Washington D.C., Jan 15, 2020 / 04:00 pm (CNA).- A new study says that while most Californians support the redefinition of marriage and the family, they choose intact marriages and traditional families.
“People with the most amount of choice and… […]
Richmond, Va., Jan 15, 2020 / 03:36 pm (CNA).- Bishop Barry Knestout of the Diocese of Richmond has issued a statement responding to concerns that a local parish church is to host an Episcopalian consecration of a female bishop.
The online petition, t… […]
Punalur, India, Jan 15, 2020 / 02:42 pm (CNA).- The founder of a prominent non-denominational movement in India has returned to the Catholic faith of his baptism, after more than a decade as a Pentecostal pastor and traveling preacher.
Sajith Joseph, 36, was confirmed Dec. 21, 2019 at St. Mary’s Cathedral in Punalur in the southern Indian state of Kerala. His family and nearly 50 other members of his movement were received into, or came back to, the Catholic Church the same day.
Joseph is the leader of Grace Community Global, which he founded in Kerala in 2011.
The group will now be under the jurisdiction of Bishop Selvister Ponnumuthan of Punalur as a Catholic association, with the permission of the Dicastery for Laity, Family, and Life, which is responsible for international associations of the faithful. Joseph’s Facebook page describes Grace Community Global as “an ecumenical movement of the Latin Rite of the Catholic Church.”
The group has around 2 million followers in 30 countries, and reaches many people through its televangelism programs.
Fr. Prasad Theruvath, OCD, was asked to act as chaplain to the group; he has served as the secretary of the Kerala bishops’ commission for inter-church dialogue.
Fr. Theruvath told CNA that a process of sorting out how the members of Grace Community Global want to proceed has begun. Most of the members are Protestant, but the group is also followed by Oriental Orthodox Christians, as well as Hindus and Muslims.
Those who do not want to continue with the group under its new Catholic identity will return to their “mother churches,” but there are many others who want to join the Catholic Church, he said.
They are trying to proceed with prudence, Fr. Theruvath explained, by “slowly preparing” those seeking conversion. “We are in the initial stages, [there is] lots of work to do.”
About the future of Grace Community Global, Joseph said that “the system has changed, but the function is the same.” Under the direction of the Kerala bishops, the group will continue their conventions and Sunday fellowship gatherings.
Joseph told CNA he founded Grace Community Global while he was teaching in a Protestant seminary. He said he was “seeing the difference between Catholic theology and Protestant theology” through his studies, especially of early Church history.
He was reflecting a lot on Christian unity, he said, and he began the non-denominational group, intentionally calling it a “community” rather than a denomination or church.
“I was trying my level best to bring unity to Pentecostal groups through Grace Community Global,” Joseph explained, adding that he eventually realized this unity was “impossible because of the difference of doctrines.”
He came to see there is a “gap” in Protestant history which can only be filled by being a part of the apostolic Church, he said.
“Studying Church history made me rethink the beliefs I had. Then… the theological, doctrinal unity made me think secondly about Catholicism and Catholic theology. So, my theological convictions made me come back to Catholicism and the Catholic Church.”
What followed were four years of discussions with the bishops of Kerala, canonists, theologians, and eventually the Vatican, Joseph stated.
Joseph was born into a Catholic family, but when he was 16 years old his parents left the Church to join the Assemblies of God, a Pentecostal ecclesial community.
Joseph was moved to become a preacher; by the age of 19, he was already preaching to small groups of people in Kerala.
He studied Protestant theology and became pastor of an Assemblies of God community. He taught at a Protestant seminary for a period, and started traveling to preach.
In 2011, he started Grace Community Global, which he led for several years before discovering that the unity he was seeking could be found in the Catholic Church.
Around the time he started Grace Community, when Joseph was 28 years old, he had a powerful experience in prayer, he said, including a vision of Christ crucified and an altar, which he believes was revealing to him the truth of what Christ suffered on the cross, and his presence in the Eucharist.
“As a Protestant pastor, I was not able to digest that image [of an altar],” he said, noting that he wondered why God was showing him this.
According to Joseph, this experience left him with “a great boldness to pray for the sick,” leading him to start his healing ministry.
Fr. Theruvath said Joseph has the supernatural gift of healing, an extraordinary charism received through the power of the Holy Spirit.
The priest said “the Holy Spirit is working through this.”
“God is doing amazing things here!” Joseph rejoiced.
Edinburgh, Scotland, Jan 15, 2020 / 02:15 pm (CNA).- A Scottish bishop accused of committing plagiarism in his doctoral dissertation told CNA that while he never intentionally committed any act of plagiarism, he will accept whatever consequences might come from the accusation.
“I can categorically state that there was absolutely never any intention to plagiarise any work,” Bishop Stephen Robson of Dunkeld, Scotland, told CNA January 14th.
The bishop’s remarks came in response to a 2019 article in the scholarly journal Analecta Cisterciensia, written by the journal’s editor, Fr. Alkuin Schachenmayr, a Cistercian priest living in an Austrian monastery.
The article claimed that “there seem to be dozens of passages in Robson’s dissertation which are apparently identical or remarkably similar to texts published by other scholars, yet the author does not attribute these sources.”
“My work was checked every stage by Father Herbert Alphonso SJ my supervisor, now deceased. I repeat, whatever the person you mention has claimed, there was never any intention to deceive or plagiarise. I was simply trying to understand St Bernard a bit better,” Robson said.
Robson completed his dissertation, “With the Spirit and Power of Elijah (Lk 1,17). The Prophetic-Reforming Spirituality of Bernard of Clairvaux as Evidenced Particularly in his Letters,” at Rome’s Pontifical Gregorian University in 2003.
The text was awarded the university’s 2004 Premio Bellarmino, the annual prize given to the best dissertation completed at the university.
“One must ask whether the jury responsible for awards of excellence at the Gregorian succeeded in identifying one of the institution’s best dissertations of 2003,” Schachenmayr wrote.
Robson’s dissertation was also published as a 2004 book by the Gregorian University’s publishing house.
And while Robson insisted that he had no intention to plagiarize, he told CNA that he will accept the judgment of his alma mater regarding his dissertation.
“I am happy for the Gregorian to nullify my text if they think fit,” the bishop said.
Schachenmayr’s study noted that Robbson’s dissertation contained several passages identical or nearly identical to already published scholarship. Those passages give no indication of their source material.
Among the scholars from whom Robson apparently copied are Bruno Scott James, Jean Leclercq, Friedrich Kempf, and Robert Bartlett, according to Schachenmayr.
Some of those scholars were mentioned as sources in his dissertation, even while particular verbatim passages from them were reproduced without citation. In other cases, identical or nearly identical passages from published scholars who were never referenced as sources at all were included in the dissertation, Schachenmayr showed.
Schachenmayr also suggested that Robson might have used a plagiaristic technique called the “pawn sacrifice,” in order to avoid detection of plagiarism.
“Citing some sources with apparently great vigilance can be used as a way of distracting the reader from the fact that other passages are not properly cited,” Schachenmayr explained.
Regarding the scholars from whom Schachenmayr reports he seems to have plagiarized, Robson told CNA: “I recognise some of the authors you have quoted and did quote from them.”
Still, he said, “the authors cited can only have been a minor part of what work I did as far as I can remember.”
Robson told CNA that he completed his studies- a doctorate in sacred theology as well as a licentiate in canon law- while he was serving as a spiritual director for seminarians at the Pontifical Scots College, where he was assigned from 1998 to 2006.
He studied during that time “to prevent myself going mad,” the bishop said.
“I have never claimed to be an academic and have not touched any study – I have not had time – since I came home,” he added.
“The studies were never really important to me – simply a means to spending what would have been otherwise an uncomfortable few years in the heat of Rome.”
“My directees were the much more important part of my work,” the bishop added.
Robson is a convert to Catholicism; he became a Catholic in his late teens. The bishop was ordained a priest in 1979, and worked in pastoral ministry, and as secretary to the eventually disgraced Cardinal Keith O’Brien, who resigned from the rights and duties of a cardinal in 2015 amid allegations of predatory sexual behavior toward priests and seminarians.
Robson was assigned to the Scottish seminary in Rome in 1998.
He told CNA he “had no desire to become a bishop…and yet was appointed in 2012 as an auxiliary bishop and as an Ordinary since 2013.”
After two years as an auxiliary bishop in the Archdiocese of St. Andrews and Edinburgh, Robson became Bishop of Dunkeld in January 2014.
The bishop served from 2013-2015 as a member of the McLellan Commission, which studied the Catholic Church in Scotland’s handling of clerical sexual abuse claims and the culture that allowed abuse to occur.
Priests who know Robson described him to CNA as a supporter of his priests, “a Catholic, and a believer.”
The bishop is regarded as an outspoken pro-life advocate and an advocate for Catholic education. In 2019, the bishop launched in his diocese a “Year of Re-Evangelisation” and a formation program for catechists.
That initiative, he said, was inspired by Pope Francis.
“His vision of missionary discipleship is something that really struck me but more than that his manner was so open, especially about making our parishes places of missionary disciples. All we can do now is try,” Robson told the Scottish Catholic Observer in January 2019.
At the bishop’s installation Mass in 2014, he told Catholics that “to build up communion in love means concentrated work, and that can be only done with time and many, many hands to help that.”
“Pastoral work, the work of a shepherd, involves being able to serve the people,” he said.
In addition to leaving a decision about his dissertation in the hands of the Gregorian University, Robson said he will accept any other consequences that might come from the allegation of plagiarism.
“I am sure Francis has far more worrying things to fret about than me. But if he wants my resignation, he may have it freely,” the bishop said.
Vatican City, Jan 15, 2020 / 11:52 am (CNA).- Cardinal Claudio Hummes, the relator general of the Amazon synod, sent a letter Monday to some ordinaries indicating that the apostolic exhortation on the synod should be promulgated this month or the next.
“The draft is currently being reviewed and corrected and then needs to be translated. Pope Francis hopes to promulgate it by the end of this month or in early February,” Cardinal Hummes, who is also president of the Pan Amazonic Church Network, wrote in a Jan. 13 letter.
Among the works of REPAM is “protection for the 137 ‘contactless tribes’ of the Amazon and affirmation of their right to live undisturbed.”
Cardinal Hummes said in his letter that Francis is preparing the exhortation “to present the New Paths for the Church and for an Integral Ecology as developed with the guidance of the Holy Spirit” during the Amazon synod.
According to Cardinal Hummes, the exhortation “is keenly awaited and will attract great interest and many different responses.”
The cardinal added that the pope wants ordinaries to receive the text “before it is published and before the world press starts to comment on it, and join him in presenting the Exhortation and making it accessible to the faithful, to fellow believers and all people of good will, and to the media, the academic world, and others in positions of authority and influence.”
Cardinal Hummes offered “some suggestions” to bishops on how to prepare well for the exhortation’s release. “The purpose is not to generate publicity or attract attention. Rather, it is quietly to support you the Ordinary, in communion with Pope Francis, as you prepare to receive the Exhortation and pass it on to the People of God in your jurisdiction.”
“Accordingly, with greatest freedom, please make use of the suggestions insofar as they seem helpful.”
The cardinal suggested that “a useful way of preparing would be to read some of the relevant earlier documents referenced below.” He promised that a second letter with more suggestions would be coming shortly.
Cardinal Hummes’ suggested reading for ordinaries is composed of: the Amazon synod’s final document; Pope Francis’ address at a meeting with indigenous people of Amazonia in Puerto Maldonado, Peru, Jan. 19, 2018; the pope’s address at the opening of the Amazon synod, Oct. 7, 2019; his own address of the same day; the pope’s final speech to the synod of Oct. 26; and Laudato si’, the pope’s 2015 encyclical on care for our common home, especially its fifth and sixth chapters.
The synod’s final document called for the ordination of married men as priests, and for women to be considered for diaconal ordination. It presented the synod assembly’s reflections and conclusions on topics ranging from environmentalism, inculturation in the Church, and the human rights of indigenous communities in the face of economic, environmental, and cultural exploitation.
Four days before the final document was approved, Cardinal Christoph Schönborn of Vienna indicated that it was to be written principally by a team chaired by Cardinal Hummes.
The cardinal noted that, of course, “there will be a celebratory and communications event” at the Vatican’s synod hall when the exhortation is promulgated.
He suggested that ordinaries “may also want to begin planning a press briefing or a press conference or other event as soon as convenient after the publication of the Exhortation.”
“you may find it opportune to have the Exhortation presented by yourself along with an indigenous spokesperson if relevant in your area, an experienced pastoral leader (ordained or religious, layman or laywoman), an expert on climate or ecology, and a youth involved in peer ministry.”
Cardinal Hummes asked that the letter be kept confidential, and not shared with the media.
“Please do respect the guidelines,” he added.
The letter was published Jan. 14 by LifeSiteNews in English, and by Aldo Maria Valli in Italian.
CNA understands the letter to have been sent to “concerned bishops” around the world. It was not sent to all ordinaries.
Cardinal Hummes concluded his letter “with the sincere hope that his letter has been helpful.”
He asked for prayers that God the Father would “dispose the People of God in the Amazon and throughout the world to receive it with faith and hope, intelligently and effectively.”
Washington D.C., Jan 15, 2020 / 11:00 am (CNA).- More than a dozen members of Congress have asked President Trump to press for the release of U.S. pastors imprisoned in China, as the two countries sign phase one of a trade agreement today.
Six senators and seven House members sent a letter to the President on Monday, requesting that he raise the cases of several U.S. citizens and permanent residents who have been detained or imprisoned in China, in talks with Chinese leaders.
Among the detained Americans are two Christian pastors who were working in China and neighboring Burma, and who were given prison sentences of seven years and life imprisonment.
The members’ letter was sent to the White House as the U.S. and China are expected to close on the first phase of a trade deal on Wednesday.
Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) and Rep. Jim McGovern (D-Mass.), co-chairs of the Congressional-Executive Commission on China (CECC), led the letter. Other commissioners signed it, including Senators Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.), Tom Cotton (R-Ark.), Angus King (I-Maine), Steve Daines (R-Mont.) and James Lankford (R-Okla.), and Representatives Chris Smith (R-N,J,), Tom Suozzi (D-N.Y.), Vicky Hartzler (R-Mo.), Tom Malinowski (D-N.J.), Brian Mast (R-Fla.), and Ben McAdams (D-Utah).
One of the two imprisoned pastors is John Cao, a legal permanent resident from North Carolina who taught in schools for ethnic minority communities in Burma before his arrest in March of 2018, on his way back into China from Burma.
Cao was sentenced to seven years in prison for allegedly “organizing others to illegally cross the border,” a sentence that was upheld by a Chinese court this summer. The UN’s Working Group on Arbitrary Detention has determined that Cao was arbitrarily detained, and has requested his immediate release.
Another pastor, David Lin, was detained by China in 2006 while awaiting approval to build a church. He was convicted on fraud-related charges and sentenced to life in prison, although his sentence was later reduced to a scheduled release in the year 2030.
“We write to express our deep concern about the Chinese government’s imprisonment or arbitrary detention of U.S. citizens and permanent residents in China,” the members wrote President Trump in their Monday letter.
Several other Americans are mentioned in the letter, which also asks Trump to raise the situation of relatives of American citizens or legal permanent residents who are currently detained in Xinjiang. Almost two million ethnic Uyghurs and other Turkic Muslims have been incarcerated in mass internment camps in the region, with reports of torture, forced marriage, and organ trafficking.
“These family members, like the Americans mentioned above, need the Administration to be tenacious advocates for them and the estimated 1.8 million ethnic Uyghurs and other Turkic Muslims arbitrarily detained in the XUAR,” the letter states.
Sen. Rubio told CBS’ Face the Nation on Jan. 5 that, with trade talks taking place between the U.S. and China, “absolutely” there should be sanctions on Chinese leaders for human rights abuses committed including the detention of Uyghurs in Xinjiang.
“I will never accept the notion that somehow in order to be able to sell them [China] more things, we have to look the other way on some of the grotesque human rights violations that we’re seeing systemized on their part, both in the Xianjing province of—throughout China in general, but also in places like Hong Kong as well,” Rubio said.
Vatican City, Jan 15, 2020 / 10:53 am (CNA).- Pope Francis has named Dr. Francesca Di Giovanni as undersecretary for multilateral affairs in the Vatican Secretariat of State, marking the first time that a woman has been appointed to a managerial position in the secretariat.
Di Giovanni, 66, was appointed undersecretary for the Section in Relations in States. She has worked as an official in the department for more than 25 years, with specialties including humanitarian law, communications, migrants and refugees, and the status of women, according to Vatican Media.
She will now work with Monsignor Miroslaw Wachowski, who also serves as undersecretary for the Section in Relations in States, but focuses on bilateral affairs. Di Giovanni’s field of multilateral affairs focuses on the interactions between inter-governmental organizations such as the United Nations.
Di Giovanni hails from Palermo, Italy. She has a degree in law and has worked for the Focolare Movement.
She told Vatican News and L’Osservatore Romano that her appointment shows the pope’s commitment to involving women in the Vatican.
“A woman may have certain aptitudes for finding commonalities, healing relationships with unity at heart,” she said. “I hope that my being a woman might reflect itself positively in this task, even if they are gifts that I certainly find in my male colleagues as well.”
She recalled the words of Pope Francis in his homily this year for the Solemnity of Mary, Mother of God: “Women are givers and mediators of peace and should be fully included in decision-making processes, because when women can share their gifts, the world finds itself more united, more peaceful.”
Di Giovanni said she hopes to cooperate with the other men and women in her working group and hopes to live up to the trust that Pope Francis is placing in her.
She told Vatican News and L’Osservatore Romano that she was surprised by her appointment, although the discussion has arisen in recent years about the need for an additional undersecretary in the field.
The multilateral sector, she said, is “a delicate and demanding sector that needs special attention, because it has its own procedures, in some ways different from those of the bilateral sphere.”
The sector covers multilateral treaties, which Di Giovanni said are significant “because they embody the political will of States with regard to the various issues concerning the international common good: this includes development, the environment, the protection of victims of conflicts, the situation of women, and so on.”
She reiterated the pope’s commitment to the multilateral sector, which she said “has a fundamental function in the international community.”
Di Giovanni noted that in his recent address to the Holy See’s Diplomatic Corps, Pope Francis praised the accomplishments of the United Nations while calling for reform in the multilateral system.
“In the international community, the Holy See also has the mission of ensuring that the interdependence between people and nations be developed in a moral and ethical dimension, as well as in the other dimensions and various aspects that relations are acquiring in today’s world,” she said.
She stressed the importance of dialogue and diplomacy and said the Holy See views the UN “as a necessary means for achieving the common good,” while at the same time calling for reform and change where necessary.
Paris, France, Jan 15, 2020 / 06:00 am (CNA).- The French Catholic bishops’ conference permanent council has approved a recommendation to remove references to the sex of parents on baptismal registry forms.
“The increasingly complex situation of families in France makes it extremely difficult to draft Catholic acts, especially regarding baptism,” Bishop Joseph de Metz-Noblat of Langres, president of the French bishops’ conference Council for Canonical Questions, wrote in a letter dated Dec. 13, 2018.
He said, because of complex family situations, chanceries in several dioceses in France had “faced problems of vocabulary.”
According to canon law, he said, “ministers cannot refuse sacraments to persons who opportunely ask for them, while children cannot be held responsible for the situation of their parents.”
As a result, de Metz-Noblat said he had worked with two other commissions to produce a new baptismal registry formula that will require “names and first names of parents or other holders of parental authority,” which he wrote would make “the simple acknowledgment of one’s family situation, without bearing moral judgment on it.”
The change had now been approved by the bishops’ permanent council, de Metz-Noblat added.
Fr. Claude Barthe, editor of the newsletter Catholic Res Novae, wrote in late December that it is likely that a number of dioceses will ignore the new recommendation. Each bishop in France remains free to exercise control over the baptismal registry form in his diocese.
Fr. Pius Pietrzyk, O.P., chair of the pastoral studies department at St. Patrick’s Seminary in Menlo Park, California, told CNA that recommendations from a bishops’ conference are not binding law, and that while a bishop must consider recommendations from the conference as the view of his brother bishops, the recommendations are not binding.
“We sometimes think of a bishop’s conference as a kind of Senate that has legislative power— it does not,” Pietrzyk told CNA.
“It’s simply a pastoral engine for the bishops of a certain area to coordinate their pastoral ministry.”
The Holy See in 2017 addressed how the baptisms of children of same-sex couples should be recorded in a letter from Cardinal Francesco Coccopalmerio, then the prefect of the Pontifical Council for Legislative Texts.
“In the current Code, there is not a specific law with respect to the entry of same sex couples or ‘transgendered persons’ as parents on the baptismal record. The term ‘parents’ used by the Church’s Canon 877 clearly refers to the father and mother, the man and the woman created by God who are united in the sacrament of marriage.”
“The entry of same sex couples or ‘transgendered persons’ as parents would be contrary to the aforementioned canon and the teaching of Our Lord and of the Church on marriage as God desires it as the union between a man and a woman. If one of the partners is the natural father or mother of the child, it must be mentioned on the record, the other partner cannot be entered,” Coccopalmerio added.
“Given the foregoing instructions, we do not consider it possible to enter on the baptismal record two mothers or two fathers or a ‘transgendered father’ whose real nature is a woman or a ‘transgendered mother’ whose true nature is a man,” the letter concluded.
Marriage and child adoption for same-sex couples were legalized in France in May 2013.
Barthe wrote that Bishop de Metz-Noblat had been involved in the process of revising the Church’s baptismal documents since that year, and in Feb. 2019 had written a letter reassuring his fellow bishops that the changes ought to be made to avoid accusations of “discrimination.”
Vatican City, Jan 15, 2020 / 04:00 am (CNA).- While often persecuted and misunderstood, the Church never tires of announcing the love of God made present in Jesus Christ, Pope Francis said Wednesday.
With this reflection, the pope completed an eight-m… […]
New York City, N.Y., Jan 15, 2020 / 02:56 am (CNA).- The Sisters of Life will celebrate the 100th birthday of their late founder, Cardinal John O’Connor, on Jan. 15 with an evening of prayer, reflection and thanksgiving in several major cities.
… […]
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