Denver Newsroom, Aug 10, 2020 / 04:34 pm (CNA).- An Argentine bishop said Friday the seminary in his diocese was ordered closed last month by a decision of the Vatican’s Congregation for Clergy, after a controversy surrounding the reception of the Eucharist during the coronavirus pandemic.
Bishop Eduardo Maria Taussig of San Rafael said Aug. 7 that the Santa Maria Madre de Dios Seminary in Mendoza, Argentina was ordered to close in December, at the conclusion of the academic year, by the Congregation for Clergy, and not the Diocese of San Rafael.
“The decision took me by surprise, but it is a directive that comes directly from the Holy See,” Taussig said.
The bishop said the decision to close the seminary was deeply upsetting, and he has since been discussing with the Vatican where the former students of the school will be sent to in order to continue their studies.
Each seminary transfer will be made on an individualized basis, Taussig said to local media on Friday.
“We are going to discern for each [seminarian] and decide the most appropriate school and timeline for their transfer. Some will go to Mendoza, to San Juan. We will see these changes in the coming weeks.”
As many offices in Rome are closed during the month of August, those talks will continue in early September, said Taussig.
Taussig said that the Vatican’s decision to close the seminary was made in early July, in a move that took him by surprise.
The bishop said that the Congregation for the Clergy informed him that due to the trouble the seminary had maintaining a rector–having had seven in the past 15 years–it did not seem worth it to keep the seminary open.
Taussig said that he spoke for an hour with Cardinal Stella, and on July 8 he received a letter from the Congregation for the Clergy which stated “the need to close the diocesan Seminary at the end of the academic semester.”
“As a bishop, I know that when Rome has spoken, the discussion is over.”
“We bishops make a promise of fidelity and obedience to the Holy Father,” said Taussig, adding that the Vatican has many perspectives to consider when making decisions, and that these decisions were made in light of similar situations around the world.
The diocese announced the closure July 25, and the bishop noted at that time “difficulties that the diocese is going through were taken into consideration, in the context of the measures related to COVID-19 prevention, and the reluctance or lack of obedience to the provisions that had been established.”
A large number of the priests in San Rafael have not complied with COVID-19 directives regarding the distribution of communion in the hand, among them many former students of the Santa Maria Madre de Dios seminary, which has been seen by some to be behind the priest’s “reluctance” to require communion in the hand, the bishop said.
This refusal to comply had caused “serious scandal inside and outside the seminary and diocese,” said Taussig.
Taussig said that reception of the Eucharist in the hand or on the tongue are both equally accepted by the Church.
A version of this story was first published by ACI Prensa, CNA’s Spanish-language news partner. It has been translated and adapted by CNA.
If you value the news and views Catholic World Report provides, please consider donating to support our efforts. Your contribution will help us continue to make CWR available to all readers worldwide for free, without a subscription. Thank you for your generosity!
Click here for more information on donating to CWR. Click here to sign up for our newsletter.
Mexico City, Mexico, Dec 12, 2019 / 04:00 am (CNA).- In the 500 years since Our Lady of Guadalupe appeared, the image of Our Lady has become the subject of several popular myths and legends, especially in Mexico, where she appeared.
Fr. Eduardo Chávez was the postulator for Juan Diego’s canonization and is a renowned expert on the apparitions. He is also director of the Institute for Guadalupan Studies.
Speaking to ACI Prensa, CNA’s Spanish language news partner, Chávez separated fact from fiction.
Is it true the image of Our Lady of Guadalupe has the same temperature as a human body?
“It’s logical that marble, stone, wood, and fabric have different temperatures,” he said. The image of the Virgin is formed on “a cloth made out of plant fibers, an agave called ‘ixotl.’ And it doesn’t have a temperature like a human being would have,” he said, dispelling a common rumor about the image.
Was the image painted or fabricated by human hands?
Chávez said the idea that the image was painted by human hands is “simply and plainly impossible,” because among other important details, St. Juan Diego’s tilma “doesn’t even have any brushstrokes on it.”
“It’s imprinted on there, it’s a print as such,” he noted.
Chávez also pointed to the miraculous nature of the image, asking “how is it possible for it to have lasted despite the fact that acid was accidentally spilled on it in 1784? How is it possible that after a bomb was set off underneath it on November 14, 1921, that nothing happened to it?”
Do the Virgin’s eyes move?
The priest said that on social media “people are saying that if you shine a strong light, the eyes dilate and things like that. No such thing. They don’t move, they don’t dilate.”
Chávez explained that “they’re misinterpreting something that an ophthalmologist, Enrique Graue, noted, namely that the eyes seem to be human, in the sense that they look like a photo of a human being, with the depth and reflection of a human eye.”
Does the Virgin of Guadalupe “float” on the mantilla?
Chávez was blunt: “The image doesn’t float,” rather “it’s imprinted on the tilma.”
“Nor are there two or three images placed one on top of the other,” as some claim, he explained.
Is Our Lady of Guadalupe a Catholic adaptation of an Aztec goddess?
Some scholars have promoted the idea that the Virgin of Guadalupe is a Catholic adaptation of the Aztec goddess, Coatlicue Tonantzin, who is a combination of a woman and serpents, and a symbol of fertility.
However, Chávez said that Our Lady of Guadalupe is not an adaptation of a goddess, and has nothing to do with idolatry.
“She’s not called Coatlicue, which would be idolatry, she’s called Tonantzin which isn’t any kind of idolatry, but means ‘our venerable mother,’ and as the indigenous affectionately say, ‘our dearest mother.’ It’s a title, it’s not idolatry.”
“The missionaries of the 16th century would never have made up a costume for a pagan goddess. That’s completely false,” he underscored.
Is there music hidden in the image of the Virgin of Guadalupe?
Based on mathematical analysis, Mexican accountant Fernando Ojeda discovered music embedded in the image of Our Lady of Guadalupe, Chávez explained.
Viewing the flowers and stars in the image of the Virgin as if they were musical notes, Ojeda outlined found a melody.
Chávez said that analysts repeated the experiment with copies of paintings from the 16th and 17th centuries, “where stars and flowers are placed at the painter’s discretion”, but the only thing they produced was “noise, not harmony.”
“Only with the original does a perfect harmony emerge, with a symphonic arrangement. It is true, music comes forth from the image of the Virgin of Guadalupe,” he affirmed.
Was there recently a light miraculously projected on the womb of the Virgin of Guadalupe?
For Chávez, “it’s hard to know if it was a miracle at that time because we don’t know if it was a ray of light that happened to hit upon one of the nearby metal objects, projecting a light on her womb.”
“What we do know is that she is the defender of life,” he said, and pointed to “the simple fact that she has a dark ribbon over the womb, which means she’s pregnant and that therefore Jesus Christ Our Lord is in her immaculate womb.”
Can words be seen on the image of the Virgin of Guadalupe?
Responding to those who say they can see the word “peace,” on the image, Chávez said “I don’t see that anywhere.”
“She communicates with glyphs as the indigenous did. And when it was by words she spoke in Náhuatl through Juan Diego who later translated,” he said.
Did Bishop Juan de Zumárraga mistreat Saint Juan Diego?
“The key, everything turns on the bishop,” he said, since “although the Virgin of Guadalupe chose a layman, spoke to a layman, expressed her message to a layman,” the shrine she asked for “was not going to be done without the authority of the bishop.”
Chávez said it was instead the servants who treated Saint Juan Diego badly when he went to see Bishop Juan de Zumárraga, “it was the servants who left him outside.”
The Franciscan bishops “never treated him badly, on the contrary, he treated him with affection” as well as with “a lot of respect, and much dignity,” Chávez said.
This story was originally published by ACI Prensa, CNA’s Spanish language news partner. It has been translated and adapted by CNA.
Santiago, Chile, Dec 17, 2018 / 10:53 am (ACI Prensa).- A Chilean court has ruled that private healthcare facilities may conscientiously object to abortions, declaring unconstitutional a law that had gone into effect in October.
Members of the Sts’ailes First Nation at Holy Rosary Cathedral last year for the first Mass to integrate a First Nation language. A Cardus report presents the voices of Indigenous Canadians speaking about their faith and distinguishing it from the traditional spirituality they’re often associated with. / Photo courtesy Nicholas Elbers, 2022
Vancouver, Canada, May 17, 2023 / 14:15 pm (CNA).
A groundbreaking report published by the Ottawa-based Cardus Institute has given voice to Indigenous Canadians who are frustrated by secular society’s unawareness of — or unwillingness to accept — the fact that almost half of them are Christian.
“I find that insulting to Indigenous people’s intelligence and freedom,” Catholic priest Father Cristino Bouvette said of the prejudice he regularly encounters.
Bouvette, who has mixed Cree-Métis and Italian heritage and now serves as vicar for vocations and Young Adults in the Diocese of Calgary, was one of 12 individuals interviewed by Cardus for the report “Indigenous Voices of Faith.”
Father Deacon Andrew Bennett, left, leads a post-production discussion by Indigenous Voices of Faith participants. Photo courtesy of Cardus
Prejudice against Indigenous Christians has become so strong, even inside some Indigenous communities, “that Indigenous Christians in this country right now are living in the time of new martyrdom,” Bouvette said.
Although that martyrdom may not cost them their lives, “they are ostracized and humiliated sometimes within their own communities if they openly express their Christian or Catholic faith.”
Statistics Canada reported last year that the 2021 census found that 850,000, or 47%, of Canada’s 1.8-million Indigenous people identify as Christian and that more than a quarter of the total report they are Catholic. Only 73,000, or 4%, of Indigenous people said they adhere to traditional Indigenous spiritual beliefs.
In a new report, Cardus wants to “amplify the voices of Indigenous Canadians speaking for themselves about their religious commitments, which sometimes clash with the typical public presentation of Indigenous spirituality.” Photo courtesy of Cardus
Ukrainian Catholic Deacon Andrew Bennett, program director for Cardus Faith Communities, conducted the interviews for the think tank last fall. He published his report in March at a time when Canadian mainstream media and many political leaders continued to stir division and prejudice through misleading commentary about abandoned cemeteries at Indian Residential Schools.
The purpose of the report, he writes, “is to affirm and to shed light on the religious freedom of Indigenous peoples to hold the beliefs and engage in the practices that they choose and to contextualize their faith within their own cultures.”
Too often, however, “the public narrative implies, or boldly declares, that there’s a fundamental incompatibility between Indigenous Canadians and Christianity or other faiths,” Bennett said. “[M]any Indigenous Canadians strongly disagree with those narratives.”
Father Bouvette is clearly one of those.
“We did not have Christian faith imposed upon us because of [my Indigenous grandmother’s] time in the residential school or her father’s time in the trade school that he was sent to,” Bouvette said. “No, it was because our family freely chose to receive the saving message of Jesus Christ and lived it and had continued to pass it down.”
Bouvette said his “grandmother was not tricked into becoming something that she didn’t want to be, and then tricked into staying that way for 99 years and 11 months of her life. She was a Christian from the day of her birth, and she remained a Christian until the day of her death. And so that was not by the consequence of some imposition.”
Nevertheless, Canadians continue to labor under a prejudice holding the opposite view. “I do believe that probably the majority of Canadians at this time, out of some mistaken notion of guilt for whatever their cultural or ethnic background is, think they are somehow responsible for Indigenous people having had something thrust upon them that they didn’t want,” Bouvette said.
“We did not have Christian faith imposed upon us,” Father Cristino Bouvette says in a Cardus report on Indigenous faith. Photo courtesy of Cardus
“But I would say, give us a little more credit than that and assume that if there is an Indigenous person who continues to persevere in the Christian faith it is because they want to, because they understand why they have chosen to in the first place, and they remain committed to it. We should be respectful of that.”
The executive director of the Catholic Civil Rights League, Christian Elia, agrees and says society should grant Indigenous Catholics the respect and personal agency that is due all Canadians.
“Firstly, I am not an Indigenous person, so I cannot speak for our Indigenous brothers and sisters, but neither can non-Indigenous secularists who choose to ignore that Indigenous people in Canada continue to self-identify as Christian, the majority of these Catholic,” Elia said in an interview with The B.C. Catholic.
He said his organization has heard from many Indigenous Catholics who are “growing weary of the ongoing assumption that somehow they have been coerced into the faith, that it is inconceivable that they wish to be Catholic. This condescending attitude must stop.”
Deacon Rennie Nahanee, who serves at St. Paul’s Indian Church in North Vancouver, was another of the 12 whom Bennett interviewed. A cradle Catholic and member of the Squamish First Nation, Deacon Nahanee said there is nothing incompatible with being both an authentic Indigenous person and a Catholic.
“I’m pretty sure we had a belief in the Creator even before the missionaries came to British Columbia,” he said. “And our feelings, our thoughts about creation, the way that we lived and carried out our everyday lives, and the way that we helped to preserve the land and the animals that we used for food, our spirituality and our culture, were similar to the spirituality of the Catholic Church.”
“I believe that’s why our people accepted it. I don’t think anybody can separate themselves from God, even though they say so.”
Interviewed later by The B.C. Catholic, Nahanee said he is not bothered by the sort of prejudice outlined by Bouvette. “People are going to say or do what they want,” he said.
Voices of Indigenous Christianity
Bennett, program director of Cardus Faith Communities, interviewed 12 Indigenous Canadians, most of them Christian, about their religious commitments, “which often clash with the typical public presentation of Indigenous spirituality.” Here is a selection of some of their comments:
Tal James of the Penelakut First Nation in Nanaimo spoke about the relationship between Indigenous culture and his Christian faith:
Tal James and wife Christina. Photo courtesy of Project 620 – James Ministry
“I think … that our [Indigenous] cultures were complete, and in Jesus they’re more complete. I think that’s a big thing and a big step for a lot of us. You’re going to have a lot of non-Indigenous people look at you and question your actions based on your Aboriginal heritage. Don’t take that to heart. They’re the ignorant ones who don’t want you to flourish. Those of you who are Christians, First Nations Christians, you come to the table with the same gifting that non-Aboriginal people have. For them to say, ‘We want to make room for you at the table,’ correct them. You are already at the table, and encourage them to step back and allow your gifts to flourish. Because it’s one in the same spirit.”
Rose-Alma McDonald, a Mohawk from Akwesasne, which borders New York, Ontario, and Quebec, talked about re-embracing her Catholic faith:
Rose-Alma McDonald. Photo courtesy of Cardus
“I surprised everybody, including myself, in terms of embracing Catholicism after 20 years away. So I’ve had a few epiphanies in the sense that this is why my mother made me do so much in the church growing up. When I’m working, volunteering, and doing stuff in the church, I remember that. I keep remembering I’m Catholic and I’m still Catholic. I will stay Catholic because of the way I was raised.”
Jeff Decontie, a Mohawk from the Algonquin First Nations who lives in Ottawa, talked about being a person of faith in a secular world:
Jeff Decontie. Photo courtesy of Cardus
“Secular worldviews can sort of eat up everything around them and accept a whole wide range of beliefs at the same time. For example, you have the prevailing scientific thinking alongside New Age believers, and people in society just accept this, saying, ‘Oh, whatever it is you believe in, all religions lead to the same thing.’ No one questions it. How can these contradictions coexist? … Then we ask an [Indigenous] elder to lead prayer? Any other religion would be a no-no, but you can ask for an elder who’s going to pray a generic prayer to some generic Creator, and it’s not going to ruffle any feathers. I think that’s the danger of secular thought creeping into Canada: It goes unnoticed, it’s perceived as neutral, but at the same time it’s welcoming a whole wide range of beliefs. And it doesn’t just influence Indigenous thought. It’s influencing Christianity.”
Rosella Kinoshameg, a member of the Wikwemikong Reserve on Manitoulin Island in Ontario, spoke about being Indigenous and Catholic:
Rosella Kinoshameg. Photo courtesy of the Catholic Register
“Well, I can’t change being Indigenous. That’s something that is me. I can’t change that. But to believe in the things that I was taught, the traditional things, the way of life and the meanings of these things, and then in a church, well, those things help one another and they make me feel stronger.”
This article was originally published May 10, 2023, in The B.C. Catholic, a weekly publication serving the Catholic community in British Columbia, Canada, and is reprinted here on CNA with permission.
Leave a Reply