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Month: August 2020

Knights of Columbus prepare for first-ever virtual annual convention

Posted by | Aug 4, 2020 | , |

CNA Staff, Aug 4, 2020 / 12:11 pm (CNA).- The 138th annual convention of the Knights of Columbus begins today— the first in the  organization’s history to not be held in-person.

The New Haven, Connecticut-based fraternal and charitable organization is encouraging its members to tune in to the convention online. Due to coronavirus restrictions, the gathering is being held virtually. Last year’s convention took place in Minneapolis, Minnesota.

The convention comes a few months after the Vatican announced that Fr. Michael McGivney, founder of the Knights of Columbus, will be beatified following Pope Francis’ approval of a miracle attributed to his intercession.

Founded in New Haven in 1882, the Knights of Columbus was originally intended to assist widows and their families upon the deaths of their husbands. It has grown into a worldwide Catholic fraternal order, with more than 2 million members carrying out works of charity and evangelization across the globe. The Knights also offer life insurance policies to their members.

Fr. McGivney, the Knights’ founder, will be beatified on October 31, the Vatican’s Congregation for the Causes of Saints announced in late July.

During the past year, Knights around the world donated more than 77 million service hours and $187 million for worthy causes in their communities, including millions of dollars for persecuted Christians around the world, the organization says.

The 2020 convention will begin with an opening Mass at 6:30 p.m. Eastern, celebrated by Archbishop Leonard Blair of the Archdiocese of Hartford. This will be followed by Supreme Knight Carl Anderson’s annual report, highlighting the group’s achievements and announcing new initiatives, at 8 p.m. Eastern.

The Mass is set to feature a message from Pope Francis, which the Vatican Secretariat of State delivered to the Knights in mid-July.

“His Holiness is grateful for these and for the many other countless ways in which the Knights of Columbus continue to bear prophetic witness to God’s dream for a more fraternal, just and equitable world in which all are recognized as neighbors and no one is left behind,” the letter reads in part.

An annual memorial Mass will be offered for all deceased Knights of Columbus and their families on August 5 at 2 p.m. Eastern.

Among the Knights who died in the past year was former Supreme Knight Virgil Dechant, who passed away on Feb. 15, 2020, and was the Order’s longest-serving supreme knight, holding office from 1977 to 2000, the organization said.

After the memorial Mass, the Knights will hold an awards ceremony to honor the members’ service. This will take place at 3:30 p.m. Eastern on August 5.

 

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After Beirut explosion, Lebanon turns to St. Charbel

Posted by | Aug 4, 2020 | , |

CNA Staff, Aug 4, 2020 / 12:08 pm (CNA).-  

At least one massive explosion rocked the Lebanese capital of Beirut Tuesday afternoon, which ignited fires and destroyed buildings in the city’s port area, caused damage across the city, and has reportedly flooded hospitals with casualties.

Some local news sources are reporting that at least 10 people are dead, and videos have emerged online showing cars overturned in city streets and buildings with shattered windows and crumbled balconies.

The cause of the explosion is not yet clear, but Christian leaders in Lebanon and around the world have called for prayer, and Lebanon’s Prime Minister Hassan Diab announced that Wednesday will be a day of mourning across the country.

Sixty percent of Lebanon’s people are Muslim, evenly split among Sunni and Shia, and nearly 35% of the country’s population is Christian, most of whom are Maronite Catholic Christians. In the wake of the explosion, Christians will likely turn to St. Charbel, Lebanon’s patron saint, who is also revered by many of Lebanon’s Muslims.

St. Charbel Makhlouf lived from 1828 to 1898, spending much of his life as a monk and hermit. He is known in Lebanon for the miraculous healings of those who visit his tomb to seek his intercession – both Christians and Muslims.

“St. Charbel has no geographic or confessional limits. Nothing is impossible for [his intercession] and when people ask [for something], he answers,” Fr. Louis Matar, coordinator of the Shrine of St. Charbel in Annaya, Lebanon, told CNA in 2018.

Speaking in Arabic with the help of an interpreter, Matar said the shrine, which encompasses the monastery where the Maronite Catholic priest, monk, and hermit lived for nearly 20 years, receives around 4 million visitors a year, including both Christians and Muslims.

Matar, who is responsible for archiving the thousands of medically-verified healings attributed to the intercession of the Maronite priest-monk, said that many miraculous cures have been obtained by Muslims.

Since 1950, the year the monastery began to formally record the miraculous healings, they have archived more than 29,000 miracles, Matar said. Prior to 1950, miracles were verified only through the witness of a priest. Now, with more advanced medical technology available, alleged miracles require medical documents demonstrating the person’s initial illness and later, their unexplainable good health.

One of the miracles documented by Matar in December 2018, when he spoke to CNA, was that of a 45-year-old Italian woman. Suffering from a neurological disease, she was hospitalized after it was discovered she had tried to commit suicide by consuming acid.

In the hospital, the doctors discovered that the damage to her esophagus and intestines was so extensive, “the last way possible to cure her was believing in God and praying,” Matar commented.

The woman’s parents began to pray, inviting others to pray with them. A religious sister of the Maronite Catholic Church heard about the prayer request and gave them holy oil from St. Charbel’s shrine. After her parents spread the oil on the suffering woman’s stomach, chest, and head, the woman was cured.

This was just one of seven miracles archived in December, Matar said, calling each one “a phenomenon.”

“St. Charbel is a tool to reach God,” he said.

The Shrine of St. Charbel consists of the Monastery of St. Maron, where the saint lived for 19 years with great devotion to prayer, manual labor, and contemplative silence; and the nearby hermitage where he lived a rigorous asceticism and profound union with God for the last 23 years of his life.

At the monastery, pilgrims can visit a church built in 1840, a small museum with artifacts and relics from the saint, and the site of his first grave. St. Charbel’s tomb, since 1952, is located inside a special cave-like chapel built into the property.

Even while he was alive, Charbel’s superiors observed God’s “supernatural power” at work in his life, and even some Muslims knew him as a wonder-worker.

Deeply devoted to God’s Eucharistic presence, he suffered a stroke while celebrating the Divine Liturgy of the Maronite Catholic Church on December 16, 1898, dying on Christmas Eve of that year. He was canonized in 1977 by St. Pope Paul VI.

 

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Big Ben Bongs

Posted by | Aug 4, 2020 | |

One of the world’s best-known English Catholics reflects on Great Britain’s departure from the European Union

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Cardinal Parolin in Ars for feast of St John Vianney

Posted by | Aug 4, 2020 | , |

Rome Newsroom, Aug 4, 2020 / 11:58 am (CNA).- Cardinal Pietro Parolin, Vatican Secretary of State, was in Ars Tuesday for the feast of St. John Vianney, the patron of priests.

Parolin offered Mass at the Ars shrine, where St. John Vianney is buried, Aug. 4. He later gave a speech on the saint.

The Curé of Ars, as St. John Vianney was known, is “very relevant,” Parolin said in his homily. “In these difficult times, he teaches us to transmit joy and hope through the witness of our personal life.”

The cardinal also called the saint an example of holiness for all Catholics, because he “teaches us that intimate personal union with Christ helps to conform our desires to the will of God, fills us with joy and happiness, helps us to be salt and light of the world.”

St. John Vianney, Parolin said, is an example of a priest “who comes close to all with tenderness and does not reject those who are wounded in their existence and sinners in their spiritual life.”

Vianney warned people away from the “traps and stratagems of the demon,” including acedia, “that sweet sadness which paralyzes the mind and prevents it from persevering in prayer and in the mission,” Parolin stated.

In his homily, he recalled Benedict XVI’s characterization of St. John Vianney in 2010 as “a model of priestly ministry in our world.”

Parolin pointed out that though there are priests who have been led astray, the examples of good priests “who, in a constant and transparent manner, devote themselves entirely to the good of others” outnumber them.

The cardinal urged people to pray for priests and for priestly vocations “as our first intention of prayer, which we all entrust to the particular intercession of the Holy Curé of Ars.”

Later, in his address titled “Pope Francis and priests on the way with the people of God,” Parolin gave a reflection on St. John Vianney and the “principles which can guide pastoral ministry in our 21st century.”

According to Parolin, the Curé of Ars was a priest who “went out” in search of lost sheep to rebuild the flock, despite the challenges of a post-revolution, de-Christianized France.

“It is not the first time that the Church is forced to renew her missionary commitment,” Parolin said.

“Faced with the novelty of the situations we are facing, the Holy Spirit stimulates creativity to find the best way to approach others,” he continued. “The Holy Father asks that creativity in the Spirit is also empathy in the same Spirit.”

The cardinal also stressed the intense prayer life of Vianney, his dedication to preparing his homilies well, and his charity to the poor.

The saint is best known for his giftedness as a confessor: “His art of listening, of advising, his mercy attracted more and more penitents,” Parolin noted.

Pope Francis “is inexhaustible on the theme of confession because it is the sacrament of mercy,” he added.

“You know that nowadays many faithful no longer go to confession or go very little,” requiring priests to have patience and to constantly teach about mercy and the essential nature of the sacrament, he said.

Parolin concluded his address with a prayer from Pope Francis: “Remember, Lord, your covenant of mercy with your children, the priests of your people. May we be, with Mary, the sign and sacrament of your mercy.”

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COVID-19 edicts drawing increased cynicism

Posted by | Aug 4, 2020 | , |

Bill In The News: (One News Now): Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights president Bill Donohue argues that political bias and wavering laws during the pandemic have warranted American citizens’ cynicism about following COVID-19 recommendations…

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Maryland governor overturns directive delaying school opening

Posted by | Aug 4, 2020 | , , , , , , , |

The Archdiocese of Washington and its Catholic Schools Office hailed the Aug. 3 emergency order by Maryland’s governor to override a Montgomery County Health Department blanket directive that would have kept nonpublic schools from reopening for in-person instruction through at least Oct. 1.

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My Reasons for Writing ‘The Next Pope’

Posted by | Aug 4, 2020 | |

By Edward Pentin | Unlike a typical election cycle in which ballots can take place every four or five years, conclaves can happen at any moment.

Dependent on when a pope dies or decides to retire, their timing is wholly…

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