Springfield, Ill., Feb 10, 2020 / 07:01 pm (CNA).- Bishop Thomas Paprocki of Springfield in Illinois issued a pastoral guide last month regarding diocesan policies on gender identity, expounding on existing policy that schools and other diocesan instit… […]
Santiago, Chile, Feb 10, 2020 / 06:33 pm (CNA).- A group of European motorcycle police is currently taking part in a mission trip to South America, offering support to Catholic missionaries in poor communities.
Moto for Peace is a non-profit organizat… […]
Washington D.C., Feb 10, 2020 / 05:00 pm (CNA).- Pro-life Democrats responded on Monday to Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders’ suggestion that there is no room in the party for pro-lifers.
“It’s a disturbing time in America,” Louisiana state senator Katrina Jackson (D) told CNA, “when the party that’s supposed to be the big tent party, that has always had differing views not only on abortion but also on other issues, begins to have candidates that try to close off the party to those with diverse views.”
“Across our country, there are pro-life people of all political persuasions and I don’t believe it makes sense for any party to try to exclude people because of their position on life,” Rep. Colin Peterson (D-Minn.) said to CNA on Monday.
Democratic presidential candidates continued their support of legalized abortion over the weekend, while in New Hampshire for Tuesday’s primary.
At a debate at St. Anselm College in Manchester, hosted by ABC News on Friday evening, candidates pledged that they would implement a litmus test on abortion for judicial candidates, and push to codify legal abortion.
On Saturday, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.)—the longest-serving politically independent member of Congress in U.S. history—said that support for abortion “is an absolutely essential part of being a Democrat.”
Sanders, in addition to running for the Democratic presidential nomination this year, ran for the party’s nomination in 2016 but has always served as a political independent while in the House and Senate.
“By this time in history, I think, when we talk about what a Democrat is, I think being pro-choice is essentially—an essential part of that,” Sanders said on Saturday at a presidential forum co-hosted by the National Abortion Rights Action League (NARAL), the Center for Reproductive Rights, and the Demand Justice Initiative.
Jackson, in response, told CNA on Monday that Sanders’ rhetoric is unpresidential.
“What you’ve said to America is ‘I cannot assume the role as president and represent all Americans’,” Jackson said.
She said that abortion is a “Christian issue,” and thus “for Christians who read the Word and understand the Word,” to say the party has no room for pro-lifers, “you’re essentially saying is there’s no room in the party for a Christian who follows God’s Word.”
Pete Buttigieg, the former mayor of South Bend, Indiana, who was the unofficial winner of last week’s Iowa caucuses, on Saturday reiterated previous campaign trail statements that he supports legal abortion even if pro-life Democrats oppose him because of the issue.
“We are a big tent,” he said, acknowledging that some people identify both as a Democrat and as pro-life. However, he added, he will not soften his pro-abortion platform to get pro-life Democratic votes.
“What I’m not going to do is get somebody’s vote by tricking them,” he said, noting that any attempts to criminalize abortion and punish women or doctors “is simply not consistent with the values that draw me to the Democratic party.”
Candidate Andrew Yang at Saturday’s forum that one “pro-life voter” told him his policy of providing $1,000-per-month universal basic income would support women in need, and that the voter would support Yang because of this.
“I have zero compromise when it comes to women’s reproductive rights,” said Yang, who has previously said abortion at any point in pregnancy should be up to the woman.
However, Yang said that abortion should not be celebrated—an answer that drew a rebuke from the head of NARAL.
“I think we have to get back to the point where no one is suggesting that we should be celebrating an abortion at any point in the pregnancy,” Yang said
He added that “it’s a tragedy, to me, if someone decides that they don’t want to have a child, and they’re on the fence, and that maybe at some point later—it’s a very, very difficult personal decision, and it should be something that we’re very, very sensitive to.”
Ilyse Hogue, the president of NARAL Pro-Choice America, tweeted in response, “This was a bad take” which “shows a dangerous ignorance about abortions later in pregnancy and it perpetuates stigma of women who choose not to have families for reasons that are varied and very much none of our business.”
At Friday’s debate, candidates also promised they would only appoint pro-abortion candidates to the federal judiciary, and said they would codify Roe v. Wade.
Former Vice President Joe Biden said that legal abortion is “a fundamental value of the Constitution, while Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) advocated for “a national law to protect the right of a woman’s choice.”
Sanders pledged not to “nominate any person to the Supreme Court, or the federal courts in general, who is not 100% Roe v. Wade,” and pushed to “significantly expand funding for Planned Parenthood.”
On Saturday, Buttigieg said that “the American people” largely support the Roe v. Wade “framework” of few restrictions on abortion earlier in pregnancies and “very few exceptions” late in pregnancy.
Buttigieg, however, did not give limits on late-term abortion that he supported, saying instead that “the time has come to trust women to make decisions for themselves.”
For late-term abortions, he said, “usually we’re talking about cases where, by definition, if it’s late-term, a parent, a family, a woman is expecting to carry a pregnancy to term and then gets devastating medical news” about her health or the health of the baby.”
“That creates an unthinkable situation,” he said, and “that decision will not be made any better, medically or morally, because it is being dictated by some government official.”
Chicago, Ill., Feb 10, 2020 / 04:01 pm (CNA).- The Archdiocese of Chicago announced Thursday the latest round of parish mergers and closures as part of Cardinal Blase Cupich’s “Renew my Church” initiative.
The mergers mostly affect p… […]
Havana, Cuba, Feb 10, 2020 / 03:45 pm (CNA).- Cardinal Timothy Dolan of New York is in the midst of a visit to Cuba, having been invited to the country by its bishops and its president.
During his Feb. 7-12 visit, he is saying Mass at the Havana cathedral and at the Basilica Santuario Nacional de Nuestra Señora de la Caridad del Cobre; meeting with the apostolic nuncio, Archbishop Giampiero Gloder; visiting Catholic charities and a seminary; and meeting with president Miguel Diaz-Canel.
According to the Archdiocese of New York, Cardinal Dolan “accepted the invitation after consultation with the United States State Department and the Holy See.”
Diaz-Canel had met Cardinal Dolan in 2018, and while in New York to speak to the United Nations, he met with the cardinal and gave him a statue of Our Lady of Charity of El Cobre.
Accompanying the cardinal are Bishop Octavio Cisneros, Auxiliary Bishop of Brooklyn; Msgr. Kevin Sullivan, executive director of the New York archdiocese’s Catholic Charities; Wanda Vasquez, Hispanic ministry director for the archdiocese; and Fr. Leopoldo Perez, Christopher Ljungquist, and Richard Coll of the US bishops’ conference.
Communist rule in Cuba was established soon after the conclusion of the Cuban Revolution in 1959, which ousted the authoritarian ruler Fulgencio Batista. Since the revolution, relations between the US and Cuba have been frigid.
Relations improved under the Obama administration, but many of the reforms were reversed shortly after President Donald Trump’s inauguration.
The US bishops said that president Trump’s changes to US policy on Cuba would end up weakening human rights on the island.
“The United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, in solidarity with the bishops of Cuba and the Holy See, has long held that human rights and religious freedom will be strengthened through more engagement between the Cuban and American people, not less,” said Bishop Oscar Cantu of Las Cruces said in June 2017.
Bishop Cantú said Trump was correct that serious human rights concerns remain in Cuba.
“The Cuban government must be urged to respect religious freedoms and to extend greater social, political and economic rights to all Cubans,” he said. “The fruits of investment in Cuba should benefit individuals and families, and not the security forces.”
Cuba has seen some increase in religious freedom in recent years.
Under communism churches and schools were closed, and priests were exiled or assigned to re-education camps. The Church was driven underground until religious tensions in the country began to ease in 1991. St. John Paul II then visited the island in 1998. Pope Francis played a role in the 2015 restoration of diplomatic relations between Cuba and the US.
Birmingham, England, Feb 10, 2020 / 02:30 pm (CNA).- A first-class relic of St. John Henry Newman was stolen from the Birmingham Oratory sometime in late January, the Oratory announced in its weekly newsletter.
“Sadly, the only piece of bone thought to have been St John Henry’s was stolen from its casket in the Newman Shrine. If anyone has seen any suspicious activity, please inform one of the Fathers or Brothers,” read a notice in the Oratory’s Feb. 2 newsletter.
The though reported at the beginning of the month, the most recent edition of the Oratory’s newsletter does not include any further mention of the theft, and the West Midlands Police told CNA that they were “unable to find a report of theft from Birmingham Oratory.”
The Birmingham Oratory did not respond to CNA’s request for comment.
News of the theft was first reported on Saturday, Feb. 8, in The Catholic Herald.
The bone fragment is one of very few existing first-class relics of St. John Henry Newman, who was canonized last October.
A first-class relic is part of the physical body of a saint. A second-class relic is an item that was owned or used by a saint, such as an article of clothing or a rosary bead, and third-class relics are things that have been put into contact with first- and second-class relics. The bone fragment belonging to St. John Henry Newman was discovered in 2008, when his gravesite was excavated as part of the canonization process.
Due to accelerated decomposition in the Birmingham graveyard where Newman was buried, and the nearly 120 years between his death and disinterment, very few relics were recovered from the site.
“The oratory cemetery is extremely damp, on the side of the Lickey hills and with a stream running through it,” said Peter Jennings of the Archdiocese of Birmingham in 2008, when Newman’s cause was under examination. “The undertakers hadn’t been digging for long when they warned us that we’d be lucky to find any recognizable remains at all.”
Newman was a 19th century theologian, poet, Catholic priest and cardinal. Born in 1801, before his conversion he was a well-known and much-respected Oxford academic, Anglican preacher, and public intellectual.
His conversion to the Catholic faith in 1845 was controversial in England, and resulted in the loss of many friends, including his own sister, who never spoke to him again.
He became a priest in 1847 and founded the Oratory of St. Philip Neri in England. He was particularly dedicated to education, founding two schools for boys and the Catholic University of Ireland. His “Idea is a University” became a foundational text on Catholic higher education. He was a prolific author and letter writer. Newman died in Birmingham in 1890 at the age of 89.
At the time of his canonization last year, St. John Henry Newman became Britain’s first new saint since the canonization of St. John Ogilvie in 1976.
Vatican City, Feb 10, 2020 / 01:55 pm (CNA).- A Vatican official has defended his decision to administer the Eucharist to Argentina’s president, despite the leader’s effort to legalize abortion in his country. The official also administered the sacrament to the president’s consort, who is by protocol Argentina’s first lady.
Argentine Bishop Marcelo Sánchez Sorondo, chancellor of the Pontifical Academy of the Sciences, administered Holy Communion during a Mass offered Jan. 31 in the grotto of St. Peter’s Basilica, shortly before a meeting between Fernández’ and Pope Francis.
Argentine newspaper La Nación posted a video of the Mass, in which Argentina’s President Alberto Fernández and Fabiola Yáñez, the president’s domestic partner, can be seen approaching the bishop to receive the Eucharist.
Fernández has pledged to promote a bill in the country’s legislature that would legalize abortion. In 2018, Argentina’s Senate defeated a bill that would have legalized abortion in the first 14 weeks of pregnancy.
The Argentine bishops have responded to the president’s abortion advocacy with a planned pro-life Mass and other pro-life activities.
Fernández was divorced in 2005. Yanez has been his consort since 2014; in 2019 she moved into Argentina’s presidential residence.
Sorondo was asked by online newsite LifeSiteNews last week about the distribution of Holy Communion to Fernandez.
The bishop said that according to canon law “you are obliged to give communion if somebody asks you for communion. Only in the case that he is excommunicated. The President is not excommunicated, so I can give communion if he asks me for communion.”
Canon 915 of the Church’s Code of Canon Law says that Catholics who are ”obstinately persevering in manifest grave sin are not to be admitted to holy communion.”
In 1994, the Congregation from the Doctrine of the Faith clarified that “Members of the faithful who live together as husband and wife with persons other than their legitimate spouses may not receive Holy Communion.”
With regard to advocacy for the legal protection of abortion, in 2004 Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, then Prefect for the Doctrine of the Faith, issued a memorandum to US bishops which stated that a Catholic politician who consistently campaigns and votes for permissive abortion and euthanasia laws “should not present himself for Holy Communion until he brings to an end the objective situation of sin” and that his pastor should warn him “that he will otherwise be denied the Eucharist.”
Also present at the Mass were members of Fernández’ government, accompanying him on a European trip: Foreign Minister Felipe Solá; Secretary for Strategic Affairs, Gustavo Beliz; Justice Minister, Marcela Losardo; and the Secretary for Religious Affairs, Guillermo Oliveri.
Washington D.C., Feb 10, 2020 / 01:00 pm (CNA).- The United States Conference of Catholic Bishops will once again observe National Marriage Week as part of the celebration of World Marriage Day.
World Marriage Day is the second Sunday of February each… […]
Lima, Peru, Feb 10, 2020 / 12:01 pm (CNA).- A terminally ill Peruvian woman filed a lawsuit Friday requesting that the state recognize a right to euthanasia.
The Peruvian ombudsman’s office presented the case on behalf of Ana Estrada Feb. 7.
Walter Gutiérrez Camacho, the ombudsman, said that his office is representing Estrada because of “our role as guarantor and promoter of fundamental rights so that the free and informed will of a person to decide to cease his life is repected and guaranteed, when by certain conditions, as in this case, their human dignity is gravely and irreversibly affected.”
Voluntary euthanization of a person with intolerable pain is the criminal offense of homicide in Peru, and can be penalized with up to three years imprisonment.
Estrada, 43, has polymyositis, a chronic muscle inflammation, which has left her paralyzed.
Peru’s Supreme Court has not yet decided whether it will hear the case.
The ombudsman’s office argues that the prohibition of voluntary euthanasia violates one’s right to live with dignity, and that the courts have “recognized and developed fundamental rights intimately tied to the right to death in dignified conditions,” such as “the right to dignity, to integrity, to a dignified life and the free development of personality.”
It also claims that Peru’s treaty obligations oblige it “to respect, protect, and guarantee the aforementioned rights.”
At a press conference announcing the suit, Gutiérrez said: “We mold the stories of our lives with our decisions, and it does not make sense that in the last chapter of our life we are not allowed to make the decision” to die.
Estrada told Reuters that she wants a right to euthanasia “to avoid the suffering,” and “because this is about how I live my life, about liberty. I do not feel free right now. I don’t have the freedom to choose over my own body.”
Euthanasia or assisted suicide have been legalized in Belgium, Canada, Colombia, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, and Switzerland, and in some parts of the US and Australia.
In this 1995 encyclical Evangelium vitae, St. John Paul II taught that “euthanasia is a grave violation of the law of God, since it is the deliberate and morally unacceptable killing of a human person.”
He reflected that there was a growing temptation “to have recourse to euthanasia, that is, to take control of death and bring it about before its time, ‘gently’ ending one’s own life or the life of others. In reality, what might seem logical and humane, when looked at more closely is seen to be senseless and inhumane. Here we are faced with one of the more alarming symptoms of the ‘culture of death’, which is advancing above all in prosperous societies, marked by an attitude of excessive preoccupation with efficiency and which sees the growing number of elderly and disabled people as intolerable and too burdensome. These people are very often isolated by their families and by society, which are organized almost exclusively on the basis of criteria of productive efficiency, according to which a hopelessly impaired life no longer has any value.”
Vatican City, Feb 10, 2020 / 11:34 am (CNA).- Pope Francis emphasized unity in a message sent Monday to bishops connected to the Focolare Movement, which is celebrating 100 years since the birth of its founder.
“The charism of unity is one of these graces for our time, which is experiencing a momentous change, and calls for a simple and radical spiritual and pastoral reform which brings the Church back to the ever new and current source of the Gospel of Jesus,” the pope said in the Feb. 10 message.
The pope referenced John 17:21, in which Christ prays, “so that they may all be one, as you, Father, are in me and I in you, that they also may be in us, that the world may believe that you sent me.”
“Through the charism of unity, fully attuned to the magisterium of the Second Vatican Ecumenical Council, the Holy Spirit concretely teaches how to live the grace of unity” according to Christ’s prayer, he said.
The message from Pope Francis was read aloud at the opening of a conference of seven cardinals and 137 Catholic bishops from 50 countries Feb. 10.
The bishops and cardinals are connected to the Focolare Movement and referred to as “friends” of the group. The meeting, titled “a charism at the service of the Church and humanity,” is taking place Feb. 10-12 in Loppiano, Italy.
The Focolare Movement is a Catholic organization focused on the principles of unity and fraternity; it began in northern Italy in 1943.
In 2020, the movement is celebrating the centenary of the birth of its founder, laywoman Chiara Lubich, whose cause for beatification was opened by the Vatican in 2015.
Lubich was born on Jan. 22, 1920 in Trento and died March 14, 2008 in Rocca di Papa, surrounded by members of the movement. In the days leading up to her death, she was visited by many people, including important political and religious leaders.
Her funeral was celebrated at St. Paul’s Outside the Walls in Rome and was attended by nearly 40,000 people.
In his message, the pope also spoke about the Holy Spirit’s invitation to choose Christ Crucified as the “compass of our ministry” and to become “one with everyone, starting from the least, from the excluded, from the discarded, to bring them light, joy, peace.”
“The Spirit opens the dialogue of charity and truth with every man and woman, of all cultures, religious traditions, ideal convictions, to build the new civilization of love in encounter,” he continued. “The Spirit puts us at the school of Mary, where we learn that what is worthy and remains is love.”
The president of the Focolare Movement, Maria Voce, sent a video message to the bishops’ meeting Feb. 10.
Voce said they want to promote “a lifestyle of fellowship and communion with Jesus among Catholic bishops from all over the world… Such a lifestyle contributes to making collegiality ever more effective and affective.”
© Catholic World Report