Europe

Rome, Italy, Apr 14, 2017 / 01:51 am (CNA).- In the hours after evening Mass of the Lord’s Supper on Holy Thursday, a few pilgrims in Rome make their way to the Church of Saint Praxedes, home to a fragment of stone alleged to be the pillar upon which Jesus was scourged.

Known as the Column of the Flagellation, the stone offers an object of contemplation for those visiting the church to reflect on Christ’s Passion. This is especially true on Holy Thursday, when pilgrims traditionally go to churches throughout the city to venerate the decorated altars within which the Eucharist has been reposed in anticipation of Good Friday.

The column is kept in a glass reliquary in one of the side chapels of Saint Praxedes, a 9th century church named after an early Christian martyr who has long-standing devotion in Rome, but about whom little is known for certain.

The pillar itself, sculpted from black-and-white marble, was retrieved from the Holy Land during the medieval period.

Is the artifact which continues to be visited by pilgrims as the column of the scourging a true relic of Christ’s Passion? Most scholars would say this is highly doubtful.

Yet the probable in-authenticity of the pillar does not take away from the value in venerating it, says one expert. Rather, it is reminiscent of the genuine spirituality of medieval Christians, like those who found the pillar and brought it back from the Holy Land.

“The Middle Ages had a very powerful sense of God’s Providence,” said Gregory DiPippo, managing editor of the New Liturgical Movement website, “and to them you could almost say it was illogical that God would allow something like (the pillar) – which would have been Sanctified by being part of the Lord’s Passion – to go missing.”

Whether the true pillar of the flagellation still exists anywhere is uncertain. Jerusalem’s Chapel of the Apparition claims to have the true pillar: a broken red porphyry column which bears no resemblance to the artifact in Rome.

However, in speaking of Saint Praxedes pillar, DiPippo explained it was improbable that the original would have survived on account of the 1st century uprisings which led to the destruction of Jerusalem.

Nonetheless, there is inherent value in venerating an object that may not be genuine, when one takes into account the objective of veneration, he added.

In the Western tradition, “you aren’t venerating the object for its own sake, necessarily, but rather as an expression of a sort of realized presence of the person or the event that it represents.”

This point is further illustrated by comparing Western and Eastern liturgical practices, he said, observing that in the West, the priest incenses the relics of the saints, whereas Byzantines incense the images and icons.

“It is the living presence, realized presence in this case, of the Passion of Christ,” DiPippo said. “Even if it isn’t authentic, we are still honoring the Passion of Christ by venerating it as such.”

The pillar of Saint Praxedes was first brought to Italy by Cardinal Giovanni Colonna, a 13th century prelate appointed by Pope Innocent III, who had been serving as papal legate in the Holy Land during the sixth Crusade. Returning to Rome in the 1220s, he brought with him the column in question.

“One mustn’t think of this as a conscious fraud on the part of Cardinal Colonna, or the people who received it as the relic of the flagellation,” DiPippo explained, but rather of Medieval devotion.

This article was originally published on CNA April 3, 2015.

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London, England, Apr 11, 2017 / 03:44 pm (CNA/EWTN News).- Charlie Gard is an 8 month old in the United Kingdom who has been fighting for his life against a rare disease.

His parents, Connie Yates and Chris Gard, wanted to keep him on life support and… […]

Rome, Italy, Apr 11, 2017 / 02:21 pm (CNA/EWTN News).- At a prayer vigil with youth this weekend, Pope Francis said the Church needs to listen to the voice of young people, and some of them have responded saying they want to let the world know they are… […]

London, England, Apr 10, 2017 / 04:02 am (CNA/EWTN News).- Fr. John Reid, a Roman Catholic priest serving in County Durham, England, has been spared an 18-month jail sentence for stealing more than £50,000 from his parish, which he had been spending on his housekeeper and her two daughters.

According to media reports, the 70-year-old priest was given an 18-month suspended sentence after admitting to fraud by abuse of position at an earlier hearing. He has agreed to repay the money within three months.
 
“The defendant was arrested in May 2014 at St. Patrick’s Presbytery, Stockton. It appeared that the defendant was virtually living as a family with Gillian Leddy and her daughters, Veronica and Alice,” said Jane Waugh, the prosecutor in Fr. Reid’s case, according to the Telegraph.

“There had been dramatic increases within the categories of General Administration, House Keeping, and Hospitality. This would appear to be because Gillian, Alice, and Veronica Leddy…were effectively living at the presbytery and the defendant’s expenditure increased to reflect the fact that he was helping to support them financially,” Waugh said.

Fr. Reid was assigned to St. Cuthbert’s parish in the Diocese of Hexham and Newcastle in 2009. Within a few years of his arrival, some parishioners began to raise eyebrows when the parish’s spending had more than doubled.

Suspicions were also raised when Fr. Reid began asking for blank checks without giving any details about his spending. He also started to run the parish without a finance council, and named one of his housekeeper’s daughters the co-signatory of the parish check book. He additionally wrote more than 150 checks to himself.

Basic living for a parish priest at St. Cuthbert’s should have totaled around £31,500 over the course of four years. Instead, that number spiked to over £113,000.

Eventually, parishioner Nora McKie raised the red flag and wanted Fr. Reid’s spending to be investigated by auditors and the police.

“The witness Nora McKie…stated that the defendant had a lifestyle not typical of any priest she had known, and that the reason she took action to highlight these serious concerns was to protect those people, who with total trust were giving money to the Church,” Waugh said.

During the two-year investigation, it was discovered that Fr. Reid had stolen thousands of pounds from the parish to pay for things such as foreign travel, fine dining, expensive cutlery and a seemingly lavish lifestyle for his housekeeper and her daughters.

In addition, the priest’s rectory was found “in terrible condition.”

“It was dirty and untidy with large quantities of alcohol present,” Waugh noted, adding that they also found “female clothing in the bedrooms and it was apparent that females had been staying there.”

Fr. Reid had also funded two homes, a few cars, and even financed a business venture for the two daughters, using his own inheritance.

In response to the investigation, Fr. Reid stated that he was in love with his housekeeper, Gillian Leddy, and that the three women were “the family that he never had.”

“The parish keeps me,” Fr. Reid stated, and “ultimately, I’m in charge of it, so I can spend it.”

Since the scandal, Fr. Reid has been replaced at St. Cuthbert’s by another priest and was charged to pay back the £50,000 that he stole, in addition to another £5,000 to repay the auditing costs within three months.

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Santiago de Compostela, Spain, Apr 7, 2017 / 01:27 pm (Aid to the Church in Need).- The killer of an American woman who had been walking the Camino de Santiago pilgrimage route has been found guilty and could face up to 25 years in prison.

Miguel Ange… […]

Dublin, Ireland, Apr 6, 2017 / 03:53 pm (CNA).- Facing legal scrutiny over foreign funding of efforts to fight Ireland’s anti-abortion law, a pro-abortion group has returned a $25,000 grant to billionaire George Soros’ Open Society Foundati… […]

Medjugorje, Bosnia, Apr 5, 2017 / 12:10 pm (CNA/EWTN News).- Pope Francis’ envoy to Medjugorje said Wednesday that the site seems to be bearing numerous expressions of faith and vocations. However, he added, the final determination of the apparition’s authenticity remains to be seen.

Archbishop Henryk Hoser was sent by the Pope to evaluate the pastoral situation for residents and pilgrims in Medjugorje. He clarified that he was not tasked with anything beyond this scope.

“The same as you, I expect a final decision from the commission, and of course the Holy Father Pope Francis,” Archbishop Hoser said at an April 5 press conference in Medjugorje. “I do not know what the Holy Father thinks, he never told me,” he said. “The Holy Father also needs to see what are the conclusions of the commission.”

The apparitions are under investigation by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, which is to submit its final document to the Pope for a final decision.

The apparitions allegedly started on June 24, 1981, when six children in Medjugorje, a town in what is now Bosnia and Herzegovina, have claimed to have witnessed apparitions of the Blessed Virgin Mary.

According to the alleged visionaries, the apparitions conveyed a message of peace for the world, a call to conversion, prayer and fasting, as well as certain secrets surrounding events to be fulfilled in the future.  

These apparitions are said to have continued almost daily since their first occurrence, with three of the original six visionaries claiming to have received apparitions every afternoon because not all of the “secrets” intended for them have been revealed.

Since their beginning, the alleged apparitions have been a source of both controversy and conversion. More than 2.5 million go on pilgrimage to Medjugorje each year. Some claim to have experienced miracles at the site, while many others claim the visions are non-credible.

Skeptics of the apparitions include Bishop Ratko Peric of Mostar-Duvno, whose diocese includes Medjugorje. In a Feb. 26 statement, he said “these are not true apparitions of the Blessed Virgin Mary.”

“The female figure who supposedly appeared in Medjugorje behaves in a manner completely different from the real Virgin Mother of God in the apparitions currently recognized as authentic by the Church: usually she does not speak first, she laughs in a strange way, before some questions she disappears and appears again, she obeys the ‘visionaries’ and the local pastor who make her come down from the hill into the church even against her will. She doesn’t know with certainty how many more times she will appear, she allows some of those present to step on her veil extended on the ground, and to touch her dress and her body. This is not the Virgin of the Gospels.”

Bishop Peric also pointed to a sense of nervousness rather than peace among the seers.

As for the papal envoy, Archbishop Hoser, he said Wednesday that he had contact with the reputed visionaries of Medjugorje. This contact was “completely normal,” but not in-depth.

“Let us remember they are no longer boys and girls,” he said. “Some of them are already grandmothers.”

“We should note that they are immersed in the normal regular, everyday life of the family. They need to work and support their families. They have a similar life to many of us,” he said.

He repeated that his role was not to speak about the apparitions and said the Church has not made the relevant statements yet. Nonetheless, questions at the press conference raised the issue.

Archbishop Hoser compared and contrasted the apparitions with the Marian apparitions at Kibeho in Rwanda, which began in October 1981. An apparition of the Virgin Mary had warned about a coming genocide, years before the mass killings of 1994.

The archbishop had served on a medical commission evaluating that apparition.

“The message was similar to the message that was said here in Medjugorje,” the archbishop said. “it was a calling to conversion …it is a calling to peace, an invitation to peace”

Unlike Medjugorje, the Rwanda apparitions have already received Church approval for having nothing that contradicts the faith.

“In the beginning there were doubts whether those visionaries were authentic,” he said of the Rwanda apparitions. “That is why I ask you for your patience. The more complex a phenomenon is, it takes more time to achieve valid conclusions.”

He noted some differences between the Medjugorje apparitions and other Marian apparitions. Some have counted 47,000 claims of individual apparitions related to Medjugorje, while other Marian apparitions are much fewer in number.

In other Marian apparitions, the Virgin Mary appears only in one place. At Lourdes, she always appeared in the cave that later became the famous grotto. In Fatima, she always appeared above the oak tree.

“Here, according to what visionaries are saying, the apparitions follow the person, where the person goes,” Archbishop Hoser said. “This could be at home, when they are traveling, in the church.”

“These are all specifics that make the work of a final decision more difficult,” he explained.

Archbishop Hoser, who holds the title of archbishop as a personal recognition from Pope John Paul II, heads the Polish Diocese of Warszawa-Praga.

When the archbishop’s appointment as papal envoy was announced in February, Holy See press officer Greg Burke stressed that his mission was pastoral, not doctrinal, and would not consider the substance of the Marian apparitions there. That topic is under the competence of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith.

Archbishop Hoser praised various expressions of faith he found in Medjugorje: the centrality of the Celebration of the Holy Eucharist, devotion to the Word of God, adoration of the Blessed Sacrament, devotion to the rosary, and meditation on the mysteries of the faith and the Way of the Cross. He also praised the frequent use of the Sacrament of Reconciliation.

“From the religious perspective Medjugorje is very fertile grounds for religious vocations,” he said. About 610 priests have cited Medjugorje as a motivating force in their vocation, with the greatest number of these vocations coming from Italy, the U.S. and Germany.

For the archbishop, this is a significant contribution given the crisis of vocations in some countries.

Medjugorje is only about 36 years old, he observed, but it attracts an estimated 2.5 million pilgrims each year. By comparison, Lourdes, France attracts 6 million people per year, 150 years after the apparition.

Archbishop Hoser noted the need to consider parish life for those who live there and the effects of the many pilgrims.

The number of pilgrims poses “a huge challenge” for the priests who serve in Medjugorje, with expansions to the church infrastructure needed to accommodate them. The number of pilgrims has also caused an increase in the number of hotels, restaurants and other facilities to accommodate them.

Some people have come from elsewhere to settle in Medjugorje.

The archbishop noted the various humanitarian groups and activities in Medjugorje, some of which have roots in the town. There is the Franciscans’ Domus Maria, Mary’s House, which serves orphans, young people in difficulty, persons struggling with drug and alcohol addictions, the disabled and handicapped. The retreat house Domus Pacis provides spiritual exercises, serving over 42,000 participants in 1,200 groups each year.

There are also various seminars dedicated to priestly formation, married couples, doctors and medical professionals, people with disabilities, and a new pro-life seminar.

All of this activity could be applied in other parts of the world, the papal envoy said.

“People perceive there things that they don’t have at home,” Archbishop Hoser said of Medjugorje. “In many old Christian countries, individual confessions do not exist anymore. In many countries, there is no Adoration before the Blessed Sacrament. In many countries, there is no Way of the Cross anymore. There’s no rosary anymore. In Britain, in France, they told me the last time they prayed the Way of the Cross was 30 years ago. And such dryness of sacred space obviously leads towards a crisis of the faith.”

He praised the emphasis in Medjugorje on the Virgin Mary’s title “Queen of Peace,” especially during the period which Pope Francis has called a “piecemeal Third World War.”

He cited the Balkans’ suffering of a civil war in the 1990s with the breakup of Yugoslavia. In addition, he cited his own experience in Rwanda, and the destruction in Syria, which hosts the oldest Christian presence in the world.

“To invoke the Queen of Peace, the Mother of God: this is the specific role of Medjugorje. It is most important.”

“My friends, you should be carriers of joyful news,” he told the press conference. “And you can say to the whole world that in Medjugorje, there is a light… we need these spots of light in today’s world that is going down into darkness.”

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Moscow, Russia, Apr 3, 2017 / 11:23 am (CNA/EWTN News).- Archbishop Paolo Pezzi of Moscow offered his prayers and condolences following a deadly explosion in the St. Petersburg metro on Monday afternoon.

“With deep sorrow, I learned about the vi… […]

Rome, Italy, Apr 1, 2017 / 04:02 pm (CNA/EWTN News).- Reproductive issues often leave Catholics and secular feminists at odds, but a recent anti-surrogacy conference in Rome has created an unusual camaraderie between the two.

“Se Non Ora Quando,” a feminist group known for its left-wing views, called surrogacy “incompatible with human rights and with the dignity of women,” according to the Atlantic.

The conference met last Thursday at a lower House of Parliament in Rome. Women intellectuals, doctors, and scholars from all over the world, pleaded with the United Nations to ban European citizens from traveling abroad to procure surrogate mothers.

Surrogacy is when a woman carries a baby to term for a third party, often involving payment. The pregnancy is achieved by in-vitro fertilization, in which an egg is fertilized in a lab then placed into the woman’s womb.

While the practice is legal in Canada and most of the United States, regulations vary depending on the state. Surrogacy is banned, however, in almost all of Western Europe, including France, Spain, Sweden, Germany, and Italy. Some countries, such as England, do not enforce surrogate contracts and women are not required by law to give up the baby they bore for a third party.

The Catholic Church opposed surrogacy in Donum Vitae, a document on biomedical issues written in 1987.

“Surrogate motherhood represents an objective failure to meet the obligations of maternal love,” the document reads. It further called the practice a “detriment” to the family and the dignity of the person by divorcing “physical, psychological and moral elements which constitute those families.”

In recent years, left-wing feminists have actively opposed surrogacy in countries like Spain and France, claiming it as an attack against women’s dignity, especially as an injustice to the poor. They have compared surrogacy to prostitution, and the expressed their concern for its promotion of human trafficking.  

“The state of necessity of women who turn to renting their womb, for a price, is not unlike sexual exploitation,” said the Spain-based Feminist Party, who protested a local surrogacy fair in 2016.

The United Nations’ parliament condemned surrogacy in 2015, labeling it as a practice which “undermines the human dignity of the woman since her body and its reproductive functions are used as a commodity.” World leaders have also identified a high of surrogate mothers are poor women in third world countries.

Sheela Saravanan gave her testimony to the “Se Non Ora Quando” conference last week, detailing the struggle women are faced with in India.

“Our surrogate mothers are stressed physically and mentally even if they receive money,” and they experience “poverty, illiteracy, submissiveness,” Saravanan said, according to the Italian bishops’ newspaper Avvenire.  

She also explained that these “mothers who do not claim rights” are subject to abortions if the baby is disabled.

Many feminists have expressed concern that surrogacy not only coerces impoverished women, but has unhealthy side effects. The psychologist Fabio Castriota, told the conference that birth and motherhood are inseparable, and that a “separation trauma” leaves an impression on both the baby and the woman.

“Se Non Ora Quando,” means “If not now, when?” The group emerged in response to what they view as the sexist treatment of women in the media. They are especially known for organizing the 2011 rally against then-prime minister Silvio Berlusconi, who faced accusations of sleeping with an underage woman.

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Cologne, Germany, Mar 31, 2017 / 05:12 pm (CNA/EWTN News).- Despite the controversies and abuses following the Second Vatican Council, the Catholic liturgy is ultimately a source of unity that forms Christians in the sacrifice and salvation of the cros… […]