Managua, Nicaragua, Dec 7, 2018 / 05:59 pm (ACI Prensa).- Father Mario Guevara was injured in an acid attack Wednesday while hearing confessions in the cathedral of Managua.
Elis Leonidovna Gonn, a 24 year old Russian citizen, threw sulfuric acid on the 59 year old priest Dec. 5.
Fr. Guevara was taken to hospital to be treated for severe burns to his face, arms, and shoulders.
The Archdiocese of Managua has said the priest is now in stable condition, has been discharged, and will continue his treatment at home.
“We deplore this act because we priests are there to provide a service and this pains us very much: that they would attack a priest in this way because they attacked his health,” Cardinal Leopoldo Brenes of Managua told the media.
The Auxiliary Bishop of Mangua, Silvio Báez, deplored the attack and expressed his solidarity with Fr. Guevara. “I accompany him with my love as a brother and I offer my prayers for his complete recovery. Jesus and his Most Holy Mother protect our priests!” the prelate wrote on Twitter.
The attack comes amid tension between the Church in Nicaragua and the country’s government.
Protests against president Daniel Ortega which began April 18 have resulted in more than 300 deaths, according to local human rights groups. The country’s bishops have mediated on-again, off-again peace talks between the government and opposition groups.
The Church in Nicaragua was quick to acknowledge the protesters’ complaints, which quickly turned to Ortega’s authoritarian bent.
Ortega has been president of Nicaragua since 2007, and oversaw the abolition of presidential term limits in 2014.
The Church has suggested that elections, which are not scheduled until 2021, be held in 2019, but Ortega has ruled this out.
Ortega was a leader in the Sandinista National Liberation Front, which had ousted the Somoza dictatorship in 1979 and fought US-backed right-wing counterrevolutionaries during the 1980s. Ortega was also leader of Nicaragua from 1979 to 1990.
This article was originally published by our sister agency, ACI Prensa. It has been translated and adapted by CNA.
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Cuban Catholics process with a statute of St. James on July 25, 2022, the saint’s feast day, in Santiago de Cuba, Cuba. / Facebook page of Archdiocese of Santiago de Cuba
Denver Newsroom, Jul 29, 2022 / 03:46 am (CNA).
A large number of Catholics from the Archdiocese of Santiago de Cuba participated in a procession July 25 to celebrate the feast of their patron, St. James the Apostle.
The special event also commemorated the 507th anniversary of the founding of Santiago (St. James) de Cuba.
Archbishop Dionisio García Ibáñez, who was joined by almost all the archdiocese’s clergy, celebrated a Mass the same day in the Basilica Cathedral of Our Lady of the Assumption. “Teenagers from various parishes in the city” helped organize the Mass, the archdiocese noted on its website.
In his homily, García recalled the time when the Spanish founded the city and placed it under the patronage of St. James.
“They came with two desires: the desire for wealth, and for power, but also to spread the faith,” he said. “May that desire for power disappear in us, and may what remains be the desire for justice, for good, for fidelity, for the love of God, for being witnesses of Christ in the midst of difficulties,” he said.
In addition, the prelate recalled the example of the city’s patron and asked Cuban Catholics to imitate “his strength and decision” to evangelize and bring hope to the archdiocese and the entire island of Cuba, especially during difficult times.
“In the midst of difficulties we have to give hope, and hope is only achieved, not in human promises that you know well may or may not be achieved, but in Christ Jesus,” he said.
Jesus Christ “will be with us and guides us in the midst of joy and turbulence. He is leading us to encounter him,” he added. If all Cubans followed the example of the saint, the city “would be a beautiful place in justice, in charity, in peace.”
García encouraged prayer for the Cuban people, “to be more faithful every day” and especially for their political authorities.
“We have to pray for our city, for the authorities so that they always seek the good of the citizens, respecting their rights, their freedom, and their desire for progress, their work, that their decisions may be just in order to seek the good of all citizens,” he said.
After the Mass, the participants processed with the cathedral’s statue of St. James to the atrium of the church where the prelate blessed the city of Santiago de Cuba.
In mid-July, Father Bladimir Navarro, who resides in Spain, told the pontifical foundation Aid to the Church in Need (ACN) that the situation in Cuba has worsened “very much” since the historic protests of July 11, 2021, when Cubans from different cities on the island took to the streets to protest the “economic misery” and the fear and repression of freedom that they have suffered for decades.
In Cuba “if you raise your voice and tell the truth, they come after you, they defame you,” Navarro reported. The priest stated that many young people, including minors, who protested “are in jail” and that the sentences in several cases exceed 10 years. “They only asked, ‘We want freedom, we want life; we want to live and we don’t want to (just) survive,’” he said.
On July 17, before the saint’s feast day, Archbishop García asked the Virgin Mary to move the hearts of those responsible for the imprisoned Cubans, so they can be released.
This story was originally published by ACI Prensa, CNA’s Spanish-language news partner. It has been translated and adapted by CNA.
Roger Foley enjoys taste-testing three different kinds of hummus, his favourite food, on the day of a video shoot with Amanda Achtman of the Dying to Meet You project in Canada. The two spoke about Foley’s difficulty accessing quality care for his needs and being offered Medical Assistance in Dying (MAID) “several times.” / Courtesy of Amanda Achtman
CNA Staff, Jun 23, 2024 / 06:00 am (CNA).
Amid ongoing efforts to expand euthanasia in Canada under the name of “medical aid in dying” (MAID), one Ottawa man says he has been offered euthanasia “multiple times” as he struggles with lifelong disabilities and chronic pain from a disease called cerebellar ataxia.
Roger Foley, 49, shared some of his story in a recent video interview with Amanda Achtman of the Dying to Meet You project, which was created to “humanize our conversation on suffering, death, meaning, and hope.” The project seeks to “[restore] our cultural health when it comes to our experiences of death and dying” through speaking engagements and video campaigns.
Roger Foley, a Canadian man with disabilities, says he’s been offered euthanasia “multiple times.”
Listen to him speak out against being devalued as he fights for the support he needs to live. pic.twitter.com/yY8N4NILkS
In the video, the fourth of a series, Foley said he has struggled with subpar medical help in his own home, where he is supposed to be getting quality care. Canada has a nationalized health care system but Foley said that individuals with illnesses are “worked at … not worked with.” He spoke out against being devalued as he fights for the support he needs to live.
In one case, he said, a home worker helped him into his bathtub and then fell asleep in the other room; Foley was left to crawl out of the bathroom on his own. “I reported to the agency, and then he confessed, and the agency, they really didn’t care,” he said.
Asked by Achtman if he has ever been offered euthanasia, Foley said: “Yeah, multiple times.”
“One time, [a doctor] asked me, ‘Do you have any thoughts of self-harm?’ I’m honest with them and tell them I do think about ending my life because of what I’m going through, being prevented from the resources that I need to live safely back at home.”
“From out of nowhere, he just pulls out, ‘Well, if you don’t get self-directing funding, you can always apply for an assisted.’”
Foley said the offers from doctors to help end his life have “completely traumatized me.”
“Now it’s this overlying option where in my situation, when I say I’m suicidal, I’m met with, ‘Well, the hospital has a program to help you with that if you want to end your life.’”
“That didn’t exist before [MAID] was legalized, but now it’s there,” he said. “There is not going to be a second within the rest of my life that I’m not going to have flashbacks to [being offered suicide]. The devaluing of me and all that I am.”
Noting that he’s “not religious,” Foley said: “Saying that it’s just religious persons who oppose euthanasia in society is completely wrong.”
“These people who usually say it, they have an ableist mindset,” he said. “And they look at persons with disabilities and see us as just better off dead and a waste of resources.”
Achtman told CNA there is a need for euthanasia-free health care spaces, not only for protecting the integrity of Catholic institutions but also because many patients — including nonreligious patients like Foley — want to be treated in facilities that do not raise euthanasia with patients.
“Having euthanasia suggested, in a sense, already kills the person. It deflates a person’s sense of confidence that doctors and nurses are going to truly fight for them,” Achtman told CNA. “When euthanasia is suggested ostensibly as one ‘treatment’ option among others, there are all-too-frequently no other real options provided.
She continued: “This is why I always say that a request for euthanasia is not so much an expression of a desire to die as it is an expression of disappointment. Responding to such disappointment with real interventions that are adequate to the person is demanding, but that’s what people deserve. It is wrong to concede or capitulate to a person’s suicidal ideation — instead, every person deserves suicide prevention rather than suicide assistance.”
Roger Foley enjoys taste-testing three different kinds of hummus, his favorite food, on the day of a video shoot with Amanda Achtman of the Dying to Meet You project. The two spoke about Foley’s difficulty accessing quality care for his needs and being offered Medical Assistance in Dying (MAID) “several times.”. Courtesy of Amanda Achtman
Canada has become one of the most permissive countries in the world when it comes to euthanasia. The country first began allowing doctors to help kill terminally ill patients nearing death in 2016; the law was then expanded in 2021 to include patients whose death is not imminent.
In February the country paused a proposal to allow mentally ill individuals access to MAID, with the proposal set to be reconsidered in 2027. Earlier this year, Canadian health researchers alleged that MAID will “save” the Canadian health care system between $34.7 and $136.8 million per year.
A couple in British Columbia is currently suing the provincial government, as well as a Catholic health care provider, after their daughter was denied euthanasia while suffering from a terminal illness. The suit demands that the government remove the religious exemption from the Catholic hospital that protects them from having to offer MAID.
A judge in March, meanwhile, ruled that a woman with autism could be granted her request to die by MAID, overruling efforts by the woman’s father to halt the deadly procedure.
Asked what gives him hope, Foley told Achtman that he aspires one day to “be able to break through [the health care system] and get access to the resources that I need and to live at home with workers who want to work with me and I want to work with them and that we can work as a team.”
“I have a passion to live,” he said. “I don’t want to give up my life.”
Immigrants seeking asylum in the United States wait as they are processed by U.S. Border Patrol agents in the early morning hours after crossing into Arizona from Mexico on May 10, 2023 in Yuma, Arizona. / Credit: Mario Tama/Getty Images
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