Fuzhou, China, Mar 27, 2018 / 11:53 am (CNA/EWTN News).- Police have detained a Catholic bishop at the center of controversy over a possible agreement between the Vatican and China.
Bishop Vincent Guo Xijin of Mindong in China’s Fujian province … […]
Tokyo, Japan, Mar 27, 2018 / 12:00 am (CNA/EWTN News).- Japan’s National Police Agency has reported that investigations for the possession and distribution of child pornography reached record levels in 2017, the result of a large database of porn… […]
Mexico City, Mexico, Mar 26, 2018 / 06:14 pm (ACI Prensa).- The Mexican Senate has approved a measure protecting the conscientious objections of medical personnel who hold moral or ethical objections to certain treatments.
The decree, approved March 2… […]
Portsmouth, England, Mar 26, 2018 / 06:01 pm (CNA/EWTN News).- Legalizing assisted suicide is a false solution to the sufferings of the terminally ill, an English bishop has said in a Palm Sunday letter addressed to the faithful of the Channel Island of Guernsey.
“Someone near the end of life needs emotional support, comfort and care, good pain control, respect and loving communication – not suicide on prescription,” said Bishop Philip Egan of Portsmouth. “Let us redouble our efforts to offer this support, not least to anyone tempted to suicide or a hurried death.”
“I appeal to Catholics to mobilize,” he added in his Palm Sunday letter to the Parish of Our Lady and the Saints of Guernsey. “Speak out against this proposal. It is never permissible to do good by an evil means.” He asked everyone in Guernsey to overturn this “grim proposal” and to “redouble the compassionate care of those who are frail and terminally ill.”
Guernsey, one of the Channel Islands off the coast of Normandy, is a Crown dependency for which the U.K. is responsible. It is part of the Diocese of Portsmouth.
Its chief minister, Gavin St. Pier, has proposed allowing terminally ill patients to commit suicide in a state-funded program with what he says are strict guidelines, the U.K. newspaper The Sunday Express reports. Those eligible under the proposal would include those who are mentally competent, diagnosed with a terminal illness, and given less than six months to live.
St. Pier cited his father’s death at age 77 after heart disease left him bedridden and unable to move, speak, eat, or drink. The minister said his father would have wanted an assisted suicide two to three weeks before his death.
The proposed change aims to give people choice and a sense of control over their death, St. Pier said. The Suicide Act 1961 bars euthanasia, with a maximum sentence of 14 years in prison.
<blockquote class=”twitter-tweet” data-lang=”en”><p lang=”en” dir=”ltr”>As we prepare for the Palm Sunday Mass, let’s pray for the people of Guernsey that, along with their doctors and other civilised people, they will robustly reject the push from secularists and liberals for assisted suicide and death-clinics.</p>— Bishop Philip Egan (@BishopEgan) <a href=”https://twitter.com/BishopEgan/status/977819241712939008?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw”>March 25, 2018</a></blockquote>
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Bishop Egan wrote that assisted suicide is “fundamentally incompatible with a doctor’s role as healer.”
“It would be difficult or impossible to control and it would pose serious societal risks,” he said. “Let there be no death-clinics in Guernsey.”
Bishop Egan said the proposal to legalize assisted suicide is “fundamentally subversive, horrific and dangerous, however well-intentioned.” Invoking the expansion of Belgium’s legal assisted suicide to include children, he said “the right to die would soon become the duty to die.”
“It would be an intolerable and utterly immoral demand to ask medical staff, doctors and nurses dedicated to preserving life, to extinguish the life of another human person,” the bishop added. “However carefully crafted the laws might be, assisted suicide would place medics in an impossible dilemma.”
Dr. Brian Parkin, a Guernsey representative of the British Medical Society, told The Sunday Express he was concerned about the proposal.
“Safeguarding the vulnerable is paramount in such a debate,” Parkin said. “The continued investment and development of the high-quality palliative care services in Guernsey involves all health care professionals – and their focus on end of life care plans should be prioritized.”
The local branch of the British Medical Society said that support for aid in dying could have an impact on recruiting and retaining doctors to the island, home to about 63,000 people.
The national organization has opposed assisted suicide since 2006 and supports the current law. The U.K.’s General Medical Council is also clear that encouraging or assisting in a suicide is illegal.
Because the council registers doctors to practice medicine, it is unclear how legal assisted suicide in Guernsey could be carried out by registered doctors, the Jersey Evening Post said.
For Bishop Egan, the proposal was an opportunity to reflect on the hardships at the end of life and what Christians believe about suffering and death.
“Frailty, pain and infirmity are a difficult trial for anyone,” he said. “Those who are mentally ill may experience despair and gloom at the problems they face. Others, the terminally ill, become anguished at the loss of function and mobility, feeling keenly a sense of burden on family and even a financial burden on society.”
“Yet let us thank God for the amazing advances that medical science has made and the level of true loving care that can now be given,” Egan added, noting advances in palliative care and pain management.
Further, the bishop said Christians believe in “assisted living, not assisted dying.”
“Death is not pain relief but the beginning of a new, resurrected life with God our Father and Creator,” he said. “This future depends on the state of our soul when we die and this perspective rightly affects our decisions on end of life care and how best to uphold a patient’s personal dignity.”
To help someone to commit suicide or to die prematurely, even when they request it, “can never ever be a compassionate action,” he emphasized. “It is a grave sin.”
Egan’s Holy Week letter stressed the importance of uniting one’s suffering with Christ and finding in him “all the strength, patience and energy we need to sustain our suffering – to ‘carry the cross’ and to turn it to a positive good for others. That is the meaning of Holy Week, when Jesus Christ willingly underwent death at the hands of those who had decided it was better for society for Him to be extinguished.”
“We must not yield to the temptation to apply rapid or drastic solutions, moved by a false compassion or by criteria of efficiency and cost-effectiveness,” he said.
The seriously ill deserve respect, understanding and tenderness “so that the sacred value of their life can shine forth with splendor in their suffering.”
Washington D.C., Mar 26, 2018 / 04:11 pm (CNA/EWTN News).- “It is more dangerous now than any time in history to be a person of faith,” said Ambassador Sam Brownback at an event marking the second anniversary of U.S. recognition that the Islamic State committed genocide against religious minorities, including Christians, in Syria and Iraq.
Brownback, who was sworn-in as ambassador-at-large for international religious freedom last month, said that religious freedom should be advanced in U.S. national security policy, assistance programs, and economic strategies.
“I would like to see religious freedom be for this administration what climate change was for the last,” said Brownback at the March 23 event hosted by the Heritage Foundation.
“ISIS’ Genocide of Christians: The Past, Present and Future of Christians in the Middle East” brought together human rights experts, academics, and religious freedom advocates to examine how best to address the threats posed to religious minorities by extremist groups such as the Islamic State.
The U.S. House of Representatives voted unanimously “that the atrocities perpetrated by ISIL against religious and ethnic minorities in Iraq and Syria include war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide” in March 2016. Shortly after, Secretary of State John Kerry named Yazidis, Christians, and Shia Muslims as victims of genocide in the region.
While the panel discussions focused on Christians in the Middle East, Brownback also spoke of threats to religious liberty throughout the world. He highlighted the plight of the Rohingya Muslims in Burma, Tibetan Buddhists and Uyghur Muslims in China, and Catholic leaders in Venezuela, who came under fire from President Nicolas Maduro for speaking out about the country’s current crisis.
Brownback called for alliances between the political left and right in working towards greater religious freedom abroad urging, “We are at a critical moment for the future of religious minorities globally.”
He also asked for prayers for the persecuted and for those involved in religious freedom causes.
“By God’s grace, life always triumphs over death, freedom overcomes oppression, and faith extinguishes fear. This is the source of our hope and our confidence in the future,” said Brownback.
Denver, Colo., Mar 26, 2018 / 04:10 pm (CNA).- As Catholics around the world are buying Easter candy and dyeing boiled eggs, two priests have offered suggestions for getting the most out of Holy Week.
“The most important, I believe, is to take advantage of the opportunities of prayer, especially attending each of the Triduum liturgies,” said Fr. Gary Benz of the Diocese of Bismarck, N.D.
“I’m not sure if a lot of Catholics have ever attended all three liturgies – Holy Thursday, Good Friday, and Holy Saturday Vigil – and experienced the whole paschal mystery in the passion, death and resurrection,” Fr. Benz told CNA.
While it may not be easy to attend all three liturgies, Benz encouraged Catholics, including families, to at least attempt attending these opportunities for prayer. He additionally noted that most churches offer an “extension of prayer” after the Triduum liturgies, which is another way to experience a fruitful Holy Week.
“On Holy Thursday, the church has set up an altar of reposition for adoration of the Blessed Sacrament, usually until midnight,” Benz remarked.
“If individuals or families could take to heart the plea of Jesus in the garden of Gethsemane, ‘Could you not spend one hour with me?’ and to just really sacrifice and spend that hour with the Lord,” he continued, particularly encouraging families to participate together in this time of adoration.
“What a powerful witness to your kids – that you’re giving one hour to Christ, which is again by way of great sacrifice, considering the busyness of family life.”
Fr. Daniel Ciucci of the Archdiocese of Denver also recommended additional prayer on Holy Saturday, specifically found in the Church’s Office of Readings.
“I would encourage people to read the Office of Readings for Holy Saturday, beginning with ‘Something Strange is Happening,’” Fr. Ciucci told CNA.
‘Something Strange is Happening’ is an ancient homily traditionally read on Holy Saturday.
On Good Friday, Benz also noted a tradition on Good Friday, in which some Churches set up a chapel with an image of the crucified body of Christ. He prompted both individuals and families to “spend some time before it, gazing upon the body of Christ and his wounds.”
If that would not be possible, Benz suggested that individuals and families set up a display of the crucifix in their own homes to venerate and “maybe pray the sorrowful mysteries of the rosary.”
Benz also highlighted “an old European tradition” for the Triduum. According to this custom, from the time of the end of the Good Friday liturgy until the Easter Vigil, homes “try to produce an aura of mourning, because Christ is in the tomb,” Benz said.
“It would be great if homes could silence the radios, televisions, technology, phones, iPads – to the best they can. Even limited talked and conversation, just to meditate that Christ is in the tomb,” he continued.
“It’s really powerful to just maintain that prayerful silence and anticipation in waiting for the resurrection.”
Atchison, Kansas, Mar 26, 2018 / 03:45 pm (CNA).- Fifty years later, the teachings of Humanae Vitae are more relevant and necessary for the life of the Church than ever, participants at a recent symposium on the encyclical said.
The encyclical by Pope Paul VI affirms, among other things, the Church’s teaching on natural family planning methods and rejects contraception as a morally valid method for the planning and spacing of children.
The encyclical was the topic of the seventh annual Symposium on Advancing the New Evangelization at Benedictine College in Atchison, Kansas last weekend, a gathering of dozens of scholars, philosophers, theologians, students and lay people from throughout the United States.
The keynote speakers included Dr. Janet Smith from Sacred Heart Major Seminary; Dr. Brad Wilcox, director of the National Marriage Project at the University of Virginia; Archbishop Salvatore Cordileone of San Francisco; and Dr. Jennifer Roback-Morse, founder of the Ruth Institute.
While the message and teachings of Humanae Vitae on marriage and family are 50 years old, they remain a key part of the New Evangelization in today’s culture, participants said.
“I think we all know that it touches us at our core and we all know that it’s the answer to what has so gone wrong in our culture,” Teresa Kenney, a woman’s health nurse practitioner with the Pope Paul VI Institute and symposium speaker, told CNA.
But it’s not enough to just talk about Humanae Vitae, Kenney said, it needs to be lived out in the Christian community.
She said that she experiences the teachings of Humanae Vitae in the interactions that she has with each woman she encounters. “I feel so blessed and so grateful to be doing what I’m doing.”
The Pope Paul VI Institute is an international research, education, medical, and service center based in Omaha, Nebraska that provides women with fertility care via the Creighton Model FertilityCare™ System and NaProTechnology reproductive care, which “embodies the best principles of medicine and offers superior treatments to women and challenges mainstream medicine, which relies on contraception, in-vitro fertilization, and abortion.”
In her work there, Kenney said she has found that the biggest hurdle preventing people from accepting Church teaching and natural family planning methods is the false idea of full autonomy and freedom offered by contraception.
“We’re born and bred in this culture that you have personal freedom, and that really you should be able (to do whatever) as long as you’re not hurting anybody else,” Kenney said. But the best way Kenney has found to reach women “is just letting them know that it’s important to know about their body,” and by talking about the negative side effects of contraception that many women have personally experienced.
“We have to (help people) perceive the connection between love and life as an ultimate good, and we have to have people move toward it,” she added. “And as they move closer to the foundation of Humanae Vitae, we don’t need to do anything else because it changes the culture itself.”
Joel Feldpausch works as a missionary with The Culture Project International, a mission organization that speaks to high school and middle school students about virtue, dignity and sexual integrity.
As a missionary working with young people, Feldpausch said he decided to come to the symposium because understanding and communicating the truth of Humanae Vitae is essential in his mission to youth.
“The most fascinating thing about my job in dealing with middle schoolers and high schoolers is that Humanae Vitae, Pope Paul VI’s vision, the warnings of Our Lady of Fatima, the writings of John Paul II – they become more relevant,” he said.
Feldpausch said his approach to speaking to young people is to flip on its head the cultural narrative that suggests total autonomy and the freedom to do whatever one chooses are the keys to happiness.
“You’re finding now in our world, people are accomplishing those things that they think will make them happy, and they’re getting to that point and they’re realizing that they’re not happy,” he said.
“So it’s beautiful and enlightening to introduce them to [Humanae Vitae] and say hey, I understand where you’re coming from…but what if this Church and this faith and this beauty and love and truth…what if that is where your freedom lies? What if that is your fulfillment lies? Just think about that, just think for a minute.”
Reghan Methe, a student at Benedictine College, said she came to the symposium to learn how she could practically apply the teachings of Humanae Vitae in the world.
“I am interested in how to implement all these things that we’re learning here, because we have all of these great classes but that can keep it in a very abstract or intellectual level,” she told CNA. “So a lot of people here, with the primary focus being evangelization, it helps to make what you’re learning more concrete.”
Michele Chambers, who teaches Natural Family Planning in the diocese of Lincoln, Nebraska, told CNA that she found that the symposium was a time to learn from and reconnect with like-minded people before going back to the mission field.
“To have these myriads of people here all on the same team – which when you’re in your individual dioceses and parishes, you don’t see that as much – it’s nice to come and get filled so you can go back and try and do your job a bit better,” Chambers said.
She said the teachings of the encyclical continue to be relevant “because even 50 years later, we’re still struggling, and we struggled for years before,” she said. “Trying to live Humanae Vitae is a very difficult thing no matter what year you’re born in, and we have to give people that sign of hope that it can be done.”
Carcassonne, France, Mar 26, 2018 / 03:07 pm (CNA/EWTN News).- Archbishop Charles Chaput of Philadelphia has penned a column for Holy Week highlighting the sacrifice of French policeman Arnaud Beltrame, comparing his death to save a stranger to the sac… […]
Washington D.C., Mar 26, 2018 / 01:06 pm (CNA/EWTN News).- An Italian nun working in war-torn parts of Africa was honored at the U.S. State Department’s International Women of Courage award ceremony last week, commended for her dedicated service … […]
Vatican City, Mar 26, 2018 / 12:35 pm (CNA/EWTN News).- On Monday, Pope Francis accepted the resignation of Bishop John McAreavey of Dromore, Ireland, who had asked to step down earlier this month following media claims that he mishandled an abuse report in the early ‘90s.
Pope Francis accepted McAreavey’s request to resign as bishop March 26 and appointed an apostolic administrator, retired Bishop Philip Boyce of Raphoe, 78, until the appointment of a successor.
In a letter announcing his resignation March 3, McAreavey wrote that “with a heavy heart” he would be resigning “following recent media coverage which has disturbed and upset many people.”
“I wrestled with this decision over recent weeks; it was not an easy decision to take,” he said, also asking for prayers for anyone who has been abused.
McAreavey, 69, announced his intention to step down at the beginning of March, after media and individuals called for his resignation following the airing of a program in February on allegations of child sexual abuse against a now-deceased priest of the Diocese of Dromore.
Twelve allegations of abuse have been made against Fr. Malachy Finnegan, who died in January 2002. All but two of the allegations emerged after his death.
According to the February program “Spotlight” by BBC Northern Ireland, McAreavey was asked to investigate an allegation of abuse involving Finnegan by then-Bishop of Dromore Francis Brooks in 1994. Critics said that McAreavey failed to act on the allegations that had been brought to his attention.
McAreavey, who did not become bishop until 1999, has said that he believed Bishop Brooks had reported the allegation to the authorities.
Finnegan was never prosecuted for abuse, but the allegations were investigated by the Church in Ireland’s National Board for Safeguarding Children starting in 2011, at Bishop McAreavey’s request.
McAreavey was also criticized for celebrating the funeral Mass of Finnegan in 2002. He made an apology Feb. 7, 2018, stating that through the testimony of victims, he had come to see that the decision to celebrate the funeral in early 2002 “was the wrong one.”
“In November 2002 a victim told me how hurt he was by this, I realized that I had made an error of judgement. It is something I regret and will not repeat,” he noted.
He also said that as a bishop he is aware of the need for many victims to receive “acknowledgment, an apology, counseling and indeed compensation,” and that he would be doing his best to meet these needs with the help of the diocesan director of safeguarding.
The allegations against Finnegan are from the time he was on the staff of St. Colman’s College from 1967 to 1987, and later when he was a parish priest in Clonduff/Hilltown.
In his February statement Bishop McAreavey described Finnegan’s actions as “abhorrent, inexcusable and indefensible.”
“We speak about abuse cases as being historical, but we must never lose sight of the reality that the legacy of abuse lives on for victims and for them it is all too present. I ask you to pray for them and their families,” he added, also encouraging anyone who thinks they may have been abused in a church context to come forward in order to receive support.
Upon the announcement of McAreavey’s resignation March 26, Archbishop Eamon Martin, head of the Irish bishops’ conference, issued a statement acknowledging his 19 years of service as a bishop and his “generous contribution” to the local bishops’ conference, both as a member and as president.
“As the bishops stated following their Spring 2018 general meeting earlier this month, the Church can never become complacent concerning the safeguarding of children,” he said, noting that the Church is committed to the review process of dioceses and to cooperation with any inquiries by authorities.
Martin also stated that his prayers are with “the people, religious and clergy of Dromore and in particular with all who are suffering because of abuse.”
McAreavey was born in Drumnagally, Banbridge in 1949. He was ordained a priest for the Diocese of Dromore in June 1973 and received a doctorate in canon law from the Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome in 1978.
While a priest he taught at St. Coleman’s College and St. Patrick’s College. He also served on the Armagh Regional Marriage Tribunal and has written extensively on Church law.
Pope St. John Paul II appointed him Bishop of Dromore in June 1999.
© Catholic World Report