and we should say it,” Olson said. He also questioned if the bishops’ reliance on structural and procedural reform was overshadowing their need to act with moral authority.

“We have said the Holy See should let us get some new norms, get a process together. Do we use this process as means of avoiding our pastoral responsibilities?” Olson asked, suggesting that the conference needed to condemn not just McCarrick’s alleged behavior, but also Vigano’s call for the resignation of the pope, which he called an attack on the Petrine office.

Bishop Liam Cary of Baker also insisted that the conference needed to respond to the McCarrick scandal as a body, saying McCarrick had “grievously offended” not just his victims but all Catholics, priests, and bishops.

By abusing seminarians “successively, over decades” Cary said McCarrick had left a “shameful residue” on all the bishops, and that while other institutions had revoked honors previously bestowed on the former cardinal the USCCB had taken no action.

Cary cited the example of bodies, like the U.S. Senate, which could pass resolutions to censure its members as one way they could respond, but insisted that some kind of action was urgently needed.

“What are people to make of our silence?” he asked. “How do we lead our brother to the mercy of God if we leave unspoken the demands of his justice?”

Bishop Cary echoed Bishop Olson’s concern that McCarrick was still technically qualified as a welcome participant at the conference.

“If McCarrick were to come to this microphone would he be allowed to speak?” Cary asked, noting that there was no open microphone for his victims.

In addition to the specific problem of Archbishop McCarrick, the bishops also discussed how they could proceed more generally in the light of the Holy See’s intervention to prevent them from voting to adopt the proposed Standards for Episcopal Conduct or to create an independent special commission to investigate allegations against bishops.

Bishop Kevin Vann of Orange summed up the dilemma facing the conference.

“We cannot just sit back and do nothing,” he told the bishops. If a deliberative vote was not possible, he said, the bishops needed to at least take “some sort of consultative vote” to show that the American bishops were firmly resolved among themselves.

Bishop Robert Christian, auxiliary bishop of San Francisco, expressed the frustrations of many bishops at the inability of the conference to act.

He pointed out that as several scandals broke over the summer “the leadership of this conference was blocked from either working in partnership with the Holy See or leaving it to us in the dioceses.”

Christian said that he was concerned by the Holy See’s intervention. He observed that it could take months for the Vatican to produce a final resolution after the February meeting of the heads of the world’s bishops’ conferences in Rome. This could mean, he said, that the U.S. bishops could find it still “impossible” to act in March, or even June, of next year.

“It is all the more important to vote today as if we were voting on a policy,” he said, so that both the faithful and the Holy See could see the clear mind of the bishops.

Despite the support of many on the conference hall for the original proposal for an independent commission to receive and investigate allegations against bishops, a few bishops have suggested they would prefer to see a different system altogether.

Bishop Gregory Hartmayer of Savannah proposed that Rome should instead be asked to consider amending canon law to give metropolitan archbishops an expanded role and authority for dealing with allegations against bishops in their province. His proposal was echoed by Bishop Robert Coerver of Lubbock.

Hartmayer noted that it might be better for accusations against a bishop to be considered by “a jury of their peers” since, he said, “no one understands a bishop so much as another bishop.”

He also said that bishops owed each other the “courtesy” of listening “to one of our brothers who has misbehaved in some way.”

While the majority of the interventions from the floor were concerned with what direct action the conference could take, others were more reflective.

Bishop Barry Knestout of Richmond gave a long and clearly personal reflection on the pain experienced by priests and laity alike in his former diocese, Washington.

Knestout said that he looked upon the current scandals on a continuum of previous crises, stretching back 50 years to the promulgation of Humanae vitae, saying that the rejection by many clergy of that document, and the Church’s teaching on the dignity of human life and sexuality, had caused “one long crisis of leadership and teaching” in the Church.

Despite the clear and forceful calls by several bishops for some clear statement on the case of Archbishop McCarrick, when the bishops resumed their seats after breaking for lunch they voted down a resolution to “encourage” the Holy See to release whatever documents it could on McCarrick.

As they debated the minutiae of the resolution’s wording, the bishops found they could not even agree on the inclusion of the word “soon.”

After the defeat of the proposal, one bishop remarked to CNA that “we cannot seem to speak clearly, even when we want to agree.”

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Bishop Stephen Chow of Hong Kong. / Credit: Chinese Province of the Society of Jesus

CNA Staff, Jun 4, 2024 / 14:22 pm (CNA).
Cardinal Stephen Chow Sau-yan of Hong Kong, marking the 35th anniversary of the infamous Tiananmen Square massacre in … […]

The sisters Madeleine and Marie-Liesse together with Louis Antona at the entrance of Greece. The three young people covered the distance from Paris to Jerusalem on foot, arriving in mid-May 2024. “I needed to walk 4,500 kilometers to understand that Jesus is not just in Jerusalem, but was by my side every step of the way,” Antona told CNA. / Credit: Photo courtesy of French pilgrims Madeleine and Marie-Liesse

Jerusalem, Jun 18, 2024 / 06:00 am (CNA).

On Sept. 17, 2023, two sisters left Paris and walked for approximately eight months to Jerusalem. Madeleine and Marie-Liesse, 19 and 22, who grew up in a Catholic family, decided to become pilgrims to grow in their faith. 

“We needed to make the faith our own,” they told CNA. “This pilgrimage was to discover God, to truly search for him and deepen our faith. We learned that we can trust God; he takes care of us in everything. The Gospel is not a joke.”

Two months later, in mid-November 2023, Louis Antona, 24, also left Paris on foot, bound for Jerusalem. The three young people met providentially in Albania, walked together through Turkey, then parted ways and reunited in Jerusalem. They shared the story of their pilgrimage with CNA.

“I needed to walk 4,500 kilometers to understand that Jesus is not just in Jerusalem but was by my side every step of the way,” Antona told CNA. He walked a total of 189 days and arrived in Jerusalem on May 18.

Madeleine and Marie-Liesse — who asked that their last name not be used to protect their privacy — left from the Basilica of the Sacred Heart of Montmartre in the center of Paris with the blessing of their parents and a priest.

“It was a calling from God,” Madeleine said of the decision she and her sister made to leave. “There’s no need for reasons when God calls; you simply need to follow what he tells you.” 

The sisters created a simple blog to keep friends and family updated on their pilgrimage. The photos and brief stories reveal all the freshness of two young people on a journey while not hiding moments of doubt and difficulty.

“We chose to embark on this journey as beggars,” Marie-Liesse told CNA. “We left with just a few clothes and nothing else — no food, no money. We wanted to surrender ourselves into the hands of providence. Every evening, we knocked on people’s doors asking for shelter, a bed, and food. The Lord always provided.”

Their days were marked by walking and prayer. 

“We didn’t have a strict rule because we had to adapt every day to the people who hosted us, the place, and the situation,” Marie-Liesse explained. “But we had a framework: We knew we had to pray in the morning, at midday, at night… It was important for us to be faithful to God. Every day, we also recited a rosary, praying for the intentions entrusted to us.”

The most challenging moment was making the decision to continue the journey after hearing that war had broken out in the Holy Land. “We were in Germany and full of doubts about whether to go on.”

Their journey led them to cross Switzerland, Germany, Austria, Slovenia, and Croatia. In Croatia, “the faith of the people struck us: during Advent, tradition dictates that Mass be attended every morning at 6, and every time we went, the church was packed with people,” the sisters wrote on their blog.

They stopped for a month in Medjugorje (Bosnia and Herzegovina), where their family joined them for Christmas. 

“It was a difficult time. Again, we didn’t know what to do. But after a period of discernment, we realized that Christ was calling us back on the road again,” Madeleine said.

Madeleine and Marie-Liesse crossed Montenegro and arrived in Albania, where they encountered Antona.

“I had just finished my studies and wanted to offer something to God,” Antona told CNA. “I wasn’t sure what, but I thought that the best thing I had at that time was time itself. So, I decided to offer God a year of my life by embarking on a journey. It was a challenge; I wasn’t sure if I would enjoy walking and being alone.”

Antona decided to leave, despite the war. “I believe the hardest part of a pilgrimage like this is deciding to start. I knew that if I gave up because of the war, I would never do it again. Anyway, I thought that by the time I arrived, the war would already be over.”

Madeleine and Marie-Liesse are filled with wonder at the manifestation of providence in every detail of their pilgrimage, in the beautiful weather and in the rain, in every small encounter — those who hosted them after seeing them at the bus stop, those who taught them how to make bread, the gentleman who opened his door just before a downpour. “If we had arrived a minute later, we wouldn’t have met him,” they said.

The encounter with Antona wasn’t coincidental either. The two sisters had prayed to God to give them a travel companion.

“We planned to not go through Turkey because we were two women alone, but we would have liked to go that way. So we asked God to meet one pilgrim, and we met him,” the sisters explained. 

The three crossed Macedonia and Greece, arriving in Turkey on Palm Sunday. In this predominantly Muslim country, they celebrated Easter, warmly welcomed by the small French-speaking community there.

“Every day of this pilgrimage was a miracle,” Antona said. “Every day we have met people who smiled or were nice to us. I have to say that in Turkey we found the most welcoming people.”

“It is not uncommon for the Turks to spontaneously lend us a hand,” Madeleine and Marie-Liesse wrote on their blog. “In Turkey, we encountered an infinite respect for passing strangers and for Christianity, even though Christians here are forced to protect themselves from regular attacks.”

Upon leaving Turkey, the paths of the three pilgrims split again. The sisters’ route went through Cyprus but they could not find a way from there to Jerusalem by sea due to suspension of transportation because of the war. Providentially, they met someone in Cyprus who offered to pay for airfare, and the sisters arrived in Tel Aviv on May 6. Three days later, on the feast of the Ascension, they were in Jerusalem.

“Many times, we thought we couldn’t reach Jerusalem,” Madeleine said. “We learned that the journey is even more important than reaching the goal. Being here is a great gift, just to be here.”

“We unpacked our bags once and for all, knelt before this Holy Land, and prayed. What peace, what a moment of grace! As we admired the sunrise and the golden light that brought color to the roofs of the old city, we could reread the wonders of God and meditate on the Gospels. His infinite love overwhelmed us,” the two sisters wrote on their blog.

Madeleine has no doubts: “Prayer is what carried us. When you’re weak, that’s when you’re strongest because that’s when God can act in you; you don’t take up all the space. Trusting in God can be challenging, but when you understand that God only wants you to be happy and will give you everything you need, then you realize you have everything to be happy in this moment; you can trust him.”

Ten days later, on the eve of Pentecost, Antona also arrived in Jerusalem. “Even if I had to stop somewhere else, at least I would have aimed to reach Jerusalem. This is a very important city for Christians, but the journey you take to reach it is also very important.”

The three pilgrims are still in the Holy Land. They have had the opportunity to participate in various celebrations and to visit the holy places in addition to many other sites in the area.

“The greatest gift is to be here and understand what happened here, to see with our own eyes, to witness the actual places,” Madeleine said. “We were able to pause in every place, to pray and meditate in silence.”

A journey like this isn’t for everyone, but all three of the pilgrims agree that “if God calls you, go in peace. If God helps you, everything becomes possible.” 

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