Church beatifies first US martyr
Fr Stanley Rother (pictured) was beatified in a ceremony last Saturday that drew more than 15,000 people to the Oklahoma City Convention Centre. Cardinal Angelo Amato, Prefect of the Congregation for Saints, presided over the ceremony.
Blessed Stanley Rother is the first US-born martyr to be beatified. In 1968, he volunteered to go to the archdiocesan mission in Santiago Atitlán, in south-west Guatemala. In 1981, he was urged to flee the country because paramilitary groups had him in their sights. Fr Rother returned briefly to Oklahoma City but the bishop agreed to his plea to return to the mission. On 28 July of that year, he was murdered in his home. No one was ever convicted of the crime.
Cardinal Blase Cupich has invited Fr James Martin SJ to deliver the Lenten reflections at Holy Name Cathedral in Chicago next year. It follows the cancellation of a series of talks by Fr Martin, including one at the Theological College in Washington DC earlier this month. The cancellation followed criticism on several conservative websites of his latest book, Building a Bridge, which calls for a relationship of respect, compassion and sensitivity between the Church and the LGBT community.
Writing in America magazine, Bishop Robert McElroy of San Diego defended Fr Martin and said the Church must confront “this cancer of vilification [which] is seeping into [its] institutional life”.
Holy See signs UN treaty
The Holy See on Thursday last week became one of the first states to sign and ratify a new treaty prohibiting nuclear weapons. Archbishop Paul Richard Gallagher, Secretary for Relations with States, signed the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons on behalf of the Vatican City State. More than 40 countries signed the treaty during a high-level signing ceremony held at the United Nations headquarters in New York. More nations were expected to sign in coming days. The treaty is due to go into effect 90 days after at least 50 nations have ratified it. It prohibits a range of activities related to nuclear weapons. They include moves to develop, test, produce, manufacture, acquire, possess or stockpile nuclear weapons. More than 120 nations adopted the treaty on 7 July 2017. Significantly, however, most of the countries that possess nuclear arms did not take part in the negotiations.
New Tsar film sparks arrests
Russian police have arrested several Orthodox extremists over arson attacks and death threats ahead of a new film (above) about Tsar Nicholas II’s affair with a ballerina. Interior Ministry spokeswoman Irina Volk told Russia’s Interfax news agency on Monday that Alexander Kalinin, leader of a group calling itself Christian State-Holy Rus, had been arrested. She said he had been trying to prevent the screening of Matilda, by the award-winning director Alexei Uchitel, which is based on the memoirs of the Polish-Russian ballerina Matylda Krzesinska (1872-1971), with whom Nicholas had a youthful affair.
Nicholas II was murdered with his wife and children in July 1918 after abdicating. He and his family were reinterred in St Petersburg’s Sts Peter and Paul Cathedral in 1998. The Russian Orthodox Church declared them saints in 2000.
Church sources in South Kivu, in the east of the Democratic Republic of Congo, report that security forces killed 34 Burundian refugees and injured about 100 earlier this month at a refugee camp in the Plain of Ruzizi. The sources say the local population mistrusts Burundian refugees, and no effort has been made to integrate them into local society. Tens of thousands of Burundians have fled to the DRC since 2015 to escape a campaign of violence, murder and intimidation following Pierre Nkurunziza’s election as president for a third term.
Rosary recital appeal
Poland’s Catholic bishops have asked church members to take part in a one-hour mass rosary recital on their country’s borders to mark the close of centenary celebrations of the Marian apparitions at Fátima, in Portugal.
They said that it would offer a “special way” to realise the call to penance that the Virgin Mary made to Lúcia dos Santos and her cousins, Francisco and Jacinta Marto, who are now saints.
Organisers expect at least a million Catholics to take part in the mass prayer along Poland’s 2,000-mile land and sea border on 7 October, the anniversary of the Battle of Lepanto in 1571, when a multinational Christian fleet is said to have saved Europe from invasion by the Ottoman Empire.
The German diocese of Regensburg has published a new Sunday Bible with commentaries on all the readings for Sundays and Holy Days of Obligation, drawn from the works of Joseph Ratzinger, Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI. Bishop Rudolf Voderholzer of Regensburg presented the Regensburger Sonntagsbibel (“Regensburg Sunday Bible”) to journalists at a special reception on 14 September.
Meanwhile a parchment fragment of the historic 1454 Gutenberg Bible has been found in Augsburg, in Bavaria. It had been used as a book cover for another book.
Archbishop Robert Carlson of St Louis, Missouri, joined other religious leaders in calling for peace and solidarity following the acquittal by a judge earlier this month of a white police officer, Jason Stockley, accused of the murder in 2011 of 24-year-old African American, Anthony Lamar Smith. Nearly 200 people have been arrested in demonstrations since the ruling, many under the banner of “Black Lives Matter.”
Bishops condemn atrocities
Attacks on civilians by both the South Sudan Government and its opponents have been condemned in a pastoral letter by the bishops of South Sudan. They list killings, rapes, looting, displacement, attacks on churches and the destruction of property as war crimes that are continuing all over the country.
“People have been herded into their houses, which were then set on fire to burn the occupants,” the bishops report. “Even when people have fled to our churches or to UN camps for protection, they are still harassed by security forces.”
More than 50,000 people have been killed and over 1.6 million have been internally displaced since civil war broke out in South Sudan in 2013.
Loading ...
