Articles by CNA Daily News

Baltimore, Md., Jun 11, 2018 / 01:07 pm (CNA/EWTN News).- The Archdiocese of Baltimore has announced a policy to allow weddings to be held outside of parish churches, including at outdoor venues.

“The archbishop has been emphatic about reaching out to young people,” Diane Barr, chancellor of the Baltimore archdiocese, told the Catholic Review in an article published June 6. “There is more openness to considering other options.”

The revised policy was promulgated Feb. 14, and is the fruit of conversations with people who want to be married in the Church, but also want to have the wedding at a location special to them.

Since the policy was promulgated, more than 20 requests have been made under its provisions; all have been approved.

The policy states that weddings “ordinarily shall take place in a parish church … While always encouraging the faithful to celebrate their wedding in a place of worship, another venue may be deemed a suitable place by the Archbishop or his delegate.”

The preference is that weddings occur in the parish church of the bride or groom, though they may take place in another parish or a school, university, hospital, or other Catholic chapel.

In addition, the new policy allows for wedding to take place at indoor or outdoor wedding venues which are not Catholic chapels.

School chapels are among the most common requests, the Catholic Review reported.

The request for a wedding outside a parish church is to be made by the preparing cleric to the chancellor’s office at least six months in advance of the wedding date.

Non-Catholic wedding venues “should be reasonable and in keeping with a religious celebration. The place of the ceremony should establish a prayerful, sacred feeling for the couple and their guests,” the norms state.

A list giving examples of places unsuitable for weddings mentions boats, and places where alcohol is served as a matter of course, including casinos, bars, and nightclubs.

To be permitted, outdoor venues must also have an indoor venue available in case of inclement weather.

The application for a wedding outside the parish church directs that common sense be applied, providing the guidelines that the venue should be in keeping with the sacredness of the character of Catholic marriage; it should be a physically meaningful place for the couple and provide the couple and their guests with the feeling of sacredness for the occasion; and it may not be a bar, restaurant, boat, or on the water. If the location is not a public venue, the application asks that photos be provided which fully describe the venue.

The application requires that canonical reasons be given for requesting the permission, which might include the spiritual good of the couple; the probability of conversion of a non-Catholic; the validation of a previously invalid marriage, among others. It also asks the cleric to describe the reasons the couple is seeking the permission.

The chancellor will review the petition and reply within 30 days. If the request is declined, the reasons for refusal will be included in the letter, and the decision of the archbishop is final.

“People take getting married very seriously,” Barr reflected. She told the Catholic Review that wanting to get married “in their grandmother’s field, behind the family home” is an important reason.

The norms note that “In a ceremony outside the parish or approved Catholic chapel location, a Liturgy of the Word ceremony with Exchange of Consent and blessings is permitted,” and that “all liturgical norms for weddings continue to apply.”

This norm also permits a priest to celebrate a wedding Mass at a location outside a parish or Catholic chapel; but “given the varied venues the policy did not want to oblige that a Mass be celebrated,” Sean Caine, vice-chancellor of the Archdiocese of Baltimore, told CNA.

The Baltimore archdiocese noted that requests for venues outside the archdiocese would require the permission of the local bishop and cannot be guaranteed, though the chancery “will work with other dioceses to try to secure the requisite permissions.”

The Catholic Review suggested that popular venues outside the Archdiocese of Baltimore could include the Eastern Shore or Chesapeake Bay, much of which is in the Diocese of Wilmington.

Caine said that there have been requests for venues outside the Baltimore archdiocese, and that nearby dioceses have indicated a willingness to accommodate these requests, “on a case by case basis as long as it involved a cleric from the Archdiocese of Baltimore.”

The permission to use other locations is a one-year experiment. It will be reviewed after a year, and the archdiocese is “keeping detailed records to be able to determine the efficacy of the process as well as its impact on our community,” Caine indicated.

While their processes are distinct, the Diocese of Helena and the Diocese of Harrisburg both have similar policies for permitting weddings outside of parishes.

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Denver, Colo., Jun 11, 2018 / 12:36 pm (CNA).- As the parents of a homeless son struggling with a drug addiction, Frank and his wife Deloris have done everything they could think of to get their grown son into rehab. But it didn’t work.

So Frank took it a step further – he spent a week on the streets with his son, Tommy.  

“You hear for years that with addictions there are three roads: rehab, jail, and death,” said Frank. “The jails won’t keep him. He doesn’t want to help himself. That doesn’t leave many roads…So what do I do?”

“I decided I’m just going to be with him and love him. I’m not going to try and talk him into rehab. I don’t even want to say that word. I’ve decided. I’m going to go be with my son.”

Frank recounted his story in an essay that was read by Jerry Herships, a pastor for the homeless ministry AfterHours, June 5 at Denver’s Civic Center Park. The park is a major setting for the story, and a hub for the city’s homeless population.  

Tommy, 28, struggles with bipolar disorder, is addicted to heroin, and has frequently been in and out of jail. Frank requested their family’s last name not be used, but he wanted to share his encounter with homelessness and human dignity.

The story begins when Frank is tending to his garden in San Diego, California, when he gets the idea to spend time with his son, no matter the circumstances.

“One day, I’m outside doing yard work…I go inside, and I tell Deloris I have an idea. I’m going to Denver… and be homeless. She looks at me like I’m nuts. Maybe I am. But I love my son and to be honest, I think his days are numbered.”

Frank flew to Denver with only a 50-pound backpack, which included a water bottle, small tent, first-aid kit, flashlight, 4X6 sheet of plastic, and some clothes. Arriving to Denver late, he slept in the airport and took a train downtown early the next morning.

When he arrived at Civic Center Park, Frank inquired about Tommy and was directed by the some of his son’s acquaintances toward the needle exchange. Already high, his son was waiting in line to receive clean needles to shoot up drugs, but his father embraced him anyway.

“I can see he can’t stand up without the support of the building. He would appear drunk to most people… I know from past experiences, sadly, he is on heroin,” said Frank.

“I get up to him and he starts to turn his back on me. I don’t even care, I just grab him and squeeze him as hard as I can. I’m telling him over and over how much I love him. I tell him how much his family loves him.”

In the essay, Frank gives details about the processes of finding campsites and food, interactions with other people who are homeless, and the struggles with Tommy’s drug addiction.

The experience was extremely difficult, Frank said, recalling times when watching his son’s pain and crippling addiction brought him to tears. He could the see dominating force of addiction – the constant use of people and the single-minded focus on the drug.

Because of a previous charge for bike theft, Tommy had to appear in court that week, pass a drug test, and provide evidence of attending Narcotics Anonymous meetings, or he would automatically get 30 days in jail.

But before the court case, he went into a grocery store, where he spent so long that Frank stated: “I’m sure it was to shoot up and fill his rear end with drugs. If they send him to jail he can be high and have a backup supply in jail. That’s what they do. This is all so sick. Most people couldn’t even imagine this world. I lived it. It is real.”

In the end, Tommy was able to make a deal with the District Attorney’s office, delaying the court appearance and drug test for an additional week.

Frustrated and exhausted by the end of the trip, Frank complained about his son’s lack of appreciation and rude behavior. However, his wife reminded him that the mental illness and drug addictions were influencing Tommy’s behavior.

Frank’s week-long visit with his son did not solve the problems of Tommy’s addiction or homelessness. But it gave Frank a chance to connect with his son in his suffering and to express his love.

“This experience has changed me for life,” wrote Frank, noting the insight he has gained into the public’s reaction to homelessness and the hold of addictions.

While taking public transportation or waiting in line to make a purchase, he said he was treated like a second-class citizen, both ignored and harassed because he appeared to be homeless.

“What would God say? How many of these folks go to church every week?” he said. “Maybe they too, like myself, should change and respect our fellow man.”

While Frank said that he does not give money to homeless people, he now makes a greater effort to talk to them and show them love and respect.

“I treat them like I would treat somebody else. They deserve that. God made us all equal. We are still humans, show some respect.”
 

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Washington D.C., Jun 11, 2018 / 04:00 am (CNA).- The controversy over Humanae Vitae, the papal encyclical that reaffirmed Catholic teaching on contraception 50 years ago, cannot be understood apart from the context of a well-funded advocacy network for… […]

Washington D.C., Jun 10, 2018 / 04:01 pm (CNA/EWTN News).- Catholic elementary school students, regardless of race, sex, or socioeconomic status, have more self-control and self-discipline than their peers enrolled in either public schools or non-Catho… […]

Washington D.C., Jun 10, 2018 / 05:00 am (CNA).- A Thomistic philosopher, an evolutionary biologist, and a Harvard astronomy professor walk into a bar. Well, not a bar.

But they did walk into a Washington, D.C. symposium this week, at which graduate students, professors, religious sisters, and other curious Catholics discussed highly technical scientific questions over bourbon and pecan pie, late into the night.

The three-day conference, co-sponsored by the Thomistic Institute and the Society of Catholic Scientists, brought together nearly 70 professors and graduate students from Princeton, Harvard, Yale, MIT, the University of Chicago, and other universities across the country to examine the intersection of faith and science.

“The typical contemporary view assumes that there is going to be some deep tension between faith and science. From our perspective that’s an illusion. There is not really a conflict there, but it does require you to work carefully through some of these issues,” said Fr. Dominic Legge, OP, the Thomistic Institute’s director.

The idea behind the conference was to bring high-level scientists together with some very good philosophers and theologians to talk through questions about integrating specialized scientific research with a broadly grounded philosophical perspective, Legge told CNA.

Scholars presented lectures on neuroscience, physics, cosmology, biology, and philosophy. The Thomistic Institute plans to post lectures from the symposium on iTunes.

Dr. Karin Öberg teaches astrophysics at Harvard University, where she researches the interstellar medium and star formation. Öberg seeks to discover “how chemistry and physics interact during star and planet formation to shape the bulk and organic compositions of nascent planets.” She is also one of the founders of the Society of Catholic Scientists.

At the Thomistic symposium, Öberg lectured about exoplanets and the possibility of extraterrestrials.

“The big scientific development that has happened in the past 10-20 years is that we have found out that planets are very common around other stars. Basically, every star that you see in the sky is its own solar system, so that’s a change in the cosmology that we live in. This obviously for most people begs the question, ‘Are they also living systems like our earth?’”

Öberg told CNA that it would be “super cool” to discover even non-rational life because “it would teach us something about how you go from inanimate to animate matter, which is currently very poorly understood.”

“But I think from a spiritual point of view what people are excited about is the possibility of other intelligent beings that could potentially inhabit some of these worlds,” Öberg continued.

“That’s where you get into some of the most controversial and exciting meeting points of the scientific pursuit of what may or may not exist, intelligent extraterrestrial life, and what we can deduce from Scripture or Church teachings on the likelihood of their existence. What kind of aliens would be compatible with the interpretation of Scripture?”

Neurology professor Dr. Stephen Meredith from the University of Chicago; Dr. William Carroll, a research fellow at Oxford; and Dr. Daniel de Haan, a divinity professor at Cambridge, also presented lectures.

Fr. Nicanor Austriaco, OP, presented on evolutionary theory.

“My question is how do you explain the appearance of novel traits in the biological realm from a biological perspective that appeals to four causes, one of which is efficient?” said Austriaco, who received his Ph.D., in biology from MIT.

“To invoke a first cause would make no sense to many of my colleagues at MIT who are doing science, but the attempt there is to try within a particular conceptual framework to make intelligible sense of what is actually happening,” he continued in a discussion among all of the lecturers.

On the theory of evolution, Legge explained that God’s creative activity is not in competition with explanations for the origins of being that are framed with the created universe.

“Creation means not just a first moment in time, but a relation of radical ontological dependence on God as creator. And, at the same time he endows creatures with the power to cause, and that means that creatures really can cause things to change in the world,” said Legge.

“We can investigate what’s happening with creaturely causes, including a theory of evolution about how you have the diversification of species over time and the emergence of more complex forms of life. That doesn’t threaten in any way the fact that God creates the world or that God has a providential plan,” he continued.

Dr. Jonathan Lunine, vice-president of the Society of Catholic Scientists and a professor of astronomy at Cornell University, elaborated on that point.

“Science provides us with a way of understanding the natural universe, the processes that occur, how that universe has evolved through time, but it doesn’t give us the metaphysical question of why are we here and what is behind it all,” he told CNA.
 
Unlike most scientific conferences, this symposium included an option for daily Mass and a holy hour, giving it a distinctly Dominican flavor.

Catholic speaker Matt Fradd, who has a graduate degree in philosophy, told CNA that the meeting “has been like drinking water from a fire hydrant with people who are about 17,000 times smarter than me giving talks on neuroscience and evolutionary theory, so it has been great.”

Legge told CNA that the symposium aimed to help participants grow in love for God through scientific understanding.

“To learn to love the Lord with your mind means to devote everything, all of the resources of your mind, to understanding what God has created and, ultimately, trying to understand as much as it is possible for us — God himself,” Legge told CNA.

“I think that is an important thing for every Catholic who is engaged in the life of the mind,” he said.

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Chicago, Ill., Jun 9, 2018 / 04:28 pm (CNA/EWTN News).- A U.S. appellate court has ruled against a self-described Satanist from Chicago who had filed a lawsuit seeking to remove the motto “In God We Trust” from U.S. currency.

The ruling, r… […]

New York City, N.Y., Jun 9, 2018 / 12:33 pm (CNA/EWTN News).- The Superior Court of New York ruled Friday in favor of Joan Sheen Cunningham, who had petitioned to move the body of her uncle, Venerable Fulton Sheen, to the Cathedral of St. Mary in Peoria. The body of the late archbishop is currently in St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York City.

The Diocese of Peoria welcomed the decision.

“This is the second time that the Superior Court of New York has ruled in favor of Joan Sheen Cunningham’s petition,” read a June 8 statement from the Peoria diocese.

The judge, Arlene Bluth, ruled that “the location of Archbishop Sheen’s final resting place would not have been his primary concern” and that “it makes no sense, given his lifelong devotion to the Catholic Church, that he would choose a location over the chance to become a saint.”

The Peoria diocese opened the cause for Sheen’s canonization in 2002 after Archdiocese of New York said it would not explore the case. In 2012, Benedict XVI recognized the heroic virtues of the archbishop.
 
However, Bishop Daniel Jenky of Peoria suspended the beatification cause in September 2014 on the grounds that the Holy See expected Sheen’s remains to be in the Peoria diocese.
 
The Archdiocese of New York, however, has said that Vatican officials have said the Peoria diocese can pursue Sheen’s canonization regardless of whether his body is at rest there.

Sheen was born in Illinois in 1895, and was ordained a priest of the Diocese of Peoria at the age of 24. He was appointed auxiliary bishop of New York in 1951, and he remained there until his appointment as Bishop of Rochester in 1966. He retired in 1969 and moved back to New York City until his death in 1979.

Sheen’s will had declared his wish to be buried in the Archdiocese of New York Calvary Cemetery. Soon after Sheen died, Cardinal Terence Cooke of New York asked Cunningham, Sheen’s closest living relative, if his remains could be placed in the New York cathedral’s crypt, and she consented.

Cunningham has said that Sheen would have wanted to have been interred in Peoria if he knew that he would be considered for sainthood. In 2016, she filed a legal complaint seeking to have her uncle’s remains moved to Peoria.

An initial court ruling had sided with Cunningham, but a state appeals court overturned that ruling, saying it had failed to give sufficient attention to a sworn statement from a colleague of Archbishop Sheen, Monsignor Hilary C. Franco, a witness for the New York archdiocese.
 
Msgr. Franco had said that Sheen told him he wanted to be buried in New York and that Cardinal Cooke had offered him a space in the crypt of St. Patrick’s Cathedral.

The appeals court ordered “a full exploration” of the archbishop’s desires.

The Diocese of Peoria said that the New York superior court ruled this week that Msgr. Franco “testified completely in line with the testimony of Joan Sheen Cunningham. Therefore, both supported their understanding that above all else Archbishop Sheen would not have objected to his remains being transferred to Peoria.”

“Furthermore, the Archdiocese of New York could not supply any further testimony against Joan Sheen Cunningham’s petition. The court ruled that their testimony was fundamentally the same,” the Peoria diocese said.

Bluth ruled that “Mrs. Cunningham has offered a sound reason and a laudable purpose for her petition” and that Sheen “would care much less about the location of his earthly remains than his ability … to continue to serve man and God on a grand scale after his earthly demise.”

The Peoria diocese expressed their hope that the Archdiocese of New York “will cease their legal resistance and respect the ruling of the Superior Court. Bishop Jenky hopes that the New York Archdiocese will cooperate with … the practical matters as to moving the remains of Venerable Archbishop Sheen to Peoria, Illinois. It is the hope that this process will begin immediately.”

The Diocese of Peoria said that moving Sheen’s body to Peoria will be the next step towards bringing his beatification to completion.

“Bishop Jenky encourages everyone to pray for a renewed spirit of cooperation in the effort to beatify Venerable Archbishop Fulton Sheen.”

Sheen served as host of the “Catholic Hour” radio show and the television show “Life is Worth Living”.
 
In addition to his pioneering radio and television shows, Archbishop Sheen authored many books, with proceeds supporting foreign missions. He headed the Society for the Propagation of the Faith at one point in his life, and continued to be a leading figure in U.S. Catholicism until his death.
 
Archbishop Sheen’s intercession is credited with the miraculous recovery of a pronounced stillborn American baby from the Peoria area.
 
In June 2014, a panel of theologians that advises the Congregation for the Causes of Saints ruled that the baby’s recovery was miraculous.
 
The baby, later named James Fulton Engstrom, was born in September 2010 showing no signs of life. As medical professionals tried to revive him, his parents prayed for his recovery through the intercession of Fulton Sheen.
 
Although the baby showed no pulse for an hour after his birth, his heart started beating again and he escaped serious medical problems.

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