Catholic News 2

Catholic bishops of Philippines on Monday wrapped up their plenary assembly by calling for public vigilance over proposals to amend the country’s Constitution and the threat of martial law.

The bishops did not categorically endorse or disapprove the moves to revise the 1987 Charter but urged the people to particularly keep an eye on the Constitutional safeguards against any abuse of martial law.

“Let us continue to maintain the safeguards against dictatorial martial rule that our present Constitution contains,” said Archbishop Socrates Villegas, CBCP president, in a statement.

President Rodrigo Duterte has repeatedly said he won’t hesitate to declare martial law if necessary to supposedly protect the nation.

Only recently, Duterte said he is eyeing changing martial law provisions in the Constitution to allow its declaration without the approval of Congress and the Supreme Court.

The bishops’ collegial body stressed that rewriting the “the single most important document of our country” should concern all Filipinos.

An overriding concern for the CBCP is that the provisions of the Constitution and all the proposed amendments should respect human rights, value the sanctity of family life, and promote the common good.

At the plenary assembly, the name given to the meeting of Catholic leaders, bishops agreed to offer pastoral guidance whatever decision on the Charter change would be.

 “There is a the big issue of federalism which we must all study,” added the bishops.

“Do we need to change from our present unitary system to a federal system of government? Or will it suffice to introduce amendments and laws which will make the present unitary system responsive to the needs of disadvantaged regions?”

“Keep in mind that the drafting of a Constitution and amendments to it should concern all of us,” they said. “Let us not fail our country. Even more importantly, let us not fail our Lord Jesus Christ.”

The Duterte administration is dead-set on amending the Charter, particularly towards shifting from a presidential to a federal system of government. (CBCP)

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(Vatican Radio) Pope Francis on Wednesday asked people to pray for all those in Religious and Consecrated Life, who have been called to profess the evangelical counsels.

He was speaking on Wednesday during his General Audience, in anticipation of Thursday’s celebration of the Feast of the Presentation of the Lord, which is also the World Day of Consecrated Life.

“I ask you to pray for the priests, sisters, and brothers belonging to contemplative and apostolic Religious Institutes,” Pope Francis said. “Their life dedicated to the Lord, and their charismatic service, will bear abundant fruit for the good of the faithful, and for the evangelizing mission of the Church.”

The Holy Father asked the faithful to pray that “through their witness of life, they may radiate to the world the love of Christ and the grace of the Gospel.”

Pope Francis is scheduled to celebrate Mass for the World Day of Consecrated Life on Thursday afternoon in St. Peter’s Basilica.

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Rome, Italy, Feb 1, 2017 / 03:02 am (CNA/EWTN News).- The archdiocese that once sent St. John Paul II to the papacy has a new archbishop: Marek Jedraszewski. The archbishop has special memories of the sainted Pope and the Divine Mercy devotion he brought to the world.

“Thanks to Cardinal Karol Wojtyla, later St. John Paul II, the message of mercy became very important for the world. And this is a message really close to Pope Francis, too,” Archbishop Jedraszewski told CNA.

Krakow is a major center of the Chaplet of Divine Mercy devotion, based on private revelations of Jesus Christ to St. Faustina Kowalska. It hosts Sister Faustina's convent and a shrine dedicated to Divine Mercy. St. John Paul II was himself a devotee and a popularizer of the Divine Mercy.

But the devotion itself began in the Archdiocese of Lodz, Archbishop Jedraszewski's previous assignment.

“It is really symbolic that I am coming from Lodz, where the Divine Mercy devotion began, to Krakow, where the devotion flourished. In the Lodz cathedral, Sr. Faustina saw Jesus who told her to enter the convent in Warsaw. The beginning of her spiritual life started in Lodz.”

For this reason, he added, “I feel committed to prolong this mission of mercy in Krakow, even to welcome all of the people coming to Krakow to pray over Sr. Faustina tombs, and actually touch the places Sr. Faustina lived.”

Archbishop Jedraszewski leads the archdiocese that at one time was headed by Cardinal Wojtyla, elected Pope John Paul II in the 1978 conclave. The archbishop recalled his friendship with the late Pope.
 
The new archbishop of Krakow said that their relationship started back in 1975, when he was living at the Polish College in Rome to study philosophy at the Pontifical Gregorian University.

“Cardinal Wojtyla used to come often to Rome, and stayed at the same college,” he said. “Cardinal Wojtyla was really interested in young Polish students, he spent much time with them, and so he did with me,” he recounted. “As I was studying philosophy, a subject he was very fond of, there were many possibilities to talk and discuss with him about philosophy.”
 
After Cardinal Wojtyla was elected Pope, Archbishop Jedraszewski kept a personal correspondence with him, “in particular when I was appointed bishop, since John Paul II always wanted Polish bishops who passed in Rome to spend a lunch or a dinner with him.”
 
The installation Mass of Archbishop Jedraszewski came in a favorable moment for Polish Catholicism. The latest figures of the Polish Church’s yearbook show a slight increase in the numbers of Sunday Mass attendance, as well as the number of communicants. About 40 percent of Poles attend daily Mass, while about 17 percent receive Holy Communion each Sunday.

The research also stressed the strong commitment of lay people in the Church. In Poland there are some 60,000 organizations involving about 2.5 million people.
 
Archbishop Jedraszewski told CNA that World Youth Day 2017 was “a convincing testimony that Poland cannot be considered a de-Christianized country.”

He noted that the statistics indicate growth not only in the traditionally devout southern Poland, but also in Lodz, a “highly secularized area.”

He concluded that “in the end, we may say that there is an increase of faith in Poland. On the other hand, it is true that challenges given from the secularizing trends are big.”
 
Archbishop Jedraszewski raised the issue of secularization with Pope Francis, during the Polish bishops’ meeting with the pontiff July 27. During that meeting, Pope Francis stressed the danger of gender ideology.

The archbishop also saw this approach to gender as a threat. He said Benedict XVI had affirmed gender theory as more dangerous than Marxist and Communist ideology because “it breaks with the anthropological vision of what the man his according the work of the Creator God.”
 
“God created the man as male and female, while gender ideology does everything possible to cancel differences between man and woman,” Archbishop Jedraszewski said. “This is absurd from a biological point of view, and it does not deals just with the human being: gender ideology has dramatic consequences in social life and in current culture.”
 
In the end “we cannot be open to this ideology, that is profoundly against God the Creator and against everything Christ himself taught us.”

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Rome, Italy, Feb 1, 2017 / 06:01 am (CNA/EWTN News).- An Iraqi priest who was forced to flee his village when the Islamic State seized the area in 2014 said the hardship and persecution Christians in Iraq have experienced has taught them what it really means to fully live out their faith.

“What we have witnessed is a message for us, so we may reconsider what the objectives of being Christian should be, what it means to live as a Christian to the fullest, not through empty words, and not as something that can be carried away by the wind,” Fr. Karam Shamasha told CNA.

Fr. Shamasha is from Telskuf, a town on the Nineveh plain 10 miles south of Alqosh. At one time there were more than 120,000 Christians there, he said: “In my village everybody was Christian. There was no other religion.”

As a parish priest in the Chaldean Diocese of Alqosh, Fr. Shamasha served some 1,500 Christian families before the Iraq War started.

But since 2003 the community has experienced continuous hardship, and even persecution, he said. The Islamic State burned down many of their churches and killed many priests, and many laity as well.

But in 2014, when Islamic State took over the city of Mosul, the situation on the plain of Nineveh became even worse: “It all started when the extremists came out into the open. Up till then they had existed as an extreme mentality but it was never out in the open, always clandestine,” Fr. Shamasha explained.

When the Islamic State consolidated control of Mosul between June and August 2014, he continued, they gave the Christians three options: convert to Islam; pay the jizya tax which would grant them life but not the possibility to practice their faith; or be killed.

“You must imagine that we didn’t have months to ponder our decision,” Fr. Shamasha said. “It was a matter of hours. We had to choose: stick to our faith, or renounce it so we could keep our property and our belongings.”

“All of us, may God be praised, all of us, 120,000 Christians decided to stick to our faith and leave everything else behind. This was for us a test of our faith.”

Many of the Christians fled for Erbil or Duhok, but at a checkpoint in Mosul they ran into armed men who forced them to renounce the faith or give up all the material goods they had, such as money, cars, and jewelry. Some families even had their documents taken away, he said.

“That was for us a strong message. ISIS wanted to show that they had not come to play some sort of game,” Fr. Shamasha recounted.

“They had come to destroy us, wipe us out in that specific area where we continue to speak the language that Jesus spoke, Aramaic. The very same area that Saint Thomas evangelized from AD 42 to 49. One of the most ancient parts of our Church.”

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