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Vatican halts German diocesan plan to turn 800 parishes into 35

June 10, 2020 CNA Daily News 0

CNA Staff, Jun 10, 2020 / 02:25 pm (CNA).- The Vatican has intervened to halt a controversial plan to reorganize a German diocese.
 
Bishop Stephan Ackermann of Trier met with the heads of the Congregation for Clergy and the Pontifical Council for Legislative Texts in Rome June 5 to discuss the diocesan plans to restructure several hundred parishes into 35 “XXL parishes.”
 
On June 6, the diocese confirmed that the meeting took place between Ackermann and diocesan officials, and Cardinal Beniamino Stella and Archbishop Filippo Iannone, who lead the two curial departments. While the meeting was held in a “positive atmosphere,” CNA Deutsch reported Tuesday that the diocesan plans may not be implemented in their current form.
 
According to a statement from the diocese, “the Congregation for Clergy, like the Pontifical Council for Legislative Texts, has concerns about the proposed reform of the parishes, as described in the law on the implementation of the results of the diocesan synod.”
 
The diocese said that the concerns were “in particular as regards the role of the pastor in the leadership team of the parish, the service of other priests, the conception of the parish bodies, the size of the future parishes and the speed of implementation.”
 
The restructuring program was formally adopted by the diocese in October last year, following a three-year diocesan synod aimed at addressing declining Mass attendance, a shortage of vocations, and other challenges facing the Church in Germany.
 
After Bishop Ackermann announced the Law for the Implementation of the Results of the Diocesan Synod (2013-2016), several local Catholics, including some priests, voiced concerns about its provisions, and in November last year the Congregation for Clergy and PCLT asked that the plan be delayed while it was studied in Rome.
 
The plans included the merger of all of the diocese’s 887 parishes into 35 larger parishes, led by “pastoral teams” of laypeople and priest. Under the plans, a local lay group said, “the specific transmission of the preaching, especially the homily, to volunteers/lay people will lose the specific nature of the priestly office.” Other concerns included the centralization of parishes, meaning Catholics in some parts of the diocese would have to travel up to 50 miles for Mass.
 
Following the meeting in Rome last week, the diocese released a statement saying that “during the conversation, the bishop made it clear what challenges the diocese of Trier is currently facing.”
 
“In particular, these include: the reduction in the faithful’s commitment to church life over [several] years, the decline in [local] church involvement and the tremors caused by the discovery of sexual abuse by clerics in the people of God.”
 
“In addition,” the diocese said, “demographic change, declining financial resources and the lack of priests are limiting pastoral opportunities in the diocese.”
 
The diocese said that Bishop Ackermann would now work with staff and members of his diocesan curia to form a new plan that respects the “mandate” of the three-year diocesan synod and addresses Rome’s concerns.

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News Briefs

The policeman who might be a saint

June 9, 2020 CNA Daily News 1

Rome, Italy, Jun 9, 2020 / 02:05 pm (CNA).- With police brutality in focus around the world, one priest says it is important to remember a policeman who might one day be declared a saint: Vice-Sergeant Salvo D’Acquisto, an Italian policeman who gave his life for those he had sworn to protect.

During the Second World War, Salvo D’Acquisto was a member of Italy’s Carabinieri police force, and deputy commander of the rural police station of Torrimpietra, outside of Rome.

In September 1943, German soldiers were inspecting boxes of ammunition at a military base nearby. One box exploded, and two German soldiers died. German officials decided the explosion wasn’t an accident. For that, they rounded up and arrested 22 people.

As the local police official, D’Acquisto did an investigation into the explosion, questioning the 22 people who had been arrested.  After his interviews, he tried to explain to the Germans that the explosion was an accident, and that no one in the area was responsible.

But the Nazis were determined to exact revenge. They had the prisoners dig a mass grave, and announced they would be executed.

So Salvo D’Acquisto told the Nazis that he had arranged the explosion, and that he had acted alone.

The civilians were released. D’Acquisto was shot before a firing squad. He was 22 years old.
 
The Italian Military Ordinariate opened a cause for his canonization in 1983 in 1983.

Monsignor Gabriele Teti was the postulator of the policeman’s cause from 2014 to 2018. Himself a former member of the Carabiniere, Teti knows the story of Salvo D’Acquisto in depth.

Teti said that Salvo D’Acquisto considered his membership to Carabinieri a service for his countrymen.

The policeman “went so far as to demonstrate that his life was truly at the service of the people, even to self-sacrifice,” the priest said.

Before his death, said the former postulator, D’Acquisto met a friend who had attended Carabinieri training with him. By then, a large group of Carabinieri had gone underground to fight the Germans in Rome, and this  friend invited D’Acquisto to leave the uniform and join the resistance.

“And he replied that his duty was to protect order and safety, and that his task was not to leave.”

In 2001, Pope St. John Paul II told Italian national police officers that “The history of the Italian Carabinieri shows that the heights of holiness can be reached in the faithful and generous fulfillment of the duties of one’s state. I am thinking here of your colleague, Sergeant Salvo D’Acquisto, awarded a gold medal for military valor, whose cause of beatification is under way.”

The sacrifice of D’Acquisto should be seen in the context of his whole life, the priest said.

“Certainly, he grew up in a very religious family.”

“Since childhood, then, there are small episodes that make us understand the nature of Salvo D’Acquisto. As a child, returning from school, he donated his shoes to a child he always met when returning from school and who was barefoot. Another time, he rushed to save a child who was about to end up under a train.”

The policeman’s cause for beatification ran aground on “bureaucratic” issues, Teti said. A cause for his martyrdom was set up, but Salvo D’Acquisto’s sacrifice falls more easily into a new category of saints, those who have made a “gift of life,” the priest said. His cause continues to be considered at the Vatican.

In Italy, the priests said, “devotion to Salvo D’Acquisto is everywhere. So much so that some even say that there is no need to make him a saint, given that they already consider him a blessed servant of God.”

 

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News Briefs

Catholic Church receives $1.3 million donation to fight poverty amid pandemic

June 9, 2020 CNA Daily News 1

CNA Staff, Jun 9, 2020 / 08:30 am (CNA).- The Catholic Church in England and Wales has received a 1 million pound ($1.3 million) donation to fight poverty caused by the coronavirus pandemic. 

The money was donated by the Albert Gubay Charitable Foundation, founded by the late billionaire businessman Albert Gubay, who made a pact with God in his youth that if he became rich he would give half his money to the Church.

Cardinal Vincent Nichols, president of the Bishops’ Conference of England and Wales, said June 9: “All of this remarkable gift will be spent on the immediate relief of hardship, and, I stress, its effects will be felt across the whole of England and Wales.”

Gubay, who died in 2016, amassed his fortune through Kwik Save, a British convenience store chain, Total Fitness, a chain of gyms, and property investments. Upon his death, his charitable foundation, which is based in the Isle of Man, was worth about 700 million pounds ($890 million). 

Nichols said the foundation had contacted him May 20 with the “startling news” that it would make an “immediate outright donation of £1 million” to the Church for poverty relief.

“I was taken aback by the sheer generosity of this single payment and agreed to cooperate in the distribution of this grant to Catholic charities,” he said.

After consulting with the other metropolitan archbishops of England and Wales, the cardinal invited charities to apply for emergency funding by May 31, which should be spent on the poor by the end of September.

Thirty-eight applicants applied for grants totalling more than £2 million.

The $1.3 million donation will be split into three parts with more than $508,000 going to local food banks and the direct provision of food, $317,000 to expand food voucher programs and more than $425,000 for immediate financial support for the needy.

Charities receiving money will compile reports on the impact of the funds by the end of October. 

Food banks have reported unprecedented levels of demand since the government imposed a lockdown in the U.K. in order to stem the spread of the coronavirus. The Trussell Trust, a leading food bank network, said that in the week after after the lockdown was introduced in March, it distributed 50,000 food parcels, almost twice as many as usual.

Albert Gubay was born in 1928 in the Welsh seaside resort of Rhyl to an Iraqi Jewish father and Irish Catholic mother.

In a 2011 interview with the BBC, he said that he turned to God while struggling to make ends meet as a young businessman.

“One Saturday, I didn’t know where the next penny was coming from and I lay on my bed and I had this conversation with God,” he recalled.

“I said: ‘God, help me and whatever I make over the years of my life, when I die, half will go to the Church.’”

In 2011, Nichols presented Gubay with a papal knighthood, conferred by Pope Benedict XVI, for his charitable work. 

In his June 9 statement, Nichols said: “I wish to express heartfelt thanks to the Albert Gubay Charitable Foundation for this exceptional and magnificent donation to such important work. In particular, I thank the Gubay family for their leadership in this remarkable gift which is in addition to the regular charitable giving of the foundation.” 

“I do so, not only on behalf of every bishop in England and Wales for the confidence it shows in the effectiveness of the charitable work of our Catholic charities, but much more importantly, on behalf of all those whose hardship will be alleviated by this outstanding generosity.” 

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