Catholic News 2

(VIS) An international conference entitled "Love will never end. Prospects ten years on from the Encyclical Deus caritas est" will be held on Thursday 25 February in the Vatican's New Synod Hall. Organised by the Pontifical Council "Cor Unum", the conference forms part of the programme of events for the Jubilee of Mercy and has the aim of examining in depth the theological and pastoral implications of Pope Benedict XVI's first Encyclical for today's world, especially in relation to the activity of those who work in the Church's charitable service. The event will be attended by, among others, representatives of the episcopal conferences and Catholic charitable organisations from all over the world.

The conference will begin with greetings from Msgr. Giampietro Dal Toso, secretary of the "Cor Unum", followed by an intervention from Cardinal Gerhard Ludwig Muller, prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, entitled "The Encyclical Deus caritas est: a theological reading". The subsequent speakers will be Michel Thio, president of the International Confederation of St. Vincent de Paul, Marina Almeida Costa, director of Caritas Cabo Verde, and Roy Moussali, executive director of the Syrian Society for Social Development. In the afternoon the theme of the meaning of love for the three monotheistic religions will be considered by Rabbi David Shlomo Rosen, director of the Department of Religious Affairs of the American Jewish Committee of Jerusalem, Professor Saeed Ahmed Khan, lecturer at the Wayne State University of Detroit, U.S.A., and the philosopher Fabrice Hadjadj, director of the Institut Philanthropos of the University of Fribourg, Switzerland.

The second day will begin with a presentation from Cardinal Luis Antonio G. Tagle, archbishop of Manila, Philippines and president of Caritas Internationalis, entitled "The importance of Deus caritas est for the charitable service of the Church today", followed by interventions from Alejandro Marius, president of the Asociacion Civil Trabajo y Persona, Venezuela, and Eduardo M. Almeida, representative in Paraguay of the Inter-American Bank. At midday the participants will be received in audience by Pope Francis in the Apostolic Palace. The afternoon session will open with contributions from Rev. Professor Paolo Asolan, lecturer at the Pontifical Lateran University, Rome, and Professor Rainer Gehrig, lecturer at the Catholic University of Murcia, Spain.

The morning sessions will be moderated by Martina Pastorelli, president of Catholic Voices Italia, and the afternoon sessions by Professor Luca Tuninetti, lecturer at the Pontifical Urbanian University, Rome.

Holy Mass will be celebrated on 25 and 26 February at 6 p.m. in the Church of Santa Maria della Pietà in Camposanto dei Teutonici (Our Lady of Mercy in the German Cemetery). On the first day Cardinal Paul Josef Cordes, president emeritus of "Cor Unum"; will preside, and on the second, Cardinal Robert Sarah, prefect of the Congregation for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments.

The conference will be fully broadcast by web streaming on the Pontifical Council "Cor Unum" website.
 

Full Article

Washington D.C., Feb 22, 2016 / 05:18 pm (CNA/EWTN News).- The bishops of the Church must be united under the Holy Father and not divided into factions, Cardinal Wilfrid Napier of Durban maintained Thursday at a lecture in which he shared lessons gleaned from South Africa's effort to end apartheid.

Bishops “should never be seen as pitted against each other in a contest or control over the Church, but rather they’re a college,” Cardinal Napier said Feb. 18 in Washington, D.C., where he was delivering the annual Cardinal Dearden lecture at the Catholic University of America.

The lecture is meant to promote the teachings of the Second Vatican Council, and Cardinal Napier focused on the collegiality among bishops taught in Lumen gentium, the council's 1964 dogmatic constitution on the Church.

Cardinal Napier discovered the power of collegiality when he joined South Africa's bishops’ conference and they united the Church in opposition to the racial segregation of apartheid, then a national policy.

At their first plenary session in 1979, “I got the experience of what it means to be a bishop,” he said. South Africa's bishops were already “committed to engage in what Pope Francis would now call pastors earnestly listening to each other, but also listening to the laity.”

In the Church’s struggle against apartheid, he said the central question was, “How does the Church become involved in transforming society?”

The bishops went to work. They opened Catholic schools to students of all races – which contrasted with the government’s policy of segregation at the time.

In 1977 South Africa's bishops issued a declaration of commitment on social justice and race relations within the Church, acknowledging that “the Catholic Church in South Africa is lagging behind in witness to the Gospel in matters of social justice,” and committing the Church to practicing de-segregation and social justice.

Their challenge, as the bishops saw it, was transforming the minds of Catholics who accepted the prevailing segregation into believing that “each and every person … has equal dignity and worth.” This was done through promoting a vision of the Church that is “community serving humanity,” Cardinal Napier emphasized.

The bishops and the faithful thus worked together to overcome widespread discrimination in South Africa through “becoming a real community of brothers and sisters” in Christ.

These same principles of collegiality must be at work today in “reforming the Church, beginning with marriage and the family,” he insisted. “These are the foundation stones upon which the Church and society are built.”

Cardinal Napier referred specifically to the bishops present at the recent Synod on the Family, but also spoke more broadly of the college of bishops in his talk. The bishops must be “walking together,” he said, “in a joint effort to make the Church a change-maker in modern society.”

“I think it’s more about ourselves being one, from the bishops down,” he said of the Church, citing St. John Paul II’s 1995 encyclical on commitment to ecumenism, Ut unum sint.

If the bishops splinter into factions, he added, then the faithful “will be split along the same lines.”

Cardinal Napier noted that Pope Francis has emphasized collegiality in his work to “reform and renew the Church.”

The Pope decided from the beginning of his pontificate “that the only way to get this [reform] happening would be to involve the college of bishops, of cardinals, right from the beginning,” he said.

“Whatever influence we have on our society, we have to do it through that vision of being a community serving humanity,” Cardinal Napier concluded.

 

Full Article

IMAGE: CNS photo/William Rieter

By Jerri Donohue

NORTH OLMSTED, Ohio (CNS) -- When Father Neil Kokoothe first met Joseph D'Ambrosio on Ohio's death row in December 1998, he intended to describe the funeral of the condemned man's mother.

D'Ambrosio would not listen, however. Another inmate had told him the priest had been a lawyer before ordination. Now, D'Ambrosio pleaded for help with his case.

"It's God's providence," D'Ambrosio, a lifelong Catholic, said recently of Father Kokoothe's unexpected entrance into his life.

A three-judge panel had convicted D'Ambrosio of murder in 1989 after a trial that lasted less than three days. No forensic evidence linked him to the crime and D'Ambrosio insisted he had not killed teenager Anthony Klann.

Father Kokoothe hesitated to help.

"My ministry on death row was never about getting involved in their cases," he said. "I simply wanted to companion some men who had been sentenced to death."

He told D'Ambrosio he did not have time to read thousands of pages of transcripts and appellate work. Father Kokoothe was stunned when the convict informed him that his capital case filled a single volume.

The priest read it, spotting problems in the only witness account that placed D'Ambrosio at the crime scene. Father Kokoothe knew, for example, that it was impossible for the victim to scream for mercy with gaping stab wounds in his trachea. Not only was the priest a lawyer, but he also had worked as a registered nurse for 15 years.

Father Kokoothe visited D'Ambrosio a few weeks later. He promised to investigate -- but only if the prisoner swore he had nothing to do with the murder. Then he added another condition.

"He looked me dead in the eye and said, 'One little deceit and I'm through with you!'" D'Ambrosio recalled.

Father Kokoothe said that some people ignore his background as an attorney and a nurse. They assume he believes anyone claiming to be innocent.

"I think just the opposite is the case," he said. "I want empirical proof that this is true."

For his part, D'Ambrosio longed to clear his name.

"He knew that a new trial and new evidence would win his freedom," Father Kokoothe said in an interview for Catholic News Service.

In his ensuing research, the priest learned that Klann, the only witness in a rape trial, had been slain before he could testify. The accused rapist was the same man who fingered D'Ambrosio for Klann's murder.

Father Kokoothe also discovered that the prosecution had withheld crucial evidence from D'Ambrosio's public defender.

The priest enlisted the aid of journalists who eventually publicized D'Ambrosio's story. Still, the years rolled by. Then another death-row inmate exhausted his appeals and he asked his spiritual adviser, a minister, to help D'Ambrosio instead. The pastor contacted a prestigious law firm and it agreed to work pro bono on D'Ambrosio's case.

Meanwhile, Father Kokoothe continued to support D'Ambrosio. The men are close in age, with both in their mid-50s, but the priest developed a paternal attitude toward the prisoner. Prior to a retrial, a judge ordered that D'Ambrosio be released on house arrest. Father Kokoothe worried it would be cruel to give D'Ambrosio a taste of freedom, however limited. If the case went against the defendant, he might return to death row within months. Father Kokoothe advised him to stay in the county jail.

D'Ambrosio rejected the suggestion.

"One minute of freedom is worth it," he said. "I was living in a 6-foot-by-9-foot cell for 22 years!"

D'Ambrosio moved into a friend's apartment, leaving it only for medical appointments and meetings with his lawyers.

Then, during a pre-trial hearing, the prosecution revealed that it still had not shared all physical evidence with D'Ambrosio's defense team. A federal judge soon ordered D'Ambrosio's release, and she ruled that his conviction and sentence be expunged. He was exonerated Jan. 23, 2012.

Prosecutors appealed her decision. In 2012, the U.S. Supreme Court refused to hear the case.

David Mills, a court-appointed attorney who ultimately ensured that D'Ambrosio was released and not retried, acknowledged Father Kokoothe's pivotal role years earlier.

"He essentially started everything in terms of overturning Joe's conviction," Mills said of the priest. "By meeting with Joe and really listening, he got the ball rolling."

As a free man, D'Ambrosio no longer needed an advocate, but his life had been on hold for two decades.

By that time, Father Kokoothe was pastor of St. Clarence Parish in North Olmsted. Many parishioners had corresponded with D'Ambrosio when he was in prison; some attended his court proceedings. Nobody objected when the parish hired the self-described jack-of-all-trades as a maintenance man.

Congregations of various religious denominations as well as groups opposed to capital punishment often invited D'Ambrosio and Father Kokoothe to relate their experience. When the two finally spoke at St. Clarence, parishioners packed the church. They presented D'Ambrosio with a watch engraved with the date of the Supreme Court decision that allowed him to get on with life.

"It's one of my most cherished things," D'Ambrosio said. "I've never felt more unconditional love than I have in this parish. This is my family."

In recent years, D'Ambrosio and Father Kokoothe addressed federal public defenders in Arizona and Idaho, the National Defense Investigators Association convention in San Diego and an anti-death penalty organization in London.

In this Year of Mercy, they will make several presentations.

Although he sometimes speaks alone, D'Ambrosio said they work best as a team.

"It's a brother-type relationship," D'Ambrosio said.

An incident last year illustrated this.

"Death row is not a good experience," Father Kokoothe said. "If it were me, there would come a time when I wanted to put it behind me, totally, and just move on."

He asked D'Ambrosio when he wanted to stop speaking about his ordeal.

Almost executed for a crime he did not commit, D'Ambrosio did not need to reflect before answering.

"Not until the death penalty is done," he said.

- - -

Copyright © 2016 Catholic News Service/U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops. www.catholicnews.com. All rights reserved. Republishing or redistributing of CNS content, including by framing or similar means without prior permission, is prohibited. You may link to stories on our public site. This copy is for your personal, non-commercial use only. To request permission for republishing or redistributing of CNS content, please contact permissions at cns@catholicnews.com.

Full Article

IMAGE: CNS photo/Angelo Carconi, EPA

By Carol Glatz

VATICAN CITY (CNS) -- For a Christian, talk is cheap; the faith requires concretely doing God's will and serving the least as well as those around you, Pope Francis said at his morning Mass.

"God is concrete" and so is the Christian life, he said Feb. 23 during the Mass in the chapel of the Domus Sanctae Marthae.

Christianity isn't a religion that's all talk because "just talking leads us to vanity, to pretending to be Christian," he said.

The day's reading from the Gospel of Matthew (23:1-12) describes Jesus telling the crowds and disciples to beware of the scribes and Pharisees, who have taken on the authority to teach but do not live as good role models. "For they preach, but they do not practice," Jesus says.

This kind of hypocrisy still exists, the pope said, according to Vatican Radio.

"How many times we meet people -- including us, you know -- so often in the church (who say) 'Oh, I am very Catholic!'" But, the pope said, look at how they live their lives.

"How many parents say they are Catholic, but they never have time to talk to their own kids, to play with their own kids, to listen to their own kids. Perhaps their parents are in a retirement home, but they are always busy and they can never go visit them and they leave them abandoned," he said.

These people may justify themselves by saying, "'Well, I am very Catholic, you know. I belong to this group.' This is the religion of all talk. I say I am this, but I do what's worldly."

Talking without doing "is a deception," he said. This path "leads us to where these doctors of the law were, these clerics, who like to dress and act as if they were royalty, you know? This is not the reality of the Gospel," the pope said.

God wants people to stop doing evil and to learn to do the good, he said. "Being Christian means doing -- doing God's will."

On judgment day, he said, "what will the Lord ask us? Will he say to us: 'What have you said about me?' No! He will ask about the things we have done."

Fulfilling the deeds listed in the Gospel of Matthew's "The Judgment of Nations," such as clothing, feeding and caring for those in need, welcoming the stranger and visiting the imprisoned, "is the Christian life," he said.

The pope prayed, "May the Lord give us this wisdom to understand fully what the difference is between saying and doing and teach us the path of doing."

- - -

Copyright © 2016 Catholic News Service/U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops. www.catholicnews.com. All rights reserved. Republishing or redistributing of CNS content, including by framing or similar means without prior permission, is prohibited. You may link to stories on our public site. This copy is for your personal, non-commercial use only. To request permission for republishing or redistributing of CNS content, please contact permissions at cns@catholicnews.com.

Full Article

IMAGE: CNS photo/Marcin Bielecki, EPA

By Cindy Wooden

ROME (CNS) -- The head of the Ukrainian Catholic Church said he was consoled by Pope Francis' words of understanding and tenderness after he expressed the disappointment of Ukrainians with a joint declaration signed by the pope and the Russian Orthodox patriarch.

The pope's remarks were "truly the opening of the doors of mercy," said Archbishop Sviatoslav Shevchuk of Kiev-Halych, head of the Ukrainian Catholic Church.

Pope Francis and Russian Orthodox Patriarch Kirill of Moscow signed a joint declaration in Cuba Feb. 12 and, in an interview the next day, the archbishop said it contains unclear statements on the war in Eastern Ukraine and on the identity of the Ukrainian Catholic Church. He also said his people were deeply disappointed in the declaration's wording.

Responding Feb. 17 to a reporter's questions about the archbishop's critique, Pope Francis said everyone has a right to his or her own opinions about the declaration and the archbishop's criticisms must be read in light of the experience of Ukrainian Catholics.

But Pope Francis also spoke about how his friendship with Archbishop Shevchuk began when they were both ministering in Buenos Aires, Argentina, and how the archbishop had given him an icon of Our Lady of Tenderness, which is one of the few things he asked to have brought to the Vatican after his election in 2013.

Mentioning their friendship and the icon, the archbishop said, "he is inviting us to lower our voices. You cannot have a dialogue shouting."

In an interview with Catholic News Service in Rome Feb. 23, Archbishop Shevchuk said he was pleased that even for the pope, the declaration "is not the word of God, it is not a page of the Holy Gospel," but rather offers indications for discussion.

The archbishop said that when the pope-patriarch meeting was first announced, "my spontaneous reaction was, 'Finally,' and I was pleased that Pope Francis repeated almost the same when he embraced Patriarch Kirill" in Havana.

"I think that the very gesture is sacred -- we are supposed to meet, we are supposed to talk, but that meeting is only a tool to start true, sincere dialogue," the archbishop said.

The desire for mutual respect and closer cooperation among Catholics and Orthodox in Ukraine is not in question, he said, but the declaration's depiction of the situation in Eastern Ukraine and the terminology used to describe the Ukrainian Catholic Church are.

In encouraging an end to tensions between Orthodox and Eastern-rite Catholics, the declaration referred to the churches that are in full union with Rome as "ecclesial communities," a phrase usually used to designate communities the Catholic Church believes are lacking valid sacraments and apostolic succession. Yet, clearly, as part of the Catholic Church that does not apply to Ukrainian Catholics, he said.

The declaration's affirmation that the Ukrainian Catholic and other Eastern Catholic churches have the right "to undertake all that is necessary to meet the spiritual needs of their faithful, while seeking to live in peace with their neighbors," the archbishop said, is "a step forward."

However, the declaration's recognition that the Eastern churches have a "right to exist" makes no sense, he said, because "it's not that we need anyone's permission to exist."

"The Lord resurrected us to full life 25 years ago after the fall of the Soviet Union," he added.

Under Soviet rule, the Ukrainian Catholic Church was illegal and functioned in the underground; in ecumenical dialogues at the time the Russian Orthodox claimed the church did not exist. Once the Soviet Union dissolved and the Ukrainian Catholic Church began functioning publicly, some Orthodox claimed its very existence was an attempt to encroach on the "canonical territory" of the Orthodox.

Along with other Eastern Catholic churches, Archbishop Shevchuk said, "we are churches, 'sui iuris' churches (having their own law). We conserve the Eastern Catholic-Orthodox spiritual-liturgical tradition, but we are in full communion with the successor of Peter."

Being part of the universal Catholic Church, he said, should preserve Ukrainian and other Eastern Catholics from excessive "provincialism, very narrow nationalism, and opens us to real, open ecumenical dialogue. Being Catholic today means being ecumenical."

The other problem with the declaration, the archbishop said, is how it seems to hint that the war in Eastern Ukraine is a civil war and not one involving both Russian troops and Russian support.

The declaration invited "all sides involved in the conflict to prudence, to social solidarity and to action aimed at constructing peace." The pope and patriarch also said, "We invite our churches in Ukraine to work toward social harmony, to refrain from taking part in the confrontation and to not support any further development of the conflict."

In announcing the Cuba meeting, Russian Orthodox Metropolitan Hilarion of Volokolamsk, director of foreign relations for the Moscow Patriarchate, said the Russian Orthodox still see the Eastern Catholics as an obstacle to normalized relations. However, he said the need for joint efforts to defend the rights of persecuted Christians in the Middle East was more pressing.

In addition to calling for protection and respect for religious minorities, the declaration also urged Catholics and Russian Orthodox to work together to fight secularization, to protect the environment and to defend definitions of marriage and family life.

"It is good to be united because of so many common challenges in today's world," Archbishop Shevchuk said, "but I think that real ecumenism is the search for unity in the name of one God, not one enemy."

The permanent synod of the Ukrainian Catholic Church was to meet in Rome beginning Feb. 27 and its members hoped to have a meeting with Pope Francis, the archbishop said.

- - -

Copyright © 2016 Catholic News Service/U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops. www.catholicnews.com. All rights reserved. Republishing or redistributing of CNS content, including by framing or similar means without prior permission, is prohibited. You may link to stories on our public site. This copy is for your personal, non-commercial use only. To request permission for republishing or redistributing of CNS content, please contact permissions at cns@catholicnews.com.

Full Article

Full Article

Full Article

Full Article

Full Article

Full Article