Catholic News 2
WEST PALM BEACH, Fla. (AP) -- After four tumultuous weeks of governing, President Donald Trump is out of the White House doing what he loves best - campaigning....
WASHINGTON (AP) -- The apparent assassination of the North Korean leader's estranged half-brother is strengthening bipartisan calls for the U.S. to re-list North Korea as a state sponsor of terrorism, a designation lifted nine years ago. Doing so would increase the country's isolation, while potentially complicating any future diplomacy to halt its nuclear and missile programs....
KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia (AP) -- A dispute over custody of a slain North Korean's body pushed two governments further apart Saturday as they tried to navigate the aftermath of what appeared to be the assassination of an outcast member of North Korea's ruling elite....
MUNICH (AP) -- The Latest on U.S. Vice President Mike Pence's trip to Europe (all times local):...
LOS ANGELES (AP) -- Robert Durst's close friend reluctantly admitted Friday that he had misled and lied to prosecutors for months before coming clean and saying that the real estate heir had confessed to killing their close friend....
LOS ANGELES (AP) -- A powerful Pacific storm blew into Southern and Central California on Friday with wind-driven heavy rains that downed power lines and electrocuted a man, killed a motorist in a submerged car and disrupted hundreds of flights at airports....
KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia (AP) -- The Latest on the suspected assassination of the half brother of the North Korean leader in Malaysia (all times local):...
NEW YORK (AP) -- The early weeks of the Trump administration have widened divides between liberal and conservative Jews, setting off quarrels over anti-Semitism, Israel and the Holocaust....
Washington D.C., Feb 17, 2017 / 02:38 pm (CNA/EWTN News).- The theologian, philosopher and Catholic commentator Michael Novak died Friday, drawing remembrances for his insights and influence on religion in public life.“We are immensely grateful that he could end his academic life as he began it, as a member of our community,” Catholic University of America president John Garvey said, calling Novak a man of “great intellectual honesty.”“Unlike some scholars, Michael Novak made it a point to reflect on new and different topics, always with a fresh and dynamic perspective,” Garvey said.Novak died Feb. 17 at the age of 83.He was a student at Catholic University of America in 1958 and 1959. In 2016 he was named a visiting fellow at the university’s The Arthur and Carlyse Ciocca Center for Principled Entrepreneurship. He taught special topics in management and lectured on human ecology.The center’s director, Andreas Widmer, stressed Novak&rs...
Washington D.C., Feb 17, 2017 / 02:38 pm (CNA/EWTN News).- The theologian, philosopher and Catholic commentator Michael Novak died Friday, drawing remembrances for his insights and influence on religion in public life.
“We are immensely grateful that he could end his academic life as he began it, as a member of our community,” Catholic University of America president John Garvey said, calling Novak a man of “great intellectual honesty.”
“Unlike some scholars, Michael Novak made it a point to reflect on new and different topics, always with a fresh and dynamic perspective,” Garvey said.
Novak died Feb. 17 at the age of 83.
He was a student at Catholic University of America in 1958 and 1959. In 2016 he was named a visiting fellow at the university’s The Arthur and Carlyse Ciocca Center for Principled Entrepreneurship. He taught special topics in management and lectured on human ecology.
The center’s director, Andreas Widmer, stressed Novak’s pioneering role in considering the intersection of faith and economics. He said he and his colleagues were touched by Novak’s “kindness and humility,” his generosity with his time, and his encouragement for others.
“You would never have known from working with him that this was a man who had counseled popes and changed the course of history,” Widmer said.
St. John Paul II, President Ronald Reagan, and U.K. Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher considered Novak a friend, Catholic University of America said.
Novak was the author of numerous books, most prominently the 1982 work The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism. He contended that democratic capitalism is “neither the Kingdom of God nor without sin,” but better than all other known systems of political economy.
“Such hope as we have for alleviating poverty and for removing oppressive tyranny — perhaps our last, best hope — lies in this much despised system,” he said.
The book was published around the world and had a particular impact among anti-communist dissidents in Eastern Europe. The book was illegally distributed in Poland by the Solidarity movement, the Washington Post reports.
His other books include Tell Me Why: A Father Answers His Daughter’s Questions About God, a 1998 work he co-authored with his daughter Jana.
Novak wrote on human rights, economic systems, the history of labor unions, U.S. ethnic history, and the role of churches in the modern world.
He was born to a Slovak-American family in Johnstown, Pa. on Sept. 9, 1933. His studies for the priesthood took him to the Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome and he was ordained for the Congregation of Holy Cross in 1960. Within months of his ordination, he left the priesthood and was later laicized.
He received a bachelor's degree in philosophy from Stonehill College, a Bachelor of Theology from the Pontifical Gregorian University, and a master's degree in history and the philosophy of religion from Harvard.
Novak worked as a journalist in the early 1960s, writing for the National Catholic Reporter and Commonweal before working for Time Magazine in Rome during the Second Vatican Council. He would go on to serve as an editor at Commonweal and Christian Century magazines, religion editor for National Review, a contributing editor for First Things magazine and editor-in-chief of Crisis Magazine.
According to Novak’s website, his political work included the 1968 campaigns of Eugene McCarthy and Robert F. Kennedy and speechwriting for Democratic vice presidential nominee Sargent Shriver during Sen. George McGovern’s unsuccessful 1972 presidential campaign. He became an opponent of the Vietnam War after initially supporting intervention.
He would turn away from left-wing politics and the Democratic Party to join the Republican-trending neoconservative school of thought. Under President Ronald Reagan, he was named as U.S. Ambassador to the Human Rights Commission of the United Nations and served on the Board of International Broadcasting that oversaw Radio Free Europe and Radio Free Liberty.
He served in multiple academic positions, teaching at Harvard, Stanford, Notre Dame, and Ave Maria University. In the early 1970s, he helped design a new humanities program for the Rockefeller Foundation of New York.
He joined the American Enterprise Institute think tank in 1978, where he worked as a scholar until his retirement in 2010.
Among Novak’s many achievements were his work to launch many academic institutes and seminars, including the Tertio Millennio Seminar that aimed to bring together North American and Eastern European students to discuss Catholic social teaching.
George Weigel, one of Novak's collaborators, wrote in the National Review that "both Church and nation have lost one of their most imaginative and accomplished sons."
Weigel remembered Novak "first and foremost" as a teacher, who "offered a model of patient counseling and courteous listening that our students will long remember."
Novak's honors include the Templeton Prize for Progress in Religion.
Ahead of the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq, Novak went to the Vatican to argue that the war would be justified on the grounds of self-defense against Iraq’s then-leader Saddam Hussein. His remarks tried to counter some high-level Vatican critics of a war on Iraq.
Though Novak was careful not to criticize him personally, opponents of the war included St. John Paul II.
At the time, the Los Angeles Times reported that U.S. Ambassador to the Holy See Jim Nicholson had brought Novak to Rome for an embassy-sponsored lecture series, but Nicholson stressed that Novak did not represent the U.S. government or its embassies.
Novak is survived by three children and four grandchildren. He was preceded in death by his wife Karen Laub-Novak.
Vatican City, Feb 17, 2017 / 04:02 pm (CNA/EWTN News).- Nur Essa, a Muslim Syrian woman whose family was brought to Rome from Lesbos by Pope Francis last April, said that the openness he has shown to those of different faiths has deeply impressed her.“For me, I was surprised,” she told CNA. “(He is) very open to all of the cultures, all of the religions, and he sets an example for all the religious people in the world, because he uses religion to serve the human being.”Essa, 31, has met the Pope on several occasions, most recently during the Pope's visit Feb. 17th to Roma Tre University, a public research university in Rome where she currently studies.She was one of four students of the university to ask the Pope a question, which he answered during his visit.Essa's question was about the integration of immigrants in Italy: what they must do to integrate into their host country, but also what the rights of the immigrant are.Before this, Essa and her h...
Vatican City, Feb 17, 2017 / 04:02 pm (CNA/EWTN News).- Nur Essa, a Muslim Syrian woman whose family was brought to Rome from Lesbos by Pope Francis last April, said that the openness he has shown to those of different faiths has deeply impressed her.
“For me, I was surprised,” she told CNA. “(He is) very open to all of the cultures, all of the religions, and he sets an example for all the religious people in the world, because he uses religion to serve the human being.”
Essa, 31, has met the Pope on several occasions, most recently during the Pope's visit Feb. 17th to Roma Tre University, a public research university in Rome where she currently studies.
She was one of four students of the university to ask the Pope a question, which he answered during his visit.
Essa's question was about the integration of immigrants in Italy: what they must do to integrate into their host country, but also what the rights of the immigrant are.
Before this, Essa and her husband and their little boy met Pope Francis when he brought them to Rome April 16th, 2016, along with two other Syrian refugee families who had been staying in a camp on the Island of Lesbos. She said that the Pope greeted them and blessed her son.
Essa also had an opportunity to speak with him at length when they were invited to be guests at a lunch Aug. 11th at the Vatican, which Essa said was an “honor.”
“He's very, very modest, a very simple man, a very real human being,” she said.
Essa has both an undergraduate degree and a master's in microbiology, and is studying biology at Roma Tre.
She said that she and her husband are both from the city of Damascus in Syria and chose to flee the country because her husband had been asked to join the military service there.
They went from Damascus to Turkey, and then from Turkey to Greece, where they stayed in a refugee camp for one month before they were fortunate enough to be chosen as one of the families the Pope brought back to Rome.
Pope Francis visited Roma Tre University at the request of the Dean of the university, who wanted to invite a public figure for the university's 25th anniversary.
According to Fr. John D'Orazio, who is a Catholic chaplain assigned to the university by the Diocese of Rome, the last pope to make a formal visit was St. John Paul II for the university’s 10th anniversary in 2002.
The chaplaincy just finished constructing its first Catholic chapel for students nearby to the university, something they've been wanting to do for a long time, Fr. D'Orazio said.
He said that although students don't live on campus, they still try “to create opportunities for students to meet together” and to reflect on their Catholic faith and “what it means for them in their own studies and in being citizens in today’s world and in society.”
It's a very diverse campus, he said, with students of no faith or of different religions, including Muslim students. “I think it's very interesting and beautiful to be a chaplain inside of a state university,” he said, “because it means creating dialogue, creating collaboration.”
“It's almost like mission work, because you're working in a place where there are all kinds of different people, different backgrounds, different points of view. So it's a good place to create bridges,” he said.
“Pope Francis talks a lot about creating bridges and not walls. And I think that also the chaplaincy in a state university is all about creating bridges of dialogue and collaboration.”
