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Vatican confirms first coronavirus case as Pope recovers from cold…
VATICAN CITY (AP) — The Vatican confirmed the walled city-state’s first case of the new coronavirus Friday and closed some offices as a precaution while Pope Francis continued recovering from a cold. Vatican City’s health clinic, which is used by Vatican employees and their families, was shuttered for sanitizing following the positive test result received Thursday, Vatican spokesman Matteo Bruni said. Separately, a Vatican official was put into a protective quarantine after a priest from France’s Catholic church in Rome tested positive for the virus. The official isn’t showing symptoms of COVID-19 disease but came into contact with the infected priest. In another precaution, the Vatican Apostolic Library said Friday it would keep its doors shut all next week. The library welcomes scholars ...
Audiences with the Pope are always agreeable occasions…
Pope Francis received in a private audience at the Vatican members of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops’ Region XIII for their “ad Limina Apostolorum” visit on Jan. 27. 2020. (Vatican Media) COMMENTARY: It is extremely rare to find anyone who emerges from an audience with the Holy Father without a highly favorable impression and without thinking that the Holy Father shares his position. Father Raymond J. de Souza The U.S. bishops recently concluded their ad limina visits to Rome, in which each of 15 groups of bishops spent several hours in an extended conversation with Pope Francis. Those colloquies got superlative reviews from one and all, with many bishops marveling at how frank, engaged, generous and wise the Holy Father was. Which confirms one of the key stories of...
Priest saves Blessed Sacrament after tornado hits historic Nashville church…
The tabernacle inside the Church of the Assumption in Nashville, Tennessee. (Ian St France/Twitter) Fr. Bede Price, pastor of the parish, was able to safely retrieve the Blessed Sacrament from the tabernacle, and he was uninjured in the storm. Christine Rousselle/CNA. NASHVILLE, Tenn. — An historic Catholic church in the Nashville neighborhood of Germantown was among several buildings seriously damaged by a tornado Tuesday night. The tornado’s main path struck about 100 yards away from the Church of the Assumption in the Diocese of Nashville. The storm destroyed the parish’s north transept, sacristy, and rectory chimney. The winds also badly damaged the building’s steeple and roof. Fr. Bede Price, pastor of the parish, was able to safely retrieve the Blessed Sacrament from the tabern...
German Catholics, California both live up to their billing in Super Tuesday votes…
ROME – There’s a sense in which Germany has become to Church politics what California is on the American scene, meaning a strongly blue state which tends to favor the most progressive choice on any menu. On Tuesday night, California by itself turned what otherwise would have been a Super Tuesday disaster for Senator Bernie Sanders into a mere setback, keeping his Democratic Socialist crusade for the presidency alive. In somewhat similar fashion, Germany’s Catholic bishops went to the polls the day before, and they, too, embraced a progressive as their new leader. To replace Cardinal Reinhard Marx of Munich, who’s served as president of the German bishops’ conference since 2014, they chose Bishop Georg Bätzing of Limburg. Bätzing, 58, reflects the broadly reform-minded, progressive ethos of...
The start of the New Exodus: 2nd Sunday of Lent…
This Sunday we are only eleven days into Lent, still very early along on our Lenten pilgrimage. The readings share the theme of beginning the journey of faith, even while giving us a glimpse of our final destination. In all three years of the lectionary cycle (A, B, C), the readings for the Second Sunday of Lent always pair a key pericope from the Abraham narrative (Gen 12-22) with an account of the Transfiguration from one of the Synoptic Gospels. This is because, in all the Gospels, the Transfiguration marks “the beginning of the end” of Jesus’ earthly life. After the Transfiguration, Jesus “sets his face toward Jerusalem” (Luke 9:51) and begins the “death march” toward the Holy City that will culminate in Passion Week and his crucifixion. The Readings pair the b...
What would a truly Catholic politician look like?
With the rise of Uncle Joe Biden the American public is being presented yet again with a Catholic politician who professes to keep his faith private, while exploiting his Catholic faith whenever he and his PR professionals think it expedient. Joe Biden seems like one of the old school “Kennedy Catholics” who go to church on Sunday and cut deals with the mafia on Monday, hobnob with the Bishops in smoky rooms on Tuesdays and schmooze lobbyists to get their family members cushy jobs on Wednesday. On Thursday they figure out what element of tricky Catholic teaching they can jettison to get a few more votes and on Friday eat fish at a swanky seafood restaurant because they’re Catholic. On Saturday they hang out with some top end billionaires and on Sunday they go to Mass at the parish of one o...
Explaining the Pope’s soft touch on the survival of Middle Eastern Christianity…
ROME – Say “Christianity” and “Middle East” to people who’ve been paying attention to events in the region, the and next word that would automatically come to mind for most probably would be “extinction.” By now, the statistics on the collapse of the Christian population in the Middle East are wearily familiar. The situation is worse in the war-torn nations of Iraq and Syria, for obvious reasons, than in historic Christian strongholds such as Egypt and Lebanon, but there too the pressures are strong and the trendlines alarming. Though there are promising pockets of resilience, such as the effort by Christians on Iraq’s Nineveh Plains to rebuild villages all but wiped out under ISIS occupation, most observers agree that the rise of anti-Christian violence fueled by jihadist intolerance has ...
The unreal dream of a “Church of the Ruthenians” — a clarifying letter…..
> Italiano> English> Español> Français> All the articles of Settimo Cielo in English * (s.m.) The previous post on the “strange shufflings” at the top of the Vatican congregation for the Oriental Churches has aroused considerable interest, in particular regarding the hypothetical creation of a “Church of the Ruthenians” in the sub-Carpathian region at the junction of Slovakia, Hungary, and Ukraine. Alessandro Milani, a scholar well versed in religion and politics in Eastern Europe, has written us to challenge this hypothesis, but above all to illustrate the many ethnic and liturgical particularities of that region, which cannot be compressed under a single banner. Milani is “maître de conférences” and “docteur associé” of the GSRL (Groupe Sociétés, Religions, Laïcités), whic...
Words matter: CNN backs one side in latest debates about the U.S. Senate born-alive bill…
Better than nothing, I guess. Here is the original GetReligion post on this latest example of a familiar debate in Associated Press style and newsroom politics. <div class="sqs-block video-block sqs-block-video" data-block-json="{"blockAnimation":"none","layout":"caption-hidden","overlay":true,"description":{"html":"Sasse: You can't defend the indefensible."},"hSize":null,"floatDir":null,"html":"\n","url":"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0RY0k2uD6lw","width":854,"height":480,"providerName":"YouTube","thumbnailUrl":"https://i.ytimg.com/vi/0RY0k2uD6lw/hqdefault.jpg","...
Making the Impossible possible: Can Catholics eat fake ‘meat’ during Lent?
The Vatican has had no public position on the issue. Pope Francis, who hails from Argentina where beef is a major part of the national diet, has never addressed it publicly or through any writings or statements. A spokesman for the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops did not respond to an email seeking comment. USCCB has issued guidelines, but they offer little clarity on this debate. In 1966, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops produced what’s known as the Pastoral Statement on Penance and Abstinence. In it, the bishops, who are appointed by the pope, declared that “the age of fasting is from the completion of the 18th year to the beginning of the 60th.” The document reiterates Canon Law, which states that every person 14 years or older “must abstain from meat (and items made with mea...
Flee to the truth when you’re tempted…
The Gospel today says that Jesus was tempted by the devil in the desert. Hebrews 4:15 also affirms, For we do not have a high priest who cannot sympathize with our weaknesses, but one who has been tempted in all things as we are, yet without sin. How exactly a divine person, with a sinless human nature, experiences temptation is somewhat mysterious, and yet the text affirms that He does. A Lenten antiphon from the Breviary teaches that He did this, or allowed this, for our sake: Come, let us worship Christ the Lord, who for our sake endured temptation and suffering (Invitatory Antiphon for Lent). Hence, even without pondering too deeply the mystery of how He was tempted or experienced it, we can still learn what Jesus teaches us about how to endure temptation and be victorious over it. (Mo...
How long would it take to fall through the Earth?
No, you can’t really “dig to China.” But what if you could ride the so-called gravity train through the center of the Earth to the opposite side? How long would it take? By Sabrina Stierwalt, PhD February 25, 2020 5-minute read Episode #364 How Long Would It Take to Fall Through the Earth? Update Required To play the media you will need to either update your browser to a recent version or update your Flash plugin. Hide player As children growing up in the US, we often made attempts to “dig to China.” If we could just have a little more time on the playground or out in the backyard, maybe, just maybe, we could dig a hole deep enough that it would take us all the way to the other side of the Earth. We always hoped there were Chinese children on the other side digging to get...
