Washington D.C., Jan 11, 2021 / 07:01 pm (CNA).- The Supreme Court has given the governor of Nevada eight days to file a response to a church which argued that the state’s COVID-19 protocol was discriminatory against houses of worship.
In an ord… […]
CNA Staff, Jan 11, 2021 / 05:27 pm (CNA).- The kidnappings of Catholic priests and others in Nigeria must end, Archbishop Ignatius Kaigama of Abuja said this week.He spoke during his visit to a church whose priest was abducted and released just weeks b… […]
CNA Staff, Jan 11, 2021 / 05:06 pm (CNA).- The Diocese of Buffalo released thousands of clergy abuse documents and related records to abuse victims and their lawyers this week as part of an agreement in ongoing clergy abuse negotiations during its bank… […]
Washington D.C., Jan 11, 2021 / 03:34 pm (CNA).- In a joint statement Jan. 11, the U.S. bishops’ domestic justice chair Archbishop Paul Coakley of Oklahoma City, joined by pro-life chair Archbishop Joseph Naumann, called for a stop to planned fed… […]
Washington, D.C. Newsroom, Jan 11, 2021 / 01:49 pm (CNA).- Catholic leaders spoke out against human trafficking on Monday, National Human Trafficking Awareness Day.
“It is shocking to consider the size and scope of the tragedy of human trafficking that exists in our world in 2021,” stated Bishop Robert Deeley of Portland, Maine.
He called human trafficking “a horrific crime against the basic dignity and rights of the human person.”
Jan. 11, 2021 is National Human Trafficking Awareness Day, held during January which is National Slavery and Human Trafficking Prevention Month.
There are more than 40 million estimated victims of trafficking worldwide—25 million of them trapped in labor or sex trafficking, and 15 million people in forced marriages. Human trafficking has been calculated at a $150 billion industry.
Trafficking victims are everywhere—but hiding in plain sight, said a Catholic Relief Services (CRS) advisor on the group’s fact-sheet for January.
“They are hidden from view. You don’t recognize them in the back kitchens, shops, gas stations and in hospitality. They are also tucked away in fields,” said Dr. Lucy Steinitz, Catholic Relief Services senior technical advisor for protection.
These forms of “modern-day slavery” look quite different from those of centuries past, she added.
“They [victims] are not in shackles or on farms,” Steinitz said. “People are coerced into harsh employment under horrible conditions, and then have no freedom to leave.”
Other Catholic groups also recongized National Human Trafficking Awareness Day, including Catholic Charities USA and the Texas Catholic Conference, which has organized a week of prayer to end trafficking, held from Jan. 11-17.
The problem of trafficking, Bishop Deeley said, runs so deep that it requires action at all levels of government.
He called on Congress to pass comprehensive immigration reform to encourage legal immigration and reduce the risk of refugees and child migrants being trafficked.
“Survivors of human trafficking are commonly linked by poverty and a lack of opportunity, particularly immigrants and undocumented workers in the U.S.,” he said. “The selling of people, treated as instruments of gain, takes away all fundamental values rooted in the nature of a human being.”
As part of the efforts to fight trafficking, parishes can play a role in hosting discussions, he said, also praising diocesan programs such as housing assistance for women trafficking survivors.
Florence, Italy, Jan 10, 2021 / 08:01 am (CNA).- The Archbishop of Florence has said no new students have entered his diocesan seminary this year, calling the low number of priestly vocations a “wound” in his episcopate.
Cardinal Giuseppe … […]
CNA Staff, Jan 9, 2021 / 04:51 pm (CNA).- The Wyoming legislature will again consider a bill to protect infants born alive in legal abortion attempts. Its backers say it is needed to push abortion doctors to provide health care to any baby who survives… […]
CNA Staff, Jan 9, 2021 / 05:00 am (CNA).- In an online panel Friday, the incoming chair of the U.S. bishops’ doctrine committee discussed the Church’s opposition to the death penalty as a matter of fighting the “throwaway culture.&rdq… […]
Washington, D.C. Newsroom, Jan 8, 2021 / 05:02 pm (CNA).- A Catholic podcast featuring a priest reading and analyzing the Bible has been at the top of the Apple Podcast charts since Jan. 2, ahead of secular podcasts produced by such organizations as The New York Times, NBC News, and NPR.
“The Bible in a Year (With Fr. Mike Schmitz),” produced by Ascension Catholic Faith Formation, part of Ascension Press, features episodes containing two to three scriptural readings, a reflection on those readings by Fr. Mike Schmitz, and a prayer. Each episode is about 15 to 25 minutes long, and a new episode is set to be released each day of 2021.
Instead of reading the Bible from cover to cover, the podcast follows “The Great Adventure Bible Timeline,” which was developed by Jeff Cavins. Schmitz, a priest of the Diocese of Duluth, told CNA that this approach, which centers on “14 critical narrative books” interspersed with the remaining non-narrative books, helps to maintain the story structure of salvation history.
“A lot of times, what derails people is when they’re reading the story of Genesis and Exodus and Numbers, and all of a sudden they read Leviticus and like, ‘wait, I lost the story now,’” Schmitz told CNA in a Jan. 7 interview.
“So what we’ve done is we built those other books, those non-narrative books around the narrative story or on the narrative,” he said.
“And so one of the things that it is doing is it keeps people connected like, ‘Oh, okay, now this makes sense that here you are in the wilderness, and that’s why we’re reading Leviticus, because this is where God needs to give his people the law regarding the tabernacle.’”
The “timeline” approach also means that listeners will not have to wait until very late in the year to hear about Christ.
“If we (read the Bible) straight through like that, we wouldn’t get to the New Testament until I think November,” said Schmitz. “So it was like, ‘that is not good.’ We’ve not spent 10 months not talking about Jesus very clearly.”
To help remedy this, Schmitz said there will be four “messianic checkpoints” that will introduce listeners to Christ. The first of these will occur “right around day 90,” and will consist of the Gospel of John over the course of about a week.
“I’m really excited about that. Just to be able to say, in the midst of this Old Testament story, ‘here is the revelation of Christ,’” said Schmitz.
Catholics in America read the Bible less often than do Protestants. Schmitz believes that this is due in part to how Catholics are accustomed to having Scripture “proclaimed” to them at Mass.
“I mean, the whole reason the New Testament is called the New Testament is because it was read at the celebration of the new covenant, the Eucharist,” he said.
“And so one of the things that we are used to is having the Bible read out loud, we’re used to having the Bible, as I said, proclaimed. And I think maybe because of that, we kind of sit on our laurels a little bit, and don’t necessarily dig in and ask all the questions about, you know, translations, the questions about, contexts and whatnot.”
Despite this, Schmitz thinks that “we still have this hunger to know,” and that many people are discouraged by the “daunting” nature of the Bible. He hopes his podcast, with its unique formatting of salvation history with a timeline, changes this perception.
“So the appeal, I think, of a Bible in a Year podcast is not only, you’re going to be able to go through the entire Bible in one year, but then secondly, is it’s going to be in bite size chunks. And third, you’re going to have some kind of guidance,” he said.
“And I think that that for a lot of people just makes something that might seem inaccessible, accessible.”
The success of the podcast took both Schmitz and Matthew Pinto, CEO of Ascension Press, by surprise. Schmitz said that he has been warned by his friends and family to “not let (the success) go to his head,” something he says never even occurred to him.
“I’m thinking like, ‘well, I’m literally reading the Bible.’ So I don’t know how much that could go to my head,” said Schmitz.
“I think that it’s, it’s very clearly less about me, and the fact that it’s me reading the Bible, and far more about, I think, people’s hunger” for God’s word, said Schmitz.
Pinto was willing to credit Schmitz with at least some of the show’s success.
“We knew it was going to be a great program, but clearly this has struck a nerve beyond, really what we expected,” Pinto told CNA in a phone interview Jan. 7. “Our first thought
was that, for some reason, God has anointed this particular project.”
Pinto credited the “charism of Fr. Mike and the uniqueness of the Bible timeline” as two of the factors behind the success of the show–along with God’s blessing, of course.
The success of the show caught Ascension “flat-footed,” said Pinto, and The Great Adventure Catholic Bible, which the show is centered around, sold out. Pinto told CNA it should be available again to order in the coming months.
God has, said Pinto, given the podcast “a special grace that is beyond simple human explanation.”
“And, so it’s our hope that we will just be good stewards of it, and really use this as an opportunity to expand and reach, even more. So we’re not going to stop at really where it is,” said Pinto.
“We’re going to ask God for additional blessing, and work as hard as we can to, to get the Word of God out to as many people as we can using this most unique method.”
Washington, D.C. Newsroom, Jan 8, 2021 / 02:19 pm (CNA).- A woman convicted of murdering a woman and stealing her unborn child should be granted clemency ahead of her scheduled execution on Jan. 12, her lawyer told CNA.
Lisa Montgomery was sentenced to death in 2007 for the Dec. 16, 2004 murder of Bobbie Jo Stinnett, a 23-year-old woman who was eight months pregnant. Montgomery, who told Stinnett her name was “Darlene Fischer,” claimed to be pregnant as well, and the two communicated online prior to meeting at Stinnett’s home in Skidmore, Missouri.
Montgomery strangled Stinnett, and then cut her stomach to deliver the child, a girl, via a rudimentary cesarean section. The newborn baby girl was discovered, alive, one day later when Montgomery was arrested in Kansas. Montgomery reportedly told her husband that the baby was hers.
The federal government tried the case in part as it involved a kidnapping over state lines.
“We’ve asked President Trump to commute Mrs. Montgomery’s sentence from death to life imprisonment without the possibility of parole … for several reasons,” Kelley Henry, lead counsel on the case, said to CNA in a phone interview Jan. 6.
“First, she is a person who suffers from serious mental illness as well as brain damage, and a lifetime of physical and sexual torture at the hands of her caregivers, and the men that her mother trafficked her to, for years,” said Henry.
Henry noted that despite the documentation of numerous similar crimes in the United States, Montgomery is the only person to be sentenced to death on either the federal or state levels.
“The prosecution normally understands that people who commit this particular sort of crime are individuals with severe mental illness and trauma history,” Henry explained.
“Mrs. Montgomery’s trauma history is the most severe of any case I’ve ever seen in 30 years of practice.”
Unlike others on death row, Montgomery “has expressed deep and severe remorse from the moment of her arrest,” said Henry.
Henry told CNA that those who wish to see Montgomery’s sentence commuted to life in prison without the possibility of parole to visit the website SaveLisa.org, sign the petition, and write “letters and emails” to the president and other leaders.
“These executions are, after all, carried out in the names of the citizens of the United States, and they should make it be known to the president that they would support mercy in this case,” said Henry, “which would be life in prison without the possibility of parole.”
© Catholic World Report