Europe

Madrid, Spain, Jun 27, 2019 / 05:01 pm (CNA).- The spokesman for the Spanish bishops’ conference has expressed the desire of the Church in Spain to collaborate with the attorney general’s office, after the publication of a report accusing the bishops of opacity in the identification of sexual abuse.

“We are willing and everything that we can do to join forces is good for everyone,” said Bishop Luis Javier Argüello Garcia, Auxiliary Bishop of Valladolid.

On June 24, the nation’s attorney general’s office pointed to a “deficient” response from the Church in Spain regarding the problem of sexual abuse committed by its members.

The report of the AG’s Office was made at the request of the Department of Justice and was announced through the newspaper El País. So far it has not been sent to the Spanish bishops’ conference.

The document states that in the Church in Spain there are “environments traditionally endowed with a certain opacity where the identification of cases presents difficulties for various reasons.”

The report also encourages the creation of commissions like those in Australia, the Netherlands, or Austria, and it calls for “avoiding the case first being checked out or internal filters applied by the institution where it occurred before it being reported to the competent authorities, and that without prejudice to the measures that the institution should or could adopt to prevent reoccurrences of similar incidents within the scope of its competencies.”

In face of these accusations, Bishop Argüello explained that they learned of the report of the AG’s Office “only through the media” and expressed their desire to have it in its entirety “in order to evaluate it,” and stressed that “when they speak of opacity, I don’t know what they are referring to.”

“We are facing a matter of serious societal concern, we would like a dialogue with the AG’s Office spoken of in the report. Because we are willing and everything we can do to join forces is good for everyone,” the spokesman said.

The AG Office’s report states that in 2017 and 2018 about 1,000 cases were recorded per year, while the convictions were around 500 in 2017 and 737 in 2018.

Argüello said they would like to know how many of these complaints and convictions were against members of the Catholic Church: “We would like to be able to know … how many of these verdicts were convictions and how many were acquittals and how many cleric there were. Our perception is that the clerics convicted in those two years were quite few, but we don’t know and we would like to know. As we would like to know in what other sectors of society…We understand the reluctance of the AG’s Office, because it prosecutes persons, not social sectors.”

The report by the attorney general’s office was made at the request of the Minister of Justice, Dolores Delgado, who asked that cases of sexual abuse be investigated just in the environment of the Catholic Church in Spain. Argüello said that this request “doesn’t seem right to us, it’s unsettling to us, that only abuse within the Church be investigated. We couldn’t understand  that the minister only inquired about the Church. It is just and necessary to inquire about the abuses that affect society as a whole.”

“If we want to address the prevention and cause, it would be good for us to know what social sectors are involved and the AG’s Office doesn’t say because it can’t say, because it is subject to the ground rules of criminal proceedings. This affects all of us, and that’s why we can have a conversation about this,” he stressed.

As part of the efforts being made in the Church in Spain to put an end to sexual abuse,  Argüello said they have been waiting since April for the authorization by the Holy See of a general decree which would directly oblige all the dioceses and religious orders to act jointly and according to an established protocol.

The general decree could be approved in November during the bishops’ general assembly.

In addition, in late 2018 a commission was created to update the protocols in the fight against the abuse of minors in Spain, which until now had a juridical canonical profile. However, Argüello said this commission will admit from now on “people with different characteristics and will have the possibility of having professionals, men and women, who can help us look to the future and work for prevention.”

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Brussels, Belgium, Jun 27, 2019 / 04:01 pm (CNA).- Despite European Union guidelines and the work of a special envoy for religious freedom and belief, the state of religious freedom inside and outside of Europe at times seems to be worsening, not impro… […]

Rome, Italy, Jun 27, 2019 / 01:19 pm (CNA).- The Global Rosary Relay aims to have 1 billion Hail Marys said for the sanctification of priests June 28, the feast of the Sacred Heart of Jesus.

“This is the world family all joining together as one on Friday and praying for the sanctification of our priests,” Global Rosary Relay founder and organizer Marion Mulhall told CNA June 27.

With prayer locations in more than 70 countries this year, the relay is carefully timed with the recitation of the rosary every half hour.

The relay begins with the joyful mysteries in South Korea and then is passed off to Russia for the luminous mysteries, followed by the sorrowful mysteries in China before continuing on to India, Vietnam, the United Arab Emirates, Uganda, Israel, and many other countries across Europe and the Americas.

“Ten years ago when we began the global rosary relay, we had 24 single locations in 24 countries for the 24 hour clock. This year we have 255 single prayer locations in every single corner of the planet,” Mulhall said. “The whole world is in prayer the whole day.”

“Anybody who prays the rosary on Friday — it doesn’t matter what time it is or where they are — can be pretty much guaranteed that they are joining, even if they may not realize it, with a participating prayer location around the world,” she said.

Mulhall explained that she felt personally called 25 years ago to “promote the priesthood at any price,” and this led to the creation of the World Priest Apostolate which organized campaigns to pray for priests for many years before starting the Global Rosary Relay ten years ago.

Saint Pope John Paul II declared the Feast of the Sacred Heart to be the World Day of Prayer for Priests in 2002. In 2016, the final rosary of the relay was led by the president of the Pontifical Council for the Promotion of the New Evangelization.

This year, a rosary will be said in Rome at 6pm local time for Pope Francis and his intentions.

Mulhall said that social media live streams and television broadcasts of the rosary on EWTN and other Catholic channels have led to tremendous growth of the rosary relay in recent years.

“Last year, 700 million Hail Marys were prayed and 12-14 million people joined in prayer, so to go for 1 billion Hail Marys is actually not that hard with the help of global TV broadcasts,” she said.

“She [Our Lady] is watching out for her priestly sons all the time and she is always asking us to pray for her most beloved sons,” she said.

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Paris, France, Jun 27, 2019 / 10:28 am (CNA).- An initial investigation into the devastating fire that consumed much of Notre-Dame cathedral in April has found no signs of criminal action behind the blaze, French officials said Wednesday.

Chief Prosecutor of Paris Remy Heitz said in a statement that the investigations so far have not been able to pinpoint a cause of the fire but have found no evidence that it was deliberate, the BBC reported. “Deeper investigations” will be carried out, he said.

Officials conducted 100 witness hearings in the initial stage of their investigation, according to CNN. They will now consider the possibility of negligence – including electrical malfunction or a poorly extinguished cigarette – as a cause for the fire.

Shortly before 7 p.m. on April 15, a fire broke out in the iconic Gothic cathedral in Paris. The roof and the spire, which dated to the 19th century, were destroyed. Shortly after midnight April 16, firefighters announced that the cathedral’s main structure had been preserved from collapse.

Major religious and artistic treasures of the cathedral were removed as the fire began, including a relic of the crown of thorns.

Originally built between the twelfth through fourteenth centuries, the landmark cathedral in the French capital is one of the most recognizable churches in the world, receiving more than 12 million visitors each year.

The cathedral was undergoing some restorative work at the time the fire broke out. Officials had been in the process of a massive fundraising effort to renovate the cathedral against centuries of decay, pollution, and an inundation of visitors. French conservationists and the archdiocese announced in 2017 that the renovations needed for the building’s structural integrity could cost as much as $112 million to complete.

Last month the French Senate passed a bill mandating that Notre-Dame be rebuilt as it was before the fire. President Emmanuel Macron had previously called for “an inventive reconstruction” of the cathedral.

Since the adoption of the 1905 law on separation of church and state, which formalized laïcité (a strict form of public secularism), religious buildings in France have been considered property of the state.

More than one billion dollars has been raised for the restoration effort.

The first Mass since the fire was celebrated at the cathedral June 15.

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Paris, France, Jun 27, 2019 / 03:17 am (CNA).- France’s soon-to-be mandatory Universal National Service program for teens has drawn serious religious freedom concerns, with critics noting that the program prohibits religious symbols, does not all… […]

London, England, Jun 26, 2019 / 01:10 pm (CNA).- In the face of an increasingly ‘eugenic’ mentality toward people with disabilities in Europe — exemplified in the recent overturned forced abortion case — a Catholic disability expert says parishes should be looking at how to further support people with disabilities and their families.

“Each and every person has been created in the image of God. There is no decision made about who can or cannot be born — that’s God’s choice,” disability theology specialist Cristina Gangemi told CNA.

“It is a type of eugenics here where they are beginning to say for the ‘well-being’ of this person who ‘cannot’ go through birth, who ‘cannot’ look after the child, the best thing to do is to kill their offspring,” she said.

Gangemi is the director of the UK-based Kairos Forum, a consultancy that helps communities and organizations respond to the educational and spiritual needs of people with disabilities. For the past 25 years, Gangemi has worked with people with intellectual disabilities, like the woman involved in the recent attempted forced abortion case.

In this case, “the judge was saying that she wouldn’t be able to cope with the birth and she wouldn’t be able to cope with the child being taken away, but if she had an abortion, she would, at 22 weeks, still have had to give birth to a dead baby and the baby would have been taken away dead. That is what would have caused psychological problems to the young woman,” Gangemi explained.

“We can always work with her to help her understand the life she has within her and beyond her. And who says that that young woman is not able to give that child an immense amount of love?” she said.

“If I were called into work with this family, or if I were called to advise the parish or the diocese in which the family lived — because we don’t know who they are — I would be working with the local church to help them first of all understand the canonical duties that they have toward families such as this, and I would be looking to work with symbols, pictures, body language, and music to help the young woman understand what it means to be a mother,” she said.

“She might not be able to reason out now and we shouldn’t even be expecting that, but what we can become is … creative teachers through love,” Gangemi explained.

“In my years working in the field I have never met anybody who can’t learn. I’ve met lots of people who learn creatively, but I’ve always met people who can learn,” she said.

“We turn our gaze back to God and we begin to work creatively and accompany such a family, helping this young woman and her family not to be burdened by society’s judgement, but to be celebrated by the Church’s face,” she said.

Concerns have been raised for years over the treatment of those with disabilities in Europe. Disability advocates voiced alarm in 2017 when Iceland declared that it had “eradicated Down syndrome,” because 100% of babies who were diagnosed with the condition were aborted. Many other European countries also have high rates of abortions of children with Down syndrome.

Gangemi is currently working on a program called “Icons of Christ,” which will be a resource to help parishes approach the lives of people with intellectual disabilities pastorally when they request support for marriage preparation and living family life.

“Importance needs to be given to people with disabilities in faith communities. They have to be seen for who they are, members of the Body of Christ, and therefore there have to be creative practices within our Church that are not just special parishes or special Masses,” she said.

“People with disabilities should be catechists, protagonists, active members of the Church. They should be participants rather than recipients … This is no special program. This is Catholicism at its finest,” she said.

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Paris, France, Jun 25, 2019 / 03:10 pm (CNA).- A clock nearly identical to the one destroyed in the fire at Cathedrale Notre-Dame de Paris has been found in storage. The duplicate was found at the Church of the Holy Trinity in Paris, in what is being c… […]

London, England, Jun 25, 2019 / 11:02 am (CNA).- Following a decision by the Court of Appeals in England to overturn an order for a forced abortion on a disabled woman, new details have emerged about the case.

Lawyers told the appeal court Monday that doctors had prepared the woman for the enforced abortion by promising her a new doll after the procedure. 

Fiona Paterson, the barrister representing the National Health Service (NHS) hospital trust that cares for the woman, told the appeal court on Monday that doctors had informed the woman that “she would go to sleep” and that “she would have an operation and when she woke up the baby would no longer be in her tummy.” 

To try to placate the woman, who did not wish to undergo the procedure, doctors told her that she would be given a new doll to play with after undergoing the abortion.

Observing that the woman had previously been given a doll, Paterson said that doctors thought “the prospect of a new [doll] might be very appealing to her.”

The woman reportedly has a mental age between six and nine years old, as well as a mood disorder. She was 22 weeks pregnant at the time the case was decided at the Court of Protection on June 21. 

Both the woman, who cannot be named because of privacy restrictions, and her mother are described as being of Nigerian descent, Catholic, and opposed to abortion. 

On Friday, Mrs Justice Nathalie Lieven ruled that an abortion would be the “best interest” of the woman, despite the her own objections and those of her mother (a former midwife) and her social worker. Doctors said they were concerned that the woman would be unable to physically or emotionally handle labor, or the recovery from a cesarean section. 

The court-ordered abortion was overturned on June 24, after the pregnant woman’s mother petitioned the Court of Appeal. The three appeal justices–Justices Richard McCombe, Eleanor King, and Peter Jackson, said they would explain their reasoning for their decision in the future. 

“I have to operate in [her] best interests, not on society’s views of termination,” Lieven said at the time of her original ruling. Lieven had previsouly acted as a legal repreetative for the British Pregnancy Advisory Service, the UK abortion provider, and argued in court that abortion restrictions in Northern Ireland were analogous to “torture.”

The woman’s mother made clear that she would care for her grandchild, but Lieven rejected this argument as she said it would be too complicated and risky for the child, and the potential removal of the child from the woman’s custody would be more traumatic than if she underwent an abortion. 

In her ruling, Lieven said that she did not believe the woman had the ability to understand what being pregnant meant. 

“I think she would like to have a baby in the same way she would like to have a nice doll,” she said. 

The case’s handling has proved controversial. Over 75,000 people signed a petition requesting that the UK’s health secretary intervene. 

A spokesperson for the pro-life group Right To Life UK, Clare McCarthy, welcomed the decision by the appeal court but cautioned that the decision would not protect mothers or children in similar circumstances.

“Unfortunately, we fear that this is not a one-off case,” McCarthy said.

“We are calling on the Department of Health to urgently reveal how many women have been forced to have an abortion in the UK over the last 10 years and make it clear how they will ensure it will not happen again.”

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London, England, Jun 24, 2019 / 11:03 am (CNA).- A controversial UK court decision to force a disabled woman to have an abortion has been overturned on appeal.

In a decision reportedly reached June 24, the English Court of Appeal, consisting of Lord Justice McCombe, Lady Justice King and Lord Justice Peter Jackson, overturned the previous ruling of the Court of Protection.

According to Press Association reports, the judges said they would issue a full explanation of their decision at a later date, but that the circumstances of the case were “unique.”

Mrs Justice Nathalie Lieven imposed the original decision on June 21 in the Court of Protection in England, which hears cases involving the legal and personal affairs of people judged to have diminished mental capacity.  

Lieven ruled that a forced abortion was “in the best interests” of the pregnant woman, over the objections of the woman herself, her mother, and her social worker. The woman, who has not been identified, is reportedly in her 20s and is of Nigerian descent. Both she and her mother are Catholic, and the court heard that they objected strongly to the abortion on religious grounds.

The decision on appeal comes after thousands of people signed a petition urging U.K. Health and Social Care Secretary Matthew Hancock to intervene in the case.

Two Catholic bishops in the U.K. had also spoken out against the decision.

The online petition, started by Right to Life UK June 22, has received over 75,000 signatures since it was posted.

The petion urges the Health Secretary “to intervene in this case, so far as possible, to prevent this gross injustice being inflicted by the State on this family and ensure this woman is not forced to have an abortion.”

Despite the petition, pro-life Members of Parliament aknowledged there was little chance of a ministerial intervention.

Jacob Rees-Mogg, MP for North-East Somerset, told CNA that “This is deeply troubling but there is no Parliamentary route to challenging this decision.”

Doctors who cared for the woman argued that due to her mental capacities, either natural labor or cesarean section delivery could damage her mental health. Her mother, described as a former midwife, along with a social worker who helps care for the woman, both disagree and do not wish to terminate the pregnancy.

The petition also drew attention Lieven’s “past advocacy for [the] abortion provider BPAS and her claim that Northern Ireland’s abortion law is akin to torture.”

In Northern Ireland, abortion is only permitted in instances when the mental or physical health of the mother is at risk. BPAS, the British Pregnancy Advisory Service, is the largest abortion provider in Britain.

Lieven has said that she is “acutely conscious” that ordering an abortion for a woman who did not want one was an “intense intrusion” by the state.

“I have to operate in [her] best interests, not on society’s views of termination,” Lieven explained in her decision. Lieven also suggested it would be more traumatic if the woman were to lose custody of her child, who would be a “real baby” after birth.

The woman’s mother offered to care for her grandchild, but Lieven dismissed this idea as impractical due to the pregnant woman’s mood disorder and developmental delays.

Two Catholic bishops from the United Kingdom also spoke out against the decision.

“Forcing a woman to have an abortion against her will, and that of her close family, infringes upon her human rights, not to mention the right of her unborn child to life in a family that has committed to caring for the child,” said Bishop John Sherrington, an auxilary bishop of the Archdiocese of Westminster.

Sherrington serves as the designated spokesman on life issues for the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of England and Wales.

“In a free society like ours there is a delicate balance between the rights of the individual and the powers of the state,” he added. “This is a sad and distressing decision for the whole family whom we keep in our prayers. This case, for which all information is not available, raises serious questions about the meaning of ‘best interests’ when a patient lacks mental capacity and is subject to the court’s decision against her will.”

Officials at the Archdiocese of Westminster told CNA that Cardinal Vincent Nichols would not be making a statement of his own.

Bishop John Keenan of the Diocese of Paisley, in Scotland, urged people to sign the petition in a video posted to Twitter by March4LifeUK. Keenan said that the decision “introduces a dangerous new development in the overreach of the power of the state over its citizens,” and “has to be changed.”

The decision is troubling, Keenan said, “not just in the interests of this woman and her child, but in the interests of everyone who believes in choice in this country, in the interests of everyone who believes in the prerogatives and the rights of citizens over the state.”

Scotland has both a separate court system from England and Wales, and the Catholic hierarchy of Scotland has its own bishops’ conference.

Police are investigating the circumstances of how the woman became pregnant.

This story is developing and has been updated.

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Vienna, Austria, Jun 23, 2019 / 08:10 am (CNA).- The international debut of the Vatican women’s football team, which was scheduled to play in a friendly against the Vienna FC Mariahilf Saturday, was cancelled after abortion and LGBT activists disrupted the game before it began, local media reported.

According to several local media reports, players of the Viennese soccer team Mariahilf lifted their jerseys whilst the Vatican anthem was playing, displaying painted ovaries and pro-abortion messages. Activists also displayed LGBT banners on the sidelines at the venue.

The Vatican team, who had been invited to Vienna by FCM, decided not to go ahead with the June 22 match.

The Apostolic Nuncio in Austria, Pedro Lopez Quintana, witnessed the protests but was not involved in the decision to cancel the game, local media reported.

The friendly was scheduled to kick off in the early afternoon in a sports arena in Wien-Simmering. Beforehand, both sides had participated in a prayer service and blessing of the pitch.

Austrian state broadcaster ORF quoted one of the FCM players involved in the protest as saying the activists were “not aware of the consequences of their action in any way and would have liked to play the football match”.

The activists also handed out leaflets to journalists attending the match. These stated that the activists did not assent to the Church’s teaching on abortion and same-sex marriage.

“They were not aware that the timing of the action during the playing of the Vatican anthem and in the presence of the Apostolic Nuncio could be detrimental to the idea of sport and ruin many weeks of preparation”, reported the ORF.

When announcing the upcoming game, the German section of Vatican News reported FCM founder Ernst Lackner as saying he had initially not expected that the Vatican team would really accept the invitation, but that the Archbishop of Vienna, Cardinal Christoph Schönborn, had assured the Vatican team that FC Mariahilf was a serious team that was also strongly committed to charity.

The papal women’s football team had its first appearance in 2018 and immediately received an invitation from FCM, which is currently playing in the Wiener Landesliga, the third highest league in domestic women’s football. 

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