2015-08-27T12:01:00+00:00

Vatican City, Aug 27, 2015 / 06:01 am (CNA/EWTN News).- Benedict XVI considers the quest for God to be contemporary society's foremost challenge, according to one of the emeritus Pope's former students, who has organized the annual meeting of Ratzinger's students to discuss that very topic. The Ratzinger Schuelerkreis will gather Sept. 28-30 to discuss the theme set them by their former professor. The group has gathered to discuss topics in theology and the life of the Church since 1978, shortly after their mentor was pulled from academia to become a bishop. “Benedict XVI identified, from his earliest theological studies, a faith in the progress of man which he deems to be an ideology,” Fr. Stephan Horn told CNA. In reply to that ideology, Fr. Horn said, Benedict has maintained that “the center of history is the living God who opened himself in Jesus Christ, and true progress is found in faith.” Fr. Horn, a Salvatorian, was Ratzinger's academic assistant at the University of Regensburg from 1971 to 1977, and is now organizer of the annual Schuelerkreis meeting. He related that the 40 or so members of the Schuelerkreis form a sort of “theological family,” and that in addition to the historial nucleus of the group, there was formed in 2008 a secondary group of younger theologians who have studied Benedict's thought in-depth. The idea for the annual meeting arose in 1977, when Ratzinger was appointed Archbishop of Munich and Freising, and when he moved to Rome in 1981 to take up the post of prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, it continued. Benedict's former students thought that the annual tradition would have stopped once Ratzinger was elected Pope, yet he wanted to maintain the tradition and continued to meet with his former students. Since his 2013 resignation, Benedict has not attended the Schuelerkreis, except to say Mass for the group at its conclusion. However, the Pope emeritus closely follows the works of his former students, and personally chooses the themes of discussion from among a set of three which the members of the Schuelerkreis present to him at the end of each annual gathering. In recent years, they have focused on the theology of the cross; the question of God amid secularism; and ecumenism. Fr. Horn said Benedict “did not explain in-depth the reasons why he asked us to discuss ‘Speaking about God in the contemporary world’, but is evident that to him the Word of God is the true need of today’s world, and that the Church needs to find new ways to speak about God.” Fr. Horn underscored that “today’s culture itself makes speech about God necessary, as there is a different trend – that is, speaking only about what man can do, about the so called ‘homo Faber'” and so there is a need for “a new way to search for truth and to meet the great challenges of modern man.” According to Fr. Horn the search for new means to speak of God has been at the core of Benedict's theological work since the Second Vatican Council. “It been widely said that the Second Vatican Council spoke about the Church, and the relation between the Church and the world. But Joseph Ratzinger saw that the quest for God was the main issue at the Second Vatican Council, as was shown by the fact that the very first document issued by the council was the constitution on the liturgy,” Fr. Horn explained. The emphasis on liturgy was further developed by Ratzinger when he was appointed Archbishop of Munich and Freising in 1977. “During the years he was the Archbishop of Munich, Ratzinger focused also on liturgy, according to what he had developed in the previous years as a professor in Regensburg, when he tried to foster a way to translate the language of the faith for contemporary man,” Fr. Horn stressed. Fr. Horn also higlighted that as Pope, Benedict emphasized the education of priests and the people of God, and he created a sort of “catechumenal theology.” “Ratzinger has always thought that the search for truth does not merely come from an intellectual action, but it is rather one of the ways of life. And so theologians must be beside the catechumens – that is, all who are on a Christian path – speaking with them, developing theology and faith.” Read more

2015-08-27T09:04:00+00:00

Washington D.C., Aug 27, 2015 / 03:04 am (CNA).- Chances are you've heard of the phrase “15 minutes of fame.” And you've probably seen the neon-colored canvases of Campbell soup cans or Marilyn Monroe's face – even if you don't know the artist behind them. For those who've never studied Andy Warhol and his prolific body of work, they've still most likely encountered it in many of the pop icons of the late 20th Century. But while Warhol may be known best for the his visionary depiction of fame and popular culture, his art can also be understood as iconic – in another, much more literal, way. Why? Because he was an ardently practicing Byzantine Catholic, say those close to the artist and his work. In fact, they say, Warhol's art is actually best understood through the lens of faith and iconography.   However, these same voices warn that both the art world and Catholics alike have tended to oversimplify or ignore aspects of the man that, to this day, refuses to be categorized.   “Warhol's a very complicated person and whatever angle we really try to take to his art, we can take one angle to come from but it's always going to be incomplete if we don’t take another angle as well,” said art historian Dr. James Romaine. Romaine, who also serves as president of the international Association of Scholars of Christianity in the History of Art, said that the widespread read on Warhol's work – that it's largely a critique of consumerism – actually isn't at odds with a more religious interpretation of his art.   “The more popular description of Warhol's work being concerned with popular culture, commodity culture, I think that's all true,” he told CNA. “And I don't see it as being inconsistent in any way with what we’ve already talked about with sacred art,” he said. “I see these same sides of Warhol's work as enhancing each other.” So who was Andy Warhol? Or should we say – who was Andrew Warhola? A Humble Beginning The artist who would become Andy Warhol was born as Andrew Warhola on Aug. 6, 1928, in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. His parents, Ondrej and Julia Warhola immigrated to the United States in 1914 and 1921, respectively, from what is today Slovakia. They raised their family of three sons in the Byzantine Catholic Church. Andrew was often sick as a child, and spent much time bedridden, collecting pictures and drawing. His father passed away in an accident when he was just 13. After high school, Warhol studied commercial art at the Carnegie Institute of Technology, later renamed Carnegie Mellon University. Following graduation in 1949, he moved to New York City, where he worked in magazine illustration and advertising, and also started signing his last name “Warhol,” rather than “Warhola.” His mother joined him in New York in 1952, where she lived with her son until her death in 1972. Throughout the 50s and 60s, Warhol gained attention for his painting techniques, and later photography, film, installments and multi-media exhibitions. The late 1960s also brought Warhol close to death when he was shot near the entrance to his Factory workspace. After the shooting, Warhol continued to work prodigiously, co-founding Interview Magazine, designing record covers, producing television programs, and continuing to paint both commissioned works and his own artistic series. He passed away suddenly on Feb. 22, 1987, during a routine gallbladder surgery. In the nearly 30 years since the artist's death, his art has left a lasting impact on society not only due to the vast popularity of his work, but the major themes he wrestles with and explores. “Warhol has been celebrated by critics and art historians for his ability to probe some of the most challenging themes of modern society: identity politics, celebrity, death, religion, desire, and the capitalist machine,” said Jessica Beck, assistant curator for The Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh. “From the very beginning of his career, Warhol had a particularly keen understanding of the power and weight of images,” she told CNA, “and he was able to produce a body of work that remains extremely relevant and accessible to contemporary audiences.” But while a small amount of religious work has been explored by scholars such as Lynne Cooke and Jane D. Dillenberger, largely these themes – “relative to the Pop paintings of Campbell's Soup and Coca-Cola or the celebrity portraits” – are “somewhat under-researched,” Beck said.An Abiding Faith For Warhol, faith was an integral part of family life and a daily practice – and both of these remained important to the artist until his death, according to his nephew, Donald Warhola. While many assume he was non-religious, Andy Warhol “was far from an atheist,” Warhola told CNA. “He was a practicing Byzantine Catholic, and actually attended a Roman church later in his life.” This dedication to the faith was a critical part of Andy's daily life. Warhola recalled that his uncle would visit his neighborhood Roman Catholic parish in New York City “and pray every day.” After Warhol passed away, the priest approached the Warhola family at his memorial “and said to us that he was going to miss his daily talks with Uncle Andy.” From among Warhol's personal collection displayed in the Warhol Museum after his death are religious items such as a sculpture of the Sacred Heart. But for the Warhola family, the Catholic faith was more than daily practice, and was a key part of their family life and source of personal strength. “Sunday was meant for worship,” Donald said. He added that his grandparents – Andy Warhol's parents – raised their sons to place Church and visiting with family first on Sundays. Even when Andy Warhol moved from Pittsburgh to New York City in order pursue his art career, faith remained an important familial touchstone.   “Always he would ask if I went to Church because it was a Sunday,” Warhola said of his phone calls with his uncle. “He was very religious: it was a very big part of his upbringing as well as mine.” “I know Uncle Andy was the character who had that through his upbringing and I know that he depended on God for strength.” Donald Warhola also got to know his uncle in a working environment was well, installing a computer system for Andy for several months before his death at Andy Warhol Enterprises in New York. At work, Donald describes his uncle as “quiet” but also a hard worker and fair employer, bringing their family emphasis on hard work into the workplace. “He wasn't too much different, but it was interesting to see Uncle Andy in that element and his work element as opposed to the more casual, laid back visiting at his place.” These “really basic and old school” lessons from his uncle stuck with the then-24-year-old Warhola. Donald recounted meeting someone in New York who wanted to design the young worker a “fancy business card” to use for future job searches. Uncle Andy told him “a fancy business card won't get you work,” but promised that if he did a good job at his work, he would write his nephew a good referral and help find him a good job. “The funny thing is that after that, on jobs that I took, it seems that I never got business cards,” he laughed. “Subconsciously something landed in my mind to avoid business cards.”   Other colleagues of Warhol also noticed the artist’s Catholic faith and devotion, such as Bob Colacello. He relayed that Warhol's faith “was not an act,” after attending Mass with Warhol and visiting the shrine of the Virgin of Guadalupe, according to Jane Dillenberger's work in “The Religious Art of Andy Warhol.” Warhol's diaries also provide a record of his internal religious life, documenting weekly Mass attendance, volunteer work at a parish soup kitchen, and his experience of meeting and shaking hands with then-pontiff Saint John Paul II in 1980. He also recorded his anxiety being surrounded by the “scary” crowds in St. Peter's Square waiting for the Pope, although he fought off his nervousness in order to sign autographs for several nuns. Warhol additionally wrote that he screamed after the assassination attempt on John Paul II in 1981.Art as Iconography Just as faith played an important place in Warhol's life so too did it surface as an important topic in his art. He worked on several explicitly religious pieces, including appropriations and reinventions of Raphael's “Madonna” and da Vinci's “Last Supper.” A camouflage version of the latter, Romaine observed, can be interpreted as “bringing back the halo on and over Christ’s head,” which was removed in da Vinci's original humanist painting. For Romaine, however, Warhol's religious themes run into all his work – even that thought of as non-religious. “If I had to describe Andy Warhol’s work in just one or two sentences, I would describe it as the world seen not as it is, but the world seen as it might be transformed by grace.” Romaine explained that in the Eastern Catholic churches, religious icons play a vital role in worship and spiritual life. As opposed to altar pieces or other sacred art in the Western Church, “the icon is more of a specific presence of the saints there with an icon,” he said. “The sacred image is not directly bringing the Virgin Mary into the Church, whereas with the icon, the presence of the saints is believed to be more directly there.” He said that by viewing Warhol's work – particularly his paintings – with an eye towards iconography, “I see all of Warhol's work as potentially sacred.” As an example, Romaine pointed to the now-iconic printing of the Campbell soup can. “Soup cans are disposable food,” he said. “But the way Warhol depicts them, he removed them from a time and place context in which they're disposable, into a timeless realm in which they're almost like icons.” The soup can also had a ritual tie to Warhol's life. He recalled Warhol's brother mentioning “Andy eating Campbell’s soup every day, having a soup and sandwich every day, and the importance of religious imagery in their home” – including over the kitchen table where Warhol ate his soup. Similarly, Romaine said, people are presented in a glorified, redemptive manner in Warhol's paintings. The artist finished the now-classic screen print of Marilyn Monroe shortly after the actress's sudden death after a tumultuous life. Yet, Warhol's work “doesn't depict her as a tragic figure,” he remarked, “not that we shouldn't have sympathy for her.” “He celebrates her. He sees her in a way as being, in fact, beautiful.”    Warhol also portrays Elizabeth Taylor, another actress dealing with scandal at the time of the painting. “He's depicting those women at critical moments in their lives. Warhol depicts her as kind of redeeming her through his imagery.” “If you're familiar with the Christian concept of the transfiguration...Christ appears to his disciples not as he is, but in a glorified way. He's not just this guy walking around, but he's glorified.   Romaine commented that in the way the soup can or Marilyn Monroe, or Liz Taylor are presented, it reminds him of the Transfiguration, where Christ is presented to the disciples in the fullness of His glory. Likewise, in these images, Romaine said, “I kind of see Warhol seeing the whole world as potentially glorified.” This glorification of the popular is one of the markers of Warhol's art, Romaine noted. “His work is so much connected with the lowest of the low commodity culture makes the transfiguration that takes place in his work, all the more miraculous, all the more important.” “If he's depicting the Virgin Mary as sacred, it's sort of obvious already, but if you're depicting the soup can as sacred, it’s really transformative.” Daniel Warhola agreed that, while “we never had a conversation on that topic,” it makes sense to him that Eastern iconography would have an influence on his uncle's artwork. “Perhaps I'm jaded because I grew up in the same environment but to me it seems obvious: the Byzantine Catholic Church is all about Heaven on Earth and you are stimulating the various senses and your eyes with the various icons and beautiful stained glass windows, and you know that the smell of incense and the sounds,” he stated. Among the important sensory parts of the liturgy, he continued, are “the icons, sort of the celebrities of religion.” “To me it’s very obvious that the way he presented his pop art, you take these iconic figures out of society, Marilyn Monroe, Elizabeth Taylor, and make them iconic in the way he presented them.”A Complicated Man However, while Andrew Warhola was a man of faith and his Catholic understanding of the world did make its way into his art, Andy Warhol also dealt intimately with themes such as fame, popular culture, mass production and sexuality – that would become nearly ubiquitous in the 30 years after his death. “I’ve just always thought Uncle Andy was able to predict what was going to be popular ahead of his time,” Donald Warhola said. He called his uncle's work “progressive” in that it “was ahead of his time.”   “From a standpoint of when I look at the body of work that he did in the 60s and 70s, even 80s, he was always touching on what was going to be popular in the future.” Warhola pointed to his uncle's prediction that “in the future everyone will be world-famous for 15 minutes” and art projects such as the filming of ordinary people living their lives. “I think if you look at reality TV, some people, not everyone, are intrigued by just watching someone live their life,” he said, adding that while Warhol was exploring the medium of what has become reality TV in the 60s and 70s,  at the time.“it was not popular and it was controversial and not understood.” “It was almost like he was looking for future trends in his art.” Some of the trends Warhol explored extensively were that of sexuality and sexual orientation, which he revisited throughout his professional career. “There's no question that Andy Warhol was homosexual,” Romaine said. Indeed, several scholars, such as Dillenberger, have documented that he was open about his attractions since the 1950s, and several of his art projects explore his fascination with voyeurism and the sexually explicit. However, in interviews late in his life Warhol also proclaimed that he was “still a virgin” and eschewed participation in the acts he depicted. “After twenty-five,” Warhol told Scott Cohen in a 1980 interview, “you should look, but never touch.” “I don't know exactly what that means for him, but because of his religious upbringing but even more so because of his intense shyness he wrestled with any sort of a sexual relationship,” Romaine commented. “His art then becomes a means by which he can realize some of the sexual longing that he has that he’s not able to realize in relationships.” These tensions between faith and sexuality, introversion and explicitness wrapped themselves around some of Warhol’s work with identity, Romaine said, bringing up the series “Ladies and Gentlemen,” portraits of drag queens and transsexual attendees at New York clubs. “It’s a sort of play on the perception and the answer is 'yes' – it’s both a lady and a gentleman: there's this slippage of identity.” The “and” in the title, Romaine continued, is “insightful” and important to understanding the point Warhol explored in the piece. “It's sort of the one image that portrays being a drag queen as a sort of divided identity,” Romaine continued, and in putting both parts of the “lady” and the “gentleman” portrayed together in one series he's attempting to resolve “a conflict.” In looking back, Warhol's nephew also sees the question of identity as one that concerned his uncle personally and that Andy Warhol explored in his work. “I've always thought,” Warhola told CNA, “that there’s two personas: there's the Andrew Warhola persona that I, for the most part, got to know, and the Andy Warhol persona.” “And I think that the Andy Warhol persona that almost gave my uncle the permission to do the things that Andrew Warhola would not feel comfortable doing or being.” “It's almost like an actor who goes out and plays a role, then they're able to act out maybe different aspects of their personality or life that they’re not totally comfortable with as their own individual,”  Donald said. “That’s just my own interpretation: I just think that maybe Uncle Andy experienced that.” Warhola also suggested that perhaps some of the character Andy Warhol became and the work the artist produced was itself a type of creation. This persona, Warhola added, grew and changed with public expectations and “wherever people took that, he was okay with it.” “Almost like he could see himself as a work of art, and let you create the narrative,” his nephew said. “‘I'll put out the information out there and you can create the narrative as you see fit. I'll be what you almost want me to be,' in some ways.” There may be another reason for allowing for a tension between his public and personae, Warhola added: business. “Also my uncle saw that controversy sells, and that if you’re getting  attention, it doesn’t matter if it’s positive or negative – that's what you need to be out there.”Art as Reconciliation Towards what would be the the end of his life, however, Andrew Warhola shifted focus from feeding the expectations others had for Andy Warhol. “He wasn’t painting necessarily for other people, but was more painting from his soul, and he did a lot of various religious works,” Donald Warhola noted, bringing up “The Last Supper” paintings and the “Heaven and Hell” series. “The themes kind of changed – at least what caught my attention changed,” he said. “It seemed like again he wasn’t worried so much about ‘gee, what can I paint that everyone’s going to like?’ It was more like he was trying to make statements with his artwork.” Warhola added that while earlier in his uncle’s career, the artist was concerned with staying “totally relevant” to avoid fading from popularity like other contemporary artists, later on Warhol eventually stopped orienting his artwork around other's expectations. “At a certain point, he just figured 'I'm going to paint what I want to paint.'” “After that it was more subtle, and then I think he became more profound closer to his death.” Romaine suggested, however, that the resolution of identity and other themes in Warhol's work can be seen throughout his career – and underlying that resolution is a distinctly Catholic theme. He directed attention to the resolution of male and female identities in “Ladies and Gentlemen” and other paintings, brought together with the understanding of iconography he sees in Warhol’s corpus. The resolution, Romaine said, is “this striving for grace in a broken world.” Another example of an artistic imagining that not only elevates the base, but resolves conflict and redeems a subject, Romaine said, are the prints of Marilyn Monroe. “Marilyn Monroe at the time he paints her is a picture of identity conflict,” he said, “And in his image, I think he tries to pull her together.” “This desire in his depictions of Marilyn, to reconcile these different Marilyns with each other I think projects from his own desire in his own life of having so many internal conflicts: of being on the one hand successful, and on the other feeling like a failure, on being on the one hand desirous of relationships and being unable to realize them,” Romaine said. “These conflicts that exist at the very core of Warhol's being, then drive him to create an art in which these conflicts are reconciled. Conflicts that can’t be reconciled in life can be reconciled in a work of art.” Read more

2015-08-26T22:12:00+00:00

Washington D.C., Aug 26, 2015 / 04:12 pm (CNA/EWTN News).- Is a fetal tissue supplier receiving whole fetuses from abortion clinics? That’s what one citizen journalist group claims from video of a secretly-recorded conversation released Tuesday. At issue is a statement by the CEO of the California-based fetal tissue supplier StemExpress, Cate Dyer. In a dialogue about procuring liver tissue, Dyer said that StemExpress receives “intact cases” from abortion clinics. Whether by “cases” she meant intact livers or intact fetuses is debated. The group that recorded and produced the video, the Center for Medical Progress, claims she is clearly referring to wholly-intact fetuses, which if true could mean that abortion clinics are performing live-birth abortions, they say. StemExpress, however, replied in a written statement that Dyer was specifically referring to intact livers and that the company has never received a whole fetus from an abortion clinic. The Center for Medical Progress released the video Sept. 25 after a federal court’s temporary injunction was lifted on Friday. StemExpress had secured the injunction in July to prevent undercover videos featuring its top executives from being made public. At the beginning of the discussion on liver tissue, Dyer asked one of the actors posing as a tissue “buyer” what volume of liver tissue they could provide her.   “So liver, and what about intact specimens,” the buyer responded. A problem for fetal tissue suppliers is ensuring that tissue obtained from abortions is “intact” enough to be used for research. “If you have intact cases, which we’ve done a lot, we’ve sometimes shipped those back to our lab in its entirety and that would also be great if you have those,” Dyer said. “The entire case?” one of the actors replied. “Yeah, yeah,” Dyer responded, because tissue procurement at abortion facilities, she added, “can go really sideways, depending on the facility, and then our samples are destroyed, and we’re like, ‘Really?’” StemExpress said in a written statement that the company “has never requested, received or provided to a researcher an ‘intact fetus’.” The term “intact case” is routinely used in a “clinical abortion context,” David Daleiden, project lead for the Center for Medical Progress, explained to CNA. “In the [abortion] clinics, they have problems with the procurement [of tissue],” he said, and Dyer admits that the abortion procedure often does not leave the tissue intact. Thus, StemExpress would need a wholly-intact fetus from which to procure fetal tissue, CMP claims. Elsewhere in the conversation, Dyer refers to “cases” as whole abortions and not just body parts such as livers, Daleiden said. In two separate instances, she appears to refer to a “case” as a whole aborted fetus from which StemExpress procures fetal tissue. Regarding the abortion procedure and its damaging effect on fetal tissue, Dyer says that at a clinic “the suction destroys everything and it gets to the point where you could look at 60 cases and get nothing.” Elsewhere, she talks about the number of abortion “cases” that clinics might perform in a day, and the quality of fetal tissue that may be procured there. “If you’re a physician in Nebraska, well, not Nebraska but somewhere else right? Minnesota or something and you’re doing ten cases a day, you know, and you can take your time and do a thorough job and go home at the end of the day, that might be good for you and the tissue would be good. Then you go to Planned Parenthood six blocks away, they're doing fifty cases a day and you couldn’t collect one thing, if you tried.” Planned Parenthood considers a “case” to be one whole aborted baby from which multiple organs can be extracted, according to one of its top doctors. In another undercover video previously released by the Center for Medical Progress on July 14, Planned Parenthood’s senior director of medical services, Dr. Deborah Nucatola, was asked what the organization considers one “specimen.” “One case,” she answered. She clarified that “if you end up shipping four individual specimens, that’s still one patient.” “Yea, that’s what I was going to say. If we take kidney, liver, thymus and say bone marrow --” one of the actors posing as a tissue “buyer” responded, and Nucatola interjected “Yeah, to us it’s all just one.” Dyer made other admissions in the Aug. 25 video, that sanitary conditions at some abortion clinics are quite poor and StemExpress is also a big supporter of abortion rights. “I’ve seen really rampant, rampant problems with bacteria in certain clinics,” she said. “ I’ve seen staph come out of clinics.” “You know, we’re so much more the advocate, we're like the total pro-choice advocate, NAF [National Abortion Federation] supporters,” she admitted, “we sponsor events, we sponsor NAF, we give money to these organizations. We’re totally committed to everything, with supporting the clinics.” She also joked about the harvesting of body parts of aborted babies, noting that researchers are uncomfortable when receiving fetal tissue at laboratories. “They’ll open the box, go, ‘Oh God!’” Dyer noted, laughing. “So yeah, so many of the academic labs cannot fly like that, they’re not capable.” Tuesday’s video is the latest in the “Human Capital” series produced by the Center for Medical Progress, a three-year investigation into the fetal body parts trade. The group began releasing the videos on an almost-weekly basis beginning on July 14. Previous videos featured secretly-taped conversations with top Planned Parenthood doctors, who told of how their affiliates supply body parts of aborted babies to fetal tissue procurement companies. In one of the videos released July 30, the vice president for Planned Parenthood of the Rocky Mountains Dr. Savita Ginde suggested that babies are delivered at clinics before an abortion can be performed, leaving open the question of whether clinics were performing live-birth abortions. “Sometimes, if we get, if someone delivers before we get to see them for a procedure, then we are intact, but that’s not what we go for. We try for that to not happen,” she said. In the first video in the series released July 14, Nucatola was seen discussing compensation prices for the fetal body parts and describing in grisly detail the process of obtaining fetal tissue from an aborted baby. In the second video released the following week, the president of the organization’s medical directors council, Dr. Mary Gatter, joked about the pricing of fetal body parts, saying she wanted a “Lamborghini.” Additionally, Gatter suggested that the abortion procedure could be changed to better obtain an “intact specimen.” CMP had also taped conversations with StemExpress executives about their participation in the fetal body parts trade, but these specific videos had been temporarily banned for release by the federal court order. The group did feature testimony of a former StemExpress technician, Holly O’Donnell, about the company’s partnership with Planned Parenthood clinics, in videos released Aug. 12 and Aug. 19. Fetal tissue was extracted from aborted babies without the mother’s consent, O’Donnell claimed in the video released Aug. 12. She also told of her having to harvest tissue from a baby whose heart was beating after an abortion. “I’m sitting here and I’m looking at this fetus, and its heart is beating, and I don’t know what to think,” she said. “I don’t know if that constitutes it’s technically dead, or it’s alive.” Read more

2015-08-26T18:01:00+00:00

Pasig, Philippines, Aug 26, 2015 / 12:01 pm (CNA/EWTN News).- Catholics in the Philippines are mourning Wednesday's death of Bishop Francisco San Diego, who founded the Diocese of Pasig in 2003 and led it until his retirement in 2010. Bishop San Diego, who was 79, died the morning of Sept. 26 of cardiac arrest while in his sleep at Cardinal Santos Hospital, the Pasig diocese announced. His successor as Bishop of Pasig, Mylo Vergara, received his body into the Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception saying, “Indeed Bishop San Diego received the victory of God … he entered his cathedral not as a corpse but as a soul welcomed by God to eternal life.” The Pasig diocese is saddened with the loss of Bishop San Diego, who had recently participated in a Mass of Thanksgiving for the 12th anniversary of the diocese's founding, despite his frail health. He had had diabetes, and was recently diagnosed with lung cancer. Tributes have begun flooding social media in the Philippines, and his body is being kept in the Pasig cathedral so that he can be mourned by the faithful. Bishop San Diego's funeral Mass will be said Aug. 29, and his body interred at the cathedral. Bishop San Diego was born in 1935 in Obando, north of Quezon City. He studied Latin at Our Lady of Guadalupe Minor Seminary, and later completed his philosophical and theological studies at San Carlos Seminary in Makati. He was ordained a priest of the Manila archdiocese in 1963. As a priest, he worked in parishes, on Manila's metropolitan marriage tribunal, and as a seminary professor. In 1979 he earned a doctorate in canon law from the University of Santo Tomas, and was named a monsignor in 1981. In 1983 he was consecrated a bishop, and appointed coadjutor vicar apostolic of Palawan; he succeeded as vicar apostolic in 1987. He was transferred to the Diocese of San Pablo in 1995. When the Diocese of Pasig was established out of the Archdiocese of Manila in 2003, he was appointed its first bishop. He served as its ordinary until retiring in 2010 at the age of 75. While he was the diocesan bishop, he facilitated the improvement and expansion of its cemetery, and created a retirement plan fund for its clergy. Read more

2015-08-26T15:27:00+00:00

Vatican City, Aug 26, 2015 / 09:27 am (CNA/EWTN News).- On Wednesday, Pope Francis continued his weekly catechesis on the family, saying that parents have the responsibility to teach their children to pray. Delivering his address to pilgrims and visitors, gathered under the hot sun for the weekly general audience in St. Peter's Square, the pontiff stressed the importance of teaching children how to show love for God through prayer. “It is beautiful when mothers teach their little children to blow a kiss to Jesus or to Our Lady. What tenderness there is in this!” he said. “In that moment the child's heart is transformed into a place of prayer. And this is a gift of the Holy Spirit.” However, in off-the-cuff remarks, the Pope lamented how there are children who are not taught the most basic prayers by there parents, a phenomena he said he has witnessed in the city. “There are children who have not learned how to make the sign of the cross!” he said. “You, mother, father! Teach your children how to pray, how to make the sign of the cross!” Children should learn prayer with “the same spontaneity” as when they learn to say “daddy” and “mommy,” so that it stays with them forever, the Pope added. The Pope's August 26 address was the latest in a series of catechesis dedicated to the family. Since late year, the pontiff has been centering his Wednesday catecheses on this theme as part of the lead-up to the World Meeting of Families in September, as well as October’s Synod of Bishops on the Family. In his catechesis, delivered in Italian, the Holy Father observed how many Christians know they need prayer, but do not have the time. “Their regret is sincere, certainly, because the human heart always seeks prayer, even without knowing it; and if it does not find it, it does not have peace.” It is for this reason that Christians must cultivate a love for God, he said. While it is good to believe in God, to have hope in him to help at difficult times, and to be grateful to him, Pope Francis asked whether or not we also love him. He cited the scripture passage from Deuteronomy, repeated by Christ in Matthew's Gospel, in which we are called to love God with all our heart, our soul, and strength. “(This) formula uses the intense language of love, poured into God,” the Pope said. Pope Francis acknowledged that we are able see God as the one who gives us life and from whom even death cannot separate us, the “great Being” and “Judge” who made all things and controls every act, the Pope said. However, these concepts only find their full significance “when God is the love of our loves.” “God could have simply made us know him as the supreme Being, given his commandments, and awaited the results.” This he has done, but also “infinitely more,” the Pope said, adding in off-the-cuff remarks: “He accompanies us on the path of life. He protects us. He loves us.” Pope Francis acknowledged how there is little time available in family life. However, by finding time to pray, we “give time back to God.” In so doing, we escape the obsession with not having enough time, rediscover “peace in the important things,” and “discover the joy in unexpected gifts.” Encouraging the faithful to read the Gospel every day, as he has done on numerous occasions, the Holy Father said this is a particularly important practice for families. “The Gospel, read and meditated on in the family, is like good bread which nourishes the hearts of everyone,” he said. Pope Francis concluded: “In the family of prayer, in strong moments and in difficult periods, may we be entrusted to one another, in order that everyone of us in the family may be protected by God's love.” Read more

2015-08-26T12:21:00+00:00

Washington D.C., Aug 26, 2015 / 06:21 am (CNA).- A group representing Catholic students with intellectual disabilities is hoping a U.S. visit from Pope Francis could spark nothing less than a renaissance in Catholic education. “We hope that Po... Read more

2015-08-26T06:16:00+00:00

Bamako, Mali, Aug 26, 2015 / 12:16 am (CNA/EWTN News).- Despite a hazardous situation in the African country of Mali, Catholic Relief Services is working to support displaced people and hungry school students, while calling for more humanitarian aid to... Read more

2015-08-25T22:50:00+00:00

Vatican City, Aug 25, 2015 / 04:50 pm (CNA/EWTN News).- Early this week, a leak of personal data from millions of users of Ashley Madison, a website designed to arrange extramarital affairs, wreaked havoc on and off the internet. At least two suicides have been reported in conjunction with the hack, and a series of privacy lawsuits are in the works, not to mention the rocked or devastated marriages. Shortly after the leak, several blogs also jumped on the fact that some of the e-mail addresses released in the hack were linked to the .va domain, the internet domain belonging to the Vatican (similar to .uk for United Kingdom domains or .nz for New Zealand domains). At first glance, the claim seems questionable – why would top Church officials sworn to celibacy sign up for a website for married people, and no less one that promotes adultery? It turns out, they want nothing to do with it. None of the .va addresses in the leak check out as actually belonging to Vatican officials. David Taylor of prooffreader.com went through all 222 addresses supposedly linked to the Vatican and found plausible explanations for each one. And, as an aside, Taylor wrote that he was “brought up Catholic, but I totally rebelled, so I don't have a vested interest in protecting the Vatican from scandal, quite the opposite. I just believe in accurate reporting.” “…even a casual perusal of these latter addresses reveals that something isn't right. Does the Vatican have schools named after cities in Virginia or ISPs with the same names as those in Canada?” he wrote. According to the prooffreader.com findings, almost every .va address used had a .va.us or a .va.gov equivalent, meaning that the addresses far more likely belonged to government officials in the state of Virginia who just forgot to add the final part of the e-mail address. Most of the names used before most of the .va e-mail addresses corresponded to cities in Virginia. Ashley Madison does not confirm e-mail addresses, so typos and false e-mail addresses can slip through. If the e-mail addresses did not have a Virginia government equivalent, it corresponded to a Canadian one (.ca.gov), but the user likely just slipped up and hit “v” instead of “c”. The two letters are right next to each other on a standard American keyboard. (Seriously. Look down at your hands.) Only one address used vatican.va rather than simply .va, but Vatican officials use vatican.com e-mail addresses. There were 55 e-mail addresses that Taylor said he could not connect to either Virginia or Canada, but that he said still didn’t seem to be in any way linked to the Vatican. Several websites that enable searching through the leaked data also come with a disclaimer that because Ashley Madison does not verify e-mails, addresses with typos or fake e-mail addresses could be included. Read more

2015-08-25T20:14:00+00:00

Baltimore, Md., Aug 25, 2015 / 02:14 pm (CNA/EWTN News).- For Catholic Relief Services' president Dr. Carolyn Woo, the way to lead others is to humbly admit when you don’t know something. “You need to accept the fact that there are a lot of things you don’t know. There are a few things you do know, and you have to use what you do know for the good of others,” she told CNA in a recent interview about her new book, Working for a Better World, published by Our Sunday Visitor. Woo didn’t come to her position by a traditional route; she was on the Board of Directors for CRS from 2004 to 2010, but her background is in business and academia. She served as the dean of the Mendoza College of Business at Notre Dame from 1997 to 2011. Before that, she was the vice president of academic affairs at Purdue, where she also earned several degrees and taught as a professor. But after she missed one of her search committee meetings to find a new CRS president, her colleagues told her she should be open to being a candidate for the position. “I thought somewhere along the line they would send me one of those ‘thank you very much for your interest’ letters. And, it’s just that the letter never came.” It wasn’t until she was one of the three remaining candidates from a pool of some 400 people that she realized she might actually be chosen for the position. “When I was not eliminated, it was like, ‘Aha! Perhaps this might be more real. Perhaps I would have to end up making a decision of whether I would or would not go to CRS.’” So when she took her place in 2012 as head of the 5,000 person organization, she knew she would step aside for those who were experts in their fields. She learned from one of her mentors that “you have to trust that people know what you know and they know what you don’t know.” That’s an approach that CRS has long embraced. The organization goes into a particular area with the support of the local bishop, while also partnering with other, sometimes better established, aid groups in a particular region. While half of all organizations that CRS partners with are Catholic, the other half is made up of other religious groups or NGOs. For example, Woo said, while on a recent trip to Ethiopia CRS was working on reducing harmful practices for young girls such as early marriage and genital mutilation. Although CRS has a strong relationship working with the Bishops Conference of Ethiopia and the Association of Member Episcopal Conferences in Eastern Africa, they also work with local elders and religious leaders. “To have that type of impact you really have to approach faith leaders of different faiths, because they are the elders and the teachers and it’s their influence and their encouragement that can get these practices to stop,” she said. “For transformation to come, you have to work across the society.” Working alongside members of other religions not only helps provide material support to the local area, but can bring peace and stability to a region as well. “Interfaith relationships are very important,” Woo said. “If those are poor or those are hostile, it tends to break out into violence … wherever there is a relative degree of stability, we want to enhance that stability. We want to enhance that we are not rivals, and we’re not enemies. We work together.” Even though there are always more people in need throughout the world, Woo said she doesn’t get discouraged or depressed. “Mother Teresa was right: she didn’t solve poverty, but all she did was what she could at the moment that the need was there,” she said. “And then there is a tomorrow.” And that’s something CRS has been doing for the past 72 years: doing what they can, where they can. What began as a service to help resettle European refugees from World War II has now grown to serve people in 101 countries with everything from helping obtain impact investing to disaster relief to education. Woo likened CRS’ work to that of planting a seed. It’s a very small task, but when you take a step back and look at what it’s grown into you think, “I didn’t do that part of it,” she said. “That’s what you see all the time.” Read more

2015-08-25T17:05:00+00:00

Honolulu, Hawaii, Aug 25, 2015 / 11:05 am (CNA/EWTN News).- Cardinal William Levada, a retired Vatican official, was arrested last week for allegedly driving under the influence while vacationing in Hawaii with some of his priest friends. “I r... Read more




Browse Our Archives