Catholic News
Abuja, Nigeria, Feb 13, 2015 / 03:54 pm (Aid to the Church in Need).- Bitterly condemning “the ugly tide of corruption” in Nigeria’s government, the Bishop of Sokoto has highlighted the challenges awaiting the next administration in ... Read more
Abuja, Nigeria, Feb 13, 2015 / 03:54 pm (Aid to the Church in Need).- Bitterly condemning “the ugly tide of corruption” in Nigeria’s government, the Bishop of Sokoto has highlighted the challenges awaiting the next administration in ... Read more
Vatican City, Feb 13, 2015 / 02:18 pm (CNA/EWTN News).- Reform was the watchword as cardinals met at the Vatican for briefings about the state of Vatican finances and about the work of a pontifical commission that protects minors. Cardinal Christoph ... Read more
Canberra, Australia, Feb 13, 2015 / 12:53 pm (CNA/EWTN News).- A report detailing the profoundly negative effects of the long-term detention of children seeking asylum in Australia has led Church leaders there to call the government's policy “barbaric.” Asylum seekers – including children – travel by boat from Indonesia and are intercepted by the Australian navy before reaching land. They are then sent to detention camps in Papua New Guinea and Nauru, a small Micronesian nation. Many of the refugees and asylum seekers are from Afghanistan, Sri Lanka, Iraq, or Iran. The Australian Human Rights Commission released “The Forgotten Children”, an inquiry into children in immigration detention, on Feb. 11. The report details threats to the health, both mental and physical, of children detainees, some of whom have been held on Nauru for more than 19 months. The average length of detention is 17 months. In a period of 15 months, 128 detained children committed self-harm; 171 threatened self-harm; 33 reported sexual assault; and 27 went on hunger strike. “The world’s most vulnerable children are being deliberately detained and harmed for seeking asylum,” commented Fr. Maurizio Pettena, director of the Australian Catholic Migrant and Refugee Office, on Feb. 13. “It is with deep sadness that we read the findings of the report on children in detention.” Fr. Pettana called the Australian government's asylum detention policy “barbaric”, adding that “the Australian Government has thoroughly failed in its duty to care for these children.” His office added that the Australian government “deliberately detains children in dangerous places that have subsequently led to innumerable cases of mental illness, developmental delays, sexual assaults and self-harm.” The Australian Human Rights Commission visited 11 detention centers, and conducted more than 1,200 interviews with children and their parents, both those detained and those who had been released. “The findings in this report on children in detention leave no doubt about its credibility,” said Fr. Pettena. His office also noted the report emphasizes that “Australia is the only country in the world that practises the mandatory and indefinite detention of children,” which it reckoned “a clear violation of their rights under the Convention for the Rights of Children.” Fr. Pettena urged the government to take full responsibility and to release the remaining 800 children in community detention and on Nauru, saying, “All eyes are now on Australia, to see how we as a nation respond to this inquiry.” The government of Australia – led by Tony Abbott of the Liberal Party – responded to the inquiry by asking that Gillian Triggs, president of the independent Australian Human Rights Commission, resign from her post. Mark Dreyfus, a member of parliament and a former Australian attorney general, said the government's request that Triggs resign was “a disgraceful attack by the attorney general on a statutory agency in his own portfolio. The first law officer should be defending the independence of the national guardian of human rights.” The number of child immigration detainees has fallen in the last year, but 257 remain, including 119 on Nauru. The human rights commission's report found that 34 percent of the child detainees in Australia and Christmas Island have a mental health disorder severe enough to require psychiatric report, and believes the rate to be higher on Nauru. By comparison, the rate is below two percent for children in Australia at large. The Australian Catholic Migrant and Refugee Office said it has “continuously advocated against the detention of children seeking asylum in Australia.” To gain asylum in Australia many come from Afghanistan, Sri Lanka, Iraq, and Iran, sailing in dangerous conditions on conventional unsafe boats, often paying human traffickers. In their bid to reach Australia, many die in capsized boats, and many others are intercepted and sent to detention camps in Nauru or Papua New Guinea. Read more
Washington D.C., Feb 13, 2015 / 11:21 am (CNA).- Bishop Gerald Kicanas of Tuscon, Arizona, leveled harsh criticism against the tone of some Congress members, saying that they were treating undocumented migrants as subhuman. “I must say up front that the U.S. bishops continue to be concerned with the tone on Capitol Hill toward immigrants,” he stated to the House Subcommittee on Immigration and Border Enforcement in a Feb. 11 testimony. “We do not agree with terms that characterize immigrants as less than human, since no person is 'illegal' in the eyes of God. Such harsh rhetoric has been encouraged by talk radio and cable TV, for sure, but also has been used by public officials, including members of Congress.” Immigration has been a hot battle in Washington ever since President Obama, through executive action, expanded the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program in November. His action allowed millions of qualified immigrants to stay in the U.S. for up to three more years. House Republicans responded by overturning the action within a funding bill for the Department of Homeland Security. They have also just introduced three new bills that would strengthen law enforcement against undocumented immigration and overturn the DACA program. Bishop Kicanas said that he represented the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops in voicing opposition to the bills. His diocese stretches along the Arizona-Mexico border. The bishop prefaced his testimony by recalling the example of the late American humanitarian aid worker Kayla Mueller, a hostage of the terror group ISIS who was confirmed dead this past week. Mueller, who hailed from Arizona, was helping refugees from Syria’s civil war before she was captured by ISIS. “Kayla, who dedicated her life to the service of others, represents the best of our country’s values,” Bishop Kicanas said. “She spent her life and lost her life in attempting to help the most vulnerable, here and overseas. She felt the pain and suffering of others, and responded. We might learn from the example of a fellow American.” The bishop then explained why he opposed the three proposed immigration bills, starting with their repeal of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program. The bills “would repeal protections for children fleeing violence in Central America, and would keep children in detainment for long periods of time, and would weaken protections for abandoned, neglected, and abused children,” he stated. “Our country is judged by how we treat the most vulnerable, and the removal of protection from children, the most vulnerable, flies against human decency and violates human dignity,” he said. “The removal of due process from these children seeking safety, as these bills would do, is like a fireman showing up at a burning building and locking the doors.” Read more
New York City, N.Y., Feb 13, 2015 / 04:02 am (CNA).- Questions are being raised over two U.S. foundations that have poured more than three million dollars into abortion rights, LGBT activist, and legal groups to push the message that exemptions based on religious beliefs are “un-American” and an abuse of liberty. The Arcus Foundation and the Ford Foundation have spent over $3 million in combined spending against religious liberty exemptions since 2013, according to a CNA review of tax forms and grant listings. John Lomperis of the Institute for Religion and Democracy – a D.C.-based ecumenical Christian think tank – warned that the grants appear to understand the important role of “rhetorical message and framing” on religious liberty issues. “The agenda of such groups in opposing basic conscience protections could hardly be more diametrically opposed to our nation's great traditions of freedom of conscience and of religion,” Lomperis, who serves as United Methodist Director for the institute, told CNA Feb. 10. He contended that the pattern of grants “serves a fundamentally totalitarian vision these foundations and their allied politicians have of 'religious liberty.'” This vision is especially opposed to those who value traditional sexual morality and respect for unborn human life, he noted. “Our society is now facing serious questions about to what extent Christians (as well as, to a lesser extent, followers of other faiths) will be allowed to have the same degree to live in accordance with our values without facing new and powerful coercions,” Lomperis said. The Arcus Foundation's website lists a 2014 grant of $100,000 to the American Civil Liberties Foundation supporting “communications strategies to convince conservative Americans that religious exemptions are 'un-American.'” A two-year Arcus grant to the ACLU in 2013 gave $600,000 to support the ACLU's Campaign to End the Use of Religion to Discriminate. Arcus Foundation tax forms describe this as a “multi-pronged” effort to combat “the growing trend of institutions and individuals claiming exemptions from anti-discrimination laws because of religious objections.” The Arcus Foundation is a major funder of LGBT advocacy, including “gay marriage” advocacy. The foundation had almost $170 million in assets in 2013 and gave out $17 million to organizations it considers to be working for social justice. As part of this effort, the foundation joined with the titanic wealth of the Ford Foundation to back Columbia Law School’s “Public Rights / Private Conscience Project,” run by the Center for Gender and Sexuality Law. The Arcus Foundation gave $250,000 to Columbia University’s Board of Trustees to support the project, which the foundation says will “mobilize scholars, attorneys and advocates in order to develop and distribute new methods of framing perceived conflicts between sexual rights and religious liberty.” Columbia University announced the project in a March 24, 2014 statement that acknowledged funding from both foundations. The announcement mentioned as examples of religious exemptions the Hobby Lobby and Conestoga Wood Supreme Court cases objecting to including HHS-mandated abortifacient contraceptives in employee health plans. The announcement also cited efforts to accommodate religious objections to “gay marriage.” The project criticized the Supreme Court's June 2014 decision in favor of Hobby Lobby. The project also spearheaded a letter from over 50 legal scholars that called on President Barack Obama to deny a religious exemption clause in a controversial executive order prohibiting federal contractors from discriminating on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity. The Ford Foundation's 2013 tax forms and website indicate it has committed $650,000 to the same project, which the foundation says will “counteract religious exemption and conscience-based carve-outs to laws securing sexual and reproductive rights.” The grant money also supports “a symposia series on LGBT rights.” The Ford Foundation has assets of $11 billion and dispenses $500 million in grants each year. The foundation's president, Darren Walker, sits on the Arcus Foundation’s eight-member board of directors. Walker is a past vice president of foundation initiatives of the Rockefeller Foundation, another titan of non-profit foundations involved in social change. Lomperis noted many current controversies involving religious liberty: campus ministries have been “kicked off of campus” because of their Christian commitments; Christians in wedding-related industries have been threatened with fines and jail time for declining business that would involve taking part in “gay weddings”; health care professionals face pressure to perform elective abortions against their pro-life beliefs; and parents increasingly face difficulties exempting their children from school programs “intentionally designed to cure children of traditional Christian values around sexual morality.” “It seems that with such grants, recently and historically, essentially secular liberal funders like those at the Arcus and Ford Foundations are trying their best to undercut the pro-life and pro-traditional marriage movements,” Lomperis added. The Ford Foundation gave at least one other grant targeting religious liberty. Its 2013 grant of $150,000 to Political Research Associates supported “public education and strategic communications on religious liberties exemptions from nondiscrimination laws,” in addition to what the foundation characterized as education on the “export of homophobia abroad” as portrayed in the Ford Foundation-backed film “God Loves Uganda.” Funding for efforts to reframe religious liberty extend even further. In 2014 the Arcus Foundation granted $400,000 to the Center for American Progress to back the center’s Faith and Progressive Policy Initiative in order to “articulate and disseminate a socially progressive framework of religious liberty as it relates to a range of issues” while working with “a diverse group of faith leaders, partners and allies.” The website of the center and its affiliated political action fund’s publication ThinkProgress criticize efforts to secure legal protections for those with religious objections to the HHS mandate or to the recognition of same-sex relationships. Lomperis was skeptical of such efforts. “With the specific battles these foundations are choosing to pick, it seems clear that they are hoping to confuse the public with a few prominently touted and ridiculously unrepresentative spokespeople claiming that not even ‘the religious community’ or ‘Christian leaders’ want these necessary religious-liberty protections being debated,” he said. The Arcus Foundation has also supported pro-abortion rights groups opposed to religious freedom exemptions. Tax forms indicate it gave $500,000 to the Planned Parenthood Federation of America to “expand monitoring and analysis of organized opposition to rights, information and services related to sexual orientation, gender identity and reproductive health, as well as working to prevent expanded use of religious exemptions in policy.” Planned Parenthood is the largest abortion provider in the U.S. and was responsible for over 325,000 abortions in Fiscal Year 2014. The Arcus Foundation was created in Kalamazoo, Michigan by Jon Stryker, an heir to the fortune of the Stryker Corporation. The foundation has offices in New York City and Cambridge, England. Stryker’s foundation has committed strategic funding to combating what it sees as “the abuse of religion to deny protection to LGBT people.” The foundation’s website says it aims to counter “the abuse of religious freedoms through ‘religious exemptions,’ and develop religious and legal strategies to hold exemptions in check.” The foundation aims to “challenge religious opponents of LGBT people in the U.S. and internationally” and to develop communications strategies to counter “some religious institutions” which it says engage in “the discrimination and dehumanization of LGBT people.” Its grant priorities aim to use “multiple change levers” like “leadership development, alliance-building, policy change, culture change, and resource development.” The Arcus Foundation’s 2013 grant of $50,000 to the Interfaith Alliance was intended to build “a faith network opposing discriminatory religious freedom exemptions,” which the foundation claims to be “harmful.” In 2014, the foundation gave $75,000 to Faithful America, a petition and activism website, to support “public campaigns that activate Christian grassroots advocacy networks to present a faith-based challenge to religious institutions and leaders that abuse religious freedom.” The National Latina Institute for Reproductive Health received a $100,000 grant in 2013 to build its own capacities and to build a “cross-movement alliance” in order to “combat policies with religious exemptions.” Another $100,000 went to the northwestern U.S.-based Pride Foundation in 2014 to “coordinate messaging” on religious exemptions. A 2014 grant of $100,000 to the Gill Foundation backed the Movement Advancement Project’s “research and messaging on religious exemptions.” The project is a strategy group that has previously helped the two foundations collaborate to advance LGBT advocacy within U.S. religious denominations, seminaries, clergy coalitions and media to counter religious opposition. The Colorado-based Gill Foundation was founded by the politically savvy former businessman Tim Gill, a collaborator with Arcus Foundation president Jon Stryker’s sister Pat Stryker. Gill has pursued a long-term political strategy of advancing LGBT causes by targeting small local and statewide political races to train the talent pool of his opponents. The Arcus Foundation’s current executive director, Kevin Jennings, is a former assistant deputy of the U.S. Department of Education, where he headed the Office of Safe and Drug Free Schools. Jennings is the founder of the Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network (GLSEN), which has advanced LGBT activism in thousands of U.S. secondary schools. Jennings reportedly was a member of the homosexual anti-AIDS group ACT UP in the mid-1990s, just a few years after the group’s notorious anti-Catholic protests in New York City. Jennings is on the 25-member Board of Trustees of Union Theological Seminary, a historically prominent mainline Protestant seminary with links to Columbia University. The Arcus Foundation has backed the Equally Blessed Coalition, an organization of Catholic dissenting groups which have attacked the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops and the Knights of Columbus for supporting legal marriage as a union of one man and one woman. Through the group Dignity USA, the coalition also received an Arcus grant of $200,000 in 2014 “to support pro-LGBT faith advocates to influence and counter the narrative of the Catholic Church and its ultra-conservative affiliates” as well as to “build advocacy and visibility in connection with two special events, the Synod of the Family and World Youth Day.” The Arcus Foundation is also a partner of the U.S. State Department’s Global Equality Fund, having pledged $1 million to support U.S. government-backed LGBT activism worldwide. Read more
Agrigento, Italy, Feb 13, 2015 / 02:03 am (CNA/EWTN News).- Archbishop Francesco Montenegro of Agrigento still feels himself more of a priest with concern for the poor than a cardinal, even though he will be given the red biretta this Saturday. His local Church includes Lampedusa, the small Italian island near Tunisia which is the destination of many African and Middle Eastern emigrants, and which was the destination of Francis' first trip outside Rome after his election as Pope. “I wear the wooden cross made by the immigrants hosted in Lampedusa,” he said, indicating his pectoral cross, in a Feb. 11 interview with CNA. “Thinking of the immigrants who made this cross helps me reflect how today, respect for the life of the other is not given the proper priority.” Such concern for the poor has always been pivotal in his priestly ministry. Archbishop Montenegro was born in Messina, on Sicily's northeastern tip, in 1946. He attended St. Pius X Seminary in the city, and was ordained a priest of the Archdiocese of Messina in 1969, at the age of 23. He served in several parishes and was private secretary for two of the diocese's archbishops, director of the diocesan Caritas, a spiritual director at the minor seminary, and vicar general of the archdiocese. In 2000, he was consecrated as Auxiliary Bishop of the Archdiocese of Messina-Lipari-Santa Lucia del Mela – his home diocese, which had been united with two other local Churches in 1986. While auxiliary bishop, he became president of Caritas Italy. He was appointed Archbishop of Agrigento, in the southwest of Sicily, in 2008. As Archbishop of Agrigento he has been confronted with the crisis of migrants from Africa – the island of Lampedusa is actually closer to Tunisia than to Sicily. Immigration has long been a concern for the island. Since 1988, almost 23,000 people have died in the stretch of sea between Africa and Lampedusa – 330 of them in the latest tragedy, which took place Feb. 10. Archbishop Montenegro stressed concernedly that “these are just the known data … how many people have died and we do not even know of it?” “As a bishop, I feel questioned and provoked by the pain of these brothers who knock on our doors and ask to be welcomed,” he said. “Questioned, because we cannot continue to watch them die, and remain indifferent. Provoked, because history must change; but it cannot change for the worse.” The archbishop's concern for the migrants is shared by Pope Francis, who visited Lampedusa in 2013. “Any time I talk with the Pope, he asks me: ‘What is going on in Lampedusa?’ And he proved to be very attentive to the situation on the island when he sent a Nativity set to Lampedusa. The Nativity is set in a barque, and Joseph leans outside the barque to pull an immigrant out of the sea,” Archbishop Montenegro recounted. “For Pope Francis, Lampedusa is a small piece of a new world where poverty and acceptance may be combined together.” Archbishop Montenegro has been president of the Italian bishops' commission on migration and the Migrantes Foundation since 2013. He explained that all his priestly life has been characterized by concern for the poor, and this has brought him “to see life through a different lens: there are people who have to die in order to live, there are people who make of essential things the inner sense of their life … we have to take this into account.” “The Gospel is about the poor: if we removed from the Gospel the pages about the poor, only the cover would remain,” he stated. “So if I want to live the Gospel, I must take the poor into account. And if I take the poor into account, perhaps I can really meet Jesus, since he identifies himself with the poor. Remember what he said? 'Whatever you did unto the least of my brethren, you did unto me.'” The archbishop said his appointment as cardinal now pushes him “to set my gaze on a larger scale … my attention was focused on Lampedusa, on Agrigento, on Italy, but now I have much more to look at.” “Sicily can be an example of welcoming and dialogue,” he said. “For instance: in Lampedusa there is a small shrine, beyond the parish, and there are grottos there where Muslims and Christians met to pray a very long time ago… they did this before any discussion about ecumenism or interreligious dialogue emerged.” Archbishop Montenegro is also known for his concern about the Mafia, which he has called the most pressing issue facing the Agrigento archdiocese; in 2012, he denied a Church funeral to a known Mafia leader. Archbishop Montenegro is one of the 20 bishops who will be made a cardinal at the Feb. 14 consistory being held in the Vatican, and one of 15 who, being under the age of 80, would be able to vote in a papal conclave. Read more
Vatican City, Feb 13, 2015 / 12:08 am (CNA/EWTN News).- The different cultures represented by bishops who will be created cardinals this weekend demonstrate the Church's universality, thereby enriching the College of Cardinals, says the prefect of the Congregation for the Evangelization of Peoples. Referring to those countries never before represented by a red hat, Cardinal Fernando Filoni told CNA their presence “is also making the Church very universal, not only in name but also in fact, in presence. These different cultures are enriching the cardinals' college.” Of the 20 cardinals who are to be created during the Feb. 14 consistory in the Vatican, three hail from countries which have never before been represented by a cardinal: Archbishop Charles Bo of Yangon (Burma); Bishop Soane Mafi of Tonga; and Bishop Arlindo Gomes Furtado of Santiago de Cabo Verde. In the two days leading up to Saturday's consistory, the College of Cardinals are holding meetings to discuss reform at the Roman Curia. Cardinal Filoni said that during these meetings the new cardinals typically “bring to the attention of everyone their point of view”, and will also have the “opportunity to better know our work and how we do things.” He added that there is a “balance of understanding and bringing,” noting that it “is very useful for us to listen, being here, and for them to understand and reach in.” The Italian prelate also noted the how during past consistories, new prelates asked to be part of “the most important moments of decisions either to bring something or to listen to what is going on.” “It's not just what others of different minds report but also what they themselves could listen to and see”, he said. “This opportunity of having this consistory is responding to their desire but at the same time to give them this opportunity and to us too.” Pope Francis addressed the cardinals Feb. 12 at the opening of the consistory, stressing that “reform is not an end in itself, but a means to give a strong Christian witness” and “to promote a more effective evangelization; to promote a more fruitful ecumenical spirit; to encourage a more constructive dialogue with all.” Pope Francis released the names of the new cardinals during his Jan. 4 Angelus address, having announced that the consistory would take place the previous Fall. Of the 20 new cardinals, 15 will be cardinal-electors, able to participate in a future conclaves. The 15 new cardinal-electors come from 14 nations: five are from Europe, three from Asia, three from Latin America, two from Africa, and two from Oceania. The day following the consistory, Pope Francis and the new cardinals will concelebrate a solemn Mass in St. Peter's Basilica. Read more
Oklahoma City, Okla., Feb 12, 2015 / 10:07 pm (CNA/EWTN News).- When hospitals are struggling financially, they bring in Douglas G. Wilson, Jr. to turn around their fortunes. Wilson, who previously served as CEO of five distressed hospitals througho... Read more
Washington D.C., Feb 12, 2015 / 05:18 pm (CNA).- Social justice, politics and Latino culture are three areas that are fields for evangelization, a Hispanic ministry leader told young Catholic professionals at a recent event in Washington, D.C. &ldqu... Read more
Kyiv, Ukraine, Feb 12, 2015 / 05:15 pm (CNA/EWTN News).- The Ukrainian Catholic bishops in the US issued a letter on Wednesday asking their faithful to pray and fast for peace, a day before a tentative ceasefire in Ukraine was agreed on which would end... Read more
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