Europe

Rome, Italy, Mar 30, 2018 / 12:35 pm (CNA/EWTN News).- For American seminarians at the Pontifical North American college in Rome, Holy Week liturgies take on new life and dimension, as the history of ancient traditions comes alive through the city’s remembrance of Christ’s Passion and death.

The seminarians alternate each year between having Holy Week liturgical celebrations “in house,” or having the week free to celebrate wherever they wish.

This year is an in-house year, meaning all liturgies related to Holy Week, beginning with Palm Sunday through the Easter Vigil Saturday night, are celebrated in the seminary chapel with seminarians, deacons and priests carrying out the key roles including serving, singing and chanting the Gospels.

Justin Boff, a seminarian from the Archdiocese of Baltimore in his third year of theology at the NAC, said the ambiance of the seminary during the in-house years takes on a notably calm dynamic, as the frenzied rush of coursework and exams gives way to a slower, more prayerful pace focused on the liturgy.

“We’re really blessed here to have so many resources to be able to pull from and to be able to put together really, really nice liturgies with all the smells and bells and those sorts of things,” he told CNA, adding that the NAC is “a privileged place” with few distractions from entering into the meaning of the week’s events.

As far as the run-down of the schedule for this week, after Palm Sunday Mass March 25, seminarians have largely been focused on prayer and preparing for the major liturgies.

To kick off the Triduum, seminarians on Wednesday went on the historic “church walk” started by Saint Philip Neri in the late 16th century. On Wednesday of every Holy Week, Neri would set out with his companions on foot to visit each of the four major basilicas in Rome, as well as the three minor basilicas, stopping at each for a time of prayer.

Seminarians at the NAC have kept the tradition as part of their wider observance of the ancient “Roman stational liturgy,” in which Mass is celebrated at 7 a.m. at a different Roman parish each of the 40 days during Lent, beginning Ash Wednesday and ending the Wednesday of Holy Week.

At the end of Lent, the final station Mass is typically celebrated at the papal basilica of St. Mary Major, and after this Mass seminarians and other pilgrims will set off on the seven-church walk, finishing in the evening.

For Holy Thursday at the NAC, there was the usual Mass of the Lord’s Supper, celebrated by Cardinal Edwin O’Brien. Afterward, seminarians were welcome to go out and join the hundreds of other people in Rome praying at different chapels of repose throughout the city.

After Mass is celebrated on Holy Thursday, the Eucharist is removed from the tabernacle of churches as a sign that Jesus has been taken away, and placed in a side chapel where faithful can stay to pray, sometimes all night depending on the parish.

In Rome, locals, priests, pilgrims from abroad, and members of the Curia all turn out in droves for the event, stopping to pray at different churches around the city as a way of accompanying Jesus the night before his crucifixion and death.

“It’s really an impressive sight,” Boff said, explaining that most seminarians go out for this event, and are able to take students and peers from their apostolates along with them.

“So it’s a lot of religion these weeks, but it’s a lot of fun. You really get to see the universal Church and the local Church here in Rome, which is just beautiful.”

On Good Friday, the Veneration of the Cross service at the NAC will be celebrated at 3 p.m. by the college rector, Fr. Peter Harman. The Easter vigil Saturday night this year will be celebrated by Cardinal James Harvey. Events for Holy Week and the Easter Triduum will close Sunday morning, with Mass and evening prayer later in the afternoon.

Apart from the main liturgies, there has been daily morning prayer and Mass, and lots of preparation and rehearsals for the major events. Boff, who is playing the organ during the celebrations, has had a particularly busy week practicing with the 40-member seminary choir.

“It’s really not that much playing in the end as far as the Triduum goes, because the organ is totally silent from the Gloria on Holy Thursday to the Gloria on the Easter Vigil,” he said. “So the organ goes into the tomb a bit with the Lord.”

But the music at the vigil has to be “very triumphant and joyful,” which takes a lot of preparation to make sure the music matches the magnitude of the celebration, he said.

Deacon Colin Jones, who is from the Archdiocese of St. Paul and Minneapolis and is in his fourth year of theology at the NAC, said that for him, the station churches have played a major role in how he has lived Lent.

Though attending all the station Masses, some of which are an hour-long walk to get to, is not required, Jones said this year he tried to make it to as many as possible.

“It’s nice to be reminded about how many beautiful churches there are in the city and all the different parts of the city and a different, unique walk every morning,” he said, explaining that on any given day there are usually around 20-30 seminarians at the Masses in addition to the pilgrims and locals who come.

Jones said the long walk to get to some of the churches is “demanding,” but it allows time for prayer, and “it’s nice to have the morning for prayer and to have this pilgrimage…with our Lord through Lent.”

The churches and readings are generally the same for every year, and some were selected based on historical significance, so after awhile, he said, “the readings and the church become intertwined,” and it helps give context to the scripture passage being read.

Jones will also be chanting the part of Christ in the Gospel narrative of Jesus Passion on Good Friday, which is taken from the Gospel of John.

While the Palm Sunday Gospel reading was chanted by three priests, the Good Friday Gospel narrative will be chanted by three deacons, including Jones, who said the opportunity and the hours of practice are “a pretty big blessing, very powerful and very moving.”

Though it’s been hard to get the right pitch and tempo for the lines, Jones said being able to sing the lines of Jesus has helped him to go deeper into the events of Holy Week, specifically Jesus’ crucifixion and death.

“It just hits you in a different way and strikes more deeply,” he said. “Now we’ve sung through it a dozen times or so, so the words just get deeper every time, and you let them resonate a little bit more. And the more comfortable we become with it…we’re able to make it more of a prayer and those lines really hit you.”

Jones, who will be ordained a priest May 26, in just under a month, said he hopes that when he has a parish, he is able to impart to his parishioners the excitement and depth he’s gained about Holy Week from living and celebrating the liturgies in Rome.

And while it’s nice to have time to celebrate Holy Week elsewhere or participate in papal liturgies, Jones said he prefers the in-house years, because “you can enjoy more of a restful environment and enjoy hanging out with the guys.”

There are also more opportunities for prayer, he said, adding that “even the preparations are kind of exciting, there’s a certain excitement that’s in the house, so that’s definitely fun having all of that here this week.”

[…]

Rome, Italy, Mar 29, 2018 / 03:01 am (CNA/EWTN News).- On the night of Holy Thursday Christians in Rome and around the world will take part in a tradition from the early Church, obeying Christ’s command to “keep watch” by making a pilgrimage to churches to adore Christ in the Eucharist together.

In Rome, this tradition takes the form of walking to seven churches, or more, to visit and pray before the Eucharist at what is called an “altar of repose,” where the hosts consecrated at the Mass of the Lord’s Supper are preserved for use on Good Friday.

“In each church, the altar of repose is decorated with beautiful, fragrant spring flowers and surrounded by flickering candlelight, that breaks the darkness in the rest of the church. Praying at these altars brings our hearts and minds right to the garden, as we pray there with Jesus,” Ashley and John Noronha, Catholic tour guides, told CNA.
 
The Noronhas, a married couple, have led a group of people on the Holy Thursday church walk each of the 10 years they have lived in Rome. They have also led groups in the United States.

Each year they gather a group of friends of all ages, they said, made up of both locals and pilgrims, to take part in the church walk together, enjoying “the fellowship that comes from praying together.”

They said that “the idea of visiting different churches on Holy Thursday provides an opportunity for local communities to encourage and strengthen each other in the faith.”

John and Ashley noted that one particular blessing of being in Rome – a city with more than 900 churches – is that it is easy to visit the many beautiful and historic churches by foot since they are in such proximity to one another.

The tradition of the seven churches walk is believed to have begun in Rome during the first centuries of the Church. The idea was born out of trying to keep vigil in the same spirit as the disciples in the Garden of Gethsemane, John said, even though they failed to stay up and pray as Christ asked.

The pilgrimage emphasizes two things: One is the actual act of prayer, following Christ’s plea to keep “vigil” with him, so that we do not “fall into temptation, since our spirit is willing, and flesh is weak.”

The other is the building of community, since people throughout the city gather together to pray, Ashley said. “We are already united through our Catholic faith, but the fact that we all get to be in close proximity as well… is just really powerful.”

“There’s something special that happens when people pray together; friendships can really be born from that,” she continued.

“The flowers of course bring us to the garden, that idea that we’re there with Jesus, praying, trying to keep our eyes open, to fight our weaknesses,” Ashley said.

“I certainly like the aesthetic part of it, in the sense that here we are getting to be with Christ in this incredible atmosphere: the fragrant flowers, the beautiful flickering candlelight. It’s a feast for the senses.”

The couple encouraged others to consider beginning the tradition in their own communities if they do not have a group to join. They advised to begin by reading about the tradition to really understand what it is first; both the spiritual significance and the historical symbolism.

The walk is “a beautiful opportunity to have not only a spiritual experience, but also one of fellowship with people,” John said. He added that people should not worry about the size of the group at first, but just to invite their family, or three or four people, as a starting point.

Those few people “will have such an amazing experience they will bring others” the next year, and “it will just grow,” he said.

From a logistical perspective, Ashley encouraged calling local parishes ahead of time to find out which will be open and what hours. Then to plan a route to share ahead of time so that people can join in at any point in the evening.

Traditionally, churches remain open until midnight, when they are closed to symbolize Christ’s abandonment by his apostles the night of his imprisonment.

They also said that while the tradition in Rome is to visit seven churches (influenced by St. Philip Neri’s pilgrimage to the seven major basilicas, which started in the 1500s), places around the world have their own tradition of what number to visit.

“According to tradition, the number of churches visited would vary depending on the location in the world and proximity of churches,” John said. Therefore, the tradition can be adapted to fit what is possible in each community.

John said, for example, that in the Eastern Orthodox Church the tradition is to visit eight churches, and in some places in India, there are prayer groups who will keep vigil all night long on Holy Thursday.

[…]

Portsmouth, England, Mar 26, 2018 / 06:01 pm (CNA/EWTN News).- Legalizing assisted suicide is a false solution to the sufferings of the terminally ill, an English bishop has said in a Palm Sunday letter addressed to the faithful of the Channel Island of Guernsey.

“Someone near the end of life needs emotional support, comfort and care, good pain control, respect and loving communication – not suicide on prescription,” said Bishop Philip Egan of Portsmouth. “Let us redouble our efforts to offer this support, not least to anyone tempted to suicide or a hurried death.”

“I appeal to Catholics to mobilize,” he added in his Palm Sunday letter to the Parish of Our Lady and the Saints of Guernsey. “Speak out against this proposal. It is never permissible to do good by an evil means.” He asked everyone in Guernsey to overturn this “grim proposal” and to “redouble the compassionate care of those who are frail and terminally ill.”

Guernsey, one of the Channel Islands off the coast of Normandy, is a Crown dependency for which the U.K. is responsible. It is part of the Diocese of Portsmouth.

Its chief minister, Gavin St. Pier, has proposed allowing terminally ill patients to commit suicide in a state-funded program with what he says are strict guidelines, the U.K. newspaper The Sunday Express reports. Those eligible under the proposal would include those who are mentally competent, diagnosed with a terminal illness, and given less than six months to live.

St. Pier cited his father’s death at age 77 after heart disease left him bedridden and unable to move, speak, eat, or drink. The minister said his father would have wanted an assisted suicide two to three weeks before his death.

The proposed change aims to give people choice and a sense of control over their death, St. Pier said. The Suicide Act 1961 bars euthanasia, with a maximum sentence of 14 years in prison.

<blockquote class=”twitter-tweet” data-lang=”en”><p lang=”en” dir=”ltr”>As we prepare for the Palm Sunday Mass, let’s pray for the people of Guernsey that, along with their doctors and other civilised people, they will robustly reject the push from secularists and liberals for assisted suicide and death-clinics.</p>&mdash; Bishop Philip Egan (@BishopEgan) <a href=”https://twitter.com/BishopEgan/status/977819241712939008?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw”>March 25, 2018</a></blockquote>
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Bishop Egan wrote that assisted suicide is “fundamentally incompatible with a doctor’s role as healer.”

“It would be difficult or impossible to control and it would pose serious societal risks,” he said. “Let there be no death-clinics in Guernsey.”

Bishop Egan said the proposal to legalize assisted suicide is “fundamentally subversive, horrific and dangerous, however well-intentioned.” Invoking the expansion of Belgium’s legal assisted suicide to include children, he said “the right to die would soon become the duty to die.”

“It would be an intolerable and utterly immoral demand to ask medical staff, doctors and nurses dedicated to preserving life, to extinguish the life of another human person,” the bishop added. “However carefully crafted the laws might be, assisted suicide would place medics in an impossible dilemma.”

Dr. Brian Parkin, a Guernsey representative of the British Medical Society, told The Sunday Express he was concerned about the proposal.

“Safeguarding the vulnerable is paramount in such a debate,” Parkin said. “The continued investment and development of the high-quality palliative care services in Guernsey involves all health care professionals – and their focus on end of life care plans should be prioritized.”

The local branch of the British Medical Society said that support for aid in dying could have an impact on recruiting and retaining doctors to the island, home to about 63,000 people.

The national organization has opposed assisted suicide since 2006 and supports the current law. The U.K.’s General Medical Council is also clear that encouraging or assisting in a suicide is illegal.

Because the council registers doctors to practice medicine, it is unclear how legal assisted suicide in Guernsey could be carried out by registered doctors, the Jersey Evening Post said.

For Bishop Egan, the proposal was an opportunity to reflect on the hardships at the end of life and what Christians believe about suffering and death.

“Frailty, pain and infirmity are a difficult trial for anyone,” he said. “Those who are mentally ill may experience despair and gloom at the problems they face. Others, the terminally ill, become anguished at the loss of function and mobility, feeling keenly a sense of burden on family and even a financial burden on society.”

“Yet let us thank God for the amazing advances that medical science has made and the level of true loving care that can now be given,” Egan added, noting advances in palliative care and pain management.

Further, the bishop said Christians believe in “assisted living, not assisted dying.”

“Death is not pain relief but the beginning of a new, resurrected life with God our Father and Creator,” he said. “This future depends on the state of our soul when we die and this perspective rightly affects our decisions on end of life care and how best to uphold a patient’s personal dignity.”

To help someone to commit suicide or to die prematurely, even when they request it, “can never ever be a compassionate action,” he emphasized. “It is a grave sin.”

Egan’s Holy Week letter stressed the importance of uniting one’s suffering with Christ and finding in him “all the strength, patience and energy we need to sustain our suffering – to ‘carry the cross’ and to turn it to a positive good for others. That is the meaning of Holy Week, when Jesus Christ willingly underwent death at the hands of those who had decided it was better for society for Him to be extinguished.”

“We must not yield to the temptation to apply rapid or drastic solutions, moved by a false compassion or by criteria of efficiency and cost-effectiveness,” he said.

The seriously ill deserve respect, understanding and tenderness “so that the sacred value of their life can shine forth with splendor in their suffering.”

[…]

Carcassonne, France, Mar 26, 2018 / 03:07 pm (CNA/EWTN News).- Archbishop Charles Chaput of Philadelphia has penned a column for Holy Week highlighting the sacrifice of French policeman Arnaud Beltrame, comparing his death to save a stranger to the sac… […]

Rome, Italy, Mar 25, 2018 / 03:02 pm (CNA/EWTN News).- As the Vatican gears up for the Synod on youth in October, Pope Francis has chosen a group of Italian high school students to write the meditations for his Good Friday Way of the Cross at the Colosseum.

The Pope tasked religion teacher Andrea Monda with choosing and coordinating the 15 students, who attend a classical high school in Rome.

Marta Croppo, 18, is writing the meditation for the 14th station, when Christ’s body was laid in the tomb.

She told CNA March 23 that she thinks Pope Francis wanted young people to write the meditations because of their simplicity and their ability “to communicate another type of message to the world.”

“We are not scholars, and we do not have a theological degree or something like that,” she noted. Therefore, this is “a great occasion for us to talk with simplicity,” relying on our experience of faith and religion in daily life.

Croppo said that in her meditation she did not want to speak about a social problem or “send a message to youth,” but to reflect on more existential themes. “I wanted to emphasize the human side of Jesus, because he is God, but he is human as well,” she said.

“He has suffered, and he has died just like us, so I wanted to talk about this aspect and the fact that he’s very near, [that] he comprehends deeply our condition of suffering and of sorrow.”

In the 10th station Jesus is stripped of his garments. Greta Giglio, 18, said that in her reflection on this station she tried to address present issues, such as immigration, because “immigrants, like Christ in that specific moment, come lacking everything.”

Monda said that he sees the Pope’s choice to entrust young people with the Via Crucis reflections as being in line with the greater focus of his pontificate, “trying to give a voice to those who have no voice.”

In Monda’s view, young people are also often at the peripheries. But Pope Francis says not to speak only about youth or to youth, but to “let the youth talk and then listen to them.”

The last time the reflections for the Via Crucis were written by young people was in 2013, when Benedict XVI asked youth from Lebanon to write them after visiting the country the previous September.

Those meditations were written by 45 young Lebanese between the ages of 17 and 30 and were focused on unity and peace between Christians and Muslims.  

In 2017 the meditations were written by French biblical scholar Anne-Marie Pelletier, who was the fourth woman to do so after St. John Paul II first started the practice, inviting Mother Anna Maria Canopi from the Benedictine abbey “Mater Ecclesiae” in 1993.

In recent years they have mostly been penned by Italian bishops; notably, in 2015, they were written by Bishop Emeritus Renato Corti of Novara, who preached the final Lenten spiritual exercises for St. John Paul II the week before his April 2, 2005 death.

The Roman tradition of holding the Way of the Cross at the Colosseum on Good Friday goes back to the pontificate of Benedict XIV, who died in 1758.

After dying out for a period, the tradition was revived in 1964 by Bl. Paul VI, while under St. John Paul II the Way of the Cross at the Colosseum became a worldwide television event; the Pope himself used to carry the cross.

Now the cross is usually carried by individuals and families – including religious and laity – from around the world.

The Pope personally selects who writes the meditations for the stations, and the choice can indicate issues the Pope wants to zero in on.

In 2017, the Via Crucis at the Colosseum was attended by around 20,000 people.

[…]

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“Many vulnera… […]

Stockholm, Sweden, Mar 20, 2018 / 03:48 pm (CNA/EWTN News).- Catholic educators in Sweden have denounced a political party’s promise to ban all religious schools as a political maneuver capitalizing on people’s fears in order to obtain votes.

The Social Democratic Party in Sweden has proposed banning all religious schools (known as “confessional schools”) in the country, in what the party says is an attempt at better integration of students.

The party has formed a coalition government with the Green Party, and a general election is to be held in September.

The Social Democrats have expressed concern that confessional schools contribute to the segregation of students, by religion and gender, and that they don’t teach children democratic values.

“In our schools, teachers and principals should make the decisions, not priests or imams,” Minister for Upper Secondary School and Adult Education and Training Anna Ekstrom said at a press conference.

The Social Democrats said last week that the proposed policy would be a priority were they re-elected in September.

But Catholic educators in the country are concerned that the proposal would constitute a wide-ranging infringement on religious freedom and on already-restricted religious education in the country. Religious schools cannot charge tuition, and receive government funding.

“…there is a very negative public debate with a lot of pre-judgements against us and religion in general. We are very worried of course as the proposal is an aggressive assault against our Catholic community,” Paddy Maguire, principal of Notre Dame Catholic School in Gothenburg (located fewer than 300 miles southwest of Stockholm), and Daniel Szirányi, a board member of the same school, said in a joint statement.

Religious education in the country is already under strict restrictions. Current law in Sweden does not allow for catechesis or prayer to take place during regular school hours – it must take place either before or after school, on a voluntary basis.

However, Maguire told CNA that most people in Sweden are unaware of this law, that religious schools also follow the state-issued curriculum, or how religious schools are run in general.

“We have to (abide by) Swedish law, they don’t understand that. They just think we’re run by priests and imams, as they put it,” Maguire said.

Maguire added that the issues that the Social Democrats want to solve are problems that are occurring in Muslim schools, “but they are too cowardly to say so.”

Sweden, which has a historically open-door policy for asylum seekers, saw a dramatic increase in Muslim refugees from countries such as Syria, Iran, Iraq, and Afghanistan in the past few years, with numbers more than doubling between 2014 and 2015 alone.

This dramatic increase in the number of Muslims in Sweden, and practices of some of their schools – such as sex segregation – is the primary motivation behind the religious school ban, Maguire said.

Rather than fixing individual problems, however, “they want to throw the baby out with the bath water,” she said.

Kristina Hellner, communications officer for the Diocese of Stockholm, told CNA, “It’s presented as a quick and simple solution to a problem that is quite limited.”

“The absolute majority of the religious schools in Sweden show excellent results but a small number of them (and these are Islamic schools) have had different kinds of problems. Instead of doing something about these specific schools, certain politicians would like to solve it by closing all religious schools,” she said.

There are 71 religious schools in the country, of which 59 are Christian, 11 are Muslim, and one is Jewish.

Hellner added that Cardinal Anders Arborelius of Stockholm will be working closely with other Christian groups in Sweden to oppose this proposal “with one voice through the Christian Council.”

If the ban were to be enacted, the Socialist Democrats have said that they would make the religious schools into secular schools. However, Maguire noted that most Christian schools would be forced to close, as they are tied to trust funds, through which the schools promised to provide a Christian education.

This would leave approximately 10,000 students without a school, a number the public school system is not adequately prepared to absorb, she said.

“It’s a badly sorted out policy, it’s just a play for populism as we see it,” Maguire said.

Thus far, the proposal is supported by the Social Democrats, the Left Party, and some of the Liberals. The Moderate Party and the Christian Democrats support confessional schools. Some among the Liberals support a policy that would maintain existing religious schools, but would prevent new ones from being founded.

The Green Party and the Centre Party have remained neutral on the issue.

Maguire said she didn’t believe the policy would ultimately pass, because the Social Democrats are losing political power, while right wing parties are gaining power. The Social Democratic Party has lost support in recent polls to the Moderate Party, the largest group in the opposition.

However, she added that educators and Catholic leaders in the country are prepared to fight the proposal all the way to the European Court of Human Rights, and to fight for the rights of parents, designated by the United Nations, to send their children to schools with distinct religious or philosophical leanings.

[…]

Krakow, Poland, Mar 20, 2018 / 12:51 pm (CNA/EWTN News).- As pro-life legislation moves forward in Poland, the nation’s Catholic Bishops’ Conference applauded the measure, stressing that every human person has the right to life.

On Monday,… […]