Catholic News 2

Springfield, Ill., Jul 20, 2016 / 12:04 am (CNA/EWTN News).- Some news reports got it wrong: Philadelphia Archbishop Charles Chaput’s guidelines on Holy Communion and divorce-and-remarriage were “certainly correct” and in line with Pope Francis and Catholic teaching, an Illinois bishop has said.

“The Bible clearly teaches about the proper disposition to receive Holy Communion in the First Letter to the Corinthians,” Bishop Thomas Paprocki of Springfield in Illinois said July 15.

St. Paul says in that letter that those who receive unworthily will be “guilty of profaning the body and blood of the Lord.”

Canon law reflects this biblical teaching, the bishop said in the Illinois newspaper the State Journal-Register.

Bishop Paprocki criticized press coverage of Archbishop Chaput’s response to the Pope’s 2016 apostolic exhortation Amoris laetitia. He said an Associated Press report was misleading to say that Archbishop Chaput was “closing the door opened by Pope Francis to letting civilly remarried Catholics receive Communion.”

Reiterating his April 8 remarks, the bishop said that the apostolic exhortation made no changes to canon law or church doctrine.

Archbishop Chaput on July 1 issued pastoral guidelines for his archdiocese on the Pope’s exhortation. He said the document is best understood when read “within the tradition of the Church’s teaching and life.”

Bishop Paprocki agreed. He said the archbishop’s guidelines are right to say that all Catholics, not only those who have divorced-and-remarried, must confess all serious sins and have a firm purpose of amendment before receiving Holy Communion. Chaput’s guidelines said those who have civilly remarried must work to live “as brother and sister” in this relationship to receive reconciliation in the Sacrament of Penance, which would then allow for them to receive Communion.

The archbishop’s guidance drew widespread and sometimes critical reactions. Philadelphia Mayor Jim Kenney on Twitter snapped that Archbishop Chaput’s comments “are not Christian.”

But for the Bishop of Springfield, the guidance was useful.

“This applies not only in the Archdiocese of Philadelphia, but also here in the Diocese of Springfield in Illinois, as it does elsewhere in the Church,” Bishop Paprocki said.

According to Bishop Paprocki, Catholics in irregular relationships have a free choice.

“(I)f they persist in sexual activity outside of valid marriage, they must refrain from taking Holy Communion; if they wish to receive Holy Communion, they must refrain from sexual activity outside of valid marriage,” he said, citing the Gospel of Matthew.

“The latter may seem impossible to those steeped in our sex-saturated culture, but ‘with God, all things are possible’.”

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Vatican City, Jul 20, 2016 / 01:49 pm (CNA/EWTN News).- Though rumors have been floating for some time, the Vatican confirmed that the Pope will meet with 10 Holocaust survivors during his upcoming visit to Auschwitz while in Poland for World Youth Day.

After arriving to Auschwitz and passing under the arch of the main entrance on foot, Francis will be taken by car to Block 11, where he will be welcomed by Poland’s Prime Minister Beata Szydlo, as well as the 10 survivors.

The Pope “will individually meet” with each of the survivors, “the last of whom will be given a candle,” Fr. Federico Lombardi told journalists July 20.

One of the survivors, he noted, is 101 years old and is hosting a group of pilgrims who are traveling to Krakow to participate in WYD.

In addition to the survivors, Francis will also meet with 25 “Righteous among the Nations” from all over the world. The phrase is an honorific title bestowed by the State of Israel on non-Jews who risked their lives during the Holocaust to save Jews during the Nazi extermination.

An example of one of these people is Oskar Schindler, the German industrialist, spy, Nazi party member and protagonist of the award-winning film “Schindler’s List” who is estimated to have saved the lives of some 1,200 Jews during the Holocaust.

Fr. Lombardi spoke to journalists during a July 20 news briefing on the Pope’s July 27-31 trip to Poland, during which he is scheduled to visit Poland’s historic shrine of Our Lady of Czestochowa and Krakow’s Shrine of Divine Mercy in addition to his visit to Auschwitz and the WYD events.

In his comments to journalists, Fr. Lombardi confirmed that Pope Francis will not give a speech at Auschwitz, nor will he celebrate a public Mass. Instead, he will say Mass in private, and will sit in silence in the death camp where an estimated 1 million people lost their lives.

“At Auschwitz the Pope won’t say anything, but will have a moment of silent pain, of compassion, of tears.”

He noted how two martyr Saints were among those who died in the camp: St. Maximillian Kolbe, who died of starvation after offering to take the place of another man condemned to death, and St. Teresa Benedicta of the Cross, also known as Edith Stein.

“It’s interesting,” the spokesman said, that July 29 marks the day of the Pope’s visit to Auschwitz, but is also the day of “the condemnation to death of Kolbe; it’s the 75th anniversary of the day in which he was condemned to death.”

After praying in silence at Block 11, Pope Francis will then sign the Book of Honor at the camp, “and these will be the only words that we’ll have from the Pope at Auschwitz,” Fr. Lombardi said, explaining that the visit is expected to last “a few hours.”

Fr. Pawel Rytel-Andrianik, president of the Polish bishop's conference, told CNA that Francis' decision to remain in silence at Auschwitz is deeply meaningful.

“In the world there are two very parallel places. The first is the Wailing Wall and the second is the wailing place. The Wailing Wall in Jerusalem, and the wailing place in Auschwitz-Birkenau in the German Nazi concentration camp,” he said.

The Pope’s decision to toss his speech, then, “shows that the Pope has this in his heart: wailing in the place where so many victims perished.”

To do this “is very important for the Jewish people,” as well as for Poles, many of whom lost family members in the camp, he said, noting that his own grandfather was a prisoner who escaped, and that Poland’s Prime Minister lost some of her family there.

“So personally I feel very linked and I am very grateful personally that the Holy Father is going to visit the death camp.”

Again referring to the Pope’s silence, Fr. Rytel-Andrianik noted that Poland’s chief Rabbi, Michael Schudrich, “said that this is a very good thing because after the death of his sons, Aaron (from the Bible) was in silence.”

“There is an expression in the Bible “vayidom Aharon” (the silence of Aaron) so he was in silence. And the Holy Father will do the same thing in Auschwitz.”

According to Fr. Lombardi, Pope Francis is expected to give “a demanding speech” to youth during the WYD Via Crucis, which he will attend the evening of July 29 after having visited Auschwitz that morning.
 
He will stay in the archbishop’s residence of Krakow throughout the trip, appearing each night from the balcony to greet pilgrims gathered below. The act is an imitation of St. John Paul II, who did the same each time he visited as Pope.

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Cleveland, Ohio, Jul 20, 2016 / 02:14 pm (CNA/EWTN News).- It merited only one paragraph in the 2016 GOP platform, but the party’s stand against pornography is drawing commendation from all sides, not only conservatives and Catholics.

“I would argue, surprisingly, that this is the most progressive piece in the platform,” Gail Dines, a professor of sociology at Wheelock College and founder of Culture Reframed, a group that educates about “pornography as a public health crisis in the digital age,” told CNA.

The 2016 GOP platform calls pornography a “menace” and a “public health crisis” that especially hurts children – language not used in the 2012 platform. It further acknowledges the link between child pornography and human trafficking, which the 2012 platform also noted.

The U.S. Catholic bishops already warned of the danger of pornography in a pastoral response issued in November, “Create In Me a Clean Heart.” They called porn a “grave sin against human dignity” and noted its recent “exponential” proliferation thanks to the internet.

“Everyone, in some way, is affected by increased pornography use in society. We all suffer negative consequences from its distorted view of the human person and sexuality,” the bishops wrote.

They pointed to such consequences as the moral degradation of persons involved in the making and selling of porn, the objectification of women and children, human trafficking, wrecked marriages, and widespread addiction.

Others are speaking out against pornography, however, and they may not be Catholic or even conservative.

Dines said that “pornography is a public health crisis of the digital age.” She said the anti-porn stance “is in keeping with the 40 years of empirical research that we have that pornography has enormous social, psychological, cognitive, and sexual effects.”

“It’s a bipartisan issue,” the National Center on Sexual Exploitation stated to CNA.

They noted that “since 2011, at least 24 studies have found that pornography has negative impacts on the brain, including decreased brain matter, as well as reduced impulse control and decision-making ability.”

Other consequences of porn use, they added, include “increased verbal and physical aggression, the incidence and severity of rape perpetrated by batters, acceptance of rape myths, risky sexual behaviors among adolescents, behaviors associated with higher incidence of STIs, and increased cases of sexual dysfunction.”

Yet, as Dines noted, “there’s a backlash against defining porn as a public health issue,” partly because some just don’t understand just how much of a problem it poses.

Studies have reported the average age of children first viewing pornography is right at the start of the teenage years, she said. “I think it’s been a mass abdication of responsibility on the part of adults who refuse to understand how pornography is harming our children. And we better get going on this, because it’s only going to get worse.”

Although the GOP laudably included this matter in its platform, it also showed “hypocrisy” in nominating a presidential candidate who has made statements of a “misogynist,” Dines said.

Trump has shown “distaste and disregard for women,” she reflected, pointing specifically to his controversial statements about Fox News anchor Megyn Kelly and the presumptive presidential nominee for the Democratic Party, Hillary Clinton.

“There is, absolutely, hypocrisy here, which makes those of us in the feminist anti-porn world somewhat cynical,” Dines continued.

There needs to be bipartisanship on this issue, she added, noting that Democrats “have been very quiet on this.”

“This is going to take enormous courage on the part of the politicians to go up against this multi-billion dollar industry,” she said.

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IMAGE: CNS photo/Sean Gallagher, The Criterion

By Sean Gallagher

INDIANAPOLIS (CNS) -- Violence ripped through the country the first part of July with police shootings in Minnesota and Louisiana and the killing of five police officers in Dallas.

A day after the July 7 shootings in Dallas, violence ripped through the neighborhood surrounding St. Philip Neri Church on the near east side of Indianapolis when two men were found shot dead at an intersection.

On July 10, about 30 people took action to replace the violence around St. Philip with peace by prayerfully walking through the neighborhood, stopping at a makeshift shrine at the location where the two men had been found two days earlier.

It was part of a series of nine prayer walks on Sunday afternoons sponsored by St. Philip Neri Parish that began June 5 and concludes July 31. Participants gather at the church and walk along different routes in the surrounding neighborhood for about a mile, praying the rosary in both Spanish and English.

"Peace has to start in our own hearts," said Father Christopher Wadelton, St. Philip's pastor. "It will then grow out from our church to our neighborhood and the whole world."

Father Wadelton got the idea for the prayer walks from a similar effort made by St. Gabriel Parish in Connersville two years ago after a spate of deaths by heroin overdoses sent shock waves through the small southeastern Indiana town.

The priest explained that the prayer walks sponsored by St. Philip began after similar drug problems and a growth in violent crime in the neighborhood.

He said it was important that the prayer for peace in the neighborhood actually occur on its streets, and not simply in the parish church.

"God's presence is here in the streets," Father Wadelton told The Criterion, newspaper of the Archdiocese of Indianapolis. "We're not just isolated in our church building at Rural and North streets. We're out in the streets, bringing that visible presence of Christ to the streets."

Many of the people who joined Father Wadelton on the prayer walk July 10 said something important was missing from the discussions and news coverage of the shootings and increased racial tensions across the country -- God.

St. Philip parishioner Mary Kendall said the walk was "a way to show that God should be more important than anything else. There needs to be an awareness of God. Anger is not the answer."

St. Philip parishioner Martha Torres focused on prayer as a means of fostering peace.

"It's important for peace, my life, my neighbors -- everybody," she said. "Prayer is very important. You might not see the effect now. But I put it in Jesus' hands."

Michael O'Connor sees the violence in the neighborhood around his parish and the nation and feels like changing it is out of his control. That's why he turns to God.

"A lot of things in our country are beyond our control. No matter how many training sessions they have for police officers, how many interactive dialogues they have, there's got to be more change of heart," O'Connor said. "Prayer can do that. That's why I come here."

As the people in the prayer walk moved on from the site where the two men had been found shot dead July 8, they turned onto another street and saw several Indianapolis Metropolitan Police Department officers standing in the parking lots of a gas station and neighborhood grocery store.

Matt Carroll, one of those officers, was glad to see faith-filled people walking on the streets that had been marked by violence.

"It's inspiring," said Carroll. "It shows that people care. They're willing to give to their community and do their part to assist."

Father Wadelton said that showing care and hope to people in a neighborhood suffering from so much violence and the despair of drugs was a goal in starting the prayer walks.

"Seeing a group of people walking and faithfully praying makes people aware that Christ is in the streets with them," he said. "There are people who care about what's going on. It's a strong act of peace and prayer."

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Gallagher is a reporter at The Criterion, newspaper of the Archdiocese of Indianapolis.

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