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Washington D.C., Feb 21, 2017 / 08:01 pm (CNA/EWTN News).- Anti-Semitic incidents in the United States must be prosecuted and condemned by the government to curb their rise, a religious freedom expert insists.

Regarding recent bomb threats made to Jewish community centers and the desecration of a Jewish cemetery in Missouri, there must be “very vigilant enforcement of the law,” said Prof. Daniel Mark of Villanova University, who serves on the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom.

“It’s kind of a shame,” he told CNA, that “a lot of these crimes go unpunished.” They must be recognized for what they are and condemned, he added. “If you’re not willing to recognize what it is and call the thing by its name, you’re going to have a hard time addressing it.”

Jewish leaders have been alarmed at the rise in anti-Semitic incidents in Europe in recent years, from the desecration of synagogues to attacks on Jews wearing religious symbols in public to violent attacks like in 2015, where a gunman who pledged allegiance to ISIS took hostages at a Paris kosher market and killed four.

The incidents have grown so numerous and so serious that questions have been raised about the future of Jewish communities in Europe.

However, the fervor of antisemitism in the U.S. has risen as well, religious freedom advocates have warned.

The Anti-Defamation League reported a sharp rise in violent antisemitic assaults in 2015, and leaders noted a distressing surge in online harassment of Jewish reporters during the 2016 presidential election and the proliferation of antisemitic conspiracy theories on the internet.

Shortly after Trump’s election to the presidency in November, white nationalist leaders gathered at the Ronald Reagan Building in Washington, D.C. Richard Spencer said “Hail Trump, hail our people, hail victory!” and was met with fascist salutes.

The U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum responded that they were “deeply alarmed” at the gathering and its antisemitic rhetoric.

In recent weeks, there have reportedly been dozens of bomb threats made against Jewish community centers in the U.S. A Jewish cemetery in Missouri was vandalized recently and as many as 200 headstones were reportedly damaged.

President Trump must speak out forcefully against such behavior but he has not, advocates warn, and he has even partly enabled such behavior amongst many of his far-right supporters.

“I think in some cases anti-Semites may feel emboldened by the rise of Trump,” Mark noted of the election year incidents.

“Now that’s not to say that Trump himself is not an antisemite in the way they are, but I think again, it is fair to say that Trump probably could have done more during the campaign to make it clear to his supporters that these kinds of attitudes and this kind of behavior is not tolerable, it will not be tolerated.”

Such behavior must be condemned, and Trump did not speak forcefully enough against it during the campaign, Mark insisted.

“Instead it seems like he chose the path of saying just little enough that those people could tell themselves that secretly, he’s on board with them and their bad motives, which I don’t believe he is.”

President Trump denounced antisemitism on Tuesday as he spoke at the newly-opened National Museum of African-American History and Culture in Washington, D.C.

“This tour was a meaningful reminder of why we have to fight bigotry, intolerance and hatred in all of its very ugly forms,” he said. “The anti-Semitic threats targeting our Jewish community and community centers are horrible and are a painful and a very sad reminder of the work that still must be done to root out hate and prejudice and evil.”

However, his statement came after weeks of statements – or omissions – that drew more concerns about his administration’s response to anti-Semitism.

In his Jan. 27 remarks on International Holocaust Remembrance Day, President Donald Trump left out any specific mention of the Jewish people, a mention made by the White House in past years.  

For instance, President Obama in 2015 said that “the American people pay tribute to the six million Jews and millions of others murdered by the Nazi regime.”

In 2016, in his remarks at the Righteous Among Nations Awards Dinner at the Israeli Embassy in Washington, D.C., President Obama insisted that “we must confront the reality that around the world, anti-Semitism is on the rise” including in the United States.

Then last week at a Nov. 16 press conference, Trump was asked by reporter Jake Turx, writing for the Jewish magazine “Ami,” about the rise in antisemitic incidents.

While Turx noted there were no accusations of antisemitism leveled against Trump by members of his community, he added that questions do exist of how the Trump administration would respond to the other anti-Semitic incidents nationwide.

As Turx cited reports of bomb threats made against Jewish community centers, Trump interrupted him and scolded him for not asking a simpler question, calling it “not a fair question.” He asked Turx to sit down and told him “I understood the rest of your question.”

“I am the least antisemitic person that you’ve ever seen in your entire life,” Trump began, calling himself also the “least racist person.” When Turx interrupted to follow up his question, Trump ordered him to “quiet” and said he hated both the “charge” of antisemitism leveled against him and Turx’s “question.”

The day before, at a Feb. 15 joint press conference with Israeli Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu, Trump was asked by a reporter about the rise in antisemitic incidents:

“And I wonder what you say to those among the Jewish community in the States, and in Israel, and maybe around the world who believe and feel that your administration is playing with xenophobia and maybe racist tones?”

President Trump responded first by pointing out his Electoral College victory and the “tremendous enthusiasm” for his administration in the country. He then promised to “stop crime in this country” and would work “to stop long-simmering racism” and noted that he had “so many (Jewish) friends” and family.

The advocacy group Human Rights First criticized Trump’s answer, calling it “inappropriate” and saying it “widely missed the mark.”

“The president’s response today once again highlights a deeply concerning trend toward accommodating antisemitic voices and failing to clearly and unequivocally denounce hate,” Susan Corke of Human Rights First stated.

“His inappropriate response is all the more troubling given his campaign’s association with antisemitic tropes, his administration’s embrace of individuals with deep ties to anti-Semitism, and his decision not to include any reference to the Jewish people in his statement on International Holocaust Remembrance Day.”

On Tuesday, however, Human Rights First commended Trump for finally issuing strong statements against antisemitism, saying they were “necessary and overdue.”

“These declarations, while welcome, are a departure from those made by the president during his campaign and post-inauguration, that animated those with antisemitic and other racist views into reprehensible acts of hatred,” the group continued.

Words must be accompanied by action, they added, like “by improving data collection and providing additional resources to protect communities.”

“A national leader failing to clearly denounce harmful speech can serve to embolden extremist voices and serve as a legitimation of violence,” they stated. “President Trump should make clear immediately that he condemns all forms of antisemitism and intolerance, and that he will do everything in his power to support investigations and prosecutions of hate crimes.”

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Paris, France, Feb 21, 2017 / 02:36 pm (CNA/EWTN News).- A French diocese announced that Dominican Sister Marie Bernardette, the oldest sister in her order, passed away last week at 110 years of age.

The religious sister died Feb. 13, according to the Diocese of Aire-et-Dax, France.

Funeral rites for the beloved sister were held in the monastery chapel in the town of Dax where she lived. Sister Marie Bernardette had turned 110 on January 5. She would have been a religious sister for 90 years on April 18.

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The religious sister had spent 44 years at the Dax convent, near Bayonne. She lived through two world wars and was able to see 10 popes.

Sister Marie Bernardette was born Jan. 5, 1907 in Orsanco, a small village in French Basque Country. Her parents named her “Gracious,” and she was one of 12 children. Three of her sisters would also go on to become religious sisters.

Last year, the French Catholic newspaper La Croix featured the sister in an article. In that piece, Prioress Sister Véronique explained that age has changed Sister Marie-Bernadette's tasks: “When she could no longer do house work, she made rosaries. And since she can't make them anymore, she prays (the rosary) all day” in French, Latin and Basque.

“She prays a lot for the pope, for vocations and for our order,” the prioress said.

At the Dax monastery, the Dominican sisters lead a life of prayer, contemplation and also do sewing and baking to support themselves.

In 2016, the Dominicans – whose formal name is the Order of Preachers – marked the 800th anniversary of their founding by Saint Dominic.

This order has produced many blesseds and saints, including Saint Rose of Lima, Saint Martin de Porres, Saint John Macias, Saint Vincent Ferrer, Pope Saint Pius V, and Saint Thomas Aquinas, a Doctor of the Church.

 

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Washington D.C., Feb 21, 2017 / 03:11 pm (CNA/EWTN News).- People with severe mental illness are much more likely to be incarcerated than treated for their disorders, advocates said at a recent panel, and changes need to be made in order to break the vicious cycle of prison and homelessness.

“We don’t have a mental health professional in half the counties in America. We need to do something about that,” Doris A. Fuller of the Treatment Advocacy Center said at a panel in Washington, D.C. earlier this month.

Almost 400,000 inmates in the U.S. prison system are estimated to be mentally ill. For many with severe mental problems like schizophrenia or bipolar disorder, their untreated illness may have played a primary role in landing them in prison.

“The going in and out of jail is a challenge. And many of the times it is because of the mental illness,” said Karen Ostlie, director of behavioral health services for Catholic Charities of the Archdiocese of Washington, D.C.

“So that’s the same as across the country, is you get a lot of people that are incarcerated because of their mental illness,” she told CNA, and it might be for something small like “trespassing if they’re homeless and they’re trying to find a warm place to sleep at night.”

The mentally ill are 10 times more likely to be incarcerated than hospitalized.

And if they are released from the criminal justice system back into society, without receiving the proper treatment, they may very soon end up back in jail.

In the span of five years in Miami-Dade County in Florida, 97 people – primarily homeless men and people with schizophrenia – were arrested a total of 2,200 times, said Judge Steve Leifman of the Miami-Dade County Court Criminal Division.

The panel discussion, hosted by the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, D.C., discussed the criminal justice system and the U.S. mental health crisis. Participants explored the scope of the problem after the release of a new report “Emptying the ‘New Asylums’” on reducing the number of inmates waiting in prison to be treated at a state hospital.

“We have a population of inmates behind bars in America today with mental illness that’s about the size of the city of Oakland, California,” Fuller stated, noting that an average of 5,000 people with “serious mental illness” are booked in jails per day.

They are arrested for a number of crimes ranging from the small, like trespassing or public urination, to violent felonies. Many crimes among this population are the result of someone’s untreated mental illness, such as schizophrenia or bipolar disorder, panel members argued.

The mentally ill are 10 times more likely to be incarcerated than hospitalized, according to the Treatment Advocacy Center. An estimated 40 percent of those with severe mental illness are incarcerated at some point in their lives.

A shortage of mental hospitals

Some 90,000 people in prison have been judged “incompetent to stand trial.” In all but three states, they must then be treated back to a competent state. Usually they are sent to state mental hospitals for this, yet there are far too few beds available for them there.

In the first half of the 20th century, the U.S. housed far more people in mental hospitals, but starting in the 1950s, a push to “deinstitutionalize” the system – as well as federal cases brought against hospitals for horrific abuses there – led to budget cuts and the closing of hospitals rather than states working to reform them, Leifman said.

Thus, state hospital beds for the severely mentally ill fell dramatically from 337 per 100,000 persons in 1955 to only 11.7 per 100,000 in 2016.

As a result, severely mentally ill persons are “languishing” in jail and even dying there, advocates warn. “Incarcerating pre-trial and convicted criminal offenders with serious mental illness is so common today that jails and prisons are routinely called the ‘new asylums.’ They are anything but protective,” said the report “Emptying the New Asylums” by the Treatment Advocacy Center.

The prison system does nothing to help an existing case of mental illness, and all too often exacerbates it. Studies have shown the deleterious effects of prolonged solitary confinement on someone’s mental condition, and for those with serious mental illness, a prolonged stay in prison can cause crippling damage to their health.

“If you want to really improve your public safety, improve the community mental health system.”

There may be no immediate option for people in this situation, said Kianna Richardson, a correctional support specialist with Catholic Charities of the Archdiocese of Washington, D.C. The jail or prison cannot release someone who is not competent to stand trial onto the streets without treatment.

“It would be kind of difficult just to work with them, because they may refuse services, and in turn, they may go through the same cycle and commit another crime,” she told CNA.

One way to help seriously ill inmates get the treatment they need more quickly would be to make “small changes” to the waiting system at state hospitals, said participants at the AEI panel.

The Treatment Advocacy Center contracted with the University of North Carolina and North Carolina State University to gather and analyze data from five state hospitals. Their findings led them to believe that changes could benefit the system.

In Florida, for instance, where 120 inmates per month will need to be treated for illnesses before they stand trial, “if you divert two of them, the average bed wait drops from 12 days to 3 days,” Doris A. Fuller noted. In Wisconsin, if eight beds were added to the state hospitals, the average waits for a bed would fall from two months to two weeks.

The importance of post-jail treatment

However, even after mentally ill inmates are released from jails and state hospitals, if they are not properly treated in their communities, they are at high risk of recidivism.

“Putting someone in jail with mental illness for even a few days and then releasing them – which everyone gets released – is not an improvement of public safety,” Leifman insisted at the panel. “Most of them have serious trauma issues, and jail re-traumatizes people.”

“If you want to really improve your public safety, improve the community mental health system,” he added.

Matthew D. Chase of the National Association of Counties pointed to the example of Leon County, Florida, which established a system where non-profits met officials at the jail at midnight to take in homeless individuals and inmates with serious mental issues.

They were sent to various groups who worked with mental health, domestic violence and substance abuse cases, among others, he said, where previously these people would have gone straight onto the street.

Other groups like Catholic Charities of the Archdiocese of Washington, D.C. are actively ministering to this population, providing case management and long-term psychiatric treatment for inmates and those who have been released from the justice system.

Kianna Richardson, a correctional support specialist with Catholic Charities of the Archdiocese of Washington, D.C., sees clients with arrest records, most of whom are “non-violent offenders.”

She provides 60-day case management for those “with severe and persistent mental health diagnoses who are returning from Charles County detention center back to the community.” She insisted that “it’s crucial for them” to receive treatment.

“Hopefully that will help them avoid being incarcerated in the future,” she said, and “reduce their recidivism rate”

Housing and employment are the biggest challenges for this population, she insisted. If they have untreated mental health problems and an arrest record, they have a much lower chance of getting a job and holding it down. If they have no job, they can’t pay for a place to live.

Also, in the county where she works – Charles County, Md. – the temporary shelter stays open only during the winter months, meaning that the homeless may have no options from April through September.

Washington, D.C. is one of the highest cost-of-living metropolitan areas in the U.S., and this poses a unique challenge to the city’s homeless population, said Karen Ostlie of Catholic Charities, D.C., who has worked in mental health in the district for 20 years.

“There’s a lack of affordable housing,” she said. “That can be very difficult, when somebody doesn’t have a stable place to live, to stabilize that person, for them to follow through with their mental health treatment.”

Catholic Charities provides psychiatric treatment, and the ACT (Assertive Community Treatment) team “works with about 120 of our consumers,” Ostlie explained, including “some of the most disengaged” and “seriously ill consumers.”

They also work with other clients who had long-term hospitalizations at St. Elizabeth’s, a psychiatric facility in Southeast D.C.

The ACT team will find and meet the homeless where they are, seeking to engage them in treatment, she said. But there are challenges – even if they receive prescription medication upon being discharged from mental hospitals, if they have no stable home, it is harder for them to keep the medication and take it as ordered.

The goal is to get the patients to engage in treatment with a psychiatrist, Ostlie said. They also work to get benefits for the patients and to help them apply for the appropriate housing, such as a single occupancy room or a group home.

“With some of our most seriously ill consumers, part of the difficulty with finding housing, other than the cost of apartments, is that they can’t manage in a shared group home situation, or their behaviors are so challenging that the folks that run the group homes won’t accept them or they leave or they don’t want to deal with the rules.”

Drug abuse is another significant challenge among this population, she said. Not only can it make mental illness worse, but even if patients go through treatment for it, they can easily fall back into addiction by returning to their former place on the streets.  

“The key is to change the way we think about these things,” Leifman said at the panel, insisting that there must be a greater national focus on improving mental health in communities rather than just incarcerating the perpetrators of crimes. “So much of our money is now going into correctional cost.”

“There is no other illness in this world that is permissible to send people out into homelessness in the middle of the night,” he said, but when it comes to mental illness, “people don’t bat an eye.”

 

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Vatican City, Feb 21, 2017 / 03:24 pm (CNA/EWTN News).- The Vatican and the Jewish community in Rome are marking a new step in relations between the two religions by rolling out the first-ever joint exhibition focused entirely on the Menorah – an ancient symbol representing their shared roots.

“The relation between the Catholic Church and the Jewish community is not extrinsic, but is intrinsic,” Cardinal Kurt Koch, President of the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity, told CNA at the Feb. 20 presentation of the exhibit, quoting St. John Paul II.

“That means we must know the Jewish roots of Christianity and we cannot be Christian without knowledge of the religion of the Jews because the Jews are the mother of Christianity,” he said, adding that in this sense, “it’s very important to know the roots, the family roots, of Christianity.”

Since the Menorah such an important symbol for the Jewish people, to have a joint-exhibit on it “is a very important thing and I think it will be a beautiful opportunity to deepen knowledge about the other religion; about the Jewish tradition, but also the Jewish roots in the Christian world.”

A Menorah is a seven-lamp candelabra made from pure gold and was used by Moses in the desert. According to the Book of Exodus, God asked Moses to create the candelabra and put into the temple in Jerusalem to mark it as a sacred space. The Menorah is still depicted in modern Jewish temples, and a nine-lamp version is lit during the celebration of the Jewish holiday of Hanukkah.

The Menorah is often used in Christian artwork, particularly paintings depicting scenes from the life of Jesus, such as his preaching in the temple Jerusalem.

Riccardo Di Segni, Chief Rabbi of Rome, told CNA Feb. 20 that the exhibit is “a small but important example” of how Catholics and Jews can “work together for a better world.”

Calling the exhibit “a cultural enterprise, a link between two worlds,” Di Segni said the fact that it’s a joint-exhibition between Catholics and Jews is “a way of teaching the world about common roots and different interpretations” between the two religions.

“The Menorah is a Jewish symbol. It’s not a Christian symbol, but the Christians use this symbol and work with it in many ways,” he said, calling it “a symbol of the connection between the new religion of Christianity and (it’s) Jewish roots.”

Part of what is represented in the exhibit “is the connection between what they call ‘old’ and what they call ‘new.’ So the problem is how to relate to this old symbol,” he said, adding that “to discover this story and to put it in an exhibition is very interesting because by itself it is a history of the relation between Christianity and the Jews.”

Alongside Di Segni and Koch at the presentation of joint-exhibition were Barbara Jatta, the new Director of the Vatican Museums, and Alessandra Di Castro, head of Rome’s Jewish Museum.

The exhibit, titled “Menorah: Worship, History, Legend,” will be shown simultaneously at both the Jewish Museum as well as the Braccio di Carlo Magno Museum in the Vatican, located under the left colonnade in St. Peter’s Square.

It will run May 15-July 23 and will include roughly 130 pieces, including Menorah from different periods and depictions of them in paintings, sarcophagi, sculptures and medieval and Renaissance drawings and manuscripts.

The works displayed will include pieces from the first century up to the modern times century, including the use of the Menorah as part of the crest of the State of Israel.

Divided into three key stages, the exhibit walks visitors through different ages and genres, with the first stage divided into three different sections: Visualizing the Menorah; The Menorah in the temple and in Jewish art: iconography and symbology; and The Menorah in ancient art from Jerusalem to Rome.

The second stage is divided into four sections, and focuses on the Menorah From late antiquity to the 14th century; The Renaissance; The pictorial fortune from the 600s to the 19th century; and Jewish Menorah in applied arts from the late Middle Ages to the beginnings of the 20th century.

While the first stage focuses on the story of the Menorah, its presence in the temple of Jerusalem and its dispersal throughout Rome in both ancient and modern times, the second stage provides an analysis on the Menorah in Christianity, particularly liturgical candelabras, as well as the Menorah’s consistent presence as a strong unifying symbol for Jewish identity throughout history.

In the third stage, the exhibit focuses on the theme “From the First World War to the 21st century,” and offers a panorama of the various representations of the Menorah throughout the 20th and 21st centuries.

More than 20 museums throughout the world have lent pieces to the exhibit, including the Louvre in Paris, the National Gallery of London and the Albertina Museum of Vienna.

During the presentation attention also turned to speculation as to the current whereabouts of the solid gold Menorah taken from the temple in Jerusalem by the Romans during their siege in 70AD, but which has gone missing for the past 1,500 years.

The Menorah was originally taken from Jerusalem when its temple was destroyed by the Roman general Titus, who became emperor nine years after that victory. Rumors throughout history have said the Menorah was lost during the Vandal’s Sack of Rome in 455, while others say it was buried in a cave, hidden in the Vatican or thrown into the Tiber, where it still rests.

However, despite the various theories, Di Segni said “nobody knows what had happened” since it disappeared from Jerusalem.

Present at the exhibit instead will be the ancient the Magdala Stone, which was found in 2009 during an archaeological excavation that uncovered an ancient synagogue on the shores of the Sea of Galilee.

But regardless of the legends, Di Segni said “it will be very interesting to see how people will visit, what they would say and how they will be impressed.”

“The reaction of the public” is also important, he said, “so we are waiting for this moment.”

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IMAGE: CNS/Dennis Sadowski

By Dennis Sadowski

MODESTO, Calif. (CNS) -- Affirming that all human life is sacred and all people are "protagonists of their future," more than 600 grass-roots leaders echoed the call of a U.S. bishop to disrupt practices that cause oppression and violate human dignity.

The leaders attending the U.S. Regional World Meeting of Popular Movements concluded the four-day meeting Feb. 19 saying in a final message that a "small elite is growing wealthy and powerful off the suffering of our families."

"Racism and white supremacy are America's original sins. They (the elites) continue to justify a system of unregulated capitalism that idolizes wealth accumulation over human needs," said the "Message from Modesto."

The message broadly echoed Pope Francis' regular critiques of the world economy in which he has said the accumulation of wealth by a few people has harmed the dignity of millions of people in the human family.

The representatives from dozens of faith-based and secular community organizations, labor unions and Catholic dioceses representing an estimated 1 million people called for eight actions to be undertaken. The actions included inviting faith communities, including every Catholic parish, to declare their sites a sanctuary for people facing deportation by the U.S. government; developing local leadership to hold elected officials accountable and, when possible to recruit grass-roots leaders to seek elected office; and a global week of action May 1-7 in which people "stand together against hatred and attacks on families."

"There's too many leaders in this room not to mobilize," Takia Yates-Binford of East St. Louis, Illinois, who represented the Service Employees International Union, said as the meeting ended.

The delegates called for "bold prophetic leadership" from faith communities to speak and act in solidarity with citizens on the margins of society. Participants in plenary sessions and small-group discussions challenged clergy, including the Catholic hierarchy, to be in the forefront of movements to seek justice on social issues for people outside of mainstream society.

In their message, delegates said they wanted to see the seeds planted in Modesto blossom across the country in statewide and regional gatherings to bring the vision of the four meetings of popular movements held to date and the pope's message of hope and courage to every U.S. community.

The final message reflected the words of Bishop Robert W. McElroy of San Diego, whose stirring presentation a day earlier invited people to follow the example of President Donald Trump, who campaigned as the candidate of "disruption."

"Well now, we must all become disruptors," Bishop McElroy told the delegates Feb. 18 to sustained applause. "We must disrupt those who would seek to send troops into our streets to deport the undocumented, to rip mothers and fathers from their families. We must disrupt those who portray refugees as enemies rather than our brothers and sisters in terrible need.

"We must disrupt those who train us to see Muslim men and women as a source of fear rather than as children of God. We must disrupt those who would take even food stamps and nutrition assistance from the mouths of children."

At the same time, Bishop McElroy said, people of faith must rebuild society based on justice for everyone.

"We have to rebuild this nation so that we place at its heart the service of the dignity of the human person and assert what that flag behind us asserts is our heritage: Every man, woman and child is equal in this nation and called to be equal," he said.

Bishop McElroy's words in a plenary session on labor and housing followed a video greeting from Cardinal Joseph W. Tobin of Newark, New Jersey, in which he said the concentration of wealth and political power in the country "threatens to undermine the health of our democracy."

As families cope with economic stress and feel no elected official at any level of government cares about their plight, people tend to withdraw from civic participation and effectively disenfranchise themselves, leaving special interest groups, lobbyists and "even demagogues" to fill the void, Cardinal Tobin said.

Such a situation has given rise to populist and nationalist sentiments in the U.S. under which the blame for the economic struggles of some are placed on today's "scapegoats" including immigrants, Muslims and young people of color, he said, rather than toward the architects of what the pope has called the economy of exclusion. The rising fear and anxiety among people in the dominant culture has given rise to "the sins of racism and xenophobia," he said.

Cardinal Tobin used Pope Francis' calls for encounter and dialogue as necessary steps to overcome fear, alienation and indifference. "Encounter and dialogue create the capacity for solidarity and accompaniment," he said.

"It is our responsibility to respond to the pain and anxiety of our brothers and sisters. As popular movements, your role is to knit together strong communal networks that can gather up the experiences and suffering and aspiration of the people and push for structural changes that affirm the dignity and value of every child of God," Cardinal Tobin said.

Cardinal Peter Turkson, prefect of the Vatican's Dicastery for Promoting Integral Human Development, told the gathering as the final message was adopted that the church was "here to accompany you and support you all."

"The Catholic Church believes that the joys and the hope, the grief and the anguish of people of our time, especially those who are poor or who are isolated, these also are the joys and the hope and the grief and the anguish of the followers of Christ," Cardinal Turkson said.

Meeting organizers, which included the PICO National Network of congregation-based organizations and the U.S. bishops' Catholic Campaign for Human Development, planned to send the message and a comprehensive report on the proceedings to the pope and the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops. The USCCB and the Dicastery for Promoting Integral Human Development co-sponsored the gathering.

The U.S. gathering was the first regional meeting in a series encouraged by Pope Francis to bring people working to improve poor and struggling communities around the world through organizing initiatives, prayer and social action. Three previous meetings since 2014 -- two in Rome and one in Bolivia -- have focused on land, labor and housing. The U.S. meeting added immigration and racism to the topics being discussed.

Along with the grass-roots volunteer leaders and professional organizers, 25 prelates attended the California meeting and several addressed the plenary sessions including Archbishop Jose H. Gomez of Los Angeles, USCCB vice president, on immigration, Bishop Shelton J. Fabre of Houma-Thibodaux, Louisiana, on racism, and Bishop Oscar Cantu of Las Cruces, New Mexico, on the environment.

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Editor's Note: The full Message from Modesto can be read online at http://popularmovements.org/news/message-from-modesto.

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Follow Sadowski on Twitter: @DennisSadowski.

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