US

No Picture
News Briefs

The first Catholic church in 60 years is being built in Cuba

May 18, 2017 CNA Daily News 0

Tampa, Florida, May 18, 2017 / 04:30 pm (CNA/EWTN News).- Funded by a parish in Florida, a new Catholic church is being built in Cuba and is the first the island nation has seen in 60 years.

Father Ramon Hernandez, pastor of St. Lawrence church in Tampa, said he and his parishioners are happy to see how their funds have financed the project, and said he looks forward to the inauguration Mass taking place early next year.

Saint Lawrence provided $95,000 in donations for the church’s construction in Sandino, Cuba, located in the western corner of the country.  

The new church, alongside a refurbished synagogue in Havana, shows Cuba’s progress in religious freedom since Fidel Castro ushered in communism during his revolution in the 1960s. Atheism was established as the belief system for the entire state, and many religious leaders were faced with persecution. In 1992, however, Cuba was made a secular state.  

“Cuba is changing,” Fr. Hernandez said, according to the Tampa Bay Times. The priest is a native Cuban who celebrated Mass in churches hidden in the homes of faithful families. He left the country in the 1980s.

The new church will be called the Parish of Divine Mercy of Sandino, and will be led by Father Cirilo Castro. The 800 square foot building will have a maximum capacity of 200 people. An estimated 40,000 people live in the coastal town. The town’s main industries involve citrus fruits, coffee, and fish.

The idea for the project was first conceived in 2010 by St. Lawrence’s former pastor, who wanted a greater spiritual connection between Cuba and Tampa. Tampa and Cuba have already had strong ties over the importation of tobacco in the late 19th century.

During a visit to Tampa last month, Fr. Castro said that the roof was the last piece of the structure, expected to be installed by the end of June. The pews and the altar will be added over the next few months in preparation for the first mass taking place either in January or February of 2018.

The completion of Divine Mercy of Sandino marks a significant step towards religious freedom and amends to the faiths oppressed in previous years. Religions like Mormonism and Islam have also been given room to grow.

“I see the stories of persecution of freedom of religion in Cuba but we now have a mixture of religions,” said José Ramón Cabañas, Cuba’s ambassador to the United States in an interview with the Tampa Bay Times last week.

The U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom acknowledged that churches have been dissembled and religious leaders have been arrested even within the past year. But the report reveals that nearly 70 percent of Cuba’s population is Catholic and additional five percent is Protestant, showing a greater attachment to the faith despite government meddling into religious affairs.

Religious persecution still lingers, but developments in religious freedom have notable increased, and this church is one of many planned to be erected in Cuba. Two other Catholic churches are currently under construction in Havana and Santiago. 

[…]

No Picture
News Briefs

Venerable Stanley Rother’s remains re-interred ahead of beatification

May 18, 2017 CNA Daily News 1

Oklahoma City, Okla., May 18, 2017 / 06:01 am (CNA/EWTN News).- The remains of Venerable Stanley Rother were exhumed last week and moved to a chapel in Oklahoma City in preparation for the beatification Mass of the first US-born martyr.

“The witness of Father Rother’s life and death has been a source of encouragement and inspiration to me as a seminarian, priest and now as a bishop. I consider it a great gift to be entrusted with overseeing the continuation of his cause for beatification and canonization begun by Archbishop Beltran,” Archbishop Paul Coakley of Oklahoma City said after the May 10 service.

“His beatification is an unexpected blessing for Oklahoma and for the United States as we celebrate this ordinary man from humble beginnings who answered the call to serve an extraordinary life. His witness will continue to inspire us for generations.”

The body of Fr. Rother, who served as a priest in Guatemala, was taken from Holy Trinity Cemetery in his home town of Okarche, Okla., to the chapel at Resurrection Cemetery in Oklahoma City.

Before his body was exhumed, his family led a prayerful procession to the gravesite. Fr. Rother’s remains were later removed form the vault, and examined by medical professionals and verified, as required by the process of beatification.

The martyred priest’s body was then placed in a new casket with golden vestments, along with a document signed by those in attendance. A ribbon was wrapped around the casket, sealed with the archdiocese’s seal in wax.

The Salve Regina was sung as the casket was re-interred, and a prayer service followed.

“It was a holy day. Father Rother’s presence was felt by many, and we are blessed as the Catholic Church in Oklahoma to present Father Rother’s life to the world,” Archbishop Coakley commented.

A temporary sign now marks Fr. Rother’s original gravesite in Okarche, located about 40 miles northwest of Oklahoma City, where the original vault and casket have been re-buried, and a permanent memorial marker is planned.

Fr. Rother’s Mass of Beatification will take place Sept. 23 at the Cox Convention Center in Oklahoma City. It will be said by Cardinal Angelo Amato, prefect of the Congregation for the Causes of Saints, and concelebrated by Archbishop Coakley.

Fr. Rother was born March 27, 1935 in Okarche and entered seminary soon after graduating from Holy Trinity High School.

Despite a strong calling, Rother would struggle in the seminary, failing several classes and even out of one seminary before graduating from Mount St. Mary’s in Maryland. He was ordained a priest of the Diocese of Oklahoma City and Tulsa in 1963.

He served for five years in Oklahoma before joining the Oklahoma diocese’s mission in Santiago Atitlan, Guatemala, a poor rural community of mostly indigenous persons where he would spend the next 13 years of his life.

The work ethic Fr. Rother learned on his family’s farm would serve him well in this new place. As a mission priest, he was called on not just to say Mass, but to fix the broken truck or work the fields. He built a farmers’ co-op, a school, a hospital, and the first Catholic radio station.

Over the years, the violence of the Guatemalan civil war inched closer to the once-peaceful village. Disappearances, killings, and danger soon became a part of daily life, but Fr. Rother remained steadfast and supportive of his people.

In 1980-1981, the violence escalated to an almost unbearable point; Fr. Rother was constantly seeing friends and parishioners abducted or killed.

In January 1981, in immediate danger and his name on a death list, Fr. Rother did return to Oklahoma for a few months. But as Easter approached, he wanted to spend Holy Week with his people in Guatemala.

The morning of July 28, 1981, three Ladinos, the non-indigenous men who had been fighting the native people and rural poor of Guatemala since the 1960s, broke into Fr. Rother’s rectory. They wished to disappear him, but he refused.

Not wanting to endanger the others at the parish mission, he struggled but did not call for help. Fifteen minutes and two gunshots later, Father Stanley was dead and the men fled the mission grounds.

Though his body was buried in Okarche, Fr. Rother’s heart was enshrined in the church of Santiago Atitlan where he served.

Fr. Rother’s cause for beatification was opened in 2007, and his martyrdom was recognized by the Vatican in December 2016, which cleared the way for his beatification.

[…]

No Picture
News Briefs

Cardinal Mueller to graduates: ‘Dare to be great’

May 17, 2017 CNA Daily News 0

, May 17, 2017 / 03:01 pm (CNA/EWTN News).- With God’s grace, you can accomplished great things, Cardinal Gerhard Mueller challenged young Catholics at Christendom College last weekend at their 2017 commencement ceremony.

“The summary of all natural and Christian anthropology is to say, ‘Dare to be great in the grace of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, Amen’,” Cardinal Mueller, prefect of the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith, told undergraduate students of Christendom College in Front Royal, Va. on May 13, the feast of Our Lady of Fatima.

Cardinal Mueller, the college’s 2017 commencement speaker, was the celebrant and homilist at the baccalaureate Mass on May 12 and received an honorary doctorate from the college before his commencement address. He is also the president of the Pontifical Commission “Ecclesia Dei,” appointed to that post and as prefect of the CDF by Pope Benedict XVI.

“Gerhard Cardinal Müller has been a strong, consistent voice in defense of the Church’s perennial teaching in the midst of so much confusion in our modern world,” the college’s president Dr. Timothy O’Donnell stated before the prelate’s appearance.

The cardinal focused his May 13 address on “Christian anthropology,” and exhorted the graduates “to be salt and light in the midst of the contemporary world.”

The Christian, he insisted, can only bring about the Kingdom of God on earth by performing the corporal and spiritual works of mercy through God’s grace, not solely through his own merits.

“No, the Kingdom of God is grace, and grace brings the Holy Spirit in the world, a new spirit, the spirit of charity that sanctifies and assists, the spirit of understanding, of love, that changes our hearts and introduces in all human relations a movement of freedom,” he explained.

This movement of the Holy Spirit, he continued, includes the theological virtues of faith, hope, and charity, as well as the cardinal virtues of prudence, justice, fortitude, and temperance, and “other gifts and charisms.”

Through these virtues and gifts, men can be “collaborators with God in the bringing about of His Kingdom,” he said, where “the Church, with the arrival of the Messiah, carries out her mission in the Holy Spirit to bring glad tidings to the poor, to proclaim liberty to captives, and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free and to proclaim a year acceptable to the Lord.”

He warned against seeing Christianity as a “bourgeois” practice of “interiority, only love of neighbor, and individual philanthropy” where salvation is reduced “to the world alone in the sense of social and purely humanitarian NGOs.”

However, he also taught against seeing God’s kingdom “only as above and outside of the world.”

Rather, he continued, “reverence toward God and the responsibility for the world are inseparably connected in Christ, Who did not come into this world to free us from the world, but to lead men and the world to their authentic destiny in the salvific plan of God.”

This does not mean the rejection of non-Christians who perform “good works,” he insisted, as “it would appear wrong to divide in an exaggerated manner Christianity from the rest of humanity.”

“Whomever does the good, even if they do not yet recognize God explicitly, is the mediator of the goodness of God,” he said. “For us grace and nature are belonging together, and are not in a contradiction. Grace and nature, faith and reason, must be distinct (but) not separate.”

Cardinal Mueller also exhorted those in attendance to be on guard against totalitarian ideologies that set themselves up against the vision of God and the Church.

Many ideologies of the 20th century were totalitarian in that they sought to establish their own vision of creation, a “humanism without or humanism against God,” he said.

Forms of totalitarianism exist today, he explained, like “the concept of designing one’s baby,” and the promotion of “euthanasia for those who are too tired to live, or who have become un-useful up to the sociological laboratories that want to make humanity happy with their political and economic theories, but in reality only enslave to their fantasy for omnipotence.”

Christians must fight injustices in the world in the name of human dignity, he insisted.

“Nobody may divert their gaze while the number of souls who go hungry grow, are deprived of their rights and recused to slavery, while the trauma of the refugees arriving on the European shores and the American border increase, and while being in a unified world, the risks and the challenges of globalizations are ever present,” he said.

“At the foundation of this dignity,” he added, “are the rights to lodging, food, and clothing, as well as the right to earn a living for himself and for the well-being of his family.”

The cardinal also warned against what Pope Francis has called the “ideological colonization” of the developing world, where developed countries try to force programs like abortion, birth control, sterilizations, and the approval of same-sex marriage onto developing countries.

Cardinal Mueller called this “an aggressive importation of a deformed image of the human person of the so-called ‘society of well-being’.”

These “developing cultures” cannot be ignored or trampled underfoot, he said, as “variety enriches,” which is also “the message of Pentecost when all peoples in diverse languages announce together the great works of God in the language of love.”

Christians, he insisted, must not only confess God with words, but work to do His will “by holding faithful to the Gospel and benefitting from its resources.”

“Not everyone who cries or confesses ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter the Kingdom of Heaven, but those who do the Father’s will by taking a strong grip on the work at hand,” he continued. “Now the Father wills that in all men we recognize Christ our brother and love Him effectively in word and in deed.”

“By thus giving witness to the truth, we will share with others the mystery of the Heavenly Father’s love,” he concluded.

“As a consequence, men throughout the world will be aroused to a lively hope, the gift of the Holy Spirit, that some day at the last they will be caught up in peace and utter happiness in that fatherland radiant with the glory of the Lord.”

 

[…]