NYPD officers stand in line at the funeral of NYPD officer Jonathan Diller at St. Rose of Lima Catholic Church on March 30, 2024, in Massapequa, New York. Officer Diller was killed on March 25 when he was shot in Queens after approaching an ille… […]
Protesters disrupt the Easter Vigil Mass at St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York City on March 30, 2024. / Credit: XR NYC Palestine Solidarity
Washington, D.C. Newsroom, Apr 1, 2024 / 16:20 pm (CNA).
Three pro-Palestinian protesters were arrested after disrupting the Saturday evening Easter Vigil Mass at St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York City as the faithful were celebrating the resurrection of Jesus Christ.
Protesters entered the cathedral about 45 minutes into the 8 p.m. Vigil Mass, which was celebrated by Cardinal Timothy Dolan, and stood in front of the altar with a large flag that read “silence = death.” Security quickly tried to wrestle the flag from the protesters and eventually forced them away from the altar and toward the exit of the church before police came to arrest them.
As the protesters were being forced out of the cathedral, more protesters who were standing in the pews shouted “free, free Palestine.” Security also forced those protesters out of the church.
New York City police arrested three of the protesters without further incident: 63-year-old John Rozendaal, 35-year-old Gregory Schwedock, and 31-year-old Matthew Menzies. According to police, all three were charged with disrupting a religious service, which is a Class A misdemeanor.
“Three male individuals barged [into] the church and disrupted Mass by approaching the altar while yelling ‘Free Palestine,’” according to a statement the New York City Police Department provided to CNA.
The protesters who disrupted the Mass were associated with a subgroup of the environmental group called Extinction Rebellion (XR). The subgroup is called XR NYC Palestine Solidarity. All three men issued statements through the organization in a news release after their arrests.
“War, occupation, and industrial pollution are poisoning the soil, air, and water in Gaza and all over the planet, destroying the earth’s capacity to sustain life,” Schwedock said. “This destruction is called ‘Ecocide.’”
The disruption of the Mass occurred following a daylong pro-Palestinian rally in Times Square.
The news release from XR NYC Palestine Solidarity said that its goal was to “demand faith leaders speak out” about the war in Gaza.
Although it’s unclear what the protesters are specifically requesting of Catholic faith leaders, both the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) and Pope Francis have vocally urged a cease-fire in Gaza for months.
The week before, the USCCB urged the faithful to direct prayers during Holy Week “for an end to the raging Israel-Hamas war.”
“To move forward, a cease-fire and a permanent cessation of war and violence is absolutely necessary,” the bishops said in their March 31 statement. “To move forward, those held hostage must be released and civilians must be protected. To move forward, humanitarian aid must reach those who are in such dire need.”
The pontiff urged an end to the war and expressed solidarity with Catholics in the Holy Land in a letter during Holy Week: “You are not alone; we will never leave you alone but will demonstrate our solidarity with you by prayer and practical charity.”
Neither St. Patrick’s Cathedral nor the Archdiocese of New York responded to a request for comment.
Psychologist and author Dr. Jordan Peterson speaks to EWTN News In Depth’s Colm Flynn as Peterson’s wife, Tammy, joins the Catholic Church. / Credit: Screenshot/EWTN News in Depth
CNA Staff, Apr 1, 2024 / 15:00 pm (CNA).
Psychologist and author Jordan Peterson spoke about Easter as the “core story of humanity” in an interview with “EWTN News In Depth” hours before his wife, Tammy, joined the Catholic Church this Easter at Holy Rosary Church in Toronto.
Tammy Peterson’s faith was formed through praying the rosary while she struggled against a rare form of cancer. Peterson is known for his biblical lectures on Genesis and Exodus in particular, which often appeal to both Christian and secular listeners.
When asked by EWTN News correspondent Colm Flynn about what he thought about the Christian Easter message, Peterson said that it’s “the core story of humanity.”
“I’ll speak psychologically about it and speak in terms of its literary echoes,” he said. “It’s a variant of the dragon and treasure story, which is the oldest story we have. It’s the core story of humanity in some fundamental sense — that in the darkest places, what’s of most value can be found.”
Peterson noted that he was “not going to delve into theological matters” but that “speaking strictly psychologically,” the Easter story describes “the worst that life and death can throw at us,” but then offers a “promise.”
“The promise in the story is that, if that’s undertaken wholeheartedly, the consequence is redemptive, transformative and redemptive,” he said. “A resurrection of the spirit, a resurrection of the spirit eternally — that’s the promise.”
When asked what the cross meant to him, Peterson said “it’s the point where everything comes together.”
“It’s the agony of life,” he continued. “With God’s grace, you might say that the triumph of life, in the face of agony, in the face of malevolence, that’s what it is.”
“We’re very confused about what faith is in the modern world. We think that faith is your verbal assent to a collection of descriptive statements,” he noted. “That’s perhaps an element of faith. …But the faith itself is, what would you say? It’s the willingness to presume that being and becoming is good despite tragedy and malevolence.”
In the interview, Peterson reflected on the idea of a “calling.”
“You’re called upon to climb Jacob’s Ladder, and it spirals infinitely upward — well, to where?” Peterson asked. “Infinitely upward isn’t a place — It’s a direction. Heaven is a place that’s perfect, that’s getting better at the same time.”
“Anything that attracts your attention is a portal to the divine,” he added. “You’ll pursue that thing that attracts your attention, that’s your calling, and then it’ll transmute, and you’ll find yourself oriented in another direction. The spirit that remains constant through all the transformations of your calling — that’s the divine.”
“That’s what the divine is; it’s ineffable because it can’t be fully revealed. It’s unlikely to be fully revealed in the course of your existence, but it calls you forward continually,” he continued. “That’s what the burning bush is in the story of Moses. It shows itself in different places for different people.”
When asked what it was like to see his wife join the Catholic Church, Peterson said it’s a “miraculous thing to see.”
“I loved my wife from the moment I laid eyes on her when I was a kid,” he said. “If you love someone, it hurts you when you see them deviate from the thing that draws you to them. And since she’s pursued her efforts at enlightening herself more thoroughly — and this investigation of Catholicism has been key to that — she’s much more who she is.”
Though his wife became Catholic, Peterson said he remains “unlikely” to join the Church. When Flynn asked what was holding Peterson back from becoming Catholic himself, he responded: “I don’t think anything’s holding me back. Everybody’s got their own destiny.”
Peterson said that whether this was part of his own “destiny” was “unlikely” because he, as he put it, “exist[s] on the borders of things.”
Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger celebrates the special “pro eligendo summo pontifice” (to elect Supreme Pontiff) Mass at St Peter’s Basilica in the Vatican City on April 18, 2005. / Credit: MARCO LONGARI/AFP via Getty Images
CNA Staff, Apr 1, 2024 / 13:30 pm (CNA).
Pope Francis said he was “used” in the 2005 conclave in an effort to block the election of Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, though he supported the candidacy of the man who soon became Pope Benedict XVI.
“He was my candidate,” Francis said of his predecessor in excerpts from the forthcoming book “The Successor,” published by the Spanish newspaper ABC on Easter Sunday.
In the book, Pope Francis told Spanish journalist Javier Martínez-Brocal that his name, then-Cardinal Jose Mario Bergoglio of Buenos Aires, was put forward as part of a “complete maneuver” by an unnamed group of cardinals to manipulate the conclave’s outcome.
“The idea was to block the election of [Ratzinger],” he explained. “They were using me, but behind them they were already thinking about proposing another cardinal. They still couldn’t agree on who, but they were already on the verge of throwing out a name.”
Francis said that at one point of the conclave, which began on April 18, 2005, he was receiving 40 of the 115 total votes. If cardinals continued to support him, Ratzinger would not have reached the necessary two-thirds threshold to be elected, likely prompting a search for an alternative candidate.
Francis said that he realized the “operation” was afoot on the second day of voting and told the Colombian Cardinal Dario Castrillón to not “joke with my candidacy” and cease supporting him, “because I’m not going to accept” being elected.
Austen Ivereigh, the pope’s English-speaking biographer, has previously written that Bergoglio, “almost in tears,” had begged not to be elected.
Ratzinger, who had been the longtime prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith under Pope John Paul II, was elected that same day.
Pope Francis did not say who this group of conclave manipulators consisted of nor who they planned to introduce as a third candidate, but the Argentinian prelate said that the group of cardinals “did not want a ‘foreign’ pope.”
Several accounts from the time have claimed that a group of liberal European cardinals, known as the Saint Gallen Group, attempted to manipulate the outcome of the 2005 conclave. Three members of the group, German Cardinals Walter Kasper and Karl Lehmann and Belgian Cardinal Godfried Danneels, also participated in the 2013 conclave that elected Francis. According to Ivereigh, they advocated for Bergoglio after first securing his assent, a claim the cardinals have denied.
According to Universi Dominici Gregis, an apostolic constitution governing papal conclaves, cardinal electors must refrain from “any form of pact, agreement, promise, or other commitment of any kind which could oblige them to give or deny their vote to a person or persons” under threat of automatic excommunication.
Conclave proceedings are, by definition, secretive, as the term is derived from a Latin word that means a “locked room.” But in “The Successor,” Francis said that while cardinals are sworn to secrecy regarding conclave proceedings, “the popes have license to tell it.”
Pope Francis also revealed that while others were putting his name forward in the hopes of forcing a stalemate, he believed Ratzinger “was the only one at that time [who] could be pope.”
“After the revolution of John Paul II, who had been a dynamic pontiff, very active, with initiative who traveled … there was a need for a pope who maintained a healthy balance, a transitional pope,” the Holy Father said of his predecessor, who served from 2005 to 2013.
Francis also said that he left Rome happy that Ratzinger had been elected and not himself.
“If they had chosen someone like me, who makes a lot of trouble, I wouldn’t have been able to do anything,” he said. “At that time, it would not have been possible.”
Nonetheless, Pope Francis added that the papacy “wasn’t easy” for Benedict XVI, who “encountered a lot of resistance within the Vatican.”
Pope Francis was also asked what the Holy Spirit was saying to the Church through the election of Benedict XVI.
“’I am in charge here,’” Francis said of the Spirit’s response. “’There is no room for maneuver.’”
“The Successor” is part of a flurry of Francis-focused books being released in the 87-year-old Jesuit’s 11th year as pontiff, which also includes “Life: My Story Through History,” the pope’s first autobiography.
The new book, which focuses on the relationship between Pope Francis and Benedict XVI, is set to be published in Spanish on Wednesday, April 3, with no details yet available on an English edition.
Cardinal Wilton Gregory, archbishop of Washington, leads the recession of the Mass on Ash Wednesday at the Cathedral of St. Matthew the Apostle on Feb. 22, 2023, in Washington, D.C. / Credit: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images
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