News Briefs

Panamanian bishops ask for humane, respectful domestic immigration reform

August 8, 2019 CNA Daily News 0

Panama City, Panama, Aug 8, 2019 / 02:38 pm (CNA).- The standing committee of the Panamanian bishops’ conference has expressed its concern over a migration reform bill, asking that it be humane and respectful of the rights of immigrants and refugees.

They urged that immigrants and refugees not be seen as a threat, or blamed for the social ills affecting the country.

The bishops released their statement after the Government, Justice and Constitutional Affairs Commission of the National Assembly approved a bill seeking to establish tighter migration controls.

Zulay Rodríguez, the bill’s sponsor, said that in recent years many foreigners have abused the good things about Panama, and taken jobs from Panamanians: “They’ve taken away and stolen from us our country. We’re the excluded ones, so now we are going to make decisions.”

In their statement, the bishops recognized that the debate on the migration law reforms “has created tension among some sectors of society.” However, they called for not seeing migrants as a threat since “they’re people looking for better conditions for their lives because of forced displacement, human trafficking, violence, poverty, political persecution, and terrorism.”

“We can’t hold them responsible for the social ills affecting us as a country. Instead we should seek ways of encounter, dialogue, and peace that make us grow in fraternity and solidarity,” they said.

The Panamanian bishops said they are “aware of the need of the Panamanian state for a comprehensive migration policy that respects the rights and dignity of migrants and refugees.”

However, they pointed out that “this requires an analysis based on official data, the revision of current laws and decrees on migration, in order to adopt public migration policies that guarantee peace, solidarity with the helpless, security, and mutual respect between all the inhabitants of our country.”

Panama “has historically been a been a country of transit, consisting of migrations, some forced and others driven by the search for a better quality of life.”

They recalled that the country “has always kept its arms open to receive people from all over the world and this spirit of solidarity and fraternity must be strengthened, especially at this time.”

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St. Dominic, a dog, and Divine fire

August 8, 2019 CNA Daily News 0

Bologna, Italy, Aug 8, 2019 / 10:03 am (CNA).- The first image to greet visitors to the basilica containing the tomb of St. Dominic in Bologna, Italy is a mosaic of the saint next to a dog carrying a flaming torch in its mouth.

This is not a depiction of a pyromaniacal game of fetch, but a reference to a dream which foretold the 13th-century preacher’s mission in the world — to be the bearer of Divine fire across Europe, illuminating the darkness of heresy and sin with truth and charity.

“When St. Dominic’s mother, Blessed Jane of Aza, was pregnant, she had a dream of a dog with a torch in its mouth, running around the world and setting everything on fire. She went to the monastery of Santo Domingo de Silos and asked a monk what it meant. He replied that the child in her womb would be a great preacher, who would set the world ablaze with the fire of his words,” Dominican Fr. Ezra Sullivan, lecturer at the Angelicum University in Rome, told CNA.

“In fact, the word ‘Dominican’ is a play on the Latin, Domini canes, which means ‘dogs of the Lord,” Fr. Thomas Petri, dean of the Dominican House of Studies in Washington DC, explained.

Throughout history St. Dominic has been depicted in paintings and statues standing beside a canine companion.

“One source recounts that the dog Blessed Jane saw in her vision was a greyhound. That seems right to me,” Petri said. “St. Dominic should be associated with breeds that are fast and useful for herding.”

“Imitating Christ himself, St. Dominic is a hound nipping at your heels to bring you to God,” he added.

“In the early thirteenth century, the Church was experiencing increasing devotion among the lay faithful that was unmatched by the clergy. At a time when bishops, priests, and monks were living extravagantly and rarely preaching, St. Dominic came to see that the Church needed priests who lived in poverty but who were also preachers of grace and truth, especially in the face of heretical cults that were leaching the faithful away from the Church of Jesus Christ,” Petri explained.

St. Dominic Guzman was born in Caleruega, Spain on Aug. 8, 1170. Throughout his life, he is said to have converted some 100,000 people through his preaching missions. He spread the devotion to the rosary, and played a key role in doctrinal debates combating the Albigensian heresy, a revival of Manichaeism, which had taken hold in southern France.

Dominic founded the Order of Preachers – the Dominicans – in France in 1216, adapting the Rule of St. Augustine in obedience to the pope, with an emphasis on study and community life in poverty. He died in Bologna, Italy after several weeks of illness on Aug. 6, 1221.

Benedict XVI said in Feb. 2010 that St. Dominic “reminds us that in the heart of the Church, a missionary fire must always burn.”

“Saint Dominic was given the grace not only to have a fervent zeal and love for Jesus Christ, especially Christ crucified, but also the wisdom to preach the Gospel with force and conviction,” Petri said.

Fr. Sullivan noted: “It was also said that ‘he always spoke either about God or to God,’ and therefore his words were like fiery darts that always hit their targets.”

St. Catherine of Siena, a third order Dominican, is frequently quoted as saying, “Be who God meant you to be and you will set the world on fire.”

However, Fr. Petri explained that a more accurate translation of what St. Catherine wrote in a letter in her dying days is, “If you are what you ought to be, you will set fire to all Italy, and not only there.”

She wrote this to her follower Stefano Maconi because she was “concerned that he was tepid in his devotion and pleaded with him to go to Rome to light the fire of Divine charity there amid the turmoil of schism and infidelity the city was experiencing,” Petri said.

St. Catherine of Siena spoke of cultivating the ‘Divine fire’ as “cultivating the charity of God in one’s soul,” he explained.

“The way we cultivate charity is by committing ourselves to be with Christ in prayer, in study, at work, in the home, and at every other moment in our day,” he said.

“Most especially, however, such communion with Christ is nourished and strengthened by receiving the Sacrament of Charity—the Holy Eucharist—in which the One who is Charity itself comes into us and lights our souls aflame in love for him and for our neighbor.”

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Cross that survived atomic bombing of Nagasaki returned

August 7, 2019 CNA Daily News 1

Nagasaki, Japan, Aug 7, 2019 / 04:42 pm (CNA).- An Ohio college is returning to Nagasaki’s Immaculate Conception Cathedral a wooden cross that was recovered from the cathedral’s remains after the Aug. 9, 1945 atomic strike on the city.

Dr. Tanya Maus, director of Wilmington College’s Peace Resource Center, planned to return the cross Aug. 7.

“Very few artifacts from the cathedral were retained and that’s why it’s crucial to give back that cross, which is so deeply tied to their identity,” Maus said, according to Wilmington College, a Quaker liberal arts institution in Wilmington, Ohio,

The return is being made as an “international goodwill gesture of peace and reconciliation.”

Maus said that “this is something we need to do. These are connections that help build a more peaceful world.”

The only wartime use of nuclear weapons took place in 1945’s Aug. 6 attack on Hiroshima and Aug. 9 attack on Nagasaki by the United States.

The Hiroshima attack killed around 80,000 people instantly and may have caused about 130,000 deaths, mostly civilians. The attack on Nagasaki instantly killed about 40,000, and destroyed a third of the city, the BBC reports.

The attacks took a heavy toll on all of Japan’s population, but Nagasaki was a historic center of Catholicism since European missionaries such as St. Francis Xavier arrived in the 16th century. After Japan’s rulers closed the country, in part due to fears of foreign domination, Japanese Catholics survived centuries of persecution before their freedom of religion was secured again in the 19th century.

Immaculate Conception Cathedral, built between 1895 and 1925, was destroyed when the atomic bomb fell detonated fewer than 2,000 feet away. A rebuilt cathedral, the present-day structure, was completed in 1959.

“Catholics were actually worshipping in Nagasaki, in the cathedral, at the time the atomic weapon was dropped. All of the people in the cathedral were instantly killed,” Maryann Cusimano Love, an international relations professor at the Catholic University of America, told CNA in 2015.

According to Maus, the cross was retrieved from the cathedral’s ruins by Walter Hooke, a Catholic and a US Marine stationed in Nagasaki, who sent it to his mother.

Hooke donated the cross in 1982 to the Peace Resource Center, which houses reference materials related to the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Maus decided to return the cross after learning that a group from Nagasaki had been trying to locate it.

The cross will be displayed in the cathedral.

[…]

How one priest is helping children who’ve escaped slavery in the DRC mines

August 7, 2019 CNA Daily News 1

Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Aug 7, 2019 / 02:20 pm (CNA).- Fr. Willy Milayi is a Missionary of the Immaculate Conception who lives in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. He works rescuing children who fled the coltan mines and offering them a place to live and learn a trade.

The Democratic Republic of the Congo is one the world’s top producers of coltan, a rare mineral used the manufacture of many electronic devices, such as cell phones.

Working conditions in the DRC’s coltan mines are dangerous and the workers, including young children, are often exploited.

“The exploitation of these mines is in the hands of the guerrillas,” explained Fr. Malayi in an interview with the Diocese of Málaga in Spain.

“Our cell phones are stained with the blood of the ‘walking dead children’.”

Malayi works with children who have escaped forced labor in the mines. Many of them are living on the streets when he finds them. Some 20,000 children lives on the streets of Kinshasa alone.

The Missionaries of the Immaculate Conception have started an educational center in the city. He described the center as “a home where they can learn a trade that ensures them a future away from the mines and to never return to the streets.”

“We can’t solve all the problems, but we thank God for every one of the children we can rescue. It’s a true miracle that is made possible thanks to people of goodwill,” Malayi said.

The priest recounted one boy he encountered in his ministry, who had escaped the mines and fled hundreds of miles.

Starving and grief-stricken, the boy needed someone to listen to him. “After giving him something to eat, he told me about his life,” Milayi said.

The boy said that his family had been kidnapped from their house by militiamen, who took them to the forest and told them they must choose between death and mining coltan 13 hours a day.

The family chose the mines: “They worked 650 feet below the surface taking out 15 sacks of coltan a day, for which they received two dollars at the end of the month,” Milayi said.

When riots broke out against the militias, they raped and killed and the boy’s mother and two teenage sisters. They also killed his father.

“He managed to escape. But he told me amid tears: ‘I’m not afraid of death, I’m a corpse and a corpse does not fear death’,” the priest said.

At the educational center, the Missionaries of the Immaculate Conception teach the children “to take care of each other,” Malayi said.

“We have heard more than one of them say: ‘Father Willy taught us that when we are older we’ll have to help.’ I think this is a very important step,” he said.

Malayi called on Christians to “defend the dignity of the person, the image of God” and recognize the value of each person as a brother or sister.

“In our world this concept has been lost, and we have put material things ahead of people,” he said. “What is killing us today is indifference. We don’t want to know anything about other people’s problems, and we just talk about our own. What is more worrisome than material poverty is spiritual poverty.”

This article was originally published by our sister agency, ACI Prensa. It has been translated and adapted by CNA.

 

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Indian order dismisses nun from religious life for disobedience

August 7, 2019 CNA Daily News 2

Kochi, India, Aug 7, 2019 / 11:54 am (CNA).- The superior general of the Franciscan Clarist Congregation dismissed from religious life Monday Sister Lucy Kalapura, who has been accused of several acts of disobedience, including a protest of the handling of another nun’s accusation that a bishop serially raped her.

Sr. Ann Joseph, superior general of the community, sent a letter to Sr. Lucy Aug. 5 saying that she has been dismissed from the religious community, a decision confirmed by the Congregation for the Oriental Churches.

Sr. Lucy has led a life agaisnt the principles of religious life, the community says, by disobeying a transfer order, publishing poems after having been denied permission to do so, buying a vehicle, withholding her salary from the congregation, and participating in a protest against Bishop Franco Mulakkal of Jullundur, who has been charged with several instances of raping a nun of a different congregation.

The letter from Sr. Ann Joseph said that Sr. Lucy “did not show the needed remorse and you failed to give a satisfactory explanation for your lifestyle in violation of the proper law of the FCC”, according to The News Minute.

Sr. Lucy had been sent a letter of warning Jan. 1, asking that she appear before Sr. Ann by Jan. 9 to explain her disobediences, or face expulsion from the congregation.

In January Sr. Lucy said that the congregation was trying to silence her, and denied any wrongdoing.

She was sent a second letter of warning in February, according to The News Minute. India Times reports that she “failed to respond to a notice issued against her in March”.

The congregation’s General Council, held May 11, voted unanimously to dismiss Sr. Lucy, and asked for confirmation from the Congregation for the Oriental Churches.

The congregation granted confirmation, writing, “the same professed one remains freed from her religious profession and other obligations and separated from her Religious Congregation, and to be considered dismissed from her religious life, and to be considered as a simple layperson the other things to be done what are to be done according to the law.”

Sr. Lucy has 10 days to appeal the dismissal to the congregation.

“In case you accept this decree of dismissal without any recourse, as per canon law and as per the decree of confirmation, you will be freed from the obligations of the vows of chastity, poverty and obedience that you have taken in the Franciscan Clarist Congregation and you will have no more rights and duties in the Franciscan Clarist Congregation and hence, you are to leave the present community within 10 days from the reception of this communication, after having handed over your religious habit to the superior of your local community,” the letter reads.

Sr. Lucy said that “there is no fault on my part. I will not move out from the convent and I will fight against this (dismissal) legally.”

She is currently living at a convent near Mananthavady.

In the January letter of warning sent to Sr. Lucy, the superior general wrote that she joined a protest regarding Bishop Mulakkal “without the permission of your superior. You have published articles in some non-Christian newspapers and weeklies … gave interviews to ‘Samayam’ without seeking permission from the provincial superior. Through Facebook, channel discussions and the articles, you belittled the Catholic leadership by making false accusations against it and tried to bring down the sacraments. You tried to defame FCC also. Your performance through social media as a religious sister was culpable, arising grave scandal.”

The letter also said Sr. Lucy failed to obey a transfer order given her in 2015 by her provincial superior, and that she published a book of poems despite being denied permission to do so, and used 50,000 Indian rupees ($700) from the congregation’s account “without proper permission” to do so.

Sr. Kalapura is also accused of buying a car for about $5,670 and learning to drive without permission, and failing to entrust her salary from December 2017.

Sr. Ann Joseph called these acts “a grave infringement of the vow of poverty.”

The superior general added that Sr. Kalapura has been corrected and warned several times by her provincial over her “improper behaviour and violations of religious discipline.”

“Instead of correcting yourself, you are simply denying the allegations against you stating that you have to live your own beliefs, ideologies and conviction. You are repeatedly violating the vows of obedience and poverty. The evangelization and social work you do should be according to the FCC values, principles and rules. The present mode of your life is a grave violation of the profession you have made,” Sr. Ann Joseph wrote.

Another nun of the Franciscan Clarist Congregation, Sister Lissy Vadakkel, was transferred earlier this year from Muvattupuzha to Vijawada.

Sister Alphonas Abraham, superior of the FCC’s Nirmala Province, said in February that Sr. Lissy’s transfer was unrelated to her acting as a witness in the case against Bishop Mulakkal.

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