2015-08-21T21:10:00+00:00

Homs, Syria, Aug 21, 2015 / 03:10 pm (CNA/EWTN News).- Reports surfaced on Thursday that Islamic State militants have bulldozed Mar Elian Monastery, an ancient structure located just outside a Syrian town captured by the group earlier this month. The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a British-based monitoring group, on Aug. 20 said that the Islamic State had destroyed the monastery using bulldozers. Photos of the destruction were soon released online by the militant Sunni Islamist group. The destruction was confirmed to the AP by a priest in Damascus. Mar Elian monastery, which was founded before the year 500, is located just outside Al Quaryatayn, which is some 60 miles southeast of Homs. The monastery also provided refuge to hundreds of Syrians displaced from Al Quaryatayn, and partnered with Muslim donors to provide for their needs. The town was captured by the Islamic State Aug. 6, and between 160 and 230 Christians and Muslims were abducted from the town. Many of the Christians who were in Al Quaryatayn when it fell to the Islamic State had fled there from Aleppo. Around 30 Christians were able to escape the town for Homs after it was captured. According to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, Islamic State has transported 110 of the captives from Al Quaryatayn to its de facto capital, Ar Raqqah.In May, two members of Mar Elian's community had been abducted: Father Jacques Mourad and Deacon Boutros Hanna. Fr. Mourad was prior of Mar Elian, and was pastor of a parish in Al Quaryatayn, where he served as an active mediator between the Syrian army and rebel forces. The Islamic State has persecuted all non-Sunni persons in its territory – Christians, Yazidis, and even Shia Muslims. It destroys any non-Sunni religious sites, which are regarded as pagan. In addition to churches, it has destroyed Shia mosques and shrines, and the sites of ancient, pre-Islamic cities. The militant group overran the ancient city of Palmyra in May, and have since destroyed statues and other artefacts there. It was reported Aug. 19 that Islamic State militants had killed Khaled al-Asaad, an 81-year-old archaeologist who curated the ruins at Palmyra. Since the Syrian civil war broke out in March 2011, more than 230,000 people have been killed. Four million have become refugees, and another 8 million have been internally displaced. What began as demonstrations against the nation's Ba'athist president, Bashar al-Assad, has become a complex fight among the Syrian regime; moderate rebels; Kurds; and Islamists, such as al-Nusra Front and the Islamic State. Read more

2015-08-21T18:02:00+00:00

Washington D.C., Aug 21, 2015 / 12:02 pm (CNA/EWTN News).- The Little Sisters of the Poor have received temporary protection from the federal contraception mandate until the Supreme Court decides whether or not it will hear their case. On Aug. 21, t... Read more

2015-08-21T12:01:00+00:00

Kathmandu, Nepal, Aug 21, 2015 / 06:01 am (CNA/EWTN News).- A Jesuit primary school located near Kathmandu is using increased counselling and student-parent orientation programs to help both children and parents to cope with the experience of the earthquake which struck Nepal earlier this year.  “After the massive earthquake of 7.9 magnitude that struck the nation, we as educators had also a bigger challenge before us, to reach out to the people, especially those struck in remote areas,” explained Fr. Arul Selvam S.J., a teacher at St. Xavier's School in Godawari, a town located 10 miles southeast of the Nepali capital of Kathmandu. Fr. Selvam recounted to CNA that St. Xavier's School – which was founded by Indian and American Jesuits and serves students in grades 1 through 10 – itself suffered devastating effects to its infrastructure. Eight of the school's buildings have been declared unsafe, and the school has had to find alternative ways of accomodating students, as the government has ordered a momentary halt to permanent construction. The 7.9 earthquake struck Nepal in April, killing some 9,000 people, and was followed by a number of strong aftershocks. The series of aftershocks only added to the anxiety, fear, and psychological scars among the survivors – and children are most vulnerable to these factors. Fr. Selvam explained that St. Xavier's School has increased its counselling, as well as student-parent orientation programs which help both the children and their parents to cope with their trauma, and help their overall growth. He noted the strong support St. Xavier's School has received from it's alumni, saying that many of them, most of whom are non-Catholic, “went out of their way, in their own little way, to help, without any prompting” during the earthquake relief. “The moral education they received, supplementing their academics while studying in our Catholic schools, is always present in our students and our alumni,” Fr. Selvam reflected. “This is the effect of the sound quality education in our Jesuit schools, based on education in morals, values, and ethics, which the students have inculcated parallel to their academic curriculum, which lingers and becomes a part of life that is reflected in their personality … that makes a big difference.” He added that the Jesuit community is coordinating with alumni to support earthquake victims and to co-ordinate relief activities. Fr. Jiju Kevillil, S.J., principal of St. Xavier’s, has written that “resilience is one of the best qualities of our people. We are devastated but not defeated. We are survivors and not victims. We want to get back to 'new normal' life as early as possible and move ahead. We want to rebuild our lives again and give renewed hope to our students and families.” St. Xavier's School in Godawari was founded in 1951 at the invitation of the Nepali government. Describing the growth of the Society of Jesus in the service of Nepal, Fr. Selvam described that apart from the schools and a college, the Jesuits have also institutions to serve the poor, children, the physically challenged, and the blind, including a mobile clinics unit which is run with the help of religious sisters. The Jesuits recently founded the Nepal Jesuit Social Institute to respond to earthquakes with systematic and effect relief services. Read more

2015-08-21T09:04:00+00:00

Washington D.C., Aug 21, 2015 / 03:04 am (CNA).- The Swiss Catholic Lenten Fund and a major U.S. foundation have helped fund an LGBT activist project intended to counter West African bishops at the Catholic Church’s Synod on the Family. The Ne... Read more

2015-08-21T06:03:00+00:00

Philadelphia, Pa., Aug 21, 2015 / 12:03 am (CNA/EWTN News).- The Archdiocese of Philadelphia is witnessing a lot of exciting things these days: there’s the World Meeting of Families next month that will include a visit from Pope Francis, and now, a sizeable increase in vocations to the priesthood. On Aug. 19 the archdiocese announced that in the upcoming academic year St. Charles Borromeo Seminary will have the highest enrollment numbers it’s seen in over ten years, with 20 new seminarians and 145 total seminarians. "With the servant leadership example of Pope Francis and Archbishop Chaput, these young men are once again experiencing the freedom that comes from this choice over a society that is increasingly secular and experiencing the emptiness of a world without God,” Bishop Timothy Senior, an auxiliary bishop of the archdiocese and rector of Saint Charles Borromeo Seminary, said in the announcement. "It is extraordinarily gratifying to see these young men choosing a life of service to Jesus Christ and the people of the Archdiocese of Philadelphia.” Capitalizing on this momentum, the Philadelphia archdiocese has announced it will launch a new program focused on engaging parishioners, as well as potential candidates, in the discernment process. "Building on the visit and anticipated inspiration of Pope Francis' visit, Called by Name will educate parishioners about the qualities of a good priest and ask people to suggest the names of potential candidates," said Fr. Stephen Delacy, the Archdiocese of Philadelphia's vocations director. “Called by Name” will help teach Catholics about the priesthood during the first two weekends in November, and then invite them to recognize those in their parish who they think might be called to that vocation beginning Nov. 16. Potential candidates will also be invited to “Come and See” weekends at the seminary, and dinners focused on vocational discernment. The archdiocese said that this increase in vocations has been accompanied by a greater diversity of seminarians at St. Charles Borromeo. "Our church must continue to reflect the ethnic diversity of our world and especially our region. These new seminarians will make us even more sensitive to the spiritual needs of our parishioners,” Bishop Senior said. Read more

2015-08-20T22:29:00+00:00

Vatican City, Aug 20, 2015 / 04:29 pm (CNA/EWTN News).- With the Synod of Bishops rapidly approaching, 11 cardinals have contributed to a small but important book offering a pastoral perspective of the issues at stake, while reaffirming the truth of th... Read more

2015-08-20T21:42:00+00:00

Vatican City, Aug 20, 2015 / 03:42 pm (CNA/EWTN News).- In a message sent on behalf of Pope Francis to the Rimini Meeting, an annual gathering organized by the lay movement Communion and Liberation, Cardinal Pietro Parolin said humanity's limitations point to the greatness to which we are called. “Life is not an absurd desire, lack is not a sign that we were born 'wrongly', but on the contrary is the bell which alerts us that our nature is made for great things,” the Vatican Secretary of State wrote Aug. 17. This is the 36th annual Meeting for the Friendship Amongst Peoples, held in Rimini. The Aug. 20-26 event gathers people from the world over for cultural encounter, panel discussions, art exhibits, and musical presentations. This year's meeting is themed “What is this lack a lack of, o heart, of which all of a sudden you are full?” a line from the 20th century Italian poet Mario Luzi. The theme “puts the accent on the 'heart' that is in each of us, and which St. Augustine has described as a 'restless heart', which is never content and seeks that which lives up to its expectation. It is a search which is expressed in questions about the meaning of life and of death, about love, about work, about justice, and about happiness,” Cardinal Parolin wrote in his message to the event's participants. “But to be worthy of finding an answer one must consider in a serious way one's own humanity, always cultivating this healthy restlessness,” he urged. Cardinal Parolin wrote that contemporary society offers “so many partial answers, which offer only 'infinite falsehoods' and which produce a strange anesthesia” which results in lack of the “courage, strength, or seriousness” needed “to express the decisive questions” of life. “None of us can initiate a dialogue about God, if we do not succeed in feeding the smoking lamp which burns in the heart,” he maintained. The first step in the task of Christians is “to reawaken the meaning of the lack of which the heart is full and that frequently lies beneath the weight of fatigue and dashed hopes. But 'the heart' is, and is always seeking.” “The drama of today consists in the perilous danger of the negation of the identity and the dignity of the human person. A worrying ideological colonization reduces the perception of the authentic needs of the heart to offer limited answers which do not consider the magnitude of the search for love, truth, beauty, justice that is in each of us. We are all children of this time and we suffer the influence of a mentality which offers new values and opportunities, but which can also condition, limit, and spoil the heart with alienating proposals that extinguish the thirst for God.” Cardinal Parolin noted that the human heart is restless because it is open to the inifite, and asks questions that no-one can escape: “Why do we have to suffer and, in the end, die? Why is there evil and contradiction? Is life worth living? Can one still hope before the prospect of a “Third World War fought in pieces” and with so many brothers persecuted and killed because of their faith? Does it still make sense to love, to work, to sacrifice and to commit oneself? To what end is my life going, and the lives of the people I never want to lose? What must we do in the world?” “These are questions which arise in all, youth and adults, believers and non-believers. Sooner or later, at least once in their life, becaue of a trial or a joyous event, reflecting on the future of one's children or the utility of one's work, each one finds himself in need of dealing with one or more of these questions. Even the most callous are not able to eradicate them entirely from their existence.” Commenting that human desire is a sign of capacity for greatness, he quoted the founder of Communion and Liberation, Msgr. Luigi Giussani: “human needs constitute the reference, the implicit affirmation of an ultimate answer that is beyond the existential modalities that can be experienced” and that the myth of Odysseus demonstrates “the nostalgia that can find satisfaction only in an infinite reality.” In answer to the inifinite capacity of the human heart, “God, the infinite Mystery, bent down to our nothingness … and offered the answer that all await without realizing it.” “Only the initiative of God the creator can fulful the measure of the heart,” Cardinal Paroline said, “and he has come to encounter us, to let himself be found by us, as is a friend. And so we can rest even in a stormy sea, because we are certain of his presence.” The theme of this year's Rimini Meeting, he said, “can cooperate in an essential task of the Church, that is, not to agree that someone be content with little, but that one can say fully: 'it is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me' because Jesus' 'is the message capable of responding to the desire for the infinite which abides in every human heart,'” quoting Pope Francis' 2013 apostolic exhortation Evangelii Gaudium. God's love is “the contribution which the Christian faith offers to all,” the cardinal wrote, adding that the Rimini encounter can witness to this through the lives of its participants. “Therefore the Holy Father hopes that the organizers and volunteers of the Meeting will go out to encounter all, supported by the desire to propose with strength, beauty, and simplicity the good news of the love of God, which also today bends over our lack to fill it with the water of life which flows from the risen Jesus.” Read more

2015-08-20T12:02:00+00:00

Denver, Colo., Aug 20, 2015 / 06:02 am (CNA).- Luke Spehar was an aspiring musician with a girlfriend when he couldn’t shake the feeling that God was calling him to enter the seminary and consider the priesthood. He turned the painful (but inev... Read more

2016-12-27T21:01:00+00:00

Pittsburgh, Pa., Dec 27, 2016 / 02:01 pm (CNA/EWTN News).- Nestled in a sleepy neighborhood in the hills rising over Pittsburgh lies a small chapel. Inside St. Anthony’s Chapel lies a piece from the Crown of Thorns, a tooth of St. Anthony of Padua, and more than 5,000 other verified relics, or remains, of saints from around the world. Indeed for the fragments from the bodies and scraps of the belongings of countless saints, these relics continued to have earthly adventures long after the saints’ deaths. Many of the relics traveled across the world to escape war, confiscation, and desecration to make it into the safe hands of a Belgian-born physician and priest, Fr. Suitbert Mollinger, who founded the chapel. The chapel now holds the largest collection of relics outside of Rome. “Fr. Stewart Mollinger, well, he had an unusual hobby in which he liked to acquire relics of the saints,” Carole Brueckner, chairperson of the committee for St. Anthony’s Chapel, explained to CNA. But in the midst of the political and social turmoil which Europe experienced at the end of the 19th century, this curious hobby was crucial to saving relics from across the continent. Since the second century, Catholics have honored the relics of saints- either pieces of body parts or cherished belongings of holy men and women. While theologians and Church documents clarify that relics are not to be worshiped, nor do they hold magical powers, the teaching adds that relics must be treated with respect, as they belong to persons now in heaven. While relics do not have power in and of themselves, God can continue to work miracles in the presence of the saint’s body even after death, the Church teaches. Relics are present in, or below, many Catholic altars. Because of their important place in Catholic devotion as well as their presence at Mass, relics became a target of anti-Catholic persecution in Europe.   “It was a very chaotic time, in a sense, for Catholics, because people were fighting for territories and countries,” Brueckner said. During the mid- to late- 19th century the political boundaries – and also religious identities – of regions across Europe shifted as the modern nation-states of Germany, Italy, France, and Belgium formed, the power of the nobility and the Church ebbed, and secular governments arose. Many nobles and religious “were afraid that their governments or the monarchies under which they lived would commit and confiscate the relics from them,” she explained. In some regions, Brueckner continued, authorities even “desecrated the relics and on occasion they would put someone in prison for having a relic in their possession.” “Due to what was happening in Europe, this was an opportune time for Father to enrich upon his own personal collection of relics of the saints,” she elaborated. While it is forbidden for Catholics to sell or purchase relics, Fr. Mollinger was loaned or granted relics from friends in his home country of Belgium, as well as from his travels in the Netherlands, Italy, and elsewhere. “Many times, his friends, who are also religious, would write and ask him if he could take some of their relics and keep them in safekeeping, until their countries or monarchies became stable, and Father always responded 'yes',” she explained. “Father also had agents that he had throughout Europe that were looking for the relics, because in essence, he would try to rescue them from being destroyed by governments and monarchies that existed in Europe at this time.” Initially, Fr. Mollinger kept the growing relic collection in his rectory. Medical patients as well as faithful Catholics would visit the doctor-priest for both spiritual and physical treatment, and “they had the opportunity to venerate them those relics when they were there.” Many pilgrims, Brueckner said, “were cured of their anomaly or disability” after receiving physical or spiritual aid in the presence of the relics. As a result, “Father was gaining the reputation as a priest-physician-healer,” she elaborated. Records of local Pittsburgh newspapers of the time documented Fr. Mollinger’s treatments, as well as the thousands of people who traveled to venerate the relics. Fr. Mollinger, however, “thought they belonged in a beautiful church so that everybody could visit and venerate the relics,” and thus built with his own funds a chapel to house them. The first section of the chapel was completed on the feast of St. Anthony in 1883, and houses the thousands of relics collected by Fr. Mollinger at the time. The second section was also completed on the feast of St. Anthony, nine years later in 1892, and contains the Stations of the Cross and relics collected after the chapel’s completion. Fr. Mollinger died two days after the last section of the chapel was completed. Among the relics the chapel currently claims are splinters from the True Cross and the Column of Flagellation; stone from the Garden of Gethsemane; a nail that held Christ to the Cross; material from Jesus, Mary and Joseph’s clothing; a “piece of bone from all of the apostles”; and relics from St Therese of Liseux, St. Rose of Lima, St. Faustina, St. Kateri Tekawitha. “If I had to name all the saints, we’d be here forever,” Brueckner exclaimed. Nearly all these relics have been verified, as well.   “When a relic is placed within that reliquary, it is sealed and it can never be opened again,” Brueckner said, explaining that the Church’s strict rules guard against tampering and forgery of relics. “For a relic to be venerated, you do need to have a document, and the document comes from the hierarchy in the Church. That document will tell you who the saint is, what the relic is, and it is saying that the Catholic Church has done their research and we can say what the relic is.” “We do have the certificates of authenticity for almost all of our relics here within the chapel.” While belief in the authenticity of the relics relies on a trust that “the Catholic Church has done their research, and I’m going to believe what the Catholic Church is saying,” Brueckner said, visitors still experience the same presence documented by the first pilgrims to the collection of saintly relics. “Many times when people come into the chapel they will say that they actually feel a presence.” “I say that it’s like stepping into a little piece of heaven, because you are surrounded by so many people that our Church tells us are in heaven,” she remarked.  This story was originally published on CNA Aug. 20, 2015. Read more

2015-08-20T06:04:00+00:00

Nairobi, Kenya, Aug 20, 2015 / 12:04 am (CNA/EWTN News).- What began as a training facility for rural health care workers in the 1970s has now turned into a Catholic nursing school with hundreds of graduates. This year, during the Aug. 14 graduation... Read more




Browse Our Archives