CNA Staff, Jul 8, 2020 / 07:00 am (CNA).- A new report Wednesday urged the U.K. to sanction Nigerian officials accused of turning a blind eye to the persecution of Christians.
The report, published July 8 by Competere, a trade law and economic policy … […]
Vatican City, Jul 8, 2020 / 06:05 am (CNA).- Pope Francis offered Mass Wednesday asking the Virgin Mary to help Christians recognize the face of Christ in each migrant and refugee.
“As we undertake to seek the face of the Lord, we may recognize … […]
CNA Staff, Jul 8, 2020 / 05:00 am (CNA).- She was voted the “greatest Black Briton.” A statue of her stands opposite the Houses of Parliament. Her heroic life is taught to students in England as part of the National Curriculum. Yet few people know that Mary Seacole was a Catholic convert.
There may be a good reason for that: although the 19th-century businesswoman who cared for wounded British soldiers during the Crimean War is a celebrated figure today, little is known about her journey to Catholicism.
Jane Robinson, author of a 2004 biography of Seacole, told CNA: “I was unable to find out much about Mary’s Catholic faith myself, but given that she was a convert, I can only assume that it meant a great deal to her.”
“It’s frustrating that in this, as in many areas of her personal life, information is scant. She obviously considered it to be a private affair.”
Seacole was born in 1805 in Kingston, Jamaica. Her father was a Scottish lieutenant in the British Army and her mother was a Jamaican “doctress” who taught her how to treat illnesses using herbal remedies.
She traveled to Britain in the 1820s, and worked as a nurse in the Caribbean and in Central America. She treated patients suffering in the cholera epidemic of the time.
When the Crimean War broke out in 1853, Seacole tried to join a contingent of nurses but was refused. She decided to travel independently to set up an establishment called the “British Hotel,” offering “a mess-table and comfortable quarters for sick and convalescent officers.”
Catholic author and broadcaster Joanna Bogle told CNA: “Mary Seacole never sought to be a nurse — she was a well-to-do business lady who ran a shop selling snacks and sweets to the officers.”
“She was certainly kind and helped sick soldiers, offering them comfort and doing what she could for them, and sometimes offered some of her family remedies, learned from her mother and grandmother in Jamaica.”
“Above all, she offered the strength of her faith, and the warmth of her heart: there are touching accounts of her holding dying soldiers, and saying ‘Mother is here…’ She became known affectionately as ‘Mother Seacole’ and years later, living in London, would recall with tears the poor dying soldiers whose last hours she had shared.”
When the war ended in 1856, Seacole returned to England with little money and in poor health. Prominent supporters, including the Duke of Wellington and William Howard Russell, war correspondent of the London Times, raised funds on her behalf.
Fr. Stewart Foster, the archivist of the Diocese of Brentwood in southeast England, told CNA that Seacole was received into the Church in 1860, at the age of 55. It appears that she became a Catholic in England, but because her reception occurred after the publication of her autobiography she left no record of her reasons for embracing the Catholic faith, which was remerging in Britain after centuries of suppression.
When Seacole died in 1881, she was buried in St Mary’s Catholic Cemetery in Kensal Green, northwest London. Her gravestone, which was restored by the Jamaican Nurses Association in 1973, describes her as “A notable nurse who cared for the sick and wounded in the West Indies, Panama and on the battlefields of the Crimea.”
The restoration of her grave was part of a wider rediscovery of her life, which had been all but forgotten in the decades after her death.
In 2004, Seacole came top of a list of 100 great Black Britons. The poll took place after a BBC series asked viewers to vote for the “100 Greatest Britons,” but no Black people were included in the top 100.
Following the poll, Seacole was the subject of a television documentary, several biographies, and an exhibition at the Florence Nightingale Museum. A portrait was discovered and placed in the National Portrait Gallery in London.
A statue of Seacole was erected in the grounds of St Thomas’ Hospital, London, in 2016. The statue, which faces the Palace of Westminster, was believed to be the first of a Black woman identified by name in Britain.
Reflecting on Seacole’s selfless service during the Crimean War, Bogle said: “I remember reading that when men are dying they often call for their mothers. It is apparently something noted by many nurses over the years.”
“I am rather moved by the thought of kindly Mother Seacole responding to the cry of a dying soldier, so that at least he felt loved and caressed… and perhaps somewhere in all of that is the thought that surely Our Lady heard their cries.”
Denver Newsroom, Jul 8, 2020 / 03:00 am (CNA).-
After rioters pulled down a statue of St. Junipero Serra in Sacramento on July 4, a local Catholic told CNA that she felt compelled, after prayer and reflection, to clean the spot where the statue once stood, to pray there, and to defend the 18th-century missionary’s legacy.
“I know enough about him to know that he was not a bad man, and that he doesn’t deserve the inaccurate histories that were being portrayed in our local media. I’m not going to be silent about that when given an opportunity.” Audrey Ortega told CNA.
Ortega, a homemaker from Sacramento and a parishioner at the Cathedral of the Blessed Sacrament, set up a makeshift shrine to Serra on the statue’s empty plinth July 5, and led other Catholics in cleaning graffiti from the site.
On July 4, a rioter burned the face of the Serra statue with an ignited spray from an aerosol can, before a crowd pulled the statue from its base using tow straps. After the statue fell, members of the crowd struck it with a sledgehammer and other objects, dancing and jumping upon it.
Ortega said it hurt her especially that the rioters waited for the cover of darkness to destroy the statue, which according to an eyewitness took less than ten minutes to accomplish before the rioters scattered.
St. Serra’s detractors have accused him in recent years of perpetrating abuses against Native Americans. The statue, installed on the grounds of California’s state capitol in 1965, was the third figure of the missionary saint to be torn down by crowds in California in recent weeks.
Ortega was not present at the protest, but watched the coverage that evening on the local news. She resolved to go to the site to, in her words, put “something beautiful on this marred, awful place.”
Her 12-year-old son had made a simple wooden cross for their family’s door during Holy Week, she said. She decided it would be an appropriate item to use to honor Serra, along with holy water, an Our Lady of Guadalupe candle, and holy dirt from Chimayo, New Mexico.
Ortega said she was scared at first to approach the former statue site— which is now little more than a “stump” with rebar sticking up, she said— but soon had her “prayer spot” set up on the stump with a lit candle, and she began to pray the rosary and the stations of the cross.
“I was just praying for peace, and praying for the safety of everybody involved,” she said. “I’m standing on firm ground as a Catholic…I don’t want to live with anger or bitterness in my heart. That’s what caused the statue to be torn down in the first place.”
She said praying the stations of the cross at the site was particularly powerful for her.
“I felt so connected to the sufferings of Christ, and to the sufferings of St. Serra, because I do know his story of how he suffered, of the deprivation he went through and the sacrifices he made,” referring to Serra’s practices of self-mortification and the health issues he endured as a missionary in New Spain.
Serra helped to convert thousands of native Californians to Christianity and taught them new agricultural technologies.
Critics have lambasted Serra as a symbol of European colonialism and said the missions engaged in the forced labor of Native Americans, sometimes claiming Serra himself was abusive.
But Serra’s defenders say the priest actually was an advocate for native people and a champion of human rights.
While Ortega was praying at the stump July 5, a reporter from the Sacramento Bee approached Ortega and asked to interview her about why she was there. The reporter later posted the video, which shows Ortega passionately speaking in defense of Serra, online.
“Pope Francis canonized him in 2015. He’s not going to canonize a rapist. There were rapists, yes, but it was not St. Serra,” Ortega said in the Sacramento Bee video.
Serra specifically advocated for the rights of Native peoples, at one point drafting a 33 point “bill of rights” for the Native Americans living in the mission settlements and walking all the way from California to Mexico City to present it to the viceroy.
Serra often found himself at odds with Spanish authorities over treatment of native people, and point to the outpouring of grief from native communities at his death.
Ortega lamented the fact that the statue was removed with due process, or a rational discussion. She said the groundskeepers have told her that the statue has been recovered, but she does not know if there are plans to put it back up again.
“The city has to decide: are we going to pretend like this isn’t happening? Or are we going to do better than this?” she said, suggesting that the city could hold a community forum to talk about the issue.
“At least people are now learning [Serra’s] story, even if it’s a little late for this statue,” she laughed.
On July 6, Ortega said she decided to go and scrub graffiti from the plinth, which she and her children did for two hours straight. She said many passers-by, including some state employees, thanked them for what they were doing.
Today, she said, the plinth looks nearly back to normal thanks to the cleaning efforts. But she worries that, because of the apparent inaction of the city government, it may be vandalized again.
A statue of Serra was torn down by demonstrators in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park on June 19, and one was torn down in Los Angeles on the same day. Other California cities have moved Serra statues to avoid their toppling, or plan to do so.
Ortega said she plans to pray at the statue site for a few minutes each day for as long as she can.
“Anybody can walk around the capitol grounds and pray the rosary and pray for peace. And anybody can go and pray at the Serra statue, or pray the stations of the cross like I did…you can do that without a permit and without drawing…counter protestors.”
In a July 5 statement, Bishop Jaime Soto of Sacramento said that while “the group’s actions may have been meant to draw attention to the sorrowful, angry memories over California’s past,” their “act of vandalism does little to build the future.”
“All monuments are imperfect as are our efforts to live up to America’s founding ideals. The primary task is to build up our community, not tear it down,” the bishop added.
CNA Staff, Jul 8, 2020 / 12:08 am (CNA).- As cases of COVID-19 spike in Arizona, the Diocese of Tucson has once again suspended the public celebration of Mass to help fight the coronavirus pandemic.
“I wish to inform you that after a careful rev… […]
Denver Newsroom, Jul 7, 2020 / 04:07 pm (CNA).- The US Navy is reportedly loosening some restrictions on some sailors attending “off-base indoor religious services,” which it had promulgated in late June and which the archbishop for the mil… […]
CNA Staff, Jul 7, 2020 / 01:12 pm (CNA).- The bishops of Mississippi’s two Catholic dioceses called on their priests to preach about racism and highlighted the Church’s anti-racism teachings in a letter to the state’s Catholics on Jul… […]
Rome Newsroom, Jul 7, 2020 / 12:00 pm (CNA).- More Christian families left the Nineveh Plains than returned to their hometowns last year amid ongoing security concerns in northern Iraq, according to a recently published report by Aid to the Church in Need.
The report, “Life after ISIS: New challenges to Christianity in Iraq,” documents how Iraqi Christians’ worries over Iran-backed militias operating in their region drive emigration and economic insecurity.
“Christians who have returned to their homes still feel unsafe, and substantially more insecure than other groups in the region mostly because of the violent activity of local militias,” Fr. Andrzej Halemba, the leader of ACN’s Nineveh Reconstruction Committee, wrote in the report’s foreword.
“Although economic concerns, especially employment, are paramount in some areas, it is impossible to decouple these from security considerations. These key factors need to be addressed to tackle the physical and economic insecurity that forces populations to move. If the tendency to emigrate is not stemmed, it will place, in turn, even greater pressure on Christians remaining in Iraq by reducing their critical mass and thus creating a less hospitable environment,” he said.
The ACN report found that 57% of Iraqi Christians surveyed said that they had considered emigration. Among them, 55% responded that they expect to leave Iraq by 2024.
The number of Christians living in areas formerly occupied by the Islamic State has already declined from 102,000 to 36,000 people since 2014. The report stated that some displaced Christians who returned to the Nineveh Plains as their homes were rebuilt are now choosing to leave.
“In the summer of 2019, the Christian population of this region reached an inflection point, with more families leaving their hometown than returning. In Baghdeda alone, 3,000 Syriac Catholics left over the course of just three months in 2019 – a drop of 12% in the number of Syriac Catholics in the town,” it said.
With continued migration, the future of the Western Neo-Aramaic language known as Surith, and sometimes called “Syriac,” is also threatened if the children of immigrants do not retain the language. One Christian in Bartella told ACN: “Learning Syriac is important because it’s the language of Jesus.”
The report named Australia as one of the primary locations where Iraqi Christians emigrate, with at least 139,000 moving there since 2007.
This is in part made possible by Iraqi Christians’ family connections abroad. The study found that most Christians had at least one family member living abroad, which provides an added incentive and knowledge of how to leave Iraq.
However, the majority of the Iraqi respondents to the ACN survey cited security concerns over family reasons as the primary reason for wanting to emigrate.
In particular, living under an Iran-backed militia was directly correlated with feelings of insecurity. These Shia militia groups operate with the permission of the Iraqi government, but they have previously refused to comply with the prime minister’s instructions to integrate into the Iraqi army.
The ACN report detailed Christians’ complaints of theft, threats of violence, and injury perpetrated by these militia groups, which have been sanctioned by the U.S. government for human rights abuses.
Additionally, many Iraqi Christians live with the fear that the Islamic State or a similar group will return. The survey conducted by ACN found that 87% of these Christians felt unsafe or absolutely unsafe, and 67% believed that “it is likely or very likely that ISIS or a similar group will return in the next five years.”
“Disputes between the central government in Baghdad and the Kurdistan Regional Government over certain Christian-majority areas have also hindered infrastructure reconstruction provoking further insecurity,” Halemba said.
The priest underlined that reconstruction efforts in the Nineveh Plains needed to continue, adding that the number of families in the immediate region that would still like to return is estimated to be more than 2,000.
The report, published in June, is based on a stratified sampling survey conducted between August and November 2019 of 793 Christians living in areas formerly occupied by the Islamic State in the Nineveh Plains. The report was written by Halemba and Xavier Bisits, a management consultant for Bain & Company and ACN project support officer.
The authors said that the survey’s results indicated that NGOs, churches, and governments should focus on the causes that drive Iraqi Christians to emigrate and advocate for the restoration of security in the Nineveh Plains in partnership with local Church leaders.
“The findings of ‘Life after ISIS’ make clear that restoring the stability of the Christian community in this post-conflict region is only possible with a concerted effort focusing on security, education, long-term economic opportunities, and reconstruction,” Halemba said.
CNA Staff, Jul 7, 2020 / 10:10 am (CNA).- Several U.S. bishops, along with clergy and religious brothers and sisters from around the country, have signed a statement opposing federal executions that are scheduled to resume this month.
Archbi… […]
Vatican City, Jul 7, 2020 / 07:40 am (CNA).- A Vatican cardinal has said that the world is facing a “tsunami” of humanitarian crises caused by the coronavirus emergency, conflict, and decreased security around the globe.
Echoing Pope Franc… […]
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