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Month: January 2021

Catholic Bible-in-a-year podcast tops the charts

Posted by | Jan 9, 2021 | , |

Washington, D.C. Newsroom, Jan 8, 2021 / 05:02 pm (CNA).- A Catholic podcast featuring a priest reading and analyzing the Bible has been at the top of the Apple Podcast charts since Jan. 2, ahead of secular podcasts produced by such organizations as The New York Times, NBC News, and NPR.

“The Bible in a Year (With Fr. Mike Schmitz),” produced by Ascension Catholic Faith Formation, part of Ascension Press, features episodes containing two to three scriptural readings, a reflection on those readings by Fr. Mike Schmitz, and a prayer. Each episode is about 15 to 25 minutes long, and a new episode is set to be released each day of 2021.

Instead of reading the Bible from cover to cover, the podcast follows “The Great Adventure Bible Timeline,” which was developed by Jeff Cavins. Schmitz, a priest of the Diocese of Duluth, told CNA that this approach, which centers on “14 critical narrative books” interspersed with the remaining non-narrative books, helps to maintain the story structure of salvation history.

“A lot of times, what derails people is when they’re reading the story of Genesis and Exodus and Numbers, and all of a sudden they read Leviticus and like, ‘wait, I lost the story now,’” Schmitz told CNA in a Jan. 7 interview.

“So what we’ve done is we built those other books, those non-narrative books around the narrative story or on the narrative,” he said.

“And so one of the things that it is doing is it keeps people connected like, ‘Oh, okay, now this makes sense that here you are in the wilderness, and that’s why we’re reading Leviticus, because this is where God needs to give his people the law regarding the tabernacle.’”

The “timeline” approach also means that listeners will not have to wait until very late in the year to hear about Christ.

“If we (read the Bible) straight through like that, we wouldn’t get to the New Testament until I think November,” said Schmitz. “So it was like, ‘that is not good.’ We’ve not spent 10 months not talking about Jesus very clearly.”

To help remedy this, Schmitz said there will be four “messianic checkpoints” that will introduce listeners to Christ. The first of these will occur “right around day 90,” and will consist of the Gospel of John over the course of about a week.

“I’m really excited about that. Just to be able to say, in the midst of this Old Testament story, ‘here is the revelation of Christ,’” said Schmitz. 

Catholics in America read the Bible less often than do Protestants. Schmitz believes that this is due in part to how Catholics are accustomed to having Scripture “proclaimed” to them at Mass.

“I mean, the whole reason the New Testament is called the New Testament is because it was read at the celebration of the new covenant, the Eucharist,” he said. 

“And so one of the things that we are used to is having the Bible read out loud, we’re used to having the Bible, as I said, proclaimed. And I think maybe because of that, we kind of sit on our laurels a little bit, and don’t necessarily dig in and ask all the questions about, you know, translations, the questions about, contexts and whatnot.”

Despite this, Schmitz thinks that “we still have this hunger to know,” and that many people are discouraged by the “daunting” nature of the Bible. He hopes his podcast, with its unique formatting of salvation history with a timeline, changes this perception.

“So the appeal, I think, of a Bible in a Year podcast is not only, you’re going to be able to go through the entire Bible in one year, but then secondly, is it’s going to be in bite size chunks. And third, you’re going to have some kind of guidance,” he said.

“And I think that that for a lot of people just makes something that might seem inaccessible, accessible.”

The success of the podcast took both Schmitz and Matthew Pinto, CEO of Ascension Press, by surprise. Schmitz said that he has been warned by his friends and family to “not let (the success) go to his head,” something he says never even occurred to him.

“I’m thinking like, ‘well, I’m literally reading the Bible.’ So I don’t know how much that could go to my head,” said Schmitz.

“I think that it’s, it’s very clearly less about me, and the fact that it’s me reading the Bible, and far more about, I think, people’s hunger” for God’s word, said Schmitz.

Pinto was willing to credit Schmitz with at least some of the show’s success.

“We knew it was going to be a great program, but clearly this has struck a nerve beyond, really what we expected,” Pinto told CNA in a phone interview Jan. 7. “Our first thought
was that, for some reason, God has anointed this particular project.”

Pinto credited the “charism of Fr. Mike and the uniqueness of the Bible timeline” as two of the factors behind the success of the show–along with God’s blessing, of course.

The success of the show caught Ascension “flat-footed,” said Pinto, and The Great Adventure Catholic Bible, which the show is centered around, sold out. Pinto told CNA it should be available again to order in the coming months.

God has, said Pinto, given the podcast “a special grace that is beyond simple human explanation.”

“And, so it’s our hope that we will just be good stewards of it, and really use this as an opportunity to expand and reach, even more. So we’re not going to stop at really where it is,” said Pinto.

“We’re going to ask God for additional blessing, and work as hard as we can to, to get the Word of God out to as many people as we can using this most unique method.”

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#9925 Prioritizing Virtue – John Cuddeback

Posted by | Jan 9, 2021 | |

Questions Covered:

15:40 – I want to thank John for giving me the right words to promote and discuss with other people. You’ve enabled me to have a conversation with people.
27:44 – I wanted John to know that I took courses from him and I …

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First lay head of disciplinary commission at Roman Curia appointed

Posted by | Jan 8, 2021 | , |

Vatican City, Jan 8, 2021 / 04:40 pm (CNA).- For the first time, the Disciplinary Commission of the Roman Curia will be presided by a layperson after Pope Francis appointed professor Vincenzo Buonomo, rector of the Pontifical Lateran University. And it is possible that more laypersons will be appointed for other Vatican positions.

The Commission is composed of a president and six members. Established by St. John Paul II in 1981, the Commission rules whether an administrative sanction – i.e., suspension or firing – can be imposed on a Roman Curia official is pertinent or not.

Pope Francis also appointed two new members of the Commission: Monsignor Alejandro W. Bunge, president of the Labor Office of the Apostolic See, known by the Italian acronym ULSA; and Mr. Maximino Caballero Ledo, General Secretary of the Secretariat for the Economy.

The appointment of professor Buonomo, a layperson, as a president is unprecedented. According to the Commission’s Statutes, issued in 2016, the president of the Commission must be a cardinal or at least a bishop. The statutes have a five-year validity. Until now, the Commission had five presidents: three cardinals, an archbishop, and a bishop. The last president was Bishop Giorgio Corbellini, who was also president of the ULSA. Corbellini died in November 2019, leaving the position open.

Article 4 of the Statutes read that “the Commission is composed by a Cardinal or Bishop president and other six members, both laymen and clergy, appointed for a five-year term by the Pontiff.”

Article 4 also states that the Vatican Secretariat of State’s adviser and the secretary of the administrative section of the Secretariat for the Economy are members de iure (officially sanctioned) of the same Commission. That means that also Monsignor Luigi Cona, is a member of the Commission.

The other Commission members are Bishop Juan Arrieta, secretary of the Pontifical Council for Legislative Texts, and Flaminia Giovannelli, undersecretary emeritus of the Dicastery for the Service to the Integral Human Development. Vincenzo Buonomo was also a member before being elevated to the chairmanship of the Commission. Pope Francis may now appoint another member of the Commission.

Buonomo has garnered growing attention during the years. Pope Francis called him in 2018 to be the first lay rector of the Pontifical Lateran University. Since he became the rector, Pope Francis has paid a visit to the university twice.

Since 2014, Buonomo is also a counselor of the Vatican City State Administration and was part of the committee that drafted the first Vatican law on procurements, issued in July 2020.

A professor in the Pontifical Lateran University since 1984, Buonomo began his collaboration with the Vatican Secretariat of State during the 1980s.

Since 2007, Buonomo is office chief of the Vatican’s delegation to the U.N. Organization for Food and Agriculture (FAO,) where he has served since 1993.

In 2015, he was a member of the Secretariat of State’s working group for the drafting of the Holy See Periodic Reports to the U.N. Committees on the Rights of Children, on Racial discrimination, and Against Torture.

The appointment of Buonomo as president of the Commission is certainly a sign of trust by Pope Francis. Pope Francis is also continuing his policy of appointing laypeople as Curia top-officials.

In the last year, Pope Francis appointed Maximino Caballero Ledo as general secretary of the Secretariat for the Economy and Fabio Gasperini as general secretary of the Patrimony of the Apostolic See (APSA, a sort of Vatican central bank). In 2018, Pope Francis appointed another layperson, Paolo Ruffini, as prefect of the Dicastery of Communication.

There are rumors that Pope Francis might also choose a layperson as general secretary of the Vatican City State Administration. The current general secretary, Bishop Fernando Vergez Alzaga, already turned 75, the official retirement age.

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#9924 Living in Peace – Fr. Jeffrey Kirby

Posted by | Jan 8, 2021 | |

Questions Covered:

15:35 – Are there resources or exercises for prayer to ask for peace? I have the desire but do not know how when there is so much chaos around me.
23:31 – How can I find peace when I don’t find peace in doing the right t…

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The Roman Elites, and the American

Posted by | Jan 8, 2021 | , , , , , |

The Roman aristocracy learned by experience that their traditions and institutions were fragile, and depended on the faithful obedience of every citizen. But if a man were willing to use his money and mob violence and military power for his own ends, setting aside the needs of the Republic, then he could indulge dreams and ambitions that were simply beyond the minds of previous generations.

The post The Roman Elites, and the American appeared first on Catholic Herald.

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Lawyer urges clemency for federal death row inmate

Posted by | Jan 8, 2021 | , |

Washington, D.C. Newsroom, Jan 8, 2021 / 02:19 pm (CNA).- A woman convicted of murdering a woman and stealing her unborn child should be granted clemency ahead of her scheduled execution on Jan. 12, her lawyer told CNA.

Lisa Montgomery was sentenced to death in 2007 for the Dec. 16, 2004 murder of Bobbie Jo Stinnett, a 23-year-old woman who was eight months pregnant. Montgomery, who told Stinnett her name was “Darlene Fischer,” claimed to be pregnant as well, and the two communicated online prior to meeting at Stinnett’s home in Skidmore, Missouri.

Montgomery strangled Stinnett, and then cut her stomach to deliver the child, a girl, via a rudimentary cesarean section. The newborn baby girl was discovered, alive, one day later when Montgomery was arrested in Kansas. Montgomery reportedly told her husband that the baby was hers.

The federal government tried the case in part as it involved a kidnapping over state lines.

“We’ve asked President Trump to commute Mrs. Montgomery’s sentence from death to life imprisonment without the possibility of parole … for several reasons,” Kelley Henry, lead counsel on the case, said to CNA in a phone interview Jan. 6.

“First, she is a person who suffers from serious mental illness as well as brain damage, and a lifetime of physical and sexual torture at the hands of her caregivers, and the men that her mother trafficked her to, for years,” said Henry.

Henry noted that despite the documentation of numerous similar crimes in the United States, Montgomery is the only person to be sentenced to death on either the federal or state levels.

“The prosecution normally understands that people who commit this particular sort of crime are individuals with severe mental illness and trauma history,” Henry explained.

“Mrs. Montgomery’s trauma history is the most severe of any case I’ve ever seen in 30 years of practice.”

Unlike others on death row, Montgomery “has expressed deep and severe remorse from the moment of her arrest,” said Henry.

Henry told CNA that those who wish to see Montgomery’s sentence commuted to life in prison without the possibility of parole to visit the website SaveLisa.org, sign the petition, and write “letters and emails” to the president and other leaders. 

“These executions are, after all, carried out in the names of the citizens of the United States, and they should make it be known to the president that they would support mercy in this case,” said Henry, “which would be life in prison without the possibility of parole.”

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