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Front Royal, Va., May 17, 2017 / 03:01 pm (CNA/EWTN News).- With God’s grace, you can accomplish great things, Cardinal Gerhard Mueller challenged young Catholics at Christendom College last weekend at their 2017 commencement ceremony.

“The summary of all natural and Christian anthropology is to say, ‘Dare to be great in the grace of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, Amen’,” Cardinal Mueller, prefect of the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith, told undergraduate students of Christendom College in Front Royal, Va. on May 13, the feast of Our Lady of Fatima.

Cardinal Mueller, the college’s 2017 commencement speaker, was the celebrant and homilist at the baccalaureate Mass on May 12 and received an honorary doctorate from the college before his commencement address. He is also the president of the Pontifical Commission “Ecclesia Dei,” appointed to that post and as prefect of the CDF by Pope Benedict XVI.

“Gerhard Cardinal Mueller has been a strong, consistent voice in defense of the Church’s perennial teaching in the midst of so much confusion in our modern world,” the college’s president Dr. Timothy O'Donnell stated before the prelate’s appearance.

The cardinal focused his May 13 address on “Christian anthropology,” and exhorted the graduates “to be salt and light in the midst of the contemporary world.”

The Christian, he insisted, can only bring about the Kingdom of God on earth by performing the corporal and spiritual works of mercy through God’s grace, not solely through his own merits.

“No, the Kingdom of God is grace, and grace brings the Holy Spirit in the world, a new spirit, the spirit of charity that sanctifies and assists, the spirit of understanding, of love, that changes our hearts and introduces in all human relations a movement of freedom,” he explained.

This movement of the Holy Spirit, he continued, includes the theological virtues of faith, hope, and charity, as well as the cardinal virtues of prudence, justice, fortitude, and temperance, and “other gifts and charisms.”

Through these virtues and gifts, men can be “collaborators with God in the bringing about of His Kingdom,” he said, where “the Church, with the arrival of the Messiah, carries out her mission in the Holy Spirit to bring glad tidings to the poor, to proclaim liberty to captives, and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free and to proclaim a year acceptable to the Lord.”

He warned against seeing Christianity as a “bourgeois” practice of “interiority, only love of neighbor, and individual philanthropy” where salvation is reduced “to the world alone in the sense of social and purely humanitarian NGOs.”

However, he also taught against seeing God’s kingdom “only as above and outside of the world.”

Rather, he continued, “reverence toward God and the responsibility for the world are inseparably connected in Christ, Who did not come into this world to free us from the world, but to lead men and the world to their authentic destiny in the salvific plan of God.”

This does not mean the rejection of non-Christians who perform “good works,” he insisted, as “it would appear wrong to divide in an exaggerated manner Christianity from the rest of humanity.”

“Whomever does the good, even if they do not yet recognize God explicitly, is the mediator of the goodness of God,” he said. “For us grace and nature are belonging together, and are not in a contradiction. Grace and nature, faith and reason, must be distinct (but) not separate.”

Cardinal Mueller also exhorted those in attendance to be on guard against totalitarian ideologies that set themselves up against the vision of God and the Church.

Many ideologies of the 20th century were totalitarian in that they sought to establish their own vision of creation, a “humanism without or humanism against God,” he said.

Forms of totalitarianism exist today, he explained, like “the concept of designing one’s baby,” and the promotion of “euthanasia for those who are too tired to live, or who have become un-useful up to the sociological laboratories that want to make humanity happy with their political and economic theories, but in reality only enslave to their fantasy for omnipotence.”

Christians must fight injustices in the world in the name of human dignity, he insisted.

“Nobody may divert their gaze while the number of souls who go hungry grow, are deprived of their rights and recused to slavery, while the trauma of the refugees arriving on the European shores and the American border increase, and while being in a unified world, the risks and the challenges of globalizations are ever present,” he said.

“At the foundation of this dignity,” he added, “are the rights to lodging, food, and clothing, as well as the right to earn a living for himself and for the well-being of his family.”

The cardinal also warned against what Pope Francis has called the “ideological colonization” of the developing world, where developed countries try to force programs like abortion, birth control, sterilizations, and the approval of same-sex marriage onto developing countries.

Cardinal Mueller called this “an aggressive importation of a deformed image of the human person of the so-called ‘society of well-being’.”

These “developing cultures” cannot be ignored or trampled underfoot, he said, as “variety enriches,” which is also “the message of Pentecost when all peoples in diverse languages announce together the great works of God in the language of love.”

Christians, he insisted, must not only confess God with words, but work to do His will “by holding faithful to the Gospel and benefitting from its resources.”

“Not everyone who cries or confesses ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter the Kingdom of Heaven, but those who do the Father’s will by taking a strong grip on the work at hand,” he continued. “Now the Father wills that in all men we recognize Christ our brother and love Him effectively in word and in deed.”

“By thus giving witness to the truth, we will share with others the mystery of the Heavenly Father’s love,” he concluded.

“As a consequence, men throughout the world will be aroused to a lively hope, the gift of the Holy Spirit, that some day at the last they will be caught up in peace and utter happiness in that fatherland radiant with the glory of the Lord.”

 

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Mexico City, Mexico, May 17, 2017 / 04:12 pm (CNA/EWTN News).- The Mexico archdiocese's newspaper Desde la Fe wrote an editorial decrying the “disastrous situation in Mexico” as the country ranks number two in a report on the world's most violent nations.

In its recent analysis, the International Institute for Strategic Studies ranked Mexico second on a list of the incidence of violent homicides.

The institute said that in 2016 Mexico was one place above Iraq and one place below Syria, with 26,000 deaths linked to cases of violence.

The Catholic weekly warned that “the collateral consequences” of the violence the country is going through “can already be seen in the victims of crimes, who have suffered serious violations of their human rights or injuries to their physical integrity and heritage.”

“Mexico began to create lost generations, the result of an undeclared war; with thousands as victims, whose situation in the justice system is far from having a satisfactory solution,” the editorial wrote.

Desde la Fe also emphasized the “high incidence of disappearances in the country,” citing the National Registry of Data on Lost or Missing Persons which stated that as of October 2016 there were approximately 30,000 missing persons. The Mexican states recording the highest percentage of disappearances are Tamaulipas, México, Jalisco and Sinaloa.

“Our history is at a very painful turning point,” Desde la Fe wrote.

It noted that the Mexican Bishops' Conference said that victims and persons gone missing by violence “are a serious problem that neither the authorities, the Church, nor civil society can ignore” and they need “a public pronouncement go along with their indignation.”

The victims and missing persons, the editorial added, “also expect to know the truth and have effective reparation of the harm done, things that don't have clarity or consistency in the Mexican State, which seems rather broken in the face of fear and terror.”

Desde la Fe recalled the study “We are all missing the disappeared” – published by the Mexican Bishops' Conference and the Mexican Institute on Christian Social Doctrine earlier this month – which described some of the measures taken by the Church in the country to assist victims of violence.

The Archdiocese of Mexico City pointed out that “what the study demonstrates is worrisome since it reveals that in Mexico we live in a state of disaster.”

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Baltimore, Md., May 17, 2017 / 04:32 pm (CNA/EWTN News).- No one knows who killed Sister Catherine Ann Cesnik.

A young nun who was on a year’s leave of absence, Sister Cathy, as friends called her, was murdered sometime while running an errand on the evening of November 7, 1969. She was 26 years-old.  

Her body was found in a dump two months later, though authorities have never been able to identify her killer.

This summer, a Netflix documentary series called “The Keepers” is reopening the case, talking to witnesses and examining the evidence before the case goes cold forever.

The circumstances surrounding the death of Sr. Cathy are precarious.

A member of the School Sisters of Notre Dame since the age of 18, Sr. Cathy and her friend Sister Helen Russell Phillips both took a leave of absence in 1969 and moved out of the convent into an apartment together.

A thoughtful and well-liked teacher, Sr. Cathy had taught English at Archbishop Seton Keough Catholic High School for several years before transferring to Western Public High School in 1969.

The chaplain of Keough at the time, Fr. A. Joseph Maskell, was later accused by former students of numerous counts of rape and sexual abuse during his time at the school, which first came to light through accusations made in the early 1990s. Fr. Maskell was subsequently removed from ministry, and fled the United States in 1994. He was never charged with a crime before his death in 2001.

Fr. Maskell has been a longtime suspect in Sr. Cathy’s death. Former students of Sr. Cathy believed she knew about the abuses of the priest, as many of the young women felt comfortable confiding in her. Many believe that Fr. Maskell, who was also the chaplain of the Baltimore police at the time, murdered Sr. Cathy to keep her quiet and used his connections to cover up his crimes.

The Archdiocese of Baltimore has always denied claims of a widespread conspiracy to cover up Sr. Cathy’s death and to hide the crimes of Fr. Maskell, and it maintains that the archdiocese had no prior knowledge of the sexual abuse of Fr. Maskell or his connection to Sr. Cathy until the ‘90s, when several victims came forward. There is no hard evidence to suggest that the archdiocese was involved in a cover-up of the case.

“Suggestions of a cover-up by the Archdiocese are speculative and false,” the archdiocese said in a recent statement outlining talking points before the release of the Netflix series.

“The Baltimore Sun has retracted its ‘errors’ for reporting that certain police supervisors suggested Archdiocesan interference in 1969-70 since the people cited had actually retired before (sometimes years before) the relevant time-frame,” the archdiocese said.

“The Sun also noted the numerous police officials who stated they knew of no such interference. There is no suggestion that the Archdiocese interfered in any way when the subsequent investigations were occurring in the 1990s. The Archdiocese reported the initial sexual abuse allegation to the authorities in 1993, removed Maskell from ministry and held a public meeting in 1994, and has been transparent with an Independent Review Board since that time.”

Baltimore City police began working the case, focusing on suspects in the Catholic Church. The Baltimore County police took over the case when Sr. Cathy’s body was found two months after her disappearance.

According to reports, she was found with trauma to the head, possibly from a hammer. The discovery of her body barely made the news - the local papers were on strike at the time.  

Because the alleged abuse of Fr. Maskell had not been reported to the archdiocese or the authorities in 1970, when Sr. Cathy’s body was found, Fr. Maskell was not originally investigated as a suspect in the case.

Earlier this month, local media reported that the Baltimore County police exhumed Fr. Maskell’s body to conduct DNA testing, ahead of the Netflix series that closely links him to Sr. Cathy’s murder.

There were few others investigated as possible suspects when the case opened in 1969.

On the night of Nov. 7, 1969, when Sr. Cathy disappeared, she had driven to Catonsville to cash a check, and then went to a bakery in the Edmondson Village Shopping Center. When she didn’t return after what was supposed to be a brief errand, concerned roommate Sr. Helen Phillips contacted Fr. Gerard Koob, a close friend and alleged romantic interest of Sr. Cathy.

Fr. Koob and a friend drove to the women’s apartment, and after talking to Phillips and hearing nothing from Sr. Cathy, they contacted the authorities to report her as a missing person.

Koob, now a Methodist minister, was thoroughly questioned by authorities at the time. His story that he had been at the movies with a friend that evening before learning of Sr. Cathy’s disappearance has held, and he has passed two lie detector tests regarding his whereabouts that night.

Lacking leads and new evidence, the case went cold around 1975, but was picked up again in 1992, after a woman named Jean Wehner came forward and reported that she had been abused at the hands of Fr. Maskell.

The archdiocese removed Fr. Maskell from ministry and sent him away for counseling and evaluation. Having no hard evidence against him, he returned to ministry in 1994.

At that time, Wehner revealed to police that Fr. Maskell had taken her to see Sr. Cathy’s body to “show her what happened to people who crossed him,” according to the Washington Post, and several other abuse victims came forward to accuse the priest.

The Baltimore County police then questioned Fr. Maskell about the case, but he denied both the allegations of murder and of sexual abuse. He was permanently removed from ministry by the archdiocese in 1994, and he fled to Ireland in 1996 without the knowledge of the archdiocese.

The archdiocese has offered to each victim an apology and an opportunity to meet with the archbishop, and has offered to pay for counseling assistance for anyone who may have been abused by Fr. Maskell. Some victims have sought direct financial assistance through a voluntary, pastoral mediation program established by the archdiocese. To date, the archdiocese has provided over $97,000 in counseling assistance and over $472,000 in direct financial assistance to those who may have been abused by the priest.

“It became a healing process for a number of them,” Sheldon Jacobs, an attorney for the victims, said of the settlements reached in 2016.

“Quite a few of them thought it was a cathartic experience,” he told The Washington Post.

The archdiocese said that it was willing to provide comment and to answer questions for the producers of the new Netflix series about the case.

“Unfortunately, the producers asked very few questions of the Archdiocese before releasing the series and did not respond to the Archdiocese’s request to receive an advanced copy of the series. Advanced copies were provided to media outlets,” the archdiocese notes on its website.

Ahead of the series, the Archdiocese of Baltimore has published answers to several frequently asked questions regarding the case of Sr. Cathy, and has reiterated the importance of its “zero tolerance policy” and sexual abuse screening and prevention training for its volunteers and employees.

The seven-part Netflix series “The Keepers,” directed by Ryan White, is set to debut on May 19.

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IMAGE: CNS photo/Christina Lee Knauss, The Catholic Miscellany

By Christina Lee Knauss

WALHALLA, S.C. (CNS) -- For a century, a simple but serenely beautiful wooden building tucked away in the picturesque mountain town of Walhalla has been the spiritual home for Catholics.

St. Francis of Assisi Mission was built by parishioners who donated their time, money, hours of sweat and labor, and even the wood, so they could have their own church. Today, the mission is home to a small but strong congregation who love and care for each other and treasure the little building passed down to them by that early group of dedicated people.

On May 13, current and former members packed the small church nearly to overflowing for a 100th anniversary celebration. Bishop Robert E. Guglielmone of Charleston celebrated Mass followed by a joyful reception in the parish hall.

The bishop congratulated the members of St. Francis on their close-knit community.

"People come to an understanding of who Jesus is through seeing others who live a Christian life well-lived, and for 100 years people here at St. Francis have been doing precisely that," he said.

Catholics were few and far-flung in this corner of the state in the early 19th century. Their numbers increased when 600 Irish Catholics moved to the area to work on the proposed Blue Ridge Railroad in the 1850s. The project was an ill-fated attempt to connect South Carolina with Tennessee for trade, and called for tunnels to go through several mountains in the area, including Stumphouse Mountain near Walhalla.

The Irish worked on what became known as the Stumphouse Tunnel, and a small town called Tunnel Hill sprang up near the construction site. It had its own church, St. Patrick, which was served by itinerant priests, and for a while had the largest Catholic congregation in the northwest part of the state, according to a published history.

Funding for the railroad dried up and the tunnel was abandoned. The town of Tunnel Hill slowly died away and with it St. Patrick Church, which was partially destroyed by fire, then damaged by storms. It is said that the wood of the church was scavenged for firewood by homeless Civil War deserters. All that remains of the church and the town is a cemetery northwest of Walhalla.

Many of the descendants of those Irish workers remained in Walhalla and surrounding areas of Oconee County and still needed a place to worship. In 1916, construction began on the church building on East Mauldin Street, on land purchased from Rosa Fahnstock by Bishop Henry P. Northrop. Parishioners used lumber from their farms for the building. It was completed in 1916 and officially dedicated as a mission on May 13, 1917, by Bishop William T. Russell.

St. Francis was originally a mission of St. Joseph Church in Anderson, then St. Andrew Church in Clemson, and now is connected to St. Paul the Apostle in Seneca. Diocesan priests served there from 1917 through 1940, and then Paulist priests took the helm from 1940 through 2006. Priests from the diocese returned to the mission in 2006. The current pastor is Father William Hearne.

When St. Francis of Assisi was dedicated, there were only 12 Catholic families. By 1940, those numbers had grown to 128 Catholics in Oconee and Pickens counties, including 52 students at what was then Clemson College. Currently, the mission serves about 125 households in a region where the number of faithful continues to grow.

At 93, Jenny Grobusky is the oldest member of St. Francis. She is a Walhalla native and became Catholic when she married. She raised her five children at St. Francis of Assisi and has never considered going anywhere else.

"The very real closeness we have here is what makes it special," she told The Catholic Miscellany, Charleston's diocesan newspaper. "You know everybody and everyone cares for each other."

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Knauss is a reporter at The Catholic Miscellany, newspaper of the Diocese of Charleston.

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Copyright © 2017 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.

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IMAGE: CNS photo/Diane Clay, Sooner Catholic

By Diane Clay

OKARCHE, Okla. (CNS) -- Early on the morning of May 10, the remains of Father Stanley F. Rother were exhumed from Holy Trinity Cemetery in Okarche and transported to Oklahoma City.

As required by the Catholic Church for the beatification process, his remains were examined by medical professionals and re-interred in the chapel at Resurrection Cemetery in northwest Oklahoma City.

In March, the Archdiocese of Oklahoma City announced that Father Rother, one its native sons who worked in Guatemala and was brutally murdered there in 1981, will be beatified Sept. 23 in a ceremony in downtown Oklahoma City.

Cardinal Angelo Amato, prefect of the Vatican Congregation for Saints' Causes, will celebrate the beatification Mass along with Archbishop Paul S. Coakley of Oklahoma City. Thousands of cardinals, bishops, priests, deacons and other Catholics from across the United States are expected to attend.

Pope Francis recognized Father Rother's martyrdom last December, making him the first martyr born in the United States and clearing the way for his beatification.

The Archdiocese of Oklahoma City sent Father Rother, who grew up on a family farm in Okarche, to its mission in Santiago Atitlan, Guatemala, in 1968. He served a poor and indigenous community in the area, helping build a small hospital, a school and its first Catholic radio station. But he also helped the agricultural community with its crops and to build an irrigation system.

Many Guatemalans in his community were kidnapped, disappeared or murdered as the government accused them of sympathizing with rebels during the decades-long conflict that plagued the Central American nation from the 1960s until the late 1990s.

By early 1981, Father Rother had been placed on a hit list along with several members of his parish staff and catechists for their continued aid, education and preaching of the Gospel to the poor population of Tz'utujil Indians.

Father Stanley, known as Father Francisco because his name was hard for the locals to pronounce, was 46 when a group of men entered the rectory and fatally shot him. His assailants were never identified but were believed to be government soldiers.

The Archdiocese of Oklahoma City, then headed by Archbishop Eusebius J. Beltran, opened the priest's sainthood cause in 2007. At the request of his parishioners in Guatemala, Father Rother's heart is enshrined inside the Guatemalan church.

"The witness of Father Rother's life and death has been a source of encouragement and inspiration to me as a seminarian, priest and now as a bishop. I consider it a great gift to be entrusted with overseeing the continuation of his cause for beatification and canonization begun by Archbishop Beltran," Archbishop Coakley said in a statement.

"His beatification is an unexpected blessing for Oklahoma and for the United States as we celebrate this ordinary man from humble beginnings who answered the call to serve an extraordinary life," he said. "His witness will continue to inspire us for generations."

Before the exhumation of Father Rother's remains in Okarche, his family led a procession to the gravesite and participated in a prayer.

Once the vault was removed from the gravesite, it was transported to Oklahoma City where his remains were removed, examined and verified. He was placed in a new casket with golden vestments alongside a document signed by those in attendance. A red ribbon was wrapped around the casket and sealed with a wax seal of the Archdiocese of Oklahoma City.

Archbishops Coakley and Beltran led the priests in the singing of "Salve Regina," a Gregorian chant hymn, before the casket was lowered into a crypt at Resurrection Cemetery.

A closing prayer service wrapped up the solemn process.

"It was a holy day. Father Rother's presence was felt by many, and we are blessed as the Catholic Church in Oklahoma to present Father Rother's life to the world," Archbishop Coakley said.

A temporary sign marks the gravesite at Holy Trinity Cemetery in Okarche where the original vault and casket were reburied. A permanent memorial marker will be placed. His remains will stay in the chapel at Resurrection Cemetery until his shrine is completed.

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Clay is editor of the Sooner Catholic, newspaper of the Archdiocese of Oklahoma City.

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Copyright © 2017 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.

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