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Madrid, Spain, Mar 6, 2017 / 03:07 pm (CNA/EWTN News).- After an anti-clerical childhood and adolescence, filled with hatred for the Church, Fr. Juan José Martínez says he discovered “that God exists and wants me as his priest.”

“Sunday mornings I would peer out of the balcony of my house, and when the people were going by on their way to Mass, I would spit on them. I told them that the Church was a sect that wanted their money,” explained the priest, who ministers in the Diocese of Almeria, Spain.

Fr. Juan José’s parents were not believers, and he had received no religious formation, but he said they did not raise him to be intolerant. In fact, he says he does not know where he got all those ideas, because the perception he had of the Church and God was that of a “multinational corporation with branches in every neighborhood to extract money, like a sect.”

“I was absolutely anticlerical, I was the first student in my school and the town of Carboneras, Almeria Province, to never be taught Religion because when I was 8 or 9, I chose the alternative course which was Ethics. In the following years, I went on convincing my friends to quit Religion classes and to take Ethics with me. In the end, my whole class ended up being taught Ethics and none of them Religion.”

But what he never imagined is that the end of his journey would be to help his friends to come back to the Church. Fr. Juan José remembers quite well that the first day he went into a Catholic church, “I went to make fun of those who had invited me.”

“It was in January 1995, some friends from class invited me to a Catholic Charismatic Renewal prayer group at the parish. Obviously I told them I wasn’t planning on going because I didn’t want them to brainwash me. For a whole month they persisted. I finally gave in – it was a Thursday in February 1995 when I went into a Catholic church for the first time.”

A golden box

A lot of his friends were there, and he was surprised because “they were all looking at a golden box at the back of the church. I didn’t know what it was, but I thought it was where the parish priest kept the money.”

That golden box was the Tabernacle.

Fr. Juan José says that he came to make fun of them because “I thought they were crazy. Inside, I was laughing at them a lot, but I was polite and concealed it.  But I decided to come back the following Thursday to laugh at them some more.”

And so one Thursday after another, Fr. Juan José was letting go of his prejudices against the Church and religion.

“The pastor seemed to me to be a very wise man who was helping the people,” he told CNA. And little by little, the love of God was penetrating his heart: “I was 15 years old and I started to sing at Mass, which meant I would attend Mass on Saturdays. I liked being in front of the tabernacle and little by little, I realized that God existed and loved me. I felt the love of God. The Charismatic Renewal group, which I had come to make fun of, helped me a lot.”

“My eyes were being opened and I saw that God was not a legend or story for the weak, but that he existed and that he was supporting and guiding me. I experienced that he loved me so much that he wanted me for himself and was calling me,” he recalled.

“I am yours for whatever you need”

Fr. Juan José had been baptized and made his First Communion because of his grandparents’ wishes, but he did not have a relationship with God after that. “I made my Confirmation as I was right in the midst of the process of conversion, and it was a genuine gift. That day I told the Lord, ‘I am yours for whatever you need.’ My mother came but my father did not. It was a unique moment in my life to receive the Holy Spirit and to put my trust in the Lord.”

For months, the young Juan José was resisting the call to the priesthood. “I told the Lord that I didn’t want any hassles and to quit talking to me. Until I had to make a decision and it was to follow him, becoming a priest.”

One Saturday afternoon when he was 17, Fr. Juan José told his father he wanted to go to the seminary. His father beat him and said that “he would be a priest over his dead body.”

“They did not understand that I would want to be a priest. In fact, my father offered to pay for me to go to college in the United States but (he told me) he would never pay for the seminary.”

In such a difficult moment, Fr.  Juan José recalled that all he could think of was the prayer of Saint Teresa of Avila: “Let nothing disturb you, nothing frighten you. All you need is God” and when his father stopped rebuking him, the young man gave him a hug and said to him, “I knew you were going to react like that, but I also knew that one day you’d understand.”

“Welcome”

In fact, his father went so far as to threaten to report the pastor to the police if kept helping his son discern his vocation. “My father was trying everything, but the Lord is stronger,” he said.

To obey his father, Fr. Juan José could not start the seminary, and so he began to study teaching at the University of Almeria. For years he was patient, and continued to be faithful to his vocation to the priesthood. Until one day in May 1999, as he recalled, his mother told him that she had spoken to his father and that finally he would let him enter the seminary. “I began to cry and cry. I remember when I told the pastor about it he said “welcome” and gave me a great big hug.”

In September 2000, he finally entered the seminary.

In 2006, Fr.Juan José was ordained in the Almeria cathedral and his father even attended the ceremony. “In no way did he want me to become a priest, but he saw that I was happy and even though he was totally anticlerical, he decided that the happiness of his son came before his ideology and if I was happy, even though he didn’t understand it, he would have to accept it. “

In fact, he recalled that two years ago, “before dying, my father received the Anointing of the Sick. And it was I who administered it to him.”

“When somebody tells me he doesn’t believe in God, I always tell him that neither did I believe in Him, but I was mistaken, because I have discovered the genuine happiness that Jesus has given to me. If you’re not completely happy, ask the Lord to help you, because only He will give you the happiness that your heart needs.”

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Kyiv, Ukraine, Mar 5, 2017 / 04:02 pm (Aid to the Church in Need).- Parents forced to choose which of their children will eat dinner that day. Children watching as their parents succumb to the gruesome effects of starvation. Farmers having their crops snatched up and taken away while neighbors lie emaciated on the roads, too exhausted to move.

Thousands of documented instances of cannibalism.

This is the story of the Holodomor, the “death by hunger” that gripped Ukraine between 1932 and 1933 – leaving between 2.5 and 7 million people dead in its wake.

“The story is really horrific: the amount of people who went through life and were forced to eat horrible things just to stay alive,” Ukranian Greek Catholic priest Fr. Mark Morozowich told CNA.

“People talk about (how) there would just be some water with a little bit of fat in it that they were able to eat,” said Fr. Morozowich, who also serves as dean of the School of Theology and Religious Studies at the Catholic University of America.

“And then the stories of people dying: the young people, the old people, in some cases, if there were protests, people were shot and killed,” he recalled. “It was really a demonic reality in some ways.”

An overlooked history

The Holodomor, or “death by hunger” in Ukrainian, was a man-made famine that terrorized the Ukrainian Socialist Soviet Republic – a Soviet state under the USSR – between the spring of 1932 until the summer of 1933. Through a combination of decreased crop requisition and a series of policies that restricted rations and seized food throughout the country, between an estimated 2.5 to 7.5 million Ukrainians starved to death in one of the most agriculturally productive areas of the USSR.

Contributing factors to the famine across the Soviet Union were the Soviet collectivization movements, which consolidated land and labor onto collective state farms as well as changes in crop production from grain to non-native species like sugar beets. Meanwhile, much of the grain that was grown was either not harvested, or mismanaged during production or shipping.

However, while food shortfalls were experienced in pockets across the Soviet Union, policies enacted in Ukraine in November 1932 specifically contributed to widespread death and starvation. Soviet leader Joseph Stalin’s policies required that Ukraine produce a third of the Soviet Union’s grain stocks, even though it consisted of just a fraction of the union’s arable land.  

In addition, peasants and collective farms who did not meet their grain quotas were severely punished, forced to turn over livestock or surrender up to 15 times the food they originally owed the Soviet government. Those who could not turn over the required amount of goods found their farms raided by party officials.

After these policies were put into place, Ukrainian borders were closed, prohibiting starving citizens from leaving. These policies remained in effect, with food continuing to be seized, even after the Soviet government met its food requisition goals in early 1933. As a result of these factors, tens of thousands of Ukrainians died every day during the winter of 1932-1933. Citizens turned to drastic measures just to survive – including thousands of documented cases of cannibalism.

The classification of the Holodomor as a “genocide” is contentious today, due to questions over the extent of Stalin’s intention to specifically target and extinguish the Ukrainian people, as well as differing definitions of what constitutes genocide. Currently, the Holodomor is recognized as a genocide by 24 countries – including the Vatican.

Despite these questions, Stalin’s complicity in causing and then perpetuating the starvation in Ukraine has been well-documented.

“I don’t think that the way to think about the Holodomor is as something that there was a clear blueprint for and that the blueprint was just put into action,” said Prof. Michael Kimmage, a history professor at the Catholic University of America.

“It was a number of competing agendas and, of course, the willingness of Stalin and those in his inner circle to inflict tremendous suffering on the population of the Soviet Union.”  

While there was an “anarchic” element of administrative errors and unorganized policies, Kimmage said, there was also “certainly a form of political coercion to minimize access to food.” In addition, many within the Soviet government experienced and perpetuated fears and paranoias of secret enemies within the state – particularly within Ukraine, he said.

“You have a moment of genuine political terror, of state-sponsored, state-driven violence across the Soviet Union, but it has this particular chapter, particular element within Ukraine which is dictated and guided by Stalin’s paranoia about, perhaps Ukrainian loyalties being outside of the Soviet Union.”

In addition to the scope of the famine, what also sets the Holodomor apart is the degree of state complicity – not only in the creation of the famine, but in its refusal of any aid once news of the famine started to spread, Kimmage noted.

“The state was aware of the problem, it could have allocated resources differently,” he told CNA.

“The fiendish reality of the Holodomor is that it wouldn’t have happened if the Soviet state had not made it happen. There was no way that once it was underway that the state was going to come to the rescue of its starving subjects and citizens, and that’s perhaps the core tragedy of this event.”

The Soviet’s denial of wrongdoing lasted beyond the famine itself, Kimmage pointed out. Ukrainian people were prohibited from speaking or writing about the famine and its unique impact on their people until the Soviet Union broke apart in the 1990s.

“The thing that the Soviet Union wanted to prevent after the Holodomor was the usage of this event for any nationalist purposes – so to classify the Holodomor as a specifically Ukrainian tragedy, that was impermissible in Soviet times.”

Echoes of the Famine

While the Holodomor was a verboten topic of conversation in Ukraine, it is now an important touchstone both for the Ukrainian American community and for post-soviet Ukraine, who can now speak freely and remember publicly what happened.

“What has been forbidden to be spoken about until 1991 is very much spoken about after 1991,” Kimmage said.  

For Ukrainians, said Fr. Morozowich, talking about the famine is also a means of commemorating the deep dehumanization experienced by the Ukrainian people during that period.  

“When we look at what a famine does, it strips a person, it destroys networks, it brings them down, it pits neighbor against neighbor,” Fr. Morozowich said.

The perversion of these relationships and the choices people were faced with to survive destroyed not only society, but persons as well. “It was a whole dehumanization of the person. All that was good was stripped away and a stripping away the identity of the Ukrainian people.”

‘Who is going to remember Ukraine?’

The footprint of the Holodomor today is not only in the people’s reclamation of their identity, but in the people’s response to the situation and conflicts facing Ukraine today.

“It’s difficult for people who don’t live here or don’t know the history of these areas to understand,” Archbishop Claudio Gugerotti, apostolic nuncio to Ukraine, told CNA/EWTN News.

He spoke of Ukrainian’s fears that the conflicts facing the country today will be overlooked again not only by those imposing the violence, but also the world.  

“The fact that they are afraid of being alone, of being forgotten: this is a fact that we cannot not take into consideration.”

Since 2014, conflict has raged between pro-Russian forces and the Ukrainian government in Eastern Ukraine. Nearly 10,000 people have been killed by the violence, and over 1.5 million people have registered as displaced, according to the United Nations. Nearly two million people face shortages of water and restrictively high food and medicine prices in the areas of the most fighting, according to UN reports.

“Our present situation is not the Holodomor, but it is extremely difficult, and there are areas where, I wouldn’t say they starve, but they are at the minimum level of surviving,”Archbishop Gugerotti said.

He described that in many places, citizens hide and store basic food items like bread for fear of scarcity or theft. Social cohesion has eroded in the eastern part of the country, particularly between ethnic and language groups as well as between the different Catholic, Orthodox and Protestant Churches. This has limited the churches’ ability to respond to the needs of the people, and heightened citizens’ feelings of hopelessness and paralysis.

“These kind of tensions are overwhelming, so the possibility of proper reaction is limited to the minimum.”  

The challenges facing both Russia and the West has left many people in Ukraine feeling that their needs are being overlooked.

“When one is afraid, certainly one doesn’t want to meet with people who are more afraid than he or she is,” Archbishop Gugerotti said. “We have a disastrous situation in the whole world and who is going to remember Ukraine?”

Fr. Morozowich reflected that the lesson of the Holodomor still echoes in the challenges the Ukrainian people are facing today.  

“When we look at history and we look at things that have happened, unfortunately in many cases, political power sometimes speaks louder than historical realities. We need to continually bring the stories forward,” he said, pointing to recent attention to the Holodomor in film and in research, as a hopeful sign.

Fr. Morzowich also spoke about the renewed attention to the atrocities of the Armenian genocide as another example of stories now receiving the attention they need.

Ultimately, however, both the Holodomor and the current Ukrainian conflict ask the same question, he said: “Are we really ready to listen to the plight of our brothers and sisters?”

In the Holodomor, the Soviets imposed a new reality for the Ukrainian people through the starvation and suffering of the famine.

“One that was devoid of God, stripping of their dignity, stripping of their culture, stripping of their culture, stripping of their intellectual past, stripping of their wonderful melodies,” Fr. Morozowich said. “They were deprived and then they were rebuilt into agents of the system.”

Similarly, the violence, hunger and displacement of today’s Ukrainian conflict makes people fear the same kind of deprivation, he added. “It’s a it’s a large part of the struggle of yesterday, it’s a large part of the struggle that’s going on today.”

“We have to ask if we’re ready to stand with our brothers and sisters to help them be free, to be able to live a decent life without the fear of a bomb falling, without the fear of hunger, and how do we as a people, a society for the voices of the innocent to rise above the military machinery that is just subjecting these people.”

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London, England, Mar 4, 2017 / 04:09 pm (CNA/EWTN News).- Is it ok to abort a baby who has been diagnosed with Down syndrome? What about if you find out the baby is a girl, and you wanted a boy?

 
One UK ethics watchdog recently endorsed early pregnancy tests to screen for Down syndrome but opposed the same tests to find out the baby’s sex, lest it lead to gendercide.
 
And that logic is far too widespread, says a disabilities rights group, which is challenging such thinking in a recent petition.

“While many denounce gendercide and few would argue that parents should be free to abort a girl because they prefer a boy, when it comes to Down syndrome, the logic tragically changes. It becomes a valued individual ‘free and accepted choice’ to discriminate against people with genetic variations. How is this possible?”, asks a petition from Stop Discriminating Down,  a project of the Jerome Lejeune Foundation and DownPride.

This week, the Nuffield Council on Bioethics published its findings on non-invasive prenatal testing, recommending it should not be used to reveal the unborn child’s sex, lest it promote sex-selective abortion.

However, it also recommended that NIPT be accessible to parents who wish to find out whether their child “has a significant medical condition or impairment, but only within an environment that enables them to make autonomous, informed choices.”

The test involves taking a blood sample from the mother at around 9 or 10 weeks of pregnancy. It is a non-invasive way of testing for genetic conditions and variations in the unborn child, and is thus safer than invasive measures such as amniocentesis, which carry a risk of miscarriage and other harms to the child.

The Nuffield Council’s recommendations would encourage the use of NIPT to screen for Down syndrome, Edwards syndrome, and Patau syndrome – “fetal anomalies” that in England, Wales, and Scotland are grounds for abortion under the Abortion Act 1967. The National Health Service will offer NIPT to pregnant women whose unborn children have a high risk of these anomalies from 2018.

The Nuffield Council noted that 74 percent of pregnant women in the UK currently choose to have a screening test for Down syndrome, and that between 89 and 95 percent of women abort their child after receiving a Down syndrome diagnosis.

It estimates that annually, nearly 200 more fetuses with Down syndrome in the UK will be identified, and there will be an estimated 17 fewer miscarriages related to procedures such as amniocentesis.

However, an additional 200 fetuses who are identified as having Down syndrome means, given the figures provided by the Nuffield Council, that nearly between 178 and 190 of those fetuses will be aborted.

“To offset the possibility that the increased use of NIPT might adversely affect disabled people, the Government … have a duty to provide disabled people with high quality specialist health and social care, and to tackle discrimination, exclusion and negative societal attitudes,” the Nuffield Council wrote in its report.

The council acknowledged, however, that introducing NIPT could affect the specialist health and social care received by disabled persons, and the importance attributed to research into their conditions.

And “Making NIPT available on the NHS could be perceived as sending negative and hurtful messages about the value of people with the syndromes being tested for,” it added. “Disabled people and their families might be more vulnerable to discrminination, stigma or abuse if NIPT gives rise to perceptions that people are ‘to blame’ for having a baby with a disability.”

The council also recommended that NIPT be accompanied by “accurate, balanced and non-directive information for women and couples,” and that private providers of the test be monitored to ensure their advertising is neither misleading nor harmful.

Turning from screening for “fetal anomalies”, the Nuffield Council said that “NIPT should not generally be used to find out whether a fetus has a less significant medical condition or impairment, has an adult onset condition, or carries a copy of a gene tht does not cause a condition on its own. Nor should it be used to reveal non-medical features of the fetus, such as sex.”

It added that “the Government should ensure that private NIPT providers stop offering fetal sex determination,” and that it should establish that “whole genome sequencing of fetuses is not offered outside research environments.”

The report of Nuffield Council acknowledged “the offer of NIPT to determine the sex of the fetus at an early stage of pregnancy may increase the risk of sex selective terminations taking place,” which they said “there is some evidence that sex selective terminations have happened in the UK, and they are known to occur in other countries.”

Sex-selective abortions are illegal in the UK, but in recent years the government has been criticized for a lack of enforcement.

The UK’s Department of Health has expressed concern for the pressure on pregnant women in some south Asian immigrant communities to have boys, and former Minister of Parliament Paul Uppal has said “the expectation is there – I’ve seen it firsthand myself.”

Advocates for persons with Down syndrome are strongly opposed to the expansion of NIPT.

Stop Discriminating Down says that “Government encouraged selective abortion, the refusal to provide health-benefits, or the refusal to provide adequate medical care equal to that provided to their typical peers is a social and moral crime against all people with disabilities and their families who thanks to developments in research, medical care, and social acceptance have many possibilities. The expansion of government sponsored prenatal screening and abortion stand in stark contradiction to the social progress made over the past 40 years towards an inclusive and equal society.”

“While throughout the world we petition, walk, and meet together to fight against discrimination and to protect biodiversity, no-one should have to defend threats to their life because of his or her genetic make-up. In a humane world aware of the need for acceptance and inclusion of differences, people with Down syndrome should not be discriminated against.”

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