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ACROSS THE NATION
U.S. Bishops give $3.5 Million in Grants to Support the Church in Latin America
The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops' (USCCB) Subcommittee on the Church in Latin America awarded in excess of $3.5 million in funding in the form of 215 grants to support the pastoral work of the Church in Latin America and the Caribbean. The grants were presented at the Subcommittee's meeting on June 11 in Baltimore, Maryland, and approved by teleconference on June 21, 2019.
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Projects that received funding for pastoral activities include the following:
Support and education programs for rural lay communities in their defense of the environment in the Diocese of El Alto, Bolivia.
Expansion of child and youth protection training programs to prevent sexual abuse and build safe environments in the Diocese of Petropolis, Brazil. Led by the Brazilian Apostolate Association, the program will train approximately 1,000 seminarians, teachers, and school staff throughout the diocese.
Education and formation of youth leaders in Garifuna communities throughout rural Honduras.
Support to the Paraguayan Conference of Bishops’ Indigenous Ministry, as it celebrates its 50th Anniversary. The grant will fund efforts to promote the Indigenous Ministry and educate new seminarians, priests, and bishops about the reality of the indigenous peoples in Paraguay so that they can better serve these marginalized communities.
Education programs led by the Loyola Center in Ayacucho, Peru, to engage young people, adults, and the general population around the upcoming Amazon Synod’s goals and their importance to the local population.
Youth outreach in the Diocese of Paramaribo in Suriname. This project will assist the formational and spiritual development of young people, culminating in a diocesan youth festival. “The Collection for the Church in Latin America is one tangible expression of the reality that we are one Church with one mission. Through the generosity of Catholics in the United States, communities throughout Latin America will be able to grow closer to Christ,” said Bishop Octavio Cisneros, auxiliary bishop of Brooklyn and chairman of the Subcommittee on the Church in Latin America.
Other areas of funding include lay leadership training, catechesis, seminarian and religious formation, prison ministry, and youth and family ministries. Grants are funded by the annual Collection for the Church in Latin America, taken in many dioceses across the U.S. on the fourth Sunday in January.
Other Projects not Specified in Article
• $800,000 will be poured into recovery and reconstruction projects following natrual disaster
• Catechesis projects and evangelization in Uruguay and El Salvador
• Ministry to indigenous peoples in Brazil and Venezuela.
Three Words to Balance our “Common Home” from the Vatican Press Office
Iaddress a cordial greeting to the organizers and participants in the second Forum of the Laudato si’ Communities, which is being held in a territory devastated by the earthquake that struck Italy in August 2016, and which more than any other area has paid a very high price in terms of the number of victims.
It is a sign of hope, the fact that you are indeed in Amatrice, the memory of which is always present in my heart, to focus on the imbalances that devastate our “common home”. Not only is it a sign of closeness to the many brothers and sisters who still live between the memory of a terrible tragedy and the reconstruction that is slow to get started, but it also expresses the desire to make resonate, loud and clear, that it is the poor who pay the highest price of environmental devastation. The wounds inflicted on the environment are inexorably wounds inflicted on humanity at its most defenseless. I wrote in the Encyclical Laudato si’: “There can be no renewal of our relationship with nature without a renewal of humanity itself. There can be no ecology without an adequate anthropology” (118).
After facing, last year, the theme of the plastic that is suffocating our planet, today you reflect on the grave and no longer sustainable situation of Amazonia and the peoples who live there. You are thus inspired by the theme of the Synod of Bishops which will be held this coming October for the Pan-Amazon region, and whose Instrumentum laboris was recently presented.
The situation of Amazonia is a sad paradigm of what is happening in various parts of the planet: a blind and destructive mentality that favors profit over justice; it makes evident the predatory attitude with which man relates to nature. Please, do not forget that social justice and ecology are profoundly interconnected! What is happening in Amazonia will have repercussions at a global level, but it has already prostrated thousands of men and women, robbing them of their territory, making them strangers in their own land, impoverishing them of their own culture and their own traditions, and breaking the millennia-long equilibrium that united those peoples with their land. Man cannot remain an indifferent spectator in the face of this destruction; nor can the Church remain silent: the cry of the poor must resonate in her mouth too, as already highlighted by Saint Paul VI in his Encyclical Populorum progressio. Promoted by the Church of Rieti and the Slow Food movement, the Laudato si’ Communities are engaged not only in disseminating the teaching proposed in the Encyclical of the same name, but in favoring new styles of life. From this pragmatic perspective, I wish to offer you three words. The first word is doxology Faced with the good of creation and, above all, the good of man who is the peak of creation, but also its custodian, it is necessary to assume the attitude of praise. Faced with such beauty, with renewed wonder, with the eyes of a child, we must be able to appreciate the beauty that surrounds us and of which man too is also formed. Praise is the fruit of contemplation, contemplation and praise lead to respect, and respect becomes almost veneration before the goods of creation and its Creator. The second word is Eucharist The Eucharistic attitude faced with the world and its inhabitants knows how to grasp the status of gift that every living being carries within itself. Everything is consigned to us freely, not to be plundered and swallowed up, but to become in turn a gift to share, a gift to give so that joy may be for all and that it may therefore be greater. The third word is asceticism Every form of respect arises from an ascetic attitude, that is, from the capacity to know how to renounce something for a greater good, for the good of others. Asceticism helps us to convert the predatory attitude, which is always lurking, to take the form of sharing, and of an ecological, respectful and polite relationship.
I hope that the Laudato si’ Communities may be the germ of a renewed way of living in the world, to give it a future, to preserve its beauty and integrity for the good of every living being, ad maiorem Dei gloriam. I thank you and I bless you from my heart. Pray for me. Pope Francis
Your generosity to our Annual Appeal provides funding for the Office of Superintendent of Schools which provides the necessary oversight and management of the two high schools and four elementary schools which exist within our diocese. Again this year, your Appeal is providing thirty thousand dollars to our schools for tuition assistance for those families seeking Catholic education for their children. This supplements the Bishop’s Tuition Assistance Fund, The Theresian Endowment for
Catholic Education and an Educational Endowment from the Daughters of the Cross.
May God bless all of our school benefactors for what they have done to support this critical ministry. Know that support of your Appeal helps our Catholic schools to thrive and succeed as we continually seek to support this learning outreach to our most important asset……our children.
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