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Vatican City, Sep 21, 2016 / 03:03 pm (CNA).- A region of Cameroon that traditionally believed women to have no value now sees them as equal to men, thanks to a lay Catholic apostolate in the area.

“Before the coming of the Focolare Movement, the women had no say, but the movement has taught us a lot of things,” said Nicasius Nguazong, who is the Fon – similar to a king – of the Cameroonian chiefdom of Nwangong.

Fon Nicasius and about 40 other pilgrims, including other heads of northwest Cameroonian clans, travelled to Rome to mark the 50th anniversary of the Focolare Movement first coming to the Bangwa people.

They attended the Pope’s Wednesday General Audience, and several met with Pope Francis Sept. 21.

Mafue Christina Fontem – whose role is similar to a queen – testified at a press conference afterward that her father, after meeting the founder of the Focolare Movement, a woman named Chiara Lubich, carried out a campaign for the higher education of women.

“And because of that,” she said, “you will find that those of us who are here, his daughters, went to school, and you also have among us a granddaughter who is here from Germany.”

“We had something in our tradition that we always said: ‘a woman is worth nothing’,” Mafue Christina reflected. “But with the coming of Chiara, women got emancipated.”

The Focolare Movement, a Catholic lay apostolate, was originally founded by Chiara Lubich in 1943. It was begun during World War II as a path of spiritual and social renewal.

Using the inspiration of Jesus’ prayer in John 17:21, “May they all be one,” the movement now exists all over the world; it aims to create unity through the use of dialogue and relationships among individuals, peoples and cultures.

Although it has Catholic roots, people of every age, vocation, religion and culture belong to the movement.

“Before the coming of the Focolare Movement, they didn’t encourage education for girls because they thought that a woman’s place was in the kitchen,” Fon Nicasius said.

But now, men and women share in the housework, instead of women doing everything, which used to include bending over to chop firewood while carrying babies on their backs, said Mafue Christina.

“This comes from the teaching of the Focolare Movement of loving one another as Jesus has loved us,” she said.

Mafue Christina told a story about a time when a woman left the house to go to the farm. When she returned, her husband had drawn a warm bath for her and invited her to take a bath and rest. She was very surprised, Mafue Christina said, “because it was not part of their culture. This was the culture of the disciple of love.”

Speaking from a man’s perspective, Fon Nicasius said that now, even in their traditional councils, it is acknowledged that women have a say and they have been given positions of responsibility.

He praised the efforts of Catholics in his country, saying, “The good works of the Focolare Movement and the Catholic Church cannot end in our own reign.”

 

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Washington D.C., Sep 21, 2016 / 04:03 pm (CNA/EWTN News).- Modern-day imperialism. Harmful to women. A failed promise. These are the ways that leading Catholic scholars described contraception – and said the Church is right to warn against it.

“What women have discovered over the past 48 years is that we don’t have a design flaw. Being a woman is good enough, and it’s a wonderful thing,” said Mary Rice Hasson, J.D., director of the Catholic Women’s Forum at the Ethics and Public Policy Center.

Hasson was among a group of more than 500 Catholic scholars who signed a document supporting Church teaching against contraception, as expressed in Blessed Paul VI’s 1968 encyclical Humanae Vitae.

The document, entitled “Affirmation of the Catholic Church’s Teaching on the Gift of Sexuality,” was released at a Sept. 20 press conference at The Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C.

It responded to a statement opposing Church teaching, released by the U.K.-based Wijngaards Institute. The 150 signatories of the dissenting statement argued that the Church has no reason for its teaching against contraception. They said that the use of birth control is sometimes “an ethical imperative” and that abortion-causing methods of contraception are sometimes acceptable.

Pope Paul VI’s 1968 encyclical Humanae Vitae reaffirmed the traditional Christian rejection of contraception and said it applied to the birth control pill. If a married couple faces a just reason to avoid pregnancy, the Church teaches that they may do so through Natural Family Planning, a process that works with a woman’s natural fertile cycles and abstaining from sexual activity during the times that she is fertile.

Hasson voiced gratitude for the Church’s teaching, saying that it affirms women and does not treat their bodies as “broken.”

“From a woman’s perspective, contraception, abortion and the sexual revolution were held up to be a situation of promise, opportunity, of a way to move forward in equality,” she said.

“And what we’ve found, not looking just through the eyes of faith, but our lived experience has shown that this is a false promise. In fact, women have proved to be hurt and more vulnerable by the consequences of the sex revolution and the promotion of contraception as the solution.”

Rather than affirming women, Hasson said, contraception tells women that their fertility is a problem to be “fixed” through medical means.

In contrast, the Church’s teaching protects and defends women, she said. “We are the future. Women have the support of the Church’s teaching and it’s been just a tremendous thing.”

Hasson told CNA that both domestic and foreign organizations are “very coercive” in pushing contraceptive implements on lower-income women around the world, often without regard for women’s relationship goals and at the cost of other forms of developmental support.

Religious studies professor John Grabowski of Catholic University of America agreed.

He told CNA that during his time serving on the Pontifical Council for the Family, he has heard people from around the world complain that “we are having these population, family planning services shoved down our throats, regardless of our convictions, our cultural values, our religious convictions.”

In many cases, he said, funding is directly tied to acceptance of contraception and abortion programs. “It really is contraceptive imperialism.”

Grabowki, who also signed the document supporting Church teaching, pointed out that every major Christian church agreed with Catholicism through the 20th century.

And today, he said, “there are many Catholic scholars, academics and intellectuals who support the Church’s teaching, who recognize that the teaching is not the policy instituted by the Church 48 years ago, but represents the constant teaching of the Church from its beginning.”

Grabowksi noted that when Pope Paul VI wrote Humanae Vitae, he “predicted that if contraception were to be widely implemented we could expect a number of things to come to pass: increasing infidelity, and the overall moral decline within society, a loss of respect for women on the part of men.”

All of these things have come to pass, Grabowski said, charging that the Wijngaards Statement does not recognize “the fact that we have a wealth of data from the sciences and the social sciences demonstrating the real harm done to women, to relationships, to marriages and to the family. It’s as if the sexual revolution hasn’t happened.”

He also pointed to the statement’s failure to address the “unique contribution” of St. Pope John Paul II’s Theology of the body, a work which he described as “such a rich resource in unpacking this teaching.”

Statement organizer Janet Smith, an ethics professor at Sacred Heart Major Seminary in Detroit, noted that with just a few days’ notice, the document in support of Church teaching had attracted more than triple the signatures of the dissenting statement.

She suggested that this is “an opportunity for us to show the world that there are many, many people who accept the Church’s teaching on contraception.”

Furthermore, she said, while all of the signatories hold advanced degrees, they are also largely people who are married with families.

By living out the Church’s teachings on contraception and sexuality in their daily lives, many of the signatories are a living witness to the truth of the Church’s position, she said. “They’re not just accepting it on blind obedience.”


Kevin Jones contributed to this report.

 

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Mexico City, Mexico, Sep 21, 2016 / 04:38 pm (CNA/EWTN News).- After the Mexican branch of the “hacktivist” group Anonymous reported that the Archdiocese of Mexico had let off an alleged priest who confessed to having molested 30 girls, the Church in Mexico has denied that the priest even exists, calling the Anonymous report “irresponsible and malicious.”

On Sept. 8 Anonymous Mexico claimed that the Archdiocese of Mexico “decided to let off from any crime and punishment José Ataulfo García, the priest who allegedly confessed to raping more than 30 indigenous girls in the state of Oaxaca.”

The report by the hackers group was picked up this weekend by several Spanish-language newspapers, and this week by some English media.

Religión Digital posted an article with the headline “Priest with HIV who confessed to molesting 30 girls let off”, but it has since been deleted.

SIAME, the communications office of the Archdiocese of Mexico, has stated that the supposed priest José Ataulfo is not listed in their jurisdiction's records, nor in those of the Archdiocese of Antequera, Oaxaca.

“This supposed priest does not belong to the Archdiocese of Mexico – as Anonymous Mexico asserts – much less has he been let off, as the post irresponsibly and maliciously states,” stated Fr. Hugo Valdemar Romero, a spokesman for the Archdiocese of Mexico.

SIAME stated the accusations probably originated in “Hablemos de Mexico”, a publication which “several weeks ago, in wake of the opposition of the Catholic Church to the presidential initiatives to legalize so-called 'marriage equality' throughout the country, threatened to publish a supposed list of homosexual priests and bishops which included this personage.”

“However, the existence of such a priest is increasingly doubtful, since according to the information gathered by SIAME, in the dioceses that makes up the Province of Oaxaca, there is no record of such a minister,” the publication of the Archdiocese of Mexico City explained.

Archbishop José Luis Chávez Botello of Antequera, Oaxaca, stated, “I don't know him [Ataulfo], he's not from the archdiocese.”

Archbishop Chávez cautioned that the accusations are reactions “from some quarter” which wants to silence the voices calling for peace and recalled that “the Pope has also been attacked by some groups.”

“I invite them, as I've already told them, when there's something like that, seriously investigate it, don't just repeat what's being said,” he urged, while assuring that “lies unravel all by themselves.”

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TOTOWA, N.J. (CNS) -- Retired Archbishop Peter L. Gerety of Newark died Sept. 20 while in the care of the Little Sisters of the Poor at the order's elder-care facility in Totowa. He was 104.

Plans for his funeral Mass and burial were pending.

According to a remembrance of Archbishop Gerety posted Sept. 21 by the Archdiocese of Newark on its website, Archbishop Gerety was the world's oldest Catholic bishop at the time of his death. By 2007, when he was 95, he was already the oldest living U.S. bishop.

Newark Archbishop John J. Meyers in a Sept. 21 statement called Archbishop Gerety "a remarkable churchman whose love for the people of God was always strong and ever-growing."

"He served as shepherd of this great archdiocese during a time of spiritual reawakening in the years after the Second Vatican Council, and a time of deep financial difficulties," he added. "He very carefully led the church, her people and institutions through those challenges."

Archbishop Gerety had been retired as head of the Newark Archdiocese for 30 years at the time of his death. He was Newark's archbishop for 12 years. Before that he spent five years as the bishop of Portland, Maine; he had been coadjutor bishop of the statewide diocese for three years prior.

During his tenure in Newark, Archbishop Gerety helped create Renew International, the parish renewal program still in wide use among U.S. parishes today. Renew also has created several other parish renewal programs, including one that has been used in more than two dozen countries outside the United States.

Because Renew's use was so widespread, Archbishop Gerety asked the U.S. bishops' Committee on Doctrine in 1988 to evaluate it. Some groups in dioceses where it was being used were publicly critical of it.

The committee's report praised many aspects of Renew, but said participants needed to be given a more complete understanding of Catholic faith and doctrine, and small-group leaders were to be more than just facilitators who accepted all the participants' contributions as equally valid. Revisions suggested by the committee were made.

In a 2007 interview with The Catholic Advocate, Newark's archdiocesan newspaper, he noted how he had been ordained a bishop shortly after the close of the Second Vatican Council. He noticed one important change was a shift from the "top-down" mentality that had prevailed at that time in the church.

Archbishop Gerety said the liturgy "improved tremendously" at that time, centering on increased participation among laypeople. Another major change he saw was the formation of parish councils and similar programs. In fact, he said one of his prized possessions was a stone tablet inscribed with a pledge he made in his early days in Newark when he said in a speech on April 18, 1975: "I am totally committed to parish councils by April 15, 1976."

Born July 19, 1912, in Shelton, Connecticut, Leo -- as his parents called him -- won academic honors at Shelton High School and was captain of the football team. He was the eldest of nine sons.

His mother and father, Peter L. and Charlotte Daly Gerety, "had a tremendous religious faith, and a tremendously optimistic view of life. They loved life very much. They taught us we could do almost anything," the archbishop once said.

After working for the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the New Jersey Transportation Department, the future archbishop entered St. Thomas Seminary in Bloomfield, Connecticut, and was chosen for study abroad at St. Sulpice Seminary in Issy, France. He was ordained for the Archdiocese of Hartford, Connecticut, in 1939 at the Cathedral of Notre Dame, Paris.

One hallmark of his service in the Archdiocese of Hartford was ministry to black Catholics in New Haven. He founded an interracial social and religious center, the St. Martin de Porres Center, which gained parish status in 1956 with then-Father Gerety as its first pastor. In the 1960s, he founded the New Haven chapter of the Urban League and was a member of the Connecticut State Committee on Race and Religion and the National Catholic Conference on Interracial Justice.

As bishop of Portland, Archbishop Gerety was active in pro-life and social justice causes, led campaigns to protest state legislative efforts to legalize abortion, and defended the rights of conscientious objectors during the Vietnam War.

In Newark, Archbishop Gerety expanded outreach to black and Hispanic Catholics, and shored up a deteriorating archdiocesan financial base. On a national stage, he was known for his work with the Call to Action Committee, formed at the time of the U.S. bicentennial celebration in 1976 to address and discuss the needs U.S. Catholics.

The eldest of nine brothers, Archbishop Gerety outlived all of them. He is survived by many nephews and nieces, as well as their children.

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