The
COURIER
Christmas Day December 25
December 2016
www.dowcourier.org
Official Newspaper of the Roman Catholic Diocese of Winona, MN
Sharing God's Mercy Reaching Out
to
this
Is Christmas Immigration a Family Issue
Our Elders
By SR. CONSTANCE VEIT, LSP
By MATT HADRO BALTIMORE, Nov 18, 2016 (CNA/EWTN News) - In the wake of the presidential election Catholics must remember that immigration is a global issue involving real families, the new vice president of the U.S. bishops’ conference says. “The important thing in the United States [is that] we find the way to have immigration reform,” Archbishop José Gomez of Los Angeles told CNA in an interview on Tuesday. “I think it’s important for us as the leading country in the world to find a solution to allow people to move, respecting the right of every country to protect their borders,” he continued. “Movements of people are happening all over the world.” The archbishop spoke with CNA just after he was elected vice president of
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n the past few weeks, I’ve been asked to speak about loneliness in the elderly on numerous occasions. I was even quoted in a recent article by Catholic journalist Mary Rezac, entitled "Our Elders Are Lonely – Do We Care?" As we look forward to Christmas, let’s hope we can all say, “Of course we do!” The issue of loneliness in the elderly may not be as clear-cut as it seems. While one recent study reported that nearly half of people over 60 said they feel lonely on “a regular basis,” another asserted that only 6 percent of American seniors said they “often” feel this way. Contradictory statistics aside, in our country roughly one third of those over 65 and half of those over 85 live alone. Sociologists see this trend as a sign of social progress. Improved health care, increased wealth and the emergence of retirement as a relatively long stage of life, they say, have created more choices for seniors and enabled them to live independent of their adult children. This situation, often referred to as “intimacy at a distance,” respects the life choices and autonomy of both older persons and their adult children, fostering more positive and supportive emotional bonds for all. In his book, Being Mortal, surgeon and author Atul Gawande writes, “The lines of power between the generations have been renegotiated … The aged did not lose status and control so much as share it. Modernization did not demote the elderly. It demoted the family. It gave
Archbishop José Gomez
Immigration, cont'd on pg. 16
Mercy, cont'd on pg. 4
INSIDE this issue
A New President and an Eternal King page 6
New Evangelization in Kenya page 12
Christmas: A Stewardship Reflection... page 14