Washington D.C., Jan 18, 2021 / 03:35 pm (CNA).- The National Garden of American Heroes will include statues of many notable Catholic figures, including five saints and numerous people who are on the path to sainthood.
President Donald Trump announced… […]
CNA Staff, Jan 18, 2021 / 03:10 pm (CNA).- The passing of pro-life icon Joseph M. Scheidler, 93, former National Director of the Pro-Life Action League on Martin Luther King Jr.’s Day, is “absolutely fitting,” his son Erik Scheidler told CNA after conf… […]
CNA Staff, Jan 18, 2021 / 02:49 am (CNA).- As Catholics and other Americans observe Martin Luther King Jr. Day this year, they should renew their commitment to fighting racism, said Bishop Michael Burbidge of Arlington.
“Through Dr. King’s witness and the power of his echoing words, he championed the inherent God-given dignity of all persons, particularly those subjected to bigotry and prejudice,” Burbidge said in a Jan. 15 statement.
“In his courageous fight against racism and bigotry, Dr. King relied upon faith and prayer. Hope and transformative love were central to his message, as he reminded us, ‘hate is too great a burden to bear.’”
Unfortunately, the bishop said, bigotry is still prevalent today, noting that the “sin of racism continues to affect men, women and children in communities across the nation.”
The Virginia General Assembly this week discussed a resolution that would declare institutional racism to be a public health crisis in the state. It was first introduced by Delegate Lashrecse D. Aird (D-Petersburg), during a special session in August, but the topic was postponed until the regular session on Wednesday.
If passed, the resolution would permanently establish the Commission to Examine Racial Inequity in Virginia Law, expand the power of Virginia’s Department of Health’s Office of Health Equity, and launch anti-racism training for all state elected officials and employees.
Thirty states, including North Carolina, West Virginia, and Maryland, have declared racism to be a public health crisis.
Bishop Burbidge said the diocese has worked to fight racism through prayer, education, and action. He pointed to the diocese’s recent creation of an Advisory Council on Racism.
The council, he said, “works to identify how instances of racism, prejudice and bias have impacted individuals and communities in the Diocese and to develop a plan to bring about positive change in light of the Gospel and the teachings of our Faith.”
“As we work to address this evil, we must remember that what we ultimately seek is a genuine conversion of hearts that will compel change,” the bishop added.
“Together, let us pray that those harboring the burden of hate yield to the Prince of Peace, the source of salvation and love, Jesus Christ.”
Denver Newsroom, Jan 17, 2021 / 02:00 am (CNA).- For decades, radio was Americans’ primary source of news and entertainment, before being largely superseded by television, and eventually the internet.
Now, in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic, radio theater has returned— with the goal of conveying Catholic themes in highly-produced, entertaining, 10-minute packages.
The Merry Beggars is a Catholic theater company based in Manhattan. Peter Atkinson, a stage actor and CEO of the Merry Beggars, banded together with several fellow actors to help found the nonprofit in 2019.
Atkinson described The Merry Beggar’s mission as bringing together “professional artists who are excellent at their craft and seeking to tell stories for the glory of God.”
As anyone who has worked in the entertainment industry knows, it can be very difficult for writers to get their work produced, especially when it comes to films, plays, or television. And this is especially true for works that convey an authentic Christian message.
Similarly, it can be difficult for Catholic actors to make their way in the entertainment industry— a world in which many projects may clash with a Catholic worldview.
“I’ve seen so many Christian and Catholic artists want to go into the acting industry and the entertainment industry, and it’s a really hard industry to make your way in,” Atkinson told CNA, adding that he knows many Catholics who have given up acting careers, or have abandoned their faith in the hopes of advancing in the industry.
“One of the things that I’m really passionate about is supporting Catholic artists and Christian artists to make work that can transform our culture,” he said.
Before the pandemic took hold, The Merry Beggars were planning numerous in-person events for 2020, including a conference for high school drama teachers and local events for artists in New York and Washington D.C.
When lockdowns and restrictions made in-person events impossible— or at least far less popular— Atkinson said he and the nonprofit’s board of directors set about adjusting their plans, while keeping their mission the same.
Atkinson has long been a lover of radio theater, having grown up listening to classic programs such as “The Lone Ranger” and “The Shadow.” So, he suggested the idea of producing radio plays as a way to support actors and writers while theaters remained closed amid the lockdowns.
Moreover, they decided to make the initiative a competition, calling on prospective playwrights to send in scripts for 10-minute radio plays. The plots would be entirely up to the playwrights, prompted only by the theme: “quarantine.”
Atkinson said the idea for the theme came from one of the board members, a Catholic priest, who noted that some aspects of quarantine are similar to cloistered religious life.
The response to the contest was almost overwhelming, he said— they received over 120 submissions, from all over the world, even as far away as Kenya. Atkinson assembled a team of 37 judges to pore over the scripts and select their top three.
The plots of the 10-minute plays, despite all being inspired by “quarantine,” varied widely— from allegorical retellings of Adam and Eve in the garden, to astronauts conversing on the International Space Station, to something as simple as two young people’s inner monologues during lockdown in New York.
While not every play they received was good enough to produce, Atkinson said it was so difficult to choose just the top three, they committed to producing their favorite twelve. As of Jan. 2021, The Merry Beggars have released three plays so far.
The first play The Merry Beggars released is titled “Do You Remember? With Relaxabot 938.” The play features a fictional radio broadcast within a post-apocalyptic soundscape.
The latest play to be released, “I Do Like The Rain,” follows the interplay between members of a young family stuck in a late-night traffic jam, and touches on themes of resentment and grace.
“It’s a really simple script, but it’s really beautiful,” Atkinson commented.
“The script is about a husband and wife’s interior journey to some old family wounds that they have, and then the beginning of a journey of healing.”
Atkinson worked with the artists whose plays they picked, to hear from them about their ideas for how to turn the script into a compelling radio play.
Producing the plays presented technical challenges, as the voice actors they selected— out of many hundreds of auditions— each had to record their own voices in home studios, with the editors stitching the dialogue together in post-production.
Atkinson coached the voice actors as they were recording, observing and offering direction to the actors via video chat.
Despite the asynchronous nature of the recording process, Atkinson’s coaching and careful editing helped make the dialogue sound natural.
The setting of “I Do Like the Rain” features a family of four— including two child actors— in a minivan, none of whom ever actually occupied the same space during the recording process.
“Even though they were never in the same room and they’re recorded at completely different hours of the day, it sounds like they’re all in the same minivan together. And it’s just magical to me,” Atkinson said.
Atkinson says they plan to release a new Quarantine Play every month, along with smaller plays called The Dailies. He said The Merry Beggars hope to eventually put on workshops for Catholics looking to connect with entertainment industry professionals, in New York City and beyond.
“To me, the way that you heal the culture is you tell the truth about the human person. And the truth about the human person is that we’re made for God,” Atkinson said.
“I think these stories do a really tender and beautiful job of touching upon our need for God and how, in quarantine, that quiet desire for God can surface in a really beautiful, tender and fragile way.”
Kate Olivera contributed to this report.
This interview originally aired on Catholic News Agency’s podcast, CNA Newsroom. It has been adapted for print. Listen to the interview below, beginning at 18:40.
CNA Newsroom · Ep. 89: Taking Back the Year
Washington, D.C. Newsroom, Jan 16, 2021 / 03:01 pm (CNA).- Fifty human rights professionals and organizations have signed an open letter calling for an investigation into crimes against humanity and potential genocide of the Uyghur people in China.
Th… […]
Denver Newsroom, Jan 16, 2021 / 02:00 am (CNA).- Like many in 2020, Catholic author Leah Libresco Sargeant found much solace in the past year in spiritual reading— as well as in copious amounts of baking.
“The big thing this year, especially with the new baby, is making large batches of cookies and then freezing a bunch of the dough so that there could always be fresh cookies, even if it’s a very busy day and it’s not plausible to make any. It’s great,” she laughed.
Leah is a convert from atheism, and writes and thinks a lot about ways to build up strong Christian communities. In fact, she wrote a book about it a couple of years ago, called “Building the Benedict Option,” in which she encourages Catholics to create opportunities in their lives to interact more with their faith community.
These additional, intentional interactions can include taking the initiative to host people more often for dinner or events at your home, especially on feast days. Her book offers tips on how to make these interactions more successful in building tight-knit Christian communities.
Although many of the suggestions in Leah’s book are predicated on face-to-face interactions, she said she has found ways to adapt her community-building practices during coronavirus times.
“I think one of the hard things is just having a routine shattered; some of the connections you have with other people vanishing. And it takes a bit of work, then, to build up from scratch what you otherwise could rely on from other people,” she noted.
For example, she’s taken the initiative to maintain several penpals, keeping friendships alive by conversing via snail mail. A habit Leah practiced even before the pandemic was sending things to people that she found spiritually enriching— such as book passages, or information about interesting saints— in the hopes that they would find it spiritually enriching too.
Most dioceses in the United States, save for a few in the West, have reopened almost all their churches for Mass with continued precautions such as social distancing and mask wearing. Catholic churches in Princeton, New Jersey where the Sargeants live have generally been accessible since the summer of 2020, but Leah says there have been times when the Sergeants have had to miss in-person Mass and instead participate from home via livestream.
“We try and make that an opportunity to pray for people who are in more remote places, who have a traveling priest who doesn’t come every week, even in normal times— or people who are living under persecution,” Leah told CNA.
“To try and take this unexpected and unwanted fast from the Mass as an opportunity to pray for people for whom [access to the sacraments] is an ongoing struggle, pandemic or no.”
Part of the key to making it through “unexpected fasts” from the sacraments is to reach out to others and offer to walk through it with them, she said.
“If you can’t go to Mass, or can’t go to Mass as often as you used to, part of the question might be: do you have a friend who is also in this position?” she said, adding that you could call that person on the phone and offer to pray with them.
“Is there a way that this can become something you share with others, rather than just a time of isolation?
Adding that she does not want to “sugarcoat” the difficulties in keeping a sense of community alive during the pandemic, Sergeant said restrictions on public gatherings, including Mass, have made spontaneous, organic interactions with her neighbors more difficult.
“I think in some ways what the pandemic has done is strengthened some of my ties with people who I’ve fallen out of touch with a little, and who don’t live nearby, and weakened them a bit with my actual neighbors,” she said.
On the other hand, Sergeant said she has found that the extra time spent at home during the pandemic has helped her and her family to pray more in their home.
Leah and her husband Alexi welcomed their first child in January 2020, so a lot of their domestic church traditions in the past year have been shaped by that joyful fact. For example, the Sargeants decided against putting out a physical Advent wreath in 2020.
“A lot of our traditions have to be things that are less tangible, because literally everything in the house goes into [the baby’s] mouth,” she laughed.
One “intangible” habit that Leah and her husband have gotten into is doing spiritual reading every Sunday, out loud, to each other. They’ve made their way through works such as the biblical poetry of Gregory of Nazianzus and “The Day is Now Far Spent” by Robert Cardinal Sarah.
Leah has also continued her habit of blogging, attracting several hundred followers to an email newsletter in which she writes on topics such as motherhood, the benefits she has found from working from home, and a variety of others from a Catholic feminist perspective.
One of the keys to a healthy spiritual life is silence, and cultivating periods of silence every day for prayer and peacefulness. Leah says she’s been working on this for a while, and added that the birth of her first child has, perhaps paradoxically, helped her to find quieter moments than she had before.
“For me, a baby is sometimes an excuse not to find those periods of silence. But…a baby forces you to be fully present in the moment, to put aside some of your own goals or own plans for the day,” she explained.
“And if she falls asleep on top of you after what’s been a rough afternoon, suddenly it is enforced silence…and if you weren’t planning to have any silent prayer too bad, now is the time!”
The human toll of the pandemic has a lot of people thinking about death— not only the deaths of others, but their inevitable own. Leah says for Catholics, who believe in resurrection, thinking about death is not necessarily a bad thing.
“The Church has always told us to meditate on our own death, and to make that part of our spiritual practice,” she pointed out.
“[God] defeated death and freed us from fear of it, but that doesn’t make it easy. That’s why we talk about this as a spiritual practice, something we have to do deliberately again and again, to build up that trust in God and that knowledge of who He is. And so I think the pandemic is really forcing that good spiritual practice on us in a much more stressful and frightening way than if we’d chosen it ourselves.”
This meditation on what it means to die, and for things to end, applies not just to individuals, but to the Church as a whole. Even in non-pandemic times, there are always going to be people at Mass who are journeying through grief and suffering, and pastors shouldn’t shy away from addressing that, Sergeant said, seeking to assure people that experiencing spiritual aridity and grief does not make them “bad Christians.”
“There’s always someone in your neighborhood, in your parish, who’s going through a time that’s just as hard as it is now [in the pandemic], but it isn’t shared,” she said.
“So part of the question is: Whatever’s going on now that’s helping us take care of each other, how do we continue that when there isn’t the shock of a pandemic to remind us that people around us are suffering?”
The pandemic hasn’t only brought challenges, however. There have also been some fun opportunities for enhancing the Sargeant’s family life— several of which involve baking. Leah recommends seeking out a sourdough starter, as it makes for a fun baking activity as well as a potential gift to pass on to others.
“If you’re only feeding one thing in your house, it should be the baby, not the sourdough starter,” she laughed.
This interview originally aired on Catholic News Agency’s podcast, CNA Newsroom. It has been adapted for print. Listen to the interview below, beginning at 9:40.
CNA Newsroom · Ep. 89: Taking Back the Year
CNA Staff, Jan 15, 2021 / 10:06 pm (CNA).- The U.S. bishops’ pro-life chair on Friday praised a Supreme Court decision allowing federal regulations of the abortion pill to stand during the pandemic.
On Tuesday, the Supreme Court in a 6-3 decisio… […]
CNA Staff, Jan 15, 2021 / 07:01 pm (CNA).- Conservative scholars argued this week that Xavier Becerra, president-elect Joe Biden’s pick for HHS secretary, has a history of “hostility to nonprofit institutions and the donors who support them… […]
Washington D.C., Jan 15, 2021 / 05:23 pm (CNA).- In an interview with EWTN News Nightly (ENN), the niece of Reverend Martin Luther King Jr., Alveda King, highlighted that her famous uncle was a man of faith, who always looked for “nonviolent and Bible-based” solutions to the challenges of his time.
ENN’s host Tracy Sabol opened the interview, on Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday, Jan. 15, highlighting that “honoring Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. still give us as a nation an opportunity to pay tribute to his enduring legacy,” before asking King, director of Civil Rights for the Unborn for Priests for Life, about the civil rights icon’s place in history.
“When I remember my uncle during the Martin Luther King holiday week, I think about his messages of faith, hope and love,” she said, adding that in “all of his life, he exemplified solutions that were nonviolent and Bible-based.”
King remembered that her uncle used to say that faith is “like climbing a staircase; you take one step at a time and the faith builds. And so he was very sure that if he continued to trust in the Lord and to have faith and hope and love, then he could carry a message that God had given him to carry.”
“My uncle was a nonviolent man. He believed that we were one human race … God made all people to live together on the face of the earth. And as one human race, we really could learn to live together as brothers and sisters and not perish together as fools. All of his sermons and his messages led us to understand that our answers would come from God and that we must unite and learn to get along,” King also said.
She also recalled that Martin Luther King Jr. “decided to stick with love.”
“Hate is too difficult a burden to bear. And then we bear each other’s burdens and concerns, seeing each other as human beings, regardless of skin color. We could see skin color, of course, we really are not colorblind. We could see, but we should see ethnicity as something to be celebrated, not to be fought over,” she said.
“Martin Luther King Jr. lived a life of service and love,” said his niece in closing.
“If he were here today, he would be praying for us and with us and encouraging us to set aside strife and to come together in love. And as we do that, we can surely be blessed, and 2021 will be a very different year than 2020 turned out to be.”
Martin Luther King Jr. Day is observed on the third Monday of January each year. The holiday was signed into law by President Ronald Reagan in 1983 but was officially observed in all 50 states for the first time in 2000.
Washington, D.C. Newsroom, Jan 15, 2021 / 04:04 pm (CNA).- The Buffalo diocese has responded to claims that it misrepresented the financial state of its seminary before closing it last year.
“The seminary has had sustainability issues for… […]
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