News Briefs

Funeral and public viewing set for murdered Bishop David O’Connell

February 24, 2023 Catholic News Agency 1
A view of the nave of the Cathedral of Our Lady of Angels where the funeral Mass for Bishop David O’Connell will be celebrated / David Leigh Ellis|Wikipedia|CC BY-SA 3.0

Boston, Mass., Feb 24, 2023 / 11:17 am (CNA).

The Archdiocese of Los Angeles has announced the funeral arrangements for the late Auxiliary Bishop David O’Connell, who was murdered in his Hacienda Heights home on Feb. 18.

Three days of services will be held for O’Connell, beginning on Wednesday, March 1. 

On Wednesday, there will be a memorial Mass for O’Connell at St. John Vianney Catholic Church, 1345 Turnbull Canyon Rd. in Hacienda Heights, at 7 p.m. PST. The Mass will be livestreamed here.

There will be a public viewing on Thursday at the Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels at 555 West Temple St. in Los Angeles. The viewing will take place from 10 a.m. to 12 p.m., and 1 p.m. to 6 p.m.  

A vigil Mass will be held following the public viewing at 7 p.m. and will be livestreamed both here and here.

O’Connell’s funeral Mass will be held on Friday, March 3, at the same Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels at 11 a.m. local time. The funeral Mass will be livestreamed both here and here.

O’Connell, who was known as “Bishop Dave,” served the San Gabriel Pastoral Region of the archdiocese, which covers East Los Angeles through the San Gabriel and Pomona Valleys.

Born in 1953 in County Cork, Ireland, he was ordained a priest in 1979 in Dublin, Ireland. O’Connell then began serving in the Archdiocese of Los Angeles and held many different positions during his priesthood, in which he ministered to immigrants and those affected by both gang violence and poverty.

Pope Francis named him an auxiliary bishop for the Archdiocese of Los Angeles in 2015.

O’Connell was pastor at St. Frances Cabrini Parish when the violent 1992 L.A. riots took place after the acquittal of four police officers who had been videotaped beating an unarmed black man, Rodney King.

He worked to restore trust between law enforcement and residents by bringing the two together in people’s homes for dialogue.

“That was part of our work as a Church, to try to provide spaces for conversations,” he told CNA in a 2020 interview. “And we thought we really had achieved a lot of progress. Killings were way down in south Los Angeles. There was a trust built up between LAPD and residents. This level of trust has helped us over many different crises over the last almost 30 years to be able to talk things through.”

Father Jay Cunnane, pastor of St. Cornelius Parish in Long Beach, California, and a close friend to O’Connell, told EWTN News Nightly that the bishop had a “great heart” for people on the margins of society, specifically immigrants and the poor. 

Cunnane called O’Connell “an effective organizer” for those on the margins. 

When he heard the news of O’Connell’s murder, Cunnane said he was “speechless” and “shocked.”

“I’m still sort of stunned. But grateful to God for having had all those years a good friend to walk the road with,” he said.

That interview can be seen below.

In a Wednesday press conference, Los Angeles District Attorney George Gascón said that Carlos Medina of Torrance, the suspect in custody, has admitted to murdering the bishop.

It was revealed in a press conference Monday that Medina is the husband of O’Connell’s housekeeper, who remains unnamed. Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department Sheriff Robert Luna said at that press conference that Medina had done work at the bishop’s residence as well.

It’s currently unclear what the motive for the killing was. Bail was set at $2 million.

[…]

Catholics, are you going to confession? Watch for these changes

February 23, 2023 Catholic News Agency 3
null / L’Osservatore Romano.

Denver, Colo., Feb 23, 2023 / 16:00 pm (CNA).

Lent is supposed to be a time of penance in the Catholic Church. This year, it’s a time when priests in the confessional will use a revised translation of the sacrament of penance and reconciliation to forgive the sins of Catholic penitents.

The changes are noticeable in the formula of absolution, when the priest speaks in the person of Jesus Christ to absolve a Catholic from his or her sins. The “essential words” of the priest’s absolution formula have not been changed, but there are “two minor modifications to the preliminary part of the prayer,” according to the April 2022 newsletter of the Committee on Divine Worship of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB).

Here’s the new approved text, with changes in bold:

God, the Father of mercies,

through the Death and Resurrection of his Son

has reconciled the world to himself

and poured out the Holy Spirit for the forgiveness of sins;

through the ministry of the Church may God grant you pardon and peace,

and I absolve you from your sins

in the name of the Father, and of the Son, [sign of the cross] 

and of the Holy Spirit. Amen. 

The line “poured out the Holy Spirit” previously read “sent the Holy Spirit among us.” The phrase “may God grant you pardon and peace” is only a one-word change: It previously read “may God give you pardon and peace.”

The changes add “a little bit more richness to the language,” according to Monsignor Richard Hilgartner, a former executive director of the USCCB’s Secretariat of Divine Worship who is now pastor of St. Joseph Parish in Cockeysville, Maryland.

“God’s granting something that we don’t deserve, and that’s what forgiveness is. It’s something that we don’t earn or deserve,” Hilgartner told the Archdiocese of Baltimore newspaper The Catholic Review.

The sacrament of penance, also called reconciliation or confession, is the means through which God grants pardon for sins through the priest’s ministry. In the sacrament, the contrite penitent discloses his or her sins to a Catholic priest who grants sacramental absolution. The penitent makes an act of contrition in which he or she resolves to not sin again. The priest generally instructs the penitent to perform an act of satisfaction, usually called a penance. This can take the form of prayer, such as praying three Hail Marys, for example.

The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops’ 2021 fall general assembly voted in favor of the new translation of the prayer, with 182 votes in favor, 6 against, and 2 abstentions. The Vatican’s Dicastery for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments approved the translation in April 2022.

The new language for the priest’s absolution is allowed as of Ash Wednesday, the start of Lent. Priests must use the new language starting on Divine Mercy Sunday, April 16, the first Sunday after Easter 2023.

Hilgartner noted that the liturgical season of Lent is a penitential time when many Catholics especially seek out the sacrament of reconciliation. He told the Catholic Review that many Catholics feel peace and relief after going to confession, especially if they have been away from the sacrament for a long time.

“Inevitably, people say, ‘I feel so much better. I feel like a burden has been lifted,’ because that’s what’s happening. God is casting behind his back all our sins, taking them away from us in a way that we don’t know how to do for ourselves,” he said. “I hear often about how people feel literally unburdened by this happening. And it’s the great gift — that the Lord’s taking this upon himself. For us, this is what the cross is all about, that he takes all of our sins to the cross so that we don’t have to.”

Under Church law, every Catholic has the right to an anonymous sacramental confession. In practice, priests often do not even know the identity of a penitent. In the Catholic understanding of the “seal of confession,” the contents are “inviolable.” Any priest who discloses the contents of a confession faces among the harshest penalties of the Church, an automatic excommunication.

Pope Francis has frequently encouraged Catholics to receive God’s forgiveness in the sacrament of penance.

[…]