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Wildfires wreaking ‘profound damage’ in multiple California Catholic dioceses…
Denver Newsroom, Aug 22, 2020 / 03:34 am MT (CNA).- As wildfires rage across California, scorching more than 700,000 acres of land in multiple dioceses and killing at least four people, Catholics are asking for prayers and offering resources to the displaced. “In our diocese alone the CZU, River, Carmel Valley and Dolan fires have already caused profound damage to property, persons and the environment,” Bishop Daniel Garcia of the Diocese of Monterey said in a message to Catholics on Thursday, Aug. 20. “Hundreds of people have already fled their homes fearful of the unknown. Likewise, several of our parish sites have been evacuated due to the close proximity of the fires,” he added. Over the past several days, a heat wave coupled with excessive lightning strikes sparked most of the blazes ...
A Catholic priest’s homily at the funeral of his son…
On Saturday, August 1, in Upperco, Maryland, 21-year-old Isaac Scharbach was struck and killed by a vehicle while cycling on a country road. Isaac is the second of nine children and the oldest son of Fr. Albert Scharbach and Abby Scharbach, who entered the Catholic Church with their family in 2009 at the Baltimore Basilica. Fr. Scharbach, a former Anglican priest, was ordained a Catholic priest for the Ordinariate in 2013, and he is currently the pastor of Mount Calvary Catholic Church in downtown Baltimore. Fr. Scharbach presided and preached at the Requiem Mass for his son on the feast of the Transfiguration, August 6, 2020. Isaac is remembered for being exceptional in many ways, and perhaps most of all for his virtue and the depth of his interior life — which Fr...
‘This is not sustainable’ — More new bishops than priests to be ordained in Ireland this year…
More new bishops will be ordained in Ireland this year than new priests, amid a crisis in vocations, a well-known parish priest has warned. Next Sunday, Archbishop Michael Neary will ordain Rev Shane Costello to the priesthood for the Archdiocese of Tuam at Knock Basilica, Co Mayo. It is understood that this will be the only ordination this year for the country’s 26 dioceses. “This is not sustainable – we have nobody coming after us,” said Fr Paddy Byrne, parish priest of Abbeyleix and Ballyroan, Co Laois. He described the number of ordinations this year as “abysmal”. Fr Byrne, who at 46 is the second youngest priest in the Diocese of Kildare & Leighlin, told the Irish Independent that the Catholic Church was experiencing a “real vocations cris...
U.S. Catholic bishops ‘applaud’ Trump administration over fetal tissue research…
CNA Staff, Aug 21, 2020 / 08:00 am MT (CNA).- The U.S. bishops’ pro-life committee praised the Trump administration on Thursday after a federal ethics advisory board recommended against federal funding of fetal tissue research. The Human Fetal Tissue Research Ethics Advisory Board of the National Institutes of Health (NIH)—set up by the Trump administration to review grant proposals for federally-funded fetal tissue research conducted outside of NIH facilities—issued its report on Tuesday. In its report, the advisory board said that members voted to withhold federal funding of 13 different fetal tissue research proposals, and voted not to withhold funding of one such proposal. In response, Archbishop Joseph Naumann of Kansas City—the head of the U.S. bishops’ pro-life committee—said the bi...
Heaven cracks the Devil’s code…
ABOVE: Raphael, “Saint Michael Vanquishing Satan,” 1518. BELOW: Illustrator Louis Le Breton’s depiction of Behemoth, a heavy, stupid demon, from Collin de Plancy’s Dictionnaire Infernal, 1863, first published in 1818. (Public Domain) Jacques Collin de Plancy was an atheist who wrote a peculiar book about demons — but in 1830, he became Catholic, convinced by the reality of evil and the need to counter it. Such is the lure of esoteric matters It has always been my contention that joining the words “code” and “devil” in a headline would draw an audience. Imagine my surprise upon discovering just such a “code”. The Dictionnaire Infernal is a book about demonology. It describes individual demons and the hierarchies in which they are organized. First published in Paris in 1818, it wa...
I got a robe! A teaching on one of the most shocking parables Jesus ever told…..
The Gospel from Thursday’s Mass (Thursday of the 20th Week of the Year) contains one of the most shocking parables Jesus ever told. It is the Parable of the Wedding Feast from the Gospel of Matthew, and it tells the story of a king who gives a wedding banquet for his son. Most know it well, but in case you want to review it, the full text is available here: Parable of the Wedding Feast. It does not take a degree in biblical theology to understand that this parable is an allegory. The “king” is God the Father, the “son” is Jesus, and the wedding feast is the great wedding feast of the Lamb described in the Book of Revelation: Then I heard what sounded like a great multitude, like the roar of rushing waters and like loud peals of thunder, shouting: “Hallelujah! For our Lord God Almighty...
Did you know Catholics have a small number of ‘obligations‘?
The Catholic Church is often viewed as a religious organization with all these rules to follow. However, in reality there are only a handful of obligations, which stipulate the bare minimum of what is required to lead a life united to Jesus Christ. These rules are called the precepts of the Church and are meant to be viewed as guideposts along the pathway to Heaven. They help us keep focused on the end goal and stay on the right path. Without them, we can easily wander aimlessly through life, not knowing where to go or what to do, hoping that we will reach the end. The Catechism of the Catholic Church explains, “The precepts of the Church are set in the context of a moral life bound to and nourished by liturgical life. The obligatory character of these positive laws decreed by th...
The modern muddle between morals and manners…
In recent decades, cultural forces have relativized right and wrong and pulverized the distinction between morals and mores. Growing up in the 1960s and 1970s my hometown newspaper, The Perth Amboy Evening News, used to carry two advice columns: Ann Landers, and whomever had succeeded Emily Post on etiquette. For me, Ann Landers was the more interesting, because she often addressed real problems — though I often also thought that many of her correspondents were the causes of their own problems. Etiquette back then was somewhat esoteric: how to line up multiple spoons on the place setting? Proper social behavior towards other people was taken by most folk to be common sense (something, alas, in increasingly short supply, as our coarsening social ties attest). Those two columns represented a...
Bishop Bransfield offers ‘apology for any scandal or wonderment,’ repays $400,000 to West Virginia diocese…
CNA Staff, Aug 20, 2020 / 08:15 am MT (CNA).- Bishop Michael Bransfield has repaid more than $400,000 to his former diocese and issued a narrowly-worded apology to the faithful. The apology comes nearly two years after Pope Francis accepted his resignation amid accusations of personal and financial misconduct. The letter from Bransfield, dated August 15, was released by his former diocese on Thursday, along with a letter from his successor, Bishop Mark Brennan, outlining how Bransfield will “make amends” following an investigation into his conduct by the Vatican. “I am writing to apologize for any scandal or wonderment caused by words or actions attributed to me during my tenure as Bishop of the Wheeling-Charleston Diocese,” said Bransfield, who led the diocese from 2005 to 2018,...
‘She framed me’ — Father Eduard Perrone wins $125K from cop for defamation…
Tresa Baldas Detroit Free Press Published 2:26 PM EDT Aug 17, 2020 Father Eduard Perrone says he’s been vindicated in a sex abuse case against him, and he wants his job back. The embattled priest found absolution in the justice system after suing a detective for defamation, alleging she fabricated the rape claim that got him suspended. The year-old lawsuit ended last week with a $125,000 settlement for Perrone — a rare win for an accused Catholic priest who convinced a three-person court advisory panel he deserved compensation for being defamed. Specifically, Perrone argued the church built its case around a detective’s “fabricated” report he had sodomized an altar boy 40 years earlier, though the now-grown...
Holy Mass should be all amazement, all the time…
In his 2003 encyclical, Ecclesia de Eucharistia (The Church from the Eucharist), Pope St. John Paul II invited Catholics to regain a sense of “Eucharistic amazement.” Being “amazed” by the Eucharist is probably not all that common these days. But Holy Mass should be all amazement, all the time. For in the celebration of the Eucharist, John Paul wrote, our time is linked to the time of Christ’s passion, death, and resurrection, because the Eucharist has a “truly enormous ‘capacity,’ which embraces all of history as the recipient of the grace of the redemption.” In a spirit of eucharistic amazement, we live history as His-story: God’s story. As bishops, pastors, and catechists use this moment of eucharistic fasting to rekindle a sense of eucharistic amazement in the Church, they can put a re...
Here are some of the best books on the history of the Church, according to historians…
Someone recently remarked that with two popes living and a pandemic raging throughout the known world, we now know what it feels like to have lived in the 14th century. While it might make for a cute internet meme, the comparison has a lot of holes in it. Nevertheless, with so much division in contemporary societies, wars percolating in several parts of the world, geopolitical rumblings, more and more people facing starvation, age-old beliefs being called into question, and civil liberties under pressure everywhere in the globe, some people feel there has never been a time in history when things feel so fragile. Reading history is a good antidote to that feeling — an exercise that assures us that our world has been through much of the same in the past. The same applies to...
