Cardinal Luis Antonio Tagle at the Synod of Bishops on Oct. 9, 2015. / Credit: Daniel Ibanez/CNA
CNA Newsroom, May 18, 2024 / 10:35 am (CNA).
Pope Francis has appointed Cardinal Luis Antonio G. Tagle, pro-prefect of the Dicastery for Evangelization, as his special envoy to the National Eucharistic Congress in the United States, which will be celebrated in Indianapolis July 17–21. The announcement was made Saturday by the Vatican.
Tagle will celebrate the closing Mass of the 10th National Eucharistic Congress.
Calling the appointment “a gift to the Eucharistic Congress,” Archbishop Timothy P. Broglio, president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB), said that Tagle’s “deep passion for apostolic mission rooted in the Eucharist is sure to have an inspirational impact for everyone attending the Congress,” according to a USCCB press release. Broglio also pointed out that Tagle knows the U.S. well as he earned a doctorate in theology at the Catholic University of America in 1991.
This will be the first National Eucharistic Congress in over half a century and a pivotal event in the three-year National Eucharistic Revival, leading into the final year of the revival — the Year of Missionary Sending.
“The congress will give public witness to the Church’s core identity rooted in the Eucharist, and we pray that it will inspire a renewed sense of mission as we live out the gifts of unity and charity,” Broglio said in the USCCB statement. “May it be the catalyst for a continued deepening of our faith in the Real Presence.”
This weekend marks the beginning of the National Eucharistic Pilgrimages, consisting of four different routes beginning on opposite sides of the country and meeting in Indianapolis for the Congress in July. Collectively the four pilgrimage routes will traverse 6,500 miles, 27 states, and 65 dioceses while carrying Christ in the Eucharist.
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.
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.”
Surgeon Domenico Veneziano with Cardinal Robert Sarah. / Courtesy photo.
Rome, Italy, Sep 25, 2021 / 04:00 am (CNA).
The surgeon who performed an operation on Cardinal Robert Sarah in southern Italy in July said that treating the Guinean cardina… […]
Washington D.C., Apr 18, 2023 / 08:50 am (CNA).
Kansas Gov. Laura Kelly on Friday vetoed a “born-alive” bill protecting babies who survive botched abortions. This comes the week after Arizona Gov. Katie Hobbs vetoed a similar bi… […]
“Broglio pointed out that [Cardinal] Tagle knows the U.S. well . . .”
We can only hope that the cardinal’s understanding and appreciation exceeds those of his boss.
Something to watch…
Tagle might well be totally Eucharistic, no reason to doubt this, and yet in the past he has been interpreted as the most likely Francis II on the papabile list, except for his possibly disqualifying young age (71 in June).
ON THE ONE HAND:
“…when it comes to popular causes, Cardinal Tagle has shown himself to be a clear and vocal advocate. This is especially true of issues such as ecology, seen most recently in his active participation in the Pachamama ritual in the Vatican Gardens. Along with his ambiguous statements about the goodness of all religions, these factors raise questions about what Tagle believes is the essence of the gospel. His appointment as prefect of the Congregation for the Evangelization of Peoples and elevation to the rank of cardinal-bishop nevertheless place Tagle in a leading position for the papacy if voting cardinals desire continuity with Francis’ pontificate” (final words in the detailed and documented Tagle report and summary (one of 19 in Edward Pentin, editor, “The Next Pope: The Leading Cardinal Candidates,” Sophia Institute Press, 2020, p. 584).
“Let me address the journalists. I don’t think it is helpful to label people. Labeling people as progressive, as conservative, as traditionalists, may hinder a full listening to them. If we have decided already in our minds, ‘this person is traditionalist,’ whatever the person says, you or we, will always say, “Ah, traditionalist.” Or if the person says something that does not sound traditionalist, we change the label–‘Ah, he’s not a traditionalist, he’s a progressive” (p. 575, fn. October 2014).
OR, as an unambiguously Eucharistic cardinal, is Tagle nevertheless just one bipolar step in our incoherent failure to do both ressourcement (of the Source) and aggiornamento (engagement in/not of the world): as in “one step to the right, two steps to the left”?
While synodally “walking together,” how to both walk and chew gum at the same time?
The next Pope? Maybe.
“Broglio pointed out that [Cardinal] Tagle knows the U.S. well . . .”
We can only hope that the cardinal’s understanding and appreciation exceeds those of his boss.
exceed
Something to watch…
Tagle might well be totally Eucharistic, no reason to doubt this, and yet in the past he has been interpreted as the most likely Francis II on the papabile list, except for his possibly disqualifying young age (71 in June).
ON THE ONE HAND:
“…when it comes to popular causes, Cardinal Tagle has shown himself to be a clear and vocal advocate. This is especially true of issues such as ecology, seen most recently in his active participation in the Pachamama ritual in the Vatican Gardens. Along with his ambiguous statements about the goodness of all religions, these factors raise questions about what Tagle believes is the essence of the gospel. His appointment as prefect of the Congregation for the Evangelization of Peoples and elevation to the rank of cardinal-bishop nevertheless place Tagle in a leading position for the papacy if voting cardinals desire continuity with Francis’ pontificate” (final words in the detailed and documented Tagle report and summary (one of 19 in Edward Pentin, editor, “The Next Pope: The Leading Cardinal Candidates,” Sophia Institute Press, 2020, p. 584).
ON THE OTHER HAND:
Tagle possibly offers a welcome contrast to Pope Francis’ stale caricature about American “conservatives” and now to drooling journalists that they are “suicidal”, Sunday May 20: https://www.catholicworldreport.com/2024/05/16/pope-francis-says-conservative-critics-have-a-suicidal-attitude/
This from Cardinal Tagle:
“Let me address the journalists. I don’t think it is helpful to label people. Labeling people as progressive, as conservative, as traditionalists, may hinder a full listening to them. If we have decided already in our minds, ‘this person is traditionalist,’ whatever the person says, you or we, will always say, “Ah, traditionalist.” Or if the person says something that does not sound traditionalist, we change the label–‘Ah, he’s not a traditionalist, he’s a progressive” (p. 575, fn. October 2014).
OR, as an unambiguously Eucharistic cardinal, is Tagle nevertheless just one bipolar step in our incoherent failure to do both ressourcement (of the Source) and aggiornamento (engagement in/not of the world): as in “one step to the right, two steps to the left”?
While synodally “walking together,” how to both walk and chew gum at the same time?