Pope Francis teaches about temperance (Thu, 25 Apr 2024)
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St. Mary’s Academy STEM students craft chicken coop (Thu, 25 Apr 2024)
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The crossroads that changed our lives forever (Fri, 19 Apr 2024)
My parents rarely argued, but when they did, it was about money. My mother had grown up in a middle-class family with parents who could afford to send her and her siblings to college. But she married a man who had left school in sixth grade to support his family after his father died.
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Praying the Liturgy of the Hours (Fri, 19 Apr 2024)
Jesus, in many instances in the Gospels, instructs his listeners to pray. So, whenever we stop what we are doing to pray or begin our day or end our day with prayer, we are following his earnest directive.
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UGA student to be Perpetual Pilgrim in National Eucharistic Pilgrimage (Thu, 18 Apr 2024)
University of Georgia student Jaella Mac Au will join the National Eucharistic Pilgrimage as a Perpetual Pilgrim. She is among 24 young adults who will make a cross-country trek toward the 10th National Eucharistic Congress.
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Now is time to build new world without inequality, injustice, pope says (Sun, 19 Apr 2020)
By Carol Glatz Catholic News Service ROME (CNS) — As the world slowly recovers from the COVID-19 pandemic, there is a risk it will be struck by an even worse virus — that of selfish indifference, Pope Francis said. This … Continue reading →
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Puerto Rico: ‘An unprecedented level of need’ (Mon, 06 Nov 2017)
Catholic News Service was the first major Catholic news organization to send a photographer and a reporter to tour the island and document the efforts of the church and other organizations to help many of the people far from the capital of San Juan. Continue reading →
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Historic Tomb of Michelangelo and altarpiece in dire need of repairs (Wed, 11 Oct 2017)
By Matthew Fowler ROME (CNS) — The historic tomb of Michelangelo and the Buonarroti family altarpiece in the Church of Santa Croce in Florence are in dire need of cleaning and restoration due to sustained damage over the past 50 … Continue reading →
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A look back at the Legion of Decency (Thu, 17 Aug 2017)
By Mark Pattison and Julie Asher WASHINGTON (CNS) — It’s summertime and the movies are plentiful. As everyone knows the summer movie season is a big one for Hollywood, and when it comes to a close, it is followed closely … Continue reading →
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Jamboree called ‘life-changing event’ for youths, adults (Fri, 28 Jul 2017)
Here’s a dispatch from Summit Bechtel Family National Scout Reserve in West Virginia sent earlier this week by Msgr. John B. Brady from the national Scout jamboree, which closed today. A retired priest of the Archdiocese of Washington, he became … Continue reading →
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Word to Life — Sunday Scripture readings, July 23, 2017 (Fri, 21 Jul 2017)
July 23, Sixteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time       Cycle A. Readings:      1) Wisdom 12:13, 16-19      Psalm 86:5-6, 9-10, 15-16      2) Romans 8:26-27      Gospel: Matthew 13:24-33   By Sharon K. Perkins Catholic News … Continue reading →
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John C. Quinn tended to the ‘least of these’ in U.S. newsrooms (Fri, 14 Jul 2017)
WASHINGTON (CNS) – I’m convinced that around the country, and perhaps the world, there are many letters similar to the one I received in the mail some 18 years ago. It was written by hand and it ended with a … Continue reading →
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Some cheese with your ‘whine’: Pope ‘establishes’ complaint-free zone (Fri, 14 Jul 2017)
By Junno Arocho Esteves Catholic News Service VATICAN CITY (CNS) — Pope Francis left a not-so-subtle message outside his office in the Domus Sanctae Marthae residence: anyone who is thinking of making a fuss, leave your whining at the door. … Continue reading →
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Word to Life — Sunday Scripture readings, July 16, 2017 (Thu, 13 Jul 2017)
  July 16, Fifteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time       Cycle A. Readings:       1) Isaiah 55:10-11       Psalm 65:10-14       2) Romans 8:18-23       Gospel: Matthew 13:1-23   By Jeff Hedglen Catholic News Service It seems as though every time … Continue reading →
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Word to Life — Sunday Scripture readings, July 9, 2017 (Fri, 07 Jul 2017)
The Scriptures this weekend contain a familiar, but difficult text. “Take my yoke upon you,” Jesus says. “For my yoke is easy and my burden light.” Continue reading →
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Robert F. Kennedy Jr. talks Catholic faith, abortion, Title IX in exclusive EWTN interview (Fri, 26 Apr 2024)
Kennedy opened up to veteran EWTN News anchorman Raymond Arroyo about his family’s strong faith growing up, how his faith helped him overcome drug addiction and how it impacts him in his day-to-day life in the travails of U.S. presidential politics. / Credit: EWTN News "The World Over with Raymond Arroyo" / Screenshot Washington, D.C. Newsroom, Apr 26, 2024 / 06:30 am (CNA). Independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. discussed the importance of his Catholic faith in his daily life, his plan to reduce abortions without federal restrictions, and his opposition to biological males playing in women’s sports during an exclusive interview on “The World Over with Raymond Arroyo” Thursday night. Kennedy, son of the late Sen. Robert F. Kennedy and nephew of former President John F. Kennedy, is running a vigorous independent campaign to be the next president of the United States. He launched an independent bid for the White House last October after initially challenging incumbent President Joe Biden for the Democratic presidential nomination. In the interview, the presidential hopeful opened up about his family’s strong faith growing up, how his faith helped him overcome drug addiction, and how it impacts him in his day-to-day life. “The centerpiece of our lives [growing up] was Catholicism,” Kennedy told Arroyo. “We said the rosary at least once a day, oftentimes three times a day,” Kennedy said. “We prayed before and after every [meal]. We read the Bible every night. We read the lives of the saints. We went to church, sometimes twice a day. We would go to the 7 o’clock Mass and 8 o’clock Mass in the summers. It was our whole family, and it was really our whole community. It was part of me growing up.” At age 15, following his father’s assassination, Kennedy expressed that he struggled with his faith. He became addicted to drugs, including heroin, until he was 28 years old. “During that period of time, I wouldn’t say I lost my faith, but when you’re living against conscience, which you have to do if you’re addicted to drugs, you push God out over the periphery of your horizon,” Kennedy said. “So the concept of God was, although it never was erased from me, it was just a distant concept that was not part of my day-to-day life.” He credits “a profound spiritual realignment” for his recovery from addiction in early adulthood, which he said has been “the centerpiece of my life ever since.”  “I had a spiritual awakening very early in my recovery, which I was lucky about because I no longer had to struggle with the compulsion to take drugs,” Kennedy explained. “That was lifted away from me. But you can’t live off the laurels of a spiritual awakening. You have to renew it every day, and you renew it through service to other people.” He said his faith gives him peace in the midst of the storms of life and cited his favorite saints, specifically St. Francis and St. Augustine. Reducing abortions without federal restrictions On the issue of abortion, Kennedy said his family has been divided on the issue and that he does not see himself as a “doctrinaire on either side.” Kennedy said he disagrees with former President Donald Trump’s plan to leave abortion policies up to the states. Although he acknowledged that “every abortion is a tragedy,” he said decisions “should be up to the mother” and that he does not “trust government officials and bureaucrats” to be involved in the issue. Rather than implementing restrictions on abortion, Kennedy has proposed a plan to subsidize day care “to make sure that no American mother ever has an abortion of a child that she wants to bring to term because she’s worried about her financial capacity to raise that child.” “I would like to maximize choice but also minimize the number of abortions that occur every year,” Kennedy said. The presidential hopeful also said he would not reverse the Biden administration’s approval of expanding access to the abortion pill in stores like CVS and Walgreens. However, he added that “we ought to know what the side effects are, what the risks are, [and] what the benefits [are].” Opposing biological males in women’s sports Kennedy said he disagrees with the Biden administration’s recent change to Title IX, which interprets sex discrimination as including discrimination of “gender identity.” He is opposed to biological males who identify as women being allowed to participate in women’s sports. “I don’t think it’s fair if a boy can walk off a neighboring playing field and say, I’m a girl now, and I’m going to take that spot that you worked for,” the candidate said. “I think we all need to respect people who have sexual differences and protect them, but I don’t believe that people who were born men ought to be able to compete in consequential sports.” The 2024 presidential election At this juncture, Kennedy is polling well behind Biden and Trump but has stronger poll numbers than any independent or third-party candidate since Ross Perot in 1992. A compilation of polls from RealClearPolling currently puts him at just under 12%.  “All we need to do is to get to 33% to win the election,” Kennedy said in the interview. “You don’t need 50%. It’s a three-way race. It’s really a five-way race. All I need is to get to 33%, and I’m close to that in a bunch of states.” The election is on Tuesday, Nov. 5.
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Belmont Abbey College hosts Bible marathon reading event (Fri, 26 Apr 2024)
Students, faculty, monks, and staff at Belmont Abbey College took part in their first “Cover to Cover” Bible Marathon Reading Event from April 8–12, 2024.. / Credit: Nicholas Willey CNA Staff, Apr 26, 2024 / 06:00 am (CNA). Eighty-five hours and 42 minutes. That was the time it took students, faculty, monks, and staff to read the Bible from beginning to end at Belmont Abbey College in North Carolina during its first “Cover to Cover” Bible marathon reading event earlier this month.  More than 110 readers took turns standing at a podium in Stowe Hall, the college’s main administration building, reading aloud from sacred Scripture throughout the day and night beginning Monday, April 8, and ending in the early hours of Friday, April 12.  Tom MacAlester, the vice provost and dean of student life at Belmont Abbey College, told CNA in an interview that the idea came from an experience he had during his time in college at Florida State University.  “There was a group of a number of campus ministries at Florida State that kind of undertook an ecumenical approach to reading the Bible from cover to cover, nonstop,” he explained. “Baptist students and Catholic students — we even had some students from Hillel come and read parts of the Old Testament, and it was a really cool event.” “It’s stuck with me all these years, and I was excited to be able to try it out here at the Abbey and ended up having a fantastic reception,” he added. Students, faculty, monks, and staff at Belmont Abbey College took part in their first “Cover to Cover” Bible marathon reading event from April 8–12, 2024. Credit: Nicholas Willey Ahead of the event, sign-up sheets were sent out to all students and staff giving them the ability to find a time that worked with their class schedules.  MacAlester shared that once they shared the vision for the event, “it was an easy sell” and “students got really excited about it.” “There was a moment where we were like, ‘Oh, maybe we’ll just do the New Testament,’ but then students started signing up for the Old Testament,” he said. “You know reading the Book of Numbers at two in the morning — that sounds like really exciting stuff, right? But our students signed up really quick.” He said many students have reached out to share how meaningful the event was to them and how, for many, “in a beautiful and a providential way, the Lord had them reading a very specific verse just for them and how touching and moving that was to them.” Students, faculty, monks, and staff at Belmont Abbey College took part in their first “Cover to Cover” Bible Marathon Reading Event from April 8–12, 2024. Credit: Nicholas Willey There are now plans in the works to ensure each incoming class to Belmont Abbey has the opportunity to take part in the “Cover to Cover” Bible marathon at least once during their four years at the college. This will most likely mean a once-in-three-years cycle, MacAlester explained.  MacAlester hopes that students recognized “the power of Scripture” by taking part in this event.  “It’s a blueprint right? If we’re looking for a guide, if we’re looking for inspiration in how to live a holy life and one day hopefully get to heaven and bring our friends, we can’t be ignorant of Scripture,” he said.
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Catholic school parent stabbed outside Mass celebrated by San Francisco archbishop (Thu, 25 Apr 2024)
An aerial view of Washington Square in San Francisco on May 22, 2020. / Credit: JOSH EDELSON/AFP via Getty Images CNA Staff, Apr 25, 2024 / 16:45 pm (CNA). San Francisco police arrested a homeless man last Sunday for allegedly stabbing a parent from a nearby Catholic school after an altercation involving the two outside a historic Catholic church in the city.  Twenty-five-year-old Marko Asaulyuk of San Francisco was charged with attempted murder and eight counts of assault with a deadly weapon. The Catholic school father, who was released from the hospital Sunday, only suffered a minor injury to his leg, Father Tho Bui, pastor of Sts. Peter and Paul Church, told CNA Thursday in an email. San Francisco Archbishop Salvatore Cordileone was conferring the sacrament of confirmation on the parish school’s students and students from a nearby parish during a noon Mass when a “disruptive man” entered the church, as Bui described him. The man was walking up and down the main aisle of the church holding a bottle of wine, ABC7 reported.  Bui said a group of parishioners and parents told the disruptive man to leave the church and escorted him out. ABC7 reported that the man was speaking with someone outside the church and said “Jesus is not real.” A “scuffle” then occurred on the sidewalk and that’s when the man stabbed the parent in the leg, according to the priest. The suspect, who was reported to be homeless, was arrested the same day, Bui said. Police said when they arrived at the scene, aid was given to the victim, who was brought to the hospital with “non-life-threatening injuries.” Witnesses helped the police locate the suspect, police said.  Bui called the incident “sad” and “extremely disturbing” but noted “the good news is that the criminal is behind bars, charged with attempted murder, assault with a deadly weapon, and is being held without bail.” “Very likely, by getting him off the streets, our parishioners and dads prevented something even worse from happening,” he said. “But this is just the latest in an unending series of incidents caused by our city government’s tolerance of crime and mentally ill people on the streets.” “It’s not specific to Sts. Peter and Paul. We saw in the news just this past week that the nurses at SF General [Hospital] and the librarians at our public libraries are demanding more protection from exactly the kind of incidents we had on Sunday,” he said.  “Like SF General and the public libraries, we are open every single day. The mission of Jesus Christ requires it! While both our school and club can, and do, fulfill their missions while having gates and doors locked, the Church cannot,” Bui said. CNA reached out to the archdiocese for comment but did not receive a response. 
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Louisiana police obtain new search warrant in New Orleans Archdiocese abuse investigation (Thu, 25 Apr 2024)
null / Shutterstock CNA Staff, Apr 25, 2024 / 11:30 am (CNA). Louisiana State Police have obtained a new search warrant to collect documents from the Archdiocese of New Orleans as part of an ongoing investigation into Church abuse in that state. State police spokesman Jacob Pucheu confirmed to CNA on Thursday that the bureau had obtained the warrant as part of its investigation into “numerous complaints of child sexual abuse” leveled at the archdiocese. The inquiry was first launched in 2022, he said. “As part of the ongoing investigation, on Monday, April 22, 2024, SVU investigators obtained an additional search warrant to collect information and documents from the Archdiocese of New Orleans,” Pucheu told CNA. “The archdiocese is cooperating with investigators to fulfill the terms of the search warrant,” he said. “This investigation remains ongoing with no further information available at this time.” Pucheu declined to directly provide a copy of the warrant, saying that “since it is under investigation, it is not readily available.” The archdiocese itself did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Thursday morning. The warrant comes as state police are investigating retired priest Lawrence Hecker, who was indicted in September on felony charges related to allegations that he raped an underage teenage boy in the 1970s. A team of forensic experts this week said Hecker, who is 92, is presently unfit to stand trial due to short-term memory loss, though the experts said the accused priest could stand trial at a later date. Prosecutors earlier this year had vowed to proceed with Hecker’s trial amid doubts of his competency. Orleans Parish First Assistant District Attorney Ned McGowan promised to “roll him in on a gurney” to try him. The archdiocese filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in 2020, with Archbishop Gregory Aymond pointing to financial pressure from clergy sex abuse claims as the driving force behind the reorganization. “The prospect of more abuse cases with associated prolonged and costly litigation, together with pressing ministerial needs and budget challenges, is simply not financially sustainable,” the prelate said at the time. Last year the archdiocese said it would ask “parishes, schools, and ministries” for monetary contributions in order to protect diocesan assets during the bankruptcy proceedings. The archbishop had previously said that “parishes, schools, and ministries” would not be affected by the filing. But “this is no longer the case,” Aymond said last year, “because of many external factors now facing us, including the fact that the law governing the statute of limitations has changed to now permit the filing of past abuse claims in civil court.”
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Arizona House votes to repeal law protecting life from moment of conception (Wed, 24 Apr 2024)
Pro-life advocates demonstrate prior to an Arizona House of Representatives session at the Arizona State Capitol on April 17, 2024, in Phoenix. / Credit: Rebecca Noble/Getty Images Washington, D.C. Newsroom, Apr 24, 2024 / 17:15 pm (CNA). The Arizona House of Representatives voted on Wednesday to repeal a law protecting unborn babies from abortion throughout pregnancy. The narrow 32-28 vote passed an “abortion ban repeal” bill designed to overturn the pro-life law. Republicans have a narrow majority in the Arizona House, but the bill was able to pass as three Republicans joined the Democrats against the pro-life measure. The repeal bill will now be considered by the Arizona Senate where Republicans also hold a narrow 16-14 majority. Democratic Gov. Katie Hobbs has already signaled she will sign the bill into law if it is passed by the Arizona Senate. Even if the repeal bill is signed into law it will likely not go into effect until 90 days after the legislative session closes, meaning the pro-life law may be in effect for a short time. The pro-life measure is currently set to go into effect on June 8. This comes after Democrats launched several unsuccessful attempts to repeal the pro-life law after a controversial Arizona Supreme Court decision ruled that the law — passed in 1864 — could go into effect. Dormant since being invalidated by Roe v. Wade in 1973, the 1864 law protects all unborn life from conception and imposes prison time for those who “provide, supply, or administer” an abortion. The court ruled that since the U.S. Supreme Court overruled Roe in the 2022 Dobbs v. Jackson decision, there were no legal reasons to keep the law from being enforced. On Tuesday, President Joe Biden criticized the Arizona pro-life law as backward, blaming former President Donald Trump for the Supreme Court overturning Roe and “literally taking us back 160 years.”  Abortion is currently legal in Arizona until the 15th week of pregnancy. If the 1864 law takes effect, however, all abortion will be illegal, except in cases in which the mother’s life is in danger.
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