03 20 15

Diocese of Fall River, Mass.

F riday , March 20, 2015

Calix Society offers faithbased recovery support

By Kenneth J. Souza Anchor Staff

particular denomination, faith or religion.”

TAUNTON — When DeaSoon Craig began wondercon Robert Craig first became ing if there was a program out involved with a 12-step program there that helped people explore to support his a faith compodaughter’s recovnent as part of ery effort, he notheir recovery. ticed some interThat’s what esting parallels eventually led to his own faith and drew him journey, even to the Cathough the prolix Society, an gram remained organization decidedly nonfounded in the denominational.

1940s that ini“Most of the tially attempted recovery proto address the grams certainly Spiritual needs recognize a of Catholics re‘higher power’ covering from but they don’t alcohol addicwant to say this tion. In subseis a religious quent years, it program because has expanded then there’s a its outreach potential for exto include adThis 10-foot clay statue of Venclusion,” Craig erable Matt Talbot is located dictions of all told The Anchor. at the Dublin Pro-Cathedral in kinds.

“Someone could Ireland. Talbot is considered “It was kind say: ‘Well, I’m an the unofficial patron of those of an unexatheist, so I can’t struggling with addictions. pected journey attend.’ So they for me,” Craig tend not to have that be some- said. “Clearly, (faith) was part of thing that is part of their prin- our life, and my family’s and my ciples. They recognize Spiritual- daughter’s. Not that we wanted ity but they don’t credit it to any Turn to page 15

Catholic school advocates lobby at statehouse

By Christine M. Williams Anchor Correspondent

BOSTON — Nearly 400 Catholic school supporters from all four Massachusetts dioceses traveled to the statehouse to lobby for greater access to state support. The Advocacy Day, organized by Parents Alliance for Catholic Education and held on March 11, afforded Catholic school students a civics lesson as well as the opportunity to advocate for themselves.

PACE, established by the Commonwealth’s bishops in 1994, helps Catholic schools in accessing funds that are already available through federal and state programs. The group

supports Catholic schools receiving funding for early education, after-school programs and school nurses.

Fred Kalisz, executive director of PACE, said that the state budget for early education and after-school programs has been slashed from $5.5 million in 2009 to $1.6 million today. The funds for school nursing have not been cut, but the moneys have been “reprioritized”; originally, 85 Catholic schools received funding; that number has dropped to 39.

PACE also believes that as a matter of “equity,” Catholic students should be allowed to compete for the John and Turn to page 18

Sister Patricia Harrington, RSM, recovering from surgery, received a surprise visit from former students Matthew Gill, right, and Kevin Brawley both from the Bishop Feehan Class of 2008 and who are studying for the priesthood. They brought her a beautiful bouquet of yellow roses — the symbolic flower of the Sisters of Mercy.

Annual Youth Convention: Beatitudes, Christ and jugglers — oh my!

group of kids,” said McManus of the recent CLI grads who FALL RIVER — Students have been heavily involved in the from area Catholic schools and planning since last year. “They’re parishes will “Have a Be-Atitude” going to be doing a prayer experias Bishop Stang High School in ence, which is kind of a vignette, North Dartmouth and St. Pope and it will show what it means to John Paul II High School in Hy- have a ‘be-atitude.’ They’re going annis host the Diocese of Fall to create a prayer environment River’s Office of Faith Forma- and will be assisting at Mass.”

After Bishop Edgar M. da tion’s annual Youth Convention and Middle School Rally on Cunha, S.D.V., observes his first time being at the convention by March 22-24.

The students who attend the celebrating Mass, there will be annual Catholic Leadership In- a two-hour block for the two stitute every year plan the event, workshops being offered. Shawsaid Claire McManus, director of nee Baldwin, director of youth ministry for the Archdiocese the Office of Faith Formation.

“The CLI trains kids for lead- of Hartford, will be leading one ership and as part of their train- of the workshops, which will be ing they have to demonstrate focused on the using the Lumileadership in planning. In the nous Mysteries as the structure past, before they planned the to show how teen-agers can deal convention, they were supposed with various kinds of stress in to go back to their parishes and their lives.

“She’s good,” said McManus show that they had learned these leadership skills,” said McManus, of her colleague and member of “but not every parish was really the New England Conference of Diocesan Directors of Religious ready to receive their training.”

Realizing that the skills being Education. “She does presentalearned could be put to better use, tions at national and regional McManus and her staff decided that the students could plan the diocese’s annual youth convention: “It’s been very successful.

They do everything,” she said.

The students came up with Beatitudes as the theme for this year, and a play on the spelling became “Be-Atitude”: “These kids are great, what a wonderful

By Becky Aubut Anchor Staff

workshops.”

APeX Ministries is the keynote presenter for the event and will also be presenting a workshop.

“They’re not just jugglers — that’s their act — but they do witness stories about their life and finding Christ,” said McManus, of the two-man evangelists group who will be performing.

“They’re very entertaining and a lot of fun, and when you’re working with teen-agers, you want to give them a clear Christian message but also keep them moving.

These guys have been doing this for many years.”

APeX Ministries is the brainchild of Brad Farmer and Gene Monterastelli. Formed in 1996, the two men travel all over the United States and share the Gospel through their unique “Christian vaudeville” style. Monterastelli and Farmer grew up in the same parish in Casper, Wyo. and a couple of years after graduating from high school together, found themselves looking for a direcTurn to page 18

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News From the Vatican

March 20, 2015

Christians either follow God or they’re corrupt hypocrites, pope says

VATICAN CITY (CNS) — Christians either love God and their neighbor or they are hypocrites; there is no middle ground, Pope Francis said.

“Jesus says, ‘Whoever is not with Me is against Me.’ Well, can’t there be a compromise — a bit here and a bit there? No. Either you are on the path of love or you are on the road of hypocrisy,” he said in a homily at a recent early morning Mass in the Domus Sanctae Marthae where he lives.

The day’s Gospel reading, Luke 11:14-23, shows the opposition and uncertainties surrounding Jesus after He drove a demon out of a man; some accused Jesus of using the power of the devil, others stayed neutral, wanting more evidence. The day’s first reading from the Book of Jeremiah (7:23-28) recounts how God’s people choose not to listen or obey Him and let their hearts be hardened by evil.

The whole history of the people of God and Salvation has been marked by sin, unfaithfulness and hypocrisy, the pope said, according to Vatican Radio.

“This is the story of God. It seems like God was crying here (in the Book of Jeremiah): ‘I loved you so much, I gave you everything and you — everyone is against Me,’” the pope said.

It’s what happens when people’s faith falters or vanishes, he

said. “We do our will. But by doing that along life’s journey, we are following a path that hardens — the heart becomes hardened, turns to stone. And the Word of God can’t get in. The people stray.”

People should ask themselves during Lent, “Do I listen to the Lord’s voice or do I do what I want, what I like?” the pope said.

When people’s hearts are hardened, they can no longer hear what God has to say, like those who accused Jesus of using the power of the devil, which, the pope said, is a typical accusation made by “legalists” or those “who believe life follows the laws they make.”

The same thing has happened in the Church, the pope said, pointing to St. Joan of Arc, who was burned alive after being accused of being a heretic by “doctors” of the Church who “knew solid doctrine; these Pharisees, distanced from God’s love.”

Pope Francis said another example was Blessed Antonio Rosmini, a 19th-century Italian philosopher, priest and religiousorder founder whose writings had been condemned by the Church until 2001, when the head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith — under the future Pope Benedict XVI — declared that the positions condemned more than 100 years earlier did not accurately reflect Blessed Rosmini’s thinking or beliefs.

In his homily, Pope Francis said God has always sent prophets and saints “to tell His people He loved them.” It has always been the saints, “not the powerful ones, not the hypocrites” that have “carried the life of the Church forward,” he said.

Saints are people “who are not afraid to be caressed by God’s mercy. And that is why the saints are men and women who understand so much misery, so much human misery and they accompany the people close up. They do not despise the people.”

Like Jesus told the crowds after the exorcism, Christians today are told: “Either you let God’s mercy love you or you do what you want, according to your own heart, which gets harder and harder, every step on this path” of hypocrisy, the pope said.

“There is no third way of compromise. Either you’re a saint or you take another path,” Pope Francis said. “Whoever does not gather with me leaves things behind. No, it’s worse, he scatters, he ruins” and corrupts.

Pope Francis greets people in wheelchairs during a general audience in St. Peter’s Square at the Vatican recently. (CNS photo/Paul Haring)

Don’t be bitter or give up; offer world your wisdom, pope tells seniors

VATICAN CITY (CNS) — Don’t pack it in or shift into cruise control, Pope Francis told his fellow seniors.

Today’s frenetic world, especially young people and families, needs the older generation’s prayers, wisdom and gifts to give them the encouragement, hope and faith they often lack, he said at a recent weekly general audience.

“We, older people, can remind ambitious young people that a life without love is barren.

We can tell fearful young people that worrying about the future can be overcome. We can teach young people who are in love with themselves too much that there is more joy in giving than receiving,” he said to those gathered in St. Peter’s Square.

The pope continued a series of audience talks about the family with the second part of two talks dedicated to the elderly, looking at the important role they play in modern society and the family.

The 78-year-old pope said he would use the pronouns “we” and “us” when talking about the elderly since “I, too, belong to this age group,” recalling with a smile how during his visit to the Philippines in January, the people there called him “Lolo Kiko — that is, Grandpa Francis.”

“It’s true that society tends to discard us, but the Lord definitely doesn’t. The Lord never rejects us,” he said.

In fact, there is a true vocation and mission set aside for older people, who have a lot more free time at their disposal now than before, he said.

“It’s still not time to ‘rest on one’s oars’” and just coast along,

he said.

Being older is certainly different, and so when it comes to finding one’s new purpose in the world, seniors need to sort of “make it up” as they go along “because our societies are not ready, Spiritually and morally, to give this period of life its full worth.”

Even “Christian Spirituality has been taken a bit by surprise, and it involves sketching out a Spirituality of older persons,” he said.

There are plenty of saints as role models, he said, especially the elderly Simeon and Anna in the temple, who had the knowledge and wisdom from life’s journey to recognize Jesus.

When they saw Jesus, “the weight of age and waiting disappeared at that moment,” and they found “new strength for a new task: to give thanks and bear witness to this Sign of God,” the pope said.

Just as Simeon found inspiration to sing out with joy and Anna became the first to preach of Jesus, “Let us also become poets of prayer, let us acquire a love for looking for our words” to offer, as inspired by the Word of God. The prayers of the world’s grandparents and older people are “a great gift for the Church” and they offer “a great infusion of wisdom for all of society, too, especially for (those who are) too busy, too occupied, too distracted.”

Pope Francis remarked how wonderful it was that Pope Benedict XVI “chose to spend the final stretch of life in prayer and listening to God. This is

beautiful,” he said to applause.

“It is truly a mission for grandparents, a vocation for older people,” he said, for them to hand down their wisdom and offer encouragement to those who are searching for meaning in life.

“How awful the cynicism of an older person is, he who has lost the meaning of his witness, scorns the young and does not communicate knowledge about life.”

He said he was praying for “a Church that challenges the culture of disposal with the overflowing joy of a new embrace between young and old people.”

A grandparent’s words are so important, he said, telling his audience how he often reads a letter, which he keeps in his Breviary, that his grandmother wrote him for his priestly ordination because “it does me good.”

An excerpt of that letter, published in “Pope Francis: His Life in His Own Words” by Sergio Rubin and Francesca Ambrogetti, reads: “May these, my grandchildren, to whom I gave the best my heart has to offer, lead long and happy lives, but if one day hardship, illness or the loss of a loved one should fill them with grief, may they remember that one sigh directed to the tabernacle ... and a glance toward Mary ... may cause a soothing drop to fall on the deepest and most painful of wounds.”

At the end of the audience, the pope received a delegation of pilgrims observing the 500th anniversary of the birth of St. Teresa of Avila, a mystic, co-founder of the Discalced Carmelites and doctor of the Church.

March 20, 2015

The International Church

The right hand of a nearly 10-foot tall statue of Archbishop Oscar Romero is seen cut off near Plaza El Divino Salvador del Mundo in San Salvador, El Salvador. Archbishop Romero recently was declared a martyr. (CNS photo/Edgardo Ayala)

May 23 outdoor Mass set for beatification of Archbishop Romero

SAN SALVADOR, El Salvador (CNS) — Salvadoran Archbishop Oscar Romero will be beatified in San Salvador May 23, said Italian Archbishop Vincenzo Paglia, the postulator or chief promoter of the archbishop’s sainthood cause.

The ceremony, which moves the murdered archbishop a step closer to sainthood, will be in Plaza Divino Salvador del Mundo. The archbishop said Cardinal Angelo Amato, prefect of the Congregation for Saints’ Causes, would celebrate the Mass.

“Romero, from Heaven, wants every Salvadoran to walk the path of peace and justice,” Archbishop Paglia said at a recent news conference in San Salvador.

The archbishop called the beatification a gift for the world, but particularly for the people of El Salvador.

Pope Francis formally recognized February 3 that the slain Salvadoran archbishop was killed “in hatred of the faith” — and not for purely political reasons.

While Archbishop Romero’s sainthood cause began in 1993, it continued for years as Church officials combed through thousands of documents related to his life. The effort began moving forward under Pope Benedict XVI. In May 2007, he said: “Archbishop Romero certainly was a great witness to the faith, a man of great Christian virtue.”

The process advanced rapidly with the election of Pope Francis in 2013, the first Latin American pope in history.

From the first moments of his papacy, he showed interest in

declaring Archbishop Romero a saint.

Pope Francis signed the decree recognizing Archbishop Romero as a martyr, which meant there was no need to prove a miracle for his beatification. However, a miracle is ordinarily needed for canonization as saint.

Archbishop Romero, an outspoken advocate for the poor, was shot and killed March 24, 1980, as he celebrated Mass in a hospital in San Salvador during his country’s civil war.

Archbishop Paglia said in early February that the two decades it took to obtain the decree were the result of “misunderstandings and preconceptions.”

During Archbishop Romero’s time as archbishop of San Salvador — from 1977 to 1980 — “kilos of letters against him arrived in Rome. The accusations were simple: He’s political; he’s a follower of liberation theology.”

All of the complaints, Archbishop Paglia said in February, slowed the sainthood process.

However, promoters of the cause, he said, collected “a mountain of testimony just as big” to counter the accusations and to prove that Archbishop Romero heroically lived the Christian faith and was killed out of hatred for his words and actions as a Catholic pastor.

“He was killed at the altar,” Archbishop Paglia said, instead of when he was an easier target at home or on the street.

“Through him, they wanted to strike the Church that flowed from the Second Vatican Council.”

The archbishop announced the date of the beatification on the eve of the anniversary

of the assassination of a close personal friend of Archbishop Romero: Jesuit Father Rutilio Grande, the first priest executed by death squads, March 12, 1977.

Father Grande was a fiery champion of the poor and oppressed and used the pulpit to denounce actions of the government, death squads in his country, violence from the outbreak of civil war and military occupation of churches. His death had a profound impact on Archbishop Romero, who later said, “When I looked at Rutilio lying there dead I thought, ‘If they have killed him for doing what he did, then I, too, have to walk the same path.’”

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The Church in the U.S.

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March 20, 2015

Congress urged to take multi-prong approach to religious persecution

Syrian refugee children at the Mrajeeb Al Fhood refugee camp in Jordan recently formed the word “Syria” during an event to commemorate four years of the Syrian conflict. (CNS photo/Muhammad Hamed, Reuters)

Syrian refugee crisis has reached ‘tipping point,’ say USCCB officials

WASHINGTON (CNS) — Saying the Syrian refugee crisis has reached a “tipping point,” officials of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops who recently traveled to the Middle East are urging the international community to offer more help.

“Without more international support, we will find Syrians fleeing extremists being turned away and forced back to danger,” said Anastasia Brown, interim executive director for USCCB’s Migration and Refugee Services.

“The global community, led by Europe and the United States, needs to increase its support in order to prevent a humanitarian crisis,” she said in a statement.

There are now nearly four million Syrian refugees and countries in the region are no longer able to handle the flow of refugees across their borders, according to the USCCB. A delegation of USCCB officials visited the region in late 2014 and recently released a report titled, “Refuge and Hope in the Time of ISIS,” an acronym for the Islamic State. It looks at the plight of Syrians in Turkey, Bulgaria and Greece and the obstacles facing Syrians who are attempting to reach Europe.

It says Syrians find little protection as they travel through Greece and Bulgaria on their way to Europe and cites a U.N. report describing how many refugees “are taking dangerous sea journeys in boats to reach the continent.”

The full report is available at www. usccb.org/about/migration-policy/upload/ Refuge-and-Hope-in-the-Time-of-ISIS.

pdf. Among recommendations to address the crisis, it lists increased refugee assistance and resettlement.

“Beyond their role as donors, the United States, the EU member states, and other concerned countries should also share the burden by being countries of refuge,” the report says. That means, it says, working with the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees, Turkey, Bulgaria and Greece “to also facilitate access to asylum, thirdcountry resettlement, and complementary protection outside the region.”

“It was apparent from our trip that the protection space in the region for Syrians is shrinking,” said Matt Wilch, refugee policy adviser for Migration and Refugee Services at the USCCB. “People are becoming more desperate and are attempting dangerous journeys to Europe and beyond.”

The crisis has been especially hard on children, who make up half the total of Syrian refugees. Many of the children are unaccompanied minors.

“The number of unaccompanied children and other vulnerable children from Syria and elsewhere is rising, yet there are few protection mechanisms in place to identify and rescue them from harm,” said Nathalie Lummert, MRS director of special programs. “What we are seeing is an exodus of the next generation in Syria, with little hope for their future.”

Also of grave concern, the delegation said, is the well-being of Assyrian and Chaldean Christians and Yezidis, religious minorities who are targets of extremists in the region.

WASHINGTON (CNS) — A U.S. bishop who recently visited with refugees in Iraq told a Senate subcommittee that a multi-pronged approach is needed to combat a wide range of humanitarian problems including religious persecution.

“Grim statistics are only part of the story,” Bishop Oscar Cantu of Las Cruces, N.M., told the Appropriations Committee’s subcommittee on State, Foreign Operations and Related Programs. Although religious persecution is part of the story, he said, “the weakening of the rule of law, and the corresponding rise of extremist groups, many associated with (the Islamic State), created the conditions where religious persecution could grow malignantly, like a cancer unchecked.”

Bishop Cantu traveled to Iraq and spoke at the hearing in his capacity as chairman of the Committee on International Justice and Peace of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops.

He noted that the U.N. Office for Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs reported that in February there were close to 2.5 million people in Iraq who were internally displaced from their homes.

Through 2014 at least 11,600 people had been killed in Iraq and another 22,000 were wounded.

Also in February, Bishop Cantu said, Syria had more than 12 million people in need of humanitarian assistance, including four million who have fled the country. Syria’s five-year civil war has killed 220,000 people, he added.

In those two countries especially, the bishop said, “religious persecution is a distinct crisis within a wider crisis.”

Other witnesses at the hearing included Rabbi David N. Saperstein, ambassador at large for international religious freedom; Tony Perkins, president of the Family Research Council; and Jay Sekulow, chief counsel of the American Center for Law and Justice.

Rabbi Saperstein said in his written testimony that the repression of religious freedom “is a cynical tool in the hands of the powerful, sowing conflict and violence among people of different faiths, employed sometimes out of sheer group hatred, seeking to repress or eliminate those differing beliefs and practices, but often for the subjugation of political opposition and the control of the politically weak.”

Since he began his job at the State Department two months ago, Rabbi Saperstein said, terrorist attacks in Paris and Copenhagen, “the destruction of Baga, Nigeria, by Boko Haram, and the capture and displacement of Assyrian Christians

by Da’esh in northeastern Syria and many other incidents that may not have made the front pages have only reinforced for me that the promotion of religious freedom is absolutely essential for security, stability, countering violent extremism, and conflict resolution both here and abroad.

“Ensuring respect for basic freedoms, and religious freedom in particular, is not

just a moral and ethical mandate, but a national security imperative,” he said.

“Without religious freedom, there can be no real democracy and no lasting security.”

But such hot spots are not the only places where religious freedom is a problem, Rabbi Saperstein continued.

The long view reveals that “behind each crisis are months, years, and even decades of poor governance, human rights violations, discriminatory laws, neglect, and inter-group tensions,” he said.

“You cannot have freedom of religion if you are not free to express religious views with which others might differ or even find anathema,” said Rabbi Saperstein.

“You cannot follow the dictates of your religious conscience if you can be punished for choosing the religion that best reflects your conscience. Yet blasphemy and apostasy laws are growing alarmingly common all over the world.

“In places like Indonesia, Poland, Ireland, Russia and Turkey, a conviction for blasphemy, ‘insult to religion,’ ‘insult to the religious feelings of believers,’ or similar charges carries penalties of steep fines or incarceration. And in countries such as Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, and Iran, such ‘crimes’ carry the death penalty. These and similar laws and policies carry real consequences.”

In his remarks to the committee and in his written testimony, Bishop Cantu described some of the refugees he met in Iraq, the situations they fled and the circumstances under which they are existing now, including in shelters run by Caritas, the international Catholic relief agency.

Among those he told of meeting were an elderly woman now living in a tent on the grounds of St. Elias Chaldean Catholic Chapel, after fleeing an attack by Islamic State militants. The compound was home to 116 families with 560 people who fled the mainly Christian city of Qaraqosh in August, he said.

The delegation also visited centers operated by Caritas and Catholic Relief Services that were providing materials for housing and cash subsidies, with the assistance of the U.S. Office of Foreign Disaster Assistance.

Bishop Cantu outlined five policies for the U.S. government to adopt in response to the rise of the Islamic State and religious persecution in the Middle East.

Among them, were “confront the reality of religious persecution in the Middle East, where Christians are beheaded ‘for the mere fact of being Christians’ and other religious minorities suffer similarly;” and “recognize that it may be necessary for the international community to use proportionate and discriminate force to stop the unjust aggressors.”

He also called for addressing “political exclusion and economic desperation that are being manipulated” by the Islamic State, scaling up humanitarian and development assistance and accepting “a fair share of the most vulnerable people” for resettlement in the U.S. as refugees.

The Church in the U.S. After his two years as pope, ‘Francis effect’ has taken hold

March 20, 2015

WASHINGTON (CNS) — Within two years of becoming pope, Pope Francis now has an effect named after him.

This “Francis effect” provides comfort and challenges to Catholics, according to a panel of U.S. Catholic leaders speaking during a recent teleconference organized by Faith in Public Life.

“One of the most significant things about Pope Francis is the way in which he is reimagining how the Church presents itself to the world,” said Jesuit Father Thomas Reese, a senior analyst for the National Catholic Reporter newspaper.

“If we think back three years ago, and you asked people in the street, ‘What’s the pope concerned about? What’s the Church concerned about?’ you’d get a very different response than what you’d get today,” Father Reese added. “In a sense, he has rebranded the Catholic Church.”

Pope Francis “challenges those on the left and the right,”

said Kim Daniels, a senior adviser to the group Catholic Voices. For the right, she added, the challenge is “a fresh look at poverty”; for the left, “a fresh look at how to build a Culture of Life.”

“Our faith should challenge us,” Daniels said. “The content of Pope Francis’ challenge is resistance to a throwaway culture.

This is a call to us to stand for the most vulnerable: the unborn,” she added, but also “the jobless, the migrants, to all who are marginalized. We’re all in this together.”

Sister Simone Campbell, a Sister of Social Service who is executive director of the Catholic social justice lobby Network, said one key point of Pope Francis’ tenure is “his economic analysis that states so clearly that gross injustice requires more than economic growth, it requires changing the processes that protect those who have wealth at the top. He says market forces cannot be left alone.

Market forces are a human institution and therefore can be flawed.”

The apostolic exhortation “The Joy of the Gospel” is an adage Pope Francis exemplifies daily, according to Sister Simone. “‘The Joy of the Gospel’ explains how he is leading is in his approach to peacebuilding in our society,” she said. “Just a few weeks into the 114th Congress, I think Congress needs to work on peacebuilding among themselves so they can govern our beloved nation.”

“We need more politicians capable of sincere and effective dialogue and a focus on hearing the poor, seeing the problems. Nothing could be more countercultural in Washington today,” agreed John Carr, director of the Initiative on Catholic Social Thought and Public Life at Georgetown University in Washington. “When he stands before the Congress in six months, he will challenge everybody to think and act dif-

Vanier cites St. Therese of Lisieux, Gandhi as Spiritual role models

WASHINGTON (CNS) — In 1964, when Jean Vanier quietly began what would become an international network, he had “no idea that this would be a revolutionary reality — that it would grow,” he remarked joyfully.

The founder of L’Arche and this year’s winner of the Templeton Prize made the comments in a telephone interview with Catholic News Service from London, where the recent news of him winning the prize was announced.

Vanier, a Canadian Catholic philosopher, theologian and humanitarian, is probably best known for starting L’Arche, an international federation of communities where people with and without intellectual disabilities live and work together.

The drive to form what would become L’Arche began in the early ’60s, when he started to visit institutions for the intellectually disabled in northern France. He had resigned a naval commission to pursue a career of scholarship and to follow Jesus, though he didn’t know where it would lead.

Vanier was introduced to “the whole world of people with disabilities, humiliated and depressed,” by a chaplain at such an institution — a chaplain he calls his “Spiritual father.”

“I had never even imagined that people were being treated like that,” he said of the kinds of things he saw time and time

again, remarking on the irony that “God chooses the foolish and the weak to confound the intellectual and the prideful.”

“For parents it was a shame to have a son or daughter like that,” he added, which led many of them to hide children away in big institutions where they were not given the kind of attention, love and friendship necessary for human life to flourish.

“I just felt that I should do something,” Vanier recalled, “The only thing I could do (at that time) was maybe welcome two.”

So he “bought a house, got permission from the French state and brought in two men with intellectual disabilities” named Rafael and Philip. Both of the men’s parents had died.

Today there are 147 L’Arche communities in 35 countries on five continents, and more than 1,500 Faith and Light support groups in 82 countries. These groups similarly urge solidarity among people with and without disabilities.

When asked whose life and examples have inspired him through his journey from a small house in France in the early ’60s to today, Vanier told CNS that “essentially, it’s Jesus. That is the heart of the matter.”

However, the author also said that he finds inspiration in the lives of men such as the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., Nelson Mandela and Anglican Archbishop

Desmond Tutu, saying that “these are great people who worked for peace.”

Vanier also called Mahatma Gandhi “a man of prayer, a man who had an incredible vision that the mission is not to humiliate but love the enemy,” while also praising the “little way” of St. Therese of Lisieux, saying that “there is a whole world of people who have gone before us who are our teachers.”

ferently.”

The two dominant themes of Francis’ papacy are “the joy of the Gospel and the mercy of God. These are different emphases for a Church that, frankly, has been tempted by or perceived on fear and focused on judgment,” Carr said. “I think he brings two basic perspectives. He looks at the world and he looks at the economy from the bottom up, and he looks at the Church from the outside in. He’s tough on clerics and he’s tough on hierarchs.

These priorities are not those of the hierarchy or the Curia.”

“Pope Francis has transformed the public perception of the Church that had been seen as “judgmental, shouting a big no at the world. The Church that Pope Francis portrays is humble, welcoming, open to the world,” said Stephen Schneck, director of the Institute for Policy Research & Catholic Studies at The Catholic University of America, Washington, D.C. “His vision imagines the Church as a field hospital for the Spiritually wounded.”

Schneck talked about the pope’s upcoming encyclical on the environment and “how much it’s being dreaded in some quarters.” Already, he said, there’s been “a litany of preemptive strikes by conservatives even though not a word has been released,” he added, citing the journal First Things and the Acton Institute among the critics. Schneck said he suspects the pope “will morally validate

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responses to global warming” in the encyclical.

“There are some conservatives in the Catholic Church who have responded to Pope Francis and his agenda in a negative fashion,” Father Reese acknowledged. “But as the Pew Center recent data show, self-identified conservative Catholics like Pope Francis more than liberals and moderates. It’s the chattering class, the conservative ‘commentariat,’ that’s concerned about Pope Francis, not the conservative Catholics in the pews.”

The Pew Research Center survey on Pope Francis showed that 94 percent of conservative Catholics viewed him favorably, while 87 percent of liberal and moderate Catholics did.

Jessica Martinez, a Pew research associate, said evidence of a Francis effect is “really kind of mixed.” The share of Americans who identify as Catholic between 2012 and 2014 didn’t change, and neither did frequency of Mass attendance.

But “one-quarter said they had become more excited” since Pope Francis’ election, while two in five respondents said they pray more often and one in five said they read the Bible and other religious materials more frequently, Martinez said.

“The pope is not the Catholic Church,” Father Reese said. “For the Francis effect to take hold and really be long term, people have to buy into what he’s doing.

We have to imitate him just as he’s imitating Jesus.”

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March 20, 2015

Anchor Editorial

More deaths, more mercy needed

As you can read below in his Angelus address, Pope Francis decried last Sunday’s attack on two parish churches, one Catholic and one Anglican, in Lahore, Pakistan. He expressed his solidarity with the living and dead, implored help from God, and reminded the world of its failure to take the persecution of Christians seriously (although one could say that the world is quite serious about persecuting Christians, doing so effectively in a variety of countries, using various means for multiple reasons, but always viewing believers as the enemy).

Later in the week, on Tuesday, the pope wrote to the bishops of Nigeria, the land beset by Boko Haram (now officially an affiliate of the “Islamic State” or ISIS). After beginning the letter mentioning Nigeria’s positive attributes, he got to the darkness that it confronts. “Your nation has had to confront considerable problems, among them new and violent forms of extremism and fundamentalism on ethnic, social and religious grounds. Many Nigerians have been killed, wounded or mutilated, kidnapped and deprived of everything: their loved ones, their land, their means of subsistence, their dignity and their rights.

Many have not been able to return to their homes. Believers, both Christian and Muslim, have experienced a common tragic outcome, at the hands of people who claim to be religious, but who instead abuse religion, to make of it an ideology for their own distorted interests of exploitation and murder.”

The pope then reminded the bishops of our need to truly work for peace.

“Every day I remember you in my prayers and I repeat here, for your encouragement and comfort, the consoling words of the Lord Jesus, which must always resound in our hearts: ‘Peace I leave with you; My peace I give to you’ ( Jn 14:27). Peace — as you know so well — is not only the absence of conflict or the result of political compromise or fatalistic resignation. Peace is for us a gift which comes from on High; it is Jesus Christ Himself, the Prince of Peace, Who has made of two peoples one (cf. Eph 2:14). And only the man or woman who treasures the peace of Christ as a guiding light and way of life can become a peacemaker (cf. Mt 5:9). At the same time, peace is a daily endeavor, a courageous and authentic effort to favor reconciliation, to promote experiences of sharing, to extend bridges of dialogue, to serve the weakest and the excluded. In a word, peace consists in building up a ‘culture of encounter.’”

The “culture of encounter” is a favorite theme of Pope Francis. Vatican ob-

server John L. Allen Jr., now of the Boston Globe, noted back in December 2013 in the National Catholic Reporter that these three words kept popping up in the pontiff ’s talks. Allen wrote, “Like many sound bites, the ‘culture of encounter’ is elastic enough to embrace a wide range of possible meanings, but in general Francis seems to intend the idea of reaching out, fostering dialogue and friendship even outside the usual circles, and making a special point of encountering people who are neglected and ignored by the wider world. ‘Encounter’ is thus, in some ways, a proxy for ‘mercy’ — placing the emphasis on compassion rather than, in the first instance, judgment.”

What Allen noticed fits well in the other theme about which Pope Francis focused this week — mercy, especially God’s mercy towards us, which we need to receive and then pass on to other people. In his homily last Friday at the Vatican penance service (the one in which he announced the upcoming Holy Year of Mercy — see page 13 for more on that), the pope reminded us, “The call of Jesus pushes each of us never to stop at the surface of things, especially when we are dealing with a person. We are called to look beyond, to focus on the heart to see how much generosity everyone is capable.” Here we see how mercy and encounter are tied together.

The pope praised Catholics and other people of good will in Nigeria: “in the midst of so many trials and sufferings the Church in Nigeria does not cease to witness to hospitality, mercy and forgiveness. We give thanks to the Lord for them, as for so many men and women of every social, cultural and religious background, who with great willingness stand up in concrete ways to every form of violence, and whose efforts are directed at favoring a more secure and just future for all. They offer us moving testimonies, which, as Pope Benedict XVI recalled at the end of the Synod for Africa, show ‘the power of the Spirit to transform the hearts of victims and their persecutors and thus to re-establish fraternity’”(Africae Munus, 20).

We cannot fight “fire with fire” by fighting hatred with hatred. We need to engage in a Spiritual combat, fighting hatred with love. The international community (and individual governments, including our own) must do what they can to protect the innocent and stop religious persecution, while we Christians continue to pray, offer sacrifices and see how we can be signs of God’s mercy to all the people we encounter.

Pope Francis’ Angelus message of March 15 Dear brothers and sisters, Today’s Gospel proposes once again the words of Jesus to Nicodemus: “For God so loved the world that He gave His only Son” ( Jn 3:16). Listening to this word, we turn our heart’s gaze to Jesus crucified and we feel in us that God loves us, He truly loves us, and He loves us so much! This is the simplest expression that summarizes the whole Gospel, all of faith and all of theology: God loves us with a free and boundless love.

God shows this love above all in Creation, as the Liturgy proclaims in the Eucharistic Prayer

IV: “[You] have made all that is, so that You might fill Your creatures with blessings and bring joy to many of them by the glory of Your light.” Since the beginning of time there is only the free and gratuitous love of the Father.

St. Irenaeus, a saint from the first century, writes: “In the beginning, therefore, did God form Adam, not as if He stood in need of man, but that He might have [someone] upon whom to confer His benefits” (Adversus haereses, IV, 14,1).

Thus the Eucharistic Prayer IV continues: “And when through disobedience he had lost Your OFFICIAL NEWSPAPER OF THE DIOCESE OF FALL RIVER

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friendship, You did not abandon him to the domain of death. For You came in mercy to the aid of all.” As in Creation, so does the gratuitous love of God stand out in the successive steps in the history of Salvation: the Lord chooses His people not because they deserve it, but precisely because it is the smallest among all peoples. And when He comes “in the fullness of time,” although men had repeatedly broken the covenant, God, rather than abandon them, forged a new bond with them, in the Blood of Jesus — the bond of the new and everlasting covenant — a bond that nothing will ever break.

St. Paul reminds us: “God, Who is rich in mercy” — never forget this, He is rich in mercy — “because of the great love He had for us, even when we were dead in our transgressions, brought us to life with Christ” (Eph 2:4).

The cross of Christ is the supreme proof of the love of God for us: Jesus has loved us “until the end” ( Jn 13:1), meaning not only at the final moment of His earthly life, but until extreme limit of love. If in C reation the Father has given us the proof of His great love by giving us life, in the passion of His Son He has given us the sum of all proofs: He has come to suffer and die for us. And this love that is so great

is the mercy of God, because He loves us, He forgives us. With His mercy, God forgives all and God always forgives.

May Mary, Mother of Mercy, place in our hearts the certainty that we are loved by God. May she be close to us in the moments of difficulty and give us the sentiments of her Son, so that our Lenten itinerary may be an experience of forgiveness, of welcome and of charity.

Following the Angelus, the pope said: Dear brothers and sisters, With sorrow, with much sorry I received the news of today’s terrorist attack against two churches in the city of Lahore in Pakistan that have caused numerous deaths and wounded people. They are Christian churches, the Christians who are persecuted. Our brothers shed their blood solely because they are Christians. While I assure my prayers for the victims and their families, I ask from the Lord, I implore the Lord, the Source of all good, to give peace and harmony to that country. And that this persecution against Christians, that the world tries to hide, end and that there may be peace.

I give a cordial greeting to you, the faithful of Rome and you who have come from so many parts of

the world.

I greet the pilgrims of Granada and Malaga, Spain; as well as those from Mannheim, Germany. I greet the parish groups who come from Perugia, Pordenone, Pavia, from St. Giuseppe all’Aurelio in Rome and from the Diocese of PiacenzaBobbio. I give a special thought to the youth of Serravalle Scrivia, from Rosolina and from Verdellino-Zingonia who are preparing to receive Confirmation; to those from the Diocese of Lodi and from the Romana — Vittoria deanery of Milano who have come to Rome to make “the promise” to follow Jesus. I also greet the ministers of Besana in Brianza. And I can see them from here, there is there banner, greetings!

I greet the various volunteer groups who, united in the work of solidarity, are participating in the “Together for the Common Good” demonstration. I express my closeness to the people of Vanuatu, in the Pacific Ocean, struck by a strong hurricane. I pray for the deceased, the wounded and the homeless. I thank those who have acted quickly to bring help and support.

To all I wish a good Sunday.

Please do not forget to pray for me. Have a good lunch and goodbye.

March 20, 2015

L

ast week we considered the practice of frequent reception of the Sacrament of Penance and Reconciliation in a Catholic plan of life. The “Catechism of the Catholic Church” and the last seven popes have all sought to persuade the Christian faithful to take regular advantage of the gift of the Lord’s mercy.

These popes have led also by example. Pope Francis has told us that he goes to Confession twice a month. St. John Paul II went each week. Pope Pius XII went every day.

This is not — we can be certain — because the popes are clandestine serial killers, blasphemers, liars, thieves, or regularly commit other mortal sins.

It’s because of a hard and fast law of Spiritual growth: the closer we draw to God, the more we see our thoughts, words, deeds and omissions are not totally aligned with God. The more light shines in a room, the more we see the dust on the woodwork or the fingerprints on a window.

The more we grow in holiness, the humbler we get and the hungrier we become for God’s mercy.

These popes also have recognized what so many saints themselves have noted, that the Sacrament of Penance and Reconciliation is one of the greatest means of Spiritual growth that Christ has given us.

St. John Paul used to tell

Anchor Columnist The fruits of frequent Confession young people that if they “By it genuine self-knowledge wanted to mature faster, one is increased, Christian humility of the best means was fregrows, bad habits are corrected, quent Confession, because Spiritual neglect and tepidity a thorough examination of are resisted, the conscience is conscience would help them to purified, the will strengthened, get to know themselves, a sora salutary self-control is atrowful Confession would assist tained, and grace is increased them to grow in a sense of in virtue of the Sacrament personal responsibility, and the itself.” firm resolve to change one’s behavior would be an enormous aid in Putting Into the formation of the virtues. the Deep No matter how young we are, these

By Father truths remain valid.

Roger J. Landry What are the fruits of frequent Confession? The “Catechism” lists several of them: “The Let’s examine briefly the regular Confession of our eight benefits he named: venial sins helps us form our Genuine self-knowledge conscience, fight against evil is increased — Socrates said tendencies, let ourselves be that the unexamined life is not healed by Christ and progworth living. The regular, thorress in the life of the Spirit. ough, courageous examination By receiving more frequently of our conscience helps us to through this Sacrament the do an honest appraisal of our gift of the Father’s mercy, we behaviors, character and moveare spurred to be merciful as he ments of the soul. It allows us is merciful” (CCC 1458). to know ourselves with God’s Pope Pius XII gave a more light, the good and the ugly. extended list of the Spiritual Christian humility grows advantages in his 1943 encycli- — Humility begins with seecal Mystici Corporis. ing ourselves as we really are, “To ensure more rapid but then extends to looking at progress day by day in the path and relating to God and others of virtue, the pious pracreverently as they really are. tice of frequent Confession, Humility helps us to grasp that which was introduced into we hold a treasure in vessels of the Church by the inspiration clay and allows us more easily of the Holy Spirit, should be to serve with love. earnestly advocated,” he wrote.

Bad habits are corrected

— We all have bad habits, but few of us fight intelligently to extirpate them. Frequent Confession helps us to identify our vices, probe with God’s assistance their root causes, and come up with a resolute game plan day-by-day to battle against and eradicate them.

Spiritual neglect and tepidity are resisted — Pondering Jesus’ admonition to the Church of Laodicea (Rev 3:14-19), Pope Benedict said, “The greatest danger for a Christian [is] not that he may say ‘no,’ but that he may say a very lukewarm ‘yes.’ This being lukewarm is what discredits Christianity. Faith must become in us a flame of love, that fires up my being, and so also fires up my neighbor.”

Frequent reception of God’s mercy fills us with the flame of His love and burns away Spiritual dross.

The conscience is purified — To keep our inner organ of sensitivity attuned to God, we must not only regularly calibrate it through examination our actions in light of God’s guidance but receive the Sacramental help God gives.

Trying to follow an unpurified conscience is as wise as trying to drive looking through a sullied windshield.

The will is strengthened — A strong will perseveres in doing what’s right and in say-

7 ing to God, “Thy will be done.”

Our failures and falls discourage us and weaken the will.

God’s mercy picks us up and inspires us to keep fighting.

A saving self-control is attained — To be Jesus’ disciple, we have to deny ourselves, pick up our cross and follow Him. Frequent Confession helps us to control our egomania and discipline our appetites so that we can give ourselves to God and others.

Grace is increased in virtue of the Sacrament itself — Grace is our participation as creatures in the very life and love of God. The Sacraments give the grace they signify and the Sacrament of Penance helps us to live in the truly unbelievable, life-changing reality of God’s merciful love.

For those striving to grow in holiness, how can we neglect these fruits of frequent Confession?

During his first Angelus meditation two years ago this week, Pope Francis eloquently stated, “God never tires of forgiving us, but we tire of asking for forgiveness,” and prayed, “May we never tire of asking for what God never tires of giving.”

Frequent Confession is the means by which we never fatigue of receiving the love God lavishly wants to give.

Anchor columnist Father Landry can be contacted at fatherlandry@catholicpreaching.com.

Doctrinal chief says bishops must be accountable in abuse prevention

VATICAN CITY (CNS) — Bishops of dioceses around the world have an obligation to work to prevent clerical sexual abuse and to ensure that priests in their dioceses do not commit acts of abuse, said Cardinal Gerhard Muller, prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith.

“If, unfortunately, these crimes are verified, they fall under the exclusive competence of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, which, however, always needs the assistance and collaboration of ordinaries and well-prepared canonists to act effectively and prudently,” he said in a speech at Rome’s Pontifical Urbanian University.

The Vatican newspaper, L’Osservatore Romano, printed what it described as “ample excerpts” from the speech March 12.

The cardinal spoke during a March 9-10 special course at the university looking specifically at “crimes against the Sacrament of Penance.” However, he spoke in general about the crimes the Church defines as “more grave delicts,” which includes the sexual abuse of minors.

The ordinaries of dioceses and their collaborators, he said, “have the obligation to prevent and to be vigilant in order to avoid the commission of such crimes.”

In early February, Cardinal Sean P. O’Malley of Boston, president of the Pontifical Commission for the Protection of Minors, said the commission had drawn up recommendations for Pope Francis aimed at making bishops and superiors of religious orders accountable for following Church norms regarding child

protection and the handling of allegations of abuse made against a priest.

In the speech excerpted by the Vatican newspaper, Cardinal Muller said that in the past 15 years the Church has faced “a serious challenge in which the credibility of its teaching has been placed in doubt because of certain actions — the ‘graviora delicta’

(more grave crimes) — on the part of some of its sons and by the lack of a response to confront it.”

“It is not enough for us to say that it is a matter of lies sown by enemies of the Church, who nevertheless profit from the circumstances,” Cardinal Muller said.

“The obligation to seek justice in the cases of the ‘grav-

iora delicta’ can in no way be considered opposed to the obligations of charity or mercy,” he said. “Neither charity as the highest virtue consistent with love of God and one’s neighbor, nor mercy as the inclination of compassion and assistance for the misery of others, can be true if they are introduced on the basis of injustice.”

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March 20, 2015

‘If a grain of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it produces much fruit’

I

n the first reading the Lord offered the people of Judah the hope and Divine promise of a new beginning. Jeremiah’s prophecy is fulfilled in the life, death and Resurrection of Our Lord, Jesus Christ.

In this week’s Gospel, the Greeks want to see Jesus. This is a very important moment because it means people of non-Jewish culture came in search of Christ. The Greeks understand, though only in part, that this Jewish feast is the foreshadowing of the coming of the Messiah. Jesus’ public ministry took place in conjunction with the holy feast set forth by God. The Greeks are also at the feast, however they understand and appear ready to accept what the Jews do not: Jesus is the Christ, the Son of the Living God. Philip receives the request of the Greeks and proceeds to tell Andrew, and in turn Andrew and Philip tell Jesus (12:22). John does something remarkable in this text. He fixes our eyes

on the Gentiles in order to hour of His death. We learn fix our eyes on Jesus. that from John 13:1, where Jesus receives the report “His hour” is defined in from Andrew and Philip terms of Jesus’ death on the that the Greeks have come cross. with a request to see Him. We see it again in John Jesus does not address the Greeks. Instead, He simply says, “The hour has come that Homily of the Week the Son of Man Fifth Sunday should be glorified” of Lent (12:23). Jesus interprets the coming of

By Deacon the Greeks as the Tony Cipriano arrival of His hour.

Everything in John’s Gospel has been pressing 17:1 as Jesus begins to pray towards this hour. to the Father with those Remember at the beginwords anticipating His ning of His ministry, Jesus death: “Father, the hour has went to the wedding feast come. Glorify Your Son, of Cana in Galilee. Jesus that Your Son also may says to His mother, “My glorify You.” The hour, of hour has not yet come” which Jesus is speaking, is ( Jn 2:4). We find the same the hour that has now come thing in 8:20. In the openand it is drawing near. The ing half of John’s Gospel, inclusion of the Gentiles is Jesus’ hour has not yet brought about through the come. But now, with the Jewish rejection of Jesus.

Gentiles drawing near to The Greeks wish to see JeHim, Jesus says, “The hour sus, and some of the Jewish has come.” leaders wish to kill Him. The hour to which Jesus This is the same idea as is referring, of course, is the we find in St. Paul’s readings

when he says that Christ humbled Himself and became obedient to death, even death on a cross. God exalted Jesus above all created things.

Picture the scene of Jesus’ crucifixion. The place itself conjures up the most disturbing images; it is called “the place of a skull,” in Hebrew “Golgotha” ( Jn 19:17). Here the soldiers pierced Jesus’ hands, nailing them to the cross, and they pierced His feet. They lifted Him up on the cross between two thieves. Above Him, Pilate fastened the title, “Jesus of Nazareth, the King of the Jews” (19:19).

How can the hour of Jesus’ death be the hour that the Son of Man is glorified?

Jesus tells us in John 12:24: “Most assuredly, I said to you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the ground and dies, it remains along; but if it dies, it produces much fruit.”

The hour of Jesus’ death

is the hour of His glory because at the cross, Jesus actually saves His people, securing their redemption for time and eternity.

Jesus dies in order to produce much fruit and the fruit of His death is the Salvation of men and women from every nation.

This is the lesson and encouragement to the Christian. So we should see every type of suffering and contradiction as a sharing in Christ’s cross, which redeems us and exalts us. A person has to die to himself by forgetting his comfort and shedding his selfishness.

Jesus Christ is the fruitful grain of wheat Who died in order that He might produce much fruit. The Church is His fruit and she exists to bring glory and honor to Him. Therefore, the Biblical foundation for Church planting is the glory of Christ Jesus, Our Lord.

Deacon Cipriano serves at St. Vincent de Paul Parish in Attleboro.

Upcoming Daily Readings: Sat. Mar. 21, Jer 11:18-20; Ps 7:2-3,9b-12; Jn 7:40-53. Sun. Mar. 22, Fifth Sunday of Lent, Jer 31:31-34; Ps 51:3-4,12-15; Heb 5:7-9; Jn 12:20-33. Mon. Mar. 23, Dn 13:1-9,15-17,19-30,33-62 or 13:41c-62; Ps 23:1-6; Jn 8:1-11. Tues. Mar. 24, Nm 21:4-9; Ps 102:2-3, 16-21; Jn 8:21-30. Wed. Mar. 25, Is 7:10-14, 8:10; Ps 40:7-11; Heb 10:4-10; Lk 1:26-38. Thurs. Mar. 26, Gn 17:3-9; Ps 105:4-9; Jn 8:51-59. Fri. Mar. 27, Jer 20:1013; Ps 18:2-7; Jn 10:31-42.

O

ne of the problems with my being a sports fanatic, and not just a casual fan, is the fact that I tend to take things personally.

When the home town team loses, I feel like I lost. When the home town team is on the road and is taunted by the hosting fans, I feel as though they are taunting me.

But the worst part of taking it so much to heart is that I grow attached to most of the players during the long grind of the season. I live with them, and I die with them.

All that leads to the dreadful end-of-the-season housecleaning my teams routinely take part in.

Ever since I was a pup, I dreaded trade deadlines during the season and then, beginning in 1976 in Major League Baseball and later the other major sports, the post-season free-agency frenzy.

It broke my heart to lose guys like Ken “the Hawk” Har-

Say it ain’t so, Jorge! relson and George “Boomer” feeling in my gut at these times Scott (twice), Carlton Fisk, of year, but nothing compared Dennis Eckersley, Rick Burto the feeling I had when our leson, Cedric Maxwell, Paul beloved Pope Francis said last Pierce, Ty Law, Lawyer Malweek, “I have the feeling that loy, Willie McGinest, Vince Wilfork, Phil Esposito, Derek Sanderson, and even Bobby Orr. Bobby Orr, of all people!

These were my peeps.

By Dave Jolivet They were in my living room every night they put on the Boston (or New England) uniform and my pontificate will be brief,” he stepped out into the limelight. said. “Four or five years. I do Yet, I didn’t have a say in not know, or maybe two, three. their packing their bags and Well, two have already passed. heading for a new home town It’s just a vague feeling.” team.

Say it ain’t so, Joe! Or Each year I have to sweat should it be, “Say it ain’t so, out who is going to be leaving Jorge!” my “family.”

I don’t know if Pope Francis’ If there is blame in all this, “feeling” is a premonition from it goes both ways — with the above or a gut feeling or what, players and with the owners. but I’m being enveloped by Either way, the little people that trade/free agent depresdon’t have a choice. sion.

There’s always a nagging He went on to say, “I do not

My View From the Stands

know what it is, but I have the feeling that the Lord put me here for a brief time. But it is just a feeling. So I keep the possibility open.”

I’m not ready to lose Pope Francis as the leader of the world’s Catholics. The world, including non-Catholics, is not ready to lose the hope, humility, happiness, and compassion that oozes from the man.

In my position as a journalist I know I’m supposed to remain impartial and unbiased, but ever since March 13, 2013 when Jorge Mario Bergoglio emerged as pope on the Vatican balcony overlooking St. Peter’s Square with an almost deer-in-the-headlights countenance, I knew this was the man for the job.

My heart immediately opened for this meek cardinal from Argentina.

And that heart trumps jour-

nalism protocol, and I must declare that Pope Francis is my favorite pontiff. The Bobby Orr of the papacy, if I may be so bold or irreverent.

Two, three, four or even five years is not enough to have Pope Francis as our pope. I pray for a long papacy for this brother of ours, despite his feelings.

I know that God has a plan for all of us, including all of the Successors of St. Peter, and that no matter what happens, it’s for His glory and our good.

But please ....!

I don’t want to lose good Pope Francis to retirement, resignation, free agency, a trade or ....

So, I’m asking the great Owner in the sky to do whatever it takes to keep Francis on our team. If he wants to go out for a pizza, I say go for it. I’ll buy!

Yet, God’s will be done. But please .... davejolivet@anchornews.org.

March 20, 2015

Friday 20 March 2015 — Homeport: Falmouth Harbor — first day of spring (hooray!) hen I say I keep my thumb on the pulse of popular culture, dear readers, by “culture” I mean worldwide culture. This entails tracking multiple and varied sources.

My most recent copy of “Surfer Today” is a good example.

In it is an article concerning the Vatican and a surfer dude.

“What’s this?” I asked myself.

I soon found related information on the Catholic News Service. Then Father F. X. Wallace slipped me an article on the subject he had clipped from the venerable Wall Street Journal. Indeed, my interest has now been piqued. How could I have missed this major cultural and religious phenomenon?

Here it is in a nutshell, on the remote chance that you may still be in the dark on this matter: The late Guido Schaffer, M.D., a transitional deacon from Brazil known as Anjo Surfista (Surfer Angel) may eventually be declared a saint of the Catholic Church.

Guido was born May 22, 1974 in Volta Retonda, Brazil, the son of husband-andwife physicians. To no one’s surprise, in 1998, he himself graduated from medical school.

W

A

t the faculty meeting, I scribbled a note to myself.

New to Catholic education, I was in the midst of learning to be super-organized with administrative details as this allowed me to maximize time for my teaching. I looked up as my name was mentioned yet again. Evidently, it was just going to be one of those days.

Someone said that all AP courses except mine had been “cleared.”

Implication was that I had not done my work. Suddenly, all eyes were on me and I most definitely did not like what I saw in them.

Even worse, I had no idea what “cleared” meant so I’d have to go speak privately with this person.

Thankfully, the principal tabled the discussion.

Later that day, I sat in that administrator’s office. Truthfully, I was not happy to be there as I was still disturbed by the morning’s episode. The administrator started by saying, “The principal demanded that I apologize to you.” The Holy Spirit guided my response. I replied, “You hurt me, but I know you were only thinking out loud and did not intend to do so.” In surprise, she

Anchor Columnists When the saint from Ipanema goes surfing

9

before his ordination to the As a physician, he dedicated priesthood, he died in a tragic himself to working among accident. While “hanging 10” the poor of Brazil, especially with a group of surfer buddies, the indigenous people. He served with the Missionaries of he was struck by the surfboard on which he was riding and Charity (founded by Mother drowned. He was 34 years of Teresa) in providing mediage at the time. cal care for the homeless. Dr. On the day of his Mass of Guido Schaffer enjoyed surfing Christian Burial, the Church in his spare time. Some say that for Guido Schaffer, surfing was a form of prayer, a wordless The Ship’s Log communing with Reflections of a God. Guido Schaffer Parish Priest was a very religious man and often conBy Father Tim ducted prayer services Goldrick on the beach. Before I try this new form of contemplation, I of Our Lady of Copacabana would first have to learn to swim. On second thought, per- was filled with 2,000 bishops, haps I had better stick with the priests, religious Sisters, medical professionals, young people Rosary. It seems much safer.

— and of course the sick and There came a point in life homeless. They all recognized when Dr. Schaffer suspected him as a young man who deepGod was calling him to the ly loved God and neighbor. priesthood. Eventually, in His tomb soon became a place 2002, he broke off his engageof pilgrimage. Miraculous ment to be married and began healings began to be claimed preparing for the priesthood at a Benedictine monastery. In through his intercession. By request of the people, Holy 2008 he continued his studies Mass was scheduled monthly at St. Joseph Seminary in Rio at his grave. de Janeiro. He hoped, after In May 2014, exactly five ordination, to work among the years after the death of Guido poor as a priest and medical Schaffer, the archbishop of Rio doctor. In 2009, just weeks

de Janeiro formally petitioned the Vatican for permission to open his cause for beatification and canonization. A stack of documents and testimonials were included with the petition.

The request was reviewed by various Roman Dicasteries.

No objections were raised. In January of this year, the Congregation for the Causes of Saints in Rome informed the Archbishop of Rio that nothing stood in the way of proceeding with the process (Nihil Obstat).

The Archdiocese of Rio de Janeiro has now established a tribunal to handle the case of the alleged surfing saint. Information is being collected. All of Dr. Schaffer’s writings, public and private, must be reviewed. A postulator has been appointed.

I imagine it will be difficult to find a “devil’s advocate” to argue against his canonization but they need to find one somewhere.

The task is this: the tribunal, in union with the archbishop, must render a judgment as to whether or not Servant of God Guido Schaffer, M.D., has shown heroic

virtues (all of them, not just four out of seven: faith, hope, charity, prudence, justice, temperance, and fortitude). If the ruling is affirmative, back goes the case to Rome. You can, by the way, circumvent the “heroic virtues” clause by dying as a martyr for the faith, but accidental drowning does not qualify.

Meanwhile, the body of Servant of God Guido Schaffer has been transferred to the Church of Our Lady of Peace in the resort town of Ipanema.

Outside the church hangs a large banner featuring a photograph of Guido Schaffer wearing blue surfer’s shorts, riding a wave and staring off into the distance.

The process of canonization is time-consuming, intensive, extensive, and expensive — and for Servant of God Guido Schaffer we’ve only just begun (as they used to sing at weddings in the 1970s).

Personally, I think the canonization of Guido Schaffer would be an inspiration to today’s young people. It means you can be young and holy at the same time.

Now they tell me.

Anchor columnist Father Goldrick is pastor of St. Patrick’s Parish in Falmouth.

that the other person will come said, “How can you know that?” back with continued behaviors in I replied, “I know who you are a pattern that indicates a hurtful as a person so that has to be the intent. With that evidence, one answer.” can then decide an appropriate Do you recognize the above story as an example of granting the benefit of the doubt? Many Wrestling with God resources define benefit Holding on for of the doubt as a favorHis blessing able decision when there is insufficient evidence to warrant that decision.

By Dr. Helen J. Flavin To me, that definition is inadequate. Benefit of the response. Jesus speaks directly doubt is, in truth, a suspension to each of our hearts to allow us of judgment. It is listening with one’s heart to recognize the Spirit to gently, but firmly draw that personal boundary between being of God within another. Most importantly, it is a choice to await a forgiving person and being walked upon. the expression of God’s love (the The New Testament is filled good) that the Holy Spirit will with examples where Jesus grantwork through that other person ed the benefit of the doubt to when he/she is ready to freely others. The recipients each proved respond to do so. Granting the worthy of that regard. When Jebenefit of the doubt is really sus came back to the disciples in being or walking in God’s love: “Love bears all things, believes all the garden, He granted them the benefit of the doubt and invited things, hopes all things, endures them once again to come pray all things” (1 Cor 13:7). with Him. After His ResurrecOne qualification is needed. tion, Jesus asked Peter three times There will be times after one has if Peter loved Him. This gave Pegranted the benefit of the doubt

ter the chance to forgive himself (for denying Jesus) and to choose how to continue to serve Jesus.

With love, Jesus calmly awaited James’ and John’s decisions. Was their final choice glory or to be followers (servants) as God had called them to be?

Today’s world overemphasizes the individual and thus sees application of the benefit of the doubt as weakness.

This practice is thus one example of how we each are called to be in the world, but not of the world. Henri Nouwen says, “I know that I have to move from speaking about Jesus to letting Him speak within me, from thinking about Jesus to letting Him think within me, from acting for and with Jesus to letting Him act through me. I know the only way for me to see the world is to see it through His eyes.”

Listening between the lines and being willing to grant the benefit of the doubt actually is looking inside another person to his/her heart and seeing him/her just as Our Lord does. In addition, the

love we feel when we are recipients of the benefit of the doubt is actually God’s call for us to choose to find a way to manifest His love to others.

Back to that administrator, choosing to see one another as Jesus sees us allowed the two of us to forge a professional relationship based upon genuine conversation and mutual trust.

One day, I had a senior throw a very virulent tantrum. This administrator was correct that fear lay behind his atrocious behavior.

She asked me to give him the benefit of the doubt. I erased his zero and worked intensely with him after school. He respectfully worked on his writing skills and finally finished the paper. The day of graduation, he thanked us both for the second chance.

God’s love will change our world each and every time we have the courage to serve Him by bringing it to our world.

Anchor columnist Helen Flavin is a Catholic scientist, educator and writer and a member of St. Bernadette’s Parish in Fall River. biochemwz@hotmail.com.

Listening with one’s heart

10

March 20, 2015

Hearing Confession is source of grace, conversion for priest, pope says VATICAN CITY (CNS) — Hearing a Catholic’s Confession should be awe-inspiring for a priest, an experience that makes him look at his own life and willingness to

convert, Pope Francis told a group of seminarians, new priests and priests who hear Confessions in the major basilicas of Rome.

“Let yourselves be educat-

ed by the Sacrament of Reconciliation,” he recently told them.

Hearing someone’s Confession, he said, should lead the priest to make an examination of his conscience, asking, for example, “Do I, the priest, love the Lord like this old lady does?” Or, “Am I, as a confessor, willing to change and convert like this penitent, who I am here to serve?”

“These people edify us.

They edify us,” the pope said.

Some 500 seminarians and newly-ordained priests were attending a course on the Sacrament of Penance organized by the Apostolic Penitentiary, the Vatican office that also coordinates the work of confessors in St. Peter’s Basilica and the other major basilicas in Rome.

Cardinal Mauro Piacenza, head of the Apostolic Penitentiary, introduced the pope and thanked him for emphasizing the importance of the Sacrament of Reconciliation during his first two years in office. “In everyone’s hearts,” he said, “you are the pope of mercy.”

Pope Francis, who made substantial additions to his prepared text, told the priests and seminarians that in their ministry, the Sacrament of Reconciliation must be an

opportunity to educate Catholics about God’s unending mercy and an opportunity for priests themselves to grow in holiness.

The only people God will not forgive are those who do not want God’s forgiveness, just like only those who stand in the shade are not warmed on a sunny day, Pope Francis said.

When people come to Confession, he said, it should be an experience of “peace and understanding” and never one of “torture.”

“Everyone should leave the confessional with happiness in their hearts and a face radiant with hope even if sometimes, as we all know, it is bathed with the tears of conversion and the joy that comes from that,” the pope said.

A good minister of God’s mercy, he said, is one who is able to find balance, gently leading the penitent to recognize his or her sins without conducting “a heavy, finicky and invasive interrogation.”

Taking God and the penitent seriously, he said, means not pretending that nothing the person’s confesses is really a sin, but neither can the priest put on the robes of a judge.

“Too often people confuse being merciful with be-

ing lenient,” he said. Saying, “Oh, go on, that’s not a sin” is just as bad as insisting over and over, “but the law says this,” he told them. “Neither response takes the penitent by the hand and accompanies him or her on the journey of conversion.”

“This is very important,” he said. “Mercy means taking a brother or sister by the hand and helping him or her walk.”

The best way to find the right balance, the pope told the group, is for the priest to pray often and to recognize his own sinfulness and need for mercy.

“If you’ve never done that horrible thing the penitent tells you about, it’s always because of God’s grace,” he said.

Administering the Sacrament of Confession is a blessing, the pope said. It is the occasion for seeing how good people are and how sincerely they love God. Most priests, he said, will have witnessed “real and true miracles of conversion” in the confessional.

“How beautiful it is to welcome these repentant brothers and sisters with the blessing embrace of the merciful Father,” the pope said.

Priests always must remember that they were not chosen as priests because of their expertise in theology or canon law or because they have a special talent, he said.

“We all have been made ministers of God’s mercy purely by the grace of God, freely and for love, or rather, for mercy.”

Remember, he said, “I’ve done this, this and this, but now I am called to forgive.”

When listening to someone confess a sin “with so much pain or fragility,” Pope Francis said, the priest should experience shame for his own sins. “This is a grace.”

11

March 20, 2015

Preaching to the pope: Capuchin says it’s an exercise in humility

VATICAN CITY (CNS) — The first time Capuchin Father Raniero Cantalamessa climbed the steps up to the papal altar in St. Peter’s Basilica, he said, “it felt like I was climbing Mount Everest.”

The intimidating climb 35 years ago was to fulfill a mandate from St. John Paul II, who tapped the Capuchin to preach to the pope and the public on Good Friday 1980.

Now 80, Father Cantalamessa still preaches at the Liturgy of the Lord’s Passion in the basilica each year. And, as the official “preacher of the papal household,” the Capuchin also preaches to the pope and leaders of the Roman Curia on most Fridays of Advent and Lent each year.

The superiors of a variety of religious orders took turns preaching to the pontiff and his aides during Advent and Lent until the mid-1500s when Pope Paul IV appointed the first preacher of the papal household; his successors followed suit, always choosing a religious-order priest for the job.

Pope Benedict XIV decided in 1743 to be more specific, decreeing that the preacher of the papal household always be a Capuchin friar.

Last summer, Father Cantalamessa told an Italian Catholic magazine that he figured he had given 280 Advent and Lenten talks to the curia and St. John Paul, Pope Benedict XVI and Pope Francis. With each meditation lasting about 30 minutes, he said, “I’ve been responsible for having taken up a good 140 hours of the last three popes’ precious time.”

In an interview with Catholic News Service, Father Cantalamessa said that in the life of the pope and the curia, “my service is very humble” and limited to nine meditations or homilies a year.

“Not having any role other than proclaiming the Word of God, I’m free to preach and disappear, which is to the advantage of everyone.”

While he travels frequently, preaching and giving talks especially to charismatic groups, the place he usually disappears to is the Capuchin Poor Clares hermitage in the town of Cittaducale.

He helped the nuns there discern their vocation not only to be cloistered, but to dedicate a significant amount of time each month in prayer in a hermit’s isolation.

In the quiet of the monastery, he prays and writes his sermons for the pope and for the nuns, but also for the townspeople to whom he ministers on Sundays.

The three popes he has preached to have given him the freedom to choose the topics for his meditations, he said. “I try to understand, including with the help of prayer, what are the problems, needs or even graces the Church is living at the moment and to make my little contribution with a Spiritual reflection.”

us in one faith” can be a great service.

While Father Cantalamessa’s message is Spiritual, he said the needs of the world are always in his heart and on his mind.

“Putting the Word of God into practice must characterize all preaching,” he said. “Pope Francis gives us a stupendous example of that with his morning homilies.”

The brown-robed Capuchin honed his relevancy skills on television, he said. Every Saturday evening for 14 years, he had a half-hour program on RAI 1, Italy’s main station, in which he reflected on the Scripture readings that would be used at Mass the next day.

“Television is ruthless. Either you show what the Word has to do with the lives and problems of people or they tune you out,” he Capuchin Father Raniero Cantal- said. “Thanks to the remote, peoamessa. (CNS photo) ple don’t even need to get up out of their chairs to do it.”

For Lent 2015, after watchPreaching is not an academic ing Pope Francis embrace Ecu- exercise or an occasion for philomenical Patriarch Bartholomew sophical musing, he said. But that of Constantinople in Jerusalem does not mean it’s not intimidatlast spring and in Istanbul in No- ing to preach to the pope and his vember, Father Cantalamessa de- top aides. cided to focus on a current trend “This is the real challenge for in ecumenism: learning from one the preacher of the papal houseanother. hold: To talk in front of people In the past, he told the pope who, in terms of holiness and and curia “relations between East- Spiritual knowledge, are far ahead ern theology and Latin theol- of you,” he said. “It’s a healthy exogy were marked with an obvious ercise in humility.” apologetic and polemic coloring.”

Father Cantalamessa tells the In a world thirsting for the Gos- story of one of his confreres who, pel, insisting on “subtle distinc- “a bit jokingly and a bit seritions” makes little sense, he said, ously,” told him he must not be a but bringing together “what we very good preacher. “You’ve been have in common and what unites preaching to the Roman Curia

for years and there’s still no sign of conversion,” the other Capuchin said.

In response, Father Cantalamessa said he told him, “The most difficult thing isn’t to convert those who are listening, but to convert the preacher.”

Just the fact that the popes and the heads of the departments of the Roman Curia set aside an hour every Friday morning in Lent and Advent “to listen to a simple priest” is a lesson, he said.

“In reality, the popes preach to me with their humility.”

12

March 20, 2015

Journalist blasted for lying in confessional, recording priests’ answers

Bologna, Italy (CNA/ EWTN News) — The confessional is one of the most private and privileged places in the world. So when an Italian journalist violated the bond of trust between penitent and priest, the Archbishop of Bologna decried her “grave lack of respect” for all Catholics.

Laura Alari writes for Quotidiano Nazionale, which is headquartered in Bologna. She authored a series of four articles in the newspaper which disclosed the responses of priests in the area when she approached them under the pretext of seeking Confession.

Alari went to Confession several times, inventing delicate issues for herself: she pretended to be a lesbian mother asking to baptize her daughter; a woman who cohabitates with her same-sex partner; and a divorced and civilly remarried woman who receives Communion every Sunday.

She then reported the responses of priests when they heard her “confessions.”

Cardinal Carlo Caffarra of Bologna recently responded with a statement: “In bewilderment at the incident and with a soul wounded by a profound sorrow, I mean to reiterate that these articles objectively constitute a grave offense against the truth of Confession, a Sacrament of the Christian faith.”

He said Alari’s articles “show a grave lack of respect for believers, who have recourse to it as one of the most precious of goods because it opens up to them the gifts of the mercy of God; and for confessors, by exposing them to the doubt of a possible deceit, which can disrupt the freedom of judgement, which is founded upon a relationship of trust with the penitent, like that between a father and son.”

The cardinal emphasized that Alari’s articles were written by “deliberately tricking the confessor and thereby violating the Sacredness of the Sacrament, which as a first condition requires sincerity of contrition on the part of the penitent.”

Cardinal Caffarra recalled that the publication of the contents of a Confession is among the most grave crimes in the Church, which are under the direct competence of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith.

That congregation made clear in norms released May 21, 2010 that among the most grave crimes which it is charged with investigating is that “which consists in the recording, by whatever technical means, or in the malicious Lily James and Richard Madden star in a scene from the movie “Cinderella.” For a brief review of this diffusion through communi- film, see CNS Movie Capsules below. (CNS photo/Disney Enterprises) cations media, of what is said requires accompanying parent or the estranged, law-abiding son in Sacramental Confession, ( Joel Kinnaman) of a burnedadult guardian. whether true or false, by the out hit man (Liam Neeson) is “Cinderella” (Disney) confessor or the penitent.” targeted for death by his father’s Director Kenneth Branagh’s “Anyone who commits such exuberant live-action retelling of underworld patron (Ed Harris) a delict is to be punished acthis oft-filmed fable injects vibrant after accidentally witnessing a cording to the gravity of the new life into a venerable fairy multiple murder carried out by crime, not excluding, if he be a tale. He sticks to the basic story the kingpin’s heir (Boyd Holcleric, dismissal or deposition,” and its iconic characters: sunny brook). With both crooked cops reads the norms, to which CarCinderella (Lily James), her be- under the boss’ control and the dinal Caffarra averted in his loved but soon-deceased parents honest chief of homicide (Vinstatement.

(Hayley Atwell and Ben Chap- cent D’Onofrio) on his trail, the Alari was also faulted by the Italian Professional Order of NEW YORK (CNS) — The lin), her wicked stepmother (Cate young family man has no choice Journalists. following are capsule reviews Blanchett) and ghastly stepsisters but to go on the run and entrust Enzo Iacopino, president of movies recently reviewed by (Sophie McShera and Holliday himself to his dad’s protection.

Grainger) as well as the charm- Director Jaume Collet-Serra and of the organization, told Av- Catholic News Service. ing prince (Richard Madden) and screenwriter Brad Ingelsby emvenire that their ethical rules “Chappie” (Columbia) “do not allow journalists to The designer (Dev Patel) of kindly fairy godmother (Helena phasize the veteran killer’s search hide their identity and to act in a line of police robots develops a Bonham Carter) who eventually for redemption and his determidisguise, unless the life of the computerized version of human rescue the put-upon orphan from nation to keep his lad from spillsame journalist is in danger, consciousness and uploads it into her misery. A delightful fantasy ing blood. But their Catholic-inor unless declaring the iden- the discarded chassis of one of his for the entire family, Branagh’s flected film garners a high body tity would render writing the more conventional creations (The affectionate take, at once famil- count and traverses a gritty urban article impossible but discov- voice and actions of the resulting iar and fresh, nicely brings to landscape too sordid for the caering what the Church states hybrid are provided by Sharlto the forefront dual lessons about sual moviegoer. Much harsh and regarding the divorced and Copley). But when the engi- compassion and forgiveness. The sometimes bloody violence, drug remarried, and Baptism, does neer is carjacked and his break- film is preceded by an animated use, a few vulgar sexual refernot require a glimpse through through android is kidnapped short, “Frozen Fever,” which fea- ences, about a dozen instances of the keyhole.” by a trio of gangsters (rappers tures characters from the block- profanity and twice that number “What did she find? Ninja and Yolandi Visser and Jose buster 2013 movie “Frozen.” The each of rough and crude terms.

Priests who are faithful to the Pablo Cantillo), the childlike au- Catholic News Service classifica- The Catholic News Service clasChurch’s Magisterium and tomaton is left confused by the tion is A-I — general patronage. sification is L — limited adult who approach the faithful with contradictory influences of his The Motion Picture Association audience, films whose problemhumility, in order to find with morally-upright maker and his of America rating is PG — pa- atic content many adults would each person the best and most criminally-minded new owners. rental guidance suggested. Some find troubling. The Motion Pichuman way to face their prob- Though it can be read, at least in material may not be suitable for ture Association of America rating is R — restricted. Under 17 lems,” Iacopino stressed. part, as a religious and moral alle- children.

On the other hand, Andrea gory, director and co-writer Neill “Run All Night” (Warner Bros.) requires accompanying parent or Acrid crime drama in which adult guardian.

Cangini, editor of Quotidiano Blomkamp’s frequently mayhemNazionale, responded saying, ridden, sporadically moving dra“If you interview any person in ma also heavy-handedly defames his functions, you will have an- faith, partly through the characswers that may be biased. Only ter of a villainous rival inventor in this way have we been able played by Hugh Jackman. Pervato understand how the average sive violence, much of it gory, an parish priest reacts. It is inter- incidental but negative portrayal Sunday, March 22, 11:00 a.m. esting.” of Christianity, a nonmarital situation, several uses of profanity, relentless rough and crude language. The Catholic News Service Celebrant is Father Maurice O. Gauvin, classification is L — limited adult pastor of Espirito Santo Parish audience, films whose problemin Fall River. atic content many adults would find troubling. The Motion Picture Association of America rating is R — restricted. Under 17

CNS Movie Capsules

Diocese of Fall River TV Mass on WLNE Channel 6

13

March 20, 2015

Pope Francis announces Holy Year of Divine Mercy

VATICAN CITY (CNS) — Pope Francis announced at a penance service in St. Peter’s Basilica last Friday (March 13) that he had “decided to call an extraordinary jubilee that is to have the mercy of God at its center.

It shall be a Holy Year of Mercy. We want to live this year in the light of the Lord’s words, ‘Be merciful, just as your Father is merciful’ (cf., Lk 6:36).”

He said that the Holy Year would begin on Dec. 8, 2015, the feast of the Immaculate Conception, and would end on Nov. 20, 2016, “the Sunday dedicated to Our Lord Jesus Christ, King of the Universe — and living Face of the Father’s mercy.”

The Holy Father entrusted the organizing of the Holy Year to the Pontifical Council for Promotion of the New Evangelization, so

that it “might animate it as a new stage in the journey of the Church on its mission to bring to every person the Gospel of mercy.”

Pope Francis expressed the hope that everyone in the Church would “find in this jubilee the joy needed to rediscover and make fruitful the mercy of God.” A holy year as a time of Spiritual renewal has its Biblical roots in the jubilees observed by the Jewish people at 50-year intervals, when debts were pardoned and slaves were freed.

The term “jubilee” itself comes from the Hebrew word “yobel,” meaning a ram’s horn, which was used to make the trumpet that signaled the beginning of this time of forgiveness.

For the Catholic Church, a holy year remains a time of great Spiritual significance,

and emphasis is placed on the examination of conscience and conversion, the forgiveness of sins, reconciliation, concrete acts of solidarity and initiatives to restore justice.

The jubilee is called a holy year because it aims to encourage holiness, strengthen faith in Christ and inspire greater communion within the Church and society.

The first holy year was proclaimed by Pope Boniface VIII in 1300. Among those who journeyed to the Eternal City for the first celebration was the Italian poet Dante Alighieri, who is commonly said to have found the inspiration for his “Divine Comedy” during that pilgrimage.

In the 15th century, Pope Paul II set a 25-year timetable for holy years, which has been the norm since, in order to allow each generation the

Fall River Catholic schools fine arts night is March 24

FALL RIVER — With the success of last year’s first-time collaboration, the six Catholic schools in the city of Fall River are joining together again this year to host a oneevening presentation to showcase the artistic and musical talents of their students.

The Catholic Schools of Fall River Fine Arts Night will take place March 24, from 6 to 8 p.m. at the Children’s Museum, 441 North Main Street in Fall River.

The Fine Arts Night will feature art from students of all ages in a variety of media including drawing, painting, sculpture, and weaving as well as musical performances by choral groups from each school.

The artistic pieces will be

Visit the Diocese of Fall River website at fallriverdiocese.org The site includes links to parishes, diocesan offices and national sites.

on display throughout the evening and the individual schools will present musical performances according to the following schedule: 6:10 p.m., St. Michael School; 6:25 p.m., Holy Trinity; 6:40 p.m., Holy Name; 7:00 p.m., Espirito Santo; 7:15 p.m., St. Stanislaus; and 7:30 p.m., Bishop Connolly High School.

According to St. Stanislaus School Principal Jean Willis, who is among planners for the evening, there was a very positive response to last year’s

first-time combined Fine Arts Night for Catholic schools in Fall River.

“We were so pleased with the turnout for the Fine Arts showcase last year, and we are looking forward to offering it again,” she said.

“The Fine Arts Night is a wonderful opportunity for the city’s Catholic schools to work together to display the talents and gifts of our students to a wider segment of the community, and the Children’s Museum is a great venue for it.”

Special Lenten programs on the Portuguese Channel

possibility of experiencing at least one holy year.

As a way to stress the importance of forgiveness and renewing one’s relationship with God, plenary indulgences are offered during holy years. An indulgence — that is, the remission of temporal punishment for sins — is customarily granted to those who make a pilgrimage to Rome and fulfill certain other conditions: reception of the Sacraments of Penance and the Eucharist, visits and prayers for the intention of the pope and performing simple acts such as visiting the sick.

Those who do not come to Rome can gain the same indulgence by receiving Penance and the Eucharist and praying for the pope during a visit or a community celebration in a Church designated

by the local bishop.

In addition to an “ordinary” holy year set at 25-year intervals, occasionally a special jubilee is proclaimed to mark some outstanding event.

The custom of these so-called “extraordinary” jubilees began in the 16th century, and they can vary in length from a few days to a year.

There have been 26 “ordinary” holy years so far, the last one being the Great Jubilee of the Year 2000. There were no jubilee celebrations in 1800 and 1850 because of political turmoil at the time.

There have been two extraordinary jubilees in the last century: 1933, proclaimed by Pope Pius XI to mark the 1,900th anniversary of Christ’s redemption, and 1983, proclaimed by St. John Paul II to mark 1,950 years since the redemption.

14

March 20, 2015

God loves us, has dreams for us, pope says

VATICAN CITY (CNS) — God’s dreams for His people are the dreams of a lover for His beloved; they are dreams of building a future together that is filled with joy, Pope Francis said.

“Have you ever thought this? ‘The Lord dreams about me. He thinks of me. I am in the mind and heart of the Lord,’” the pope said during a recent morning Mass in the chapel of the Domus Sanctae Marthae where he lives.

The Lord does not just dream about His creatures, the pope said. “He makes plans: ‘We’ll build homes, plant vineyards, eat together.’”

Focusing on the day’s first reading — an account from Isaiah about God promising His people He will make a new Heaven and a new earth, a place where there will always be rejoicing and happiness — the pope said the reading shows how “the Lord dreams. He has His dreams, His dreams for us.”

The language is remarkably similar to how an engaged couple dreams of their future: “When we’re together, when we’re married,” Pope Francis said.

God’s plans, he said, are those that “only someone in love would make.”

The fact that God “is in love with us,” he said, is something that “I don’t think any theologian could explain.

It cannot be explained. One only can think about it, hear it and weep for joy.”

To believe in God, to have faith, “is to make space for God’s love and power,” he said. God’s power is not a destructive power, but “the power of One Who loves me, Who is in love with me and wants to rejoice with me.

This is faith. This is what it means to believe: Make room for the Lord to come and change me.”

Pope Francis also spoke about God’s love when he led a recent recitation of the Angelus prayer at midday with visitors in St. Peter’s Square.

He focused on the Gospel passage John 3:16: “For God so loved the world that He gave His only Son, so that everyone who believes in Him might not perish but might have eternal life.”

“This is the simplest expression that summarizes the entire Gospel, the whole faith (and) all of theology,” the pope said. “God loves us with a free and boundless love.”

The cross of Christ, he said, is the supreme proof of God’s love, a love that embraces mercy and offers it to all.

In the Sunday reading from St. Paul’s Letter to the Ephesians, the pope noted, the Apostle tells the people that God “is ‘rich in mercy’ — never forget this, He is rich in mercy.”

“In the Passion and death of His Son, He has given us the proof of all proofs: He came to suffer and die for us. So great is God’s mercy!

He loves us, He forgives us.

God forgives all and forgives always.”

Pakistani Christians recently gathered at a church to protest two suicide attacks on churches in Lahore.

(CNS photo/Rahat Dar, EPA)

Attack in Pakistan part of wave of anti-Christian violence, pope says

VATICAN CITY (CNS) — Condemning deadly terrorist attacks against a Catholic and an Anglican church in Pakistan, Pope Francis said “the world is trying to hide” a wave of anti-Christian persecution in various parts of the globe.

“With sadness, with much sadness, I learned of the terrorist attacks today against two churches in Lahore, provoking numerous deaths and injuries,” the pope said March 15 after reciting the Angelus with visitors gathered in St. Peter’s Square.

Suicide bombers that morning detonated themselves outside the churches, which are both in the same predominantly Christian neighborhood. Officials said 15 people were killed and more than four dozen were injured by the blasts.

Particularly with the persecution of Christians in Syria, Iraq and Nigeria, Pope Francis frequently has denounced the growing wave of anti-Christian violence, a violence that is not simply a matter of restricting

religious freedom, but a martyrdom of Christians.

At a Mass in early February, when the Gospel reading recounted the killing of St. John the Baptist, Pope Francis said it made him “think of our martyrs, the martyrs of today, those men, women and children who are persecuted, hated, chased from their homes, tortured and massacred. This is not something from the past; it is happening today. Our martyrs are ending their lives under the corrupt authority of people who hate Jesus Christ.”

In Pakistan, Archbishop Joseph Coutts of Karachi, president of the Pakistan Catholic Bishops’ Conference, urged the government “to take strong measure for the protection of the churches and religious minorities in Pakistan.”

“The government, political parties, religious leaders and every citizen of Pakistan (should) stand against extremist forces and with their Christian brothers and sisters,” the archbishop

said in a statement, adding that “the whole nation should join hands and stand against terrorism.”

He pleaded with federal and provincial governments “to take effective measures in providing security to the churches throughout Pakistan to ensure freedom of religion and belief.”

The Pakistani Taliban claimed responsibility for the assault in a statement emailed to reporters, and warned, “There will be more of such attacks.”

In a separate statement, Archbishop Sebastian Shaw of Lahore demanded “strong action (be) taken against the perpetrators and that the guilty should be brought to justice.”

Archbishop Shaw said all archdiocesan institutions would remain closed March 16 and urged the provincial government of Punjab, with Lahore as its capital, “to protect the religious minorities.”

The Justice and Peace Commission of the Pakistani bishops’ conference issued a statement March 16 lamenting the “minimal” protection the government offered to Christians, despite the fact that threats against Christians had been made in the days before the attack.

The police “present at the moment were busy watching a cricket match on television instead of fulfilling their task of protection the churches. Consequently, because of their negligence, many Christians lost their lives,” said the statement, which was reported by Fides, the news agency of the Congregation for the Evangelization of Peoples.

15

March 20, 2015

Calix Society offers faith-based recovery support continued from page one

her to leave her involvement with the (recovery program), but we wanted to know what else was out there. I stumbled upon the Calix Society and realized this is exactly what we were looking for.”

Although affiliated with Alcoholics Anonymous in that it believes in the effectiveness of the 12-step program, the Calix Society is meant to be a supplementary group that helps Catholics who may have abandoned or neglected their faith while under the influence to find fellowship and support among other Catholics in recovery.

“The Calix Society does not present itself as an alternative to those fellowships,” Craig stressed. “They are a supplement to recovery groups.”

Sensing there was an interest in and need for just such a group in the area, Craig contacted the Calix Society administrators in Minnesota to inquire about starting a local chapter. With the blessing and approval of Bishop George W. Coleman just before his retirement last year, Craig formed a chapter of the Calix Society at Holy Family Parish in East Taunton.

“We’ve been meeting since last June and — despite a few weather interruptions — we’ve had a good core group of people who have been showing up regularly,” he said. “We meet the first Wednesday of every month.”

Craig said the response has been immediate and overwhelmingly positive.

“Right away, you could see the appreciation in these people,” he said. “Now they could freely talk about their faith and the impact it had on them and their recovery, and how the 12-

step program really goes handin-hand with their faith. It’s been an interesting evolution.”

Even more interesting is the fact that this isn’t the first time a Calix Society chapter has been formed in the Fall River Diocese. It was only after he had initiated the formation of the new group that Craig learned about its predecessor some two decades earlier.

“Msgr. Thomas J. Harrington had started a Calix Society chapter more than 20 years ago,” Craig said. “After I started putting some groundwork together, I mentioned to a friend of mine and he told me he was in the Calix Society with Father Harrington. He said they had meetings in Taunton and when he was transferred they had meetings in New Bedford and Fall River, but it just kind of petered out after that.”

For Craig, this was a sign that he was on the right track and he seized upon the opportunity to “pick Msgr. Harrington’s brain” about the society.

“He was very helpful and very supportive of us getting started again and moving forward,” he said. “In fact, Msgr.

Harrington published a series of meditations on the Stations of the Cross years ago that are still used as a resource for Calix Society chapters throughout the world. So, right here in our diocese, we have one of our priests who has been involved with the Calix Society. And we have some members from the original group who have started coming to our meetings, so it’s a nice connection between what they had 20 years ago and what we’re going forward with now.”

Craig noted that the people involved in the current version

This week in 50 years ago — The Mercian, the school newspaper at Mount St. Mary Academy in Fall River, earned top honors from the Columbia Scholastic Press Association at its annual student publications convention.

25 years ago — Maryknoll Father John Halbert, M.M., addressed the Men’s Club at Holy Redeemer Parish in Chatham. Father Halbert discussed the ongoing war in El Salvador and how $1.2 million a day is spent on arms for the military.

of the Calix Society are “a little bit different” and more diverse than the ones from 20 years ago.

“Now we have a cross-section of people who are in recovery from a lot of different addictions, because the mechanics of recovery and the 12 steps are almost identical, no matter what your recovery group is,” he said.

“We have people from A.A., N.A., Overeaters’ Anonymous — and they are still going to these other group meetings. Calix goes to great measures to try and reinforce that because they don’t expect it to supplant the effectiveness and/or the need for those groups in people’s lives.”

Monthly meetings begin with something Liturgical — typically a Mass celebration, Rosary, Divine Mercy Chaplet, or some other form of prayer.

The second half of the meeting is devoted to discussion of the 12 steps and fellowship.

“That’s when some of the great sharing takes place that helps everyone in the recovery process,” Craig said.

And like the secular recovery programs, the Calix Society welcomes not only those struggling with addictions, but their family members and friends as well.

“We’ve had several different family members of people whose loved ones are still out there with an active addiction and they’ve come to our meetings just to help them in responding to their loved one’s addiction,” Craig said. “I have not had an experience yet in the almost 10 months that I’ve been doing this where anyone has told me this has been a waste of their time.

“We just had a young guy attend last month’s meeting for

Diocesan history

10 years ago — Father Tadeusz Pacholczyk, director of education at the National Catholic Bioethics Center in Philadelphia and a priest of the Fall River Diocese, discussed the Church’s teaching on cloning and embryonic stem-cell research for a show that aired on Boston’s Catholic Television.

One year ago — More than 160 students at Bishop Stang High School in North Dartmouth took part in the ninth annual “Cardboard City,” an event that raises money and awareness for the plight of the homeless.

the first time and he just didn’t want to leave! He just wanted to pick everyone’s brain and you could see the excitement in his finding something that was helpful in his recovery. I would never get caught up in whether we fill big auditoriums with this group — as long as it’s one addict helping another, that’s why we’re here; and it’s really important for us to keep that as our focus.”

Like A.A., the Calix Society promotes total abstinence for those in recovery and takes inspiration from Venerable Matt Talbot, the unofficial patron of those struggling with addictions.

Talbot, a native of Dublin, was an active alcoholic for 15 years when he decided to take “the pledge” for three months, made a general Confession and started attending daily Mass. He joined the Secular Franciscan Order and began a life of strict penance. He prayed the Rosary conscientiously and though his job did not make him rich, he contributed generously to the missions.

Talbot died on Trinity Sunday in 1925 on his way to church. Fifty years later Pope Paul VI gave him the title venerable. His sainthood cause remains open and active.

“That’s a great story in itself,” Craig said of Talbot.

Among the items available for sale on the Calix Society website is a statue of Talbot depicting him chained to a large Celtic cross with the Blessed Mother hovering above him.

Craig noted the statue is a

“very powerful image” for people struggling with addiction.

Another powerful mantra can be found in the Calix Society’s motto, to wit: “Substituting the cup that stupefies for the cup that sanctifies.”

Noting that the Taunton chapter draws up to 20 participants a month, Craig hopes others within the diocese will take advantage of this unique program.

“We’re having success here at Holy Family Parish in East Taunton, but it’s bigger than that and I’d like to see the fruits of this be available to other parts of the diocese,” he said. “I hope we could go out and help other groups get started at their parishes. There are a lot of people out there struggling.”

Calling his involvement with the Calix Society an “eye-opening experience,” Craig said it’s been fulfilling to not only help people on the road to recovery, but also to strengthen their faith.

“I couldn’t imagine it not being a part of what I do now because there’s such a great need,” he said. “I thought I was exempt from having those kinds of experiences. Then, when it happened, I realized it can happen to anyone, at any time in any place. And it’s been a great opportunity for me to grow in my faith as well.”

For more information about the Calix Society in Taunton, email Deacon Robert Craig at imagodeihfp@gmail.com or call 508-824-5665. For more information about the Calix Society, visit www.calixsociety. org.

16

Youth Pages

March 20, 2015

First-grade students at St. Joseph School in Fairhaven recently collected 100 canned goods in celebration of the 100th day of school. The collected food will be combined with the ongoing drive at the school and donated to a local food pantry.

Second-grade students, from Holy Name School in Fall River recently wrote a sequential paragraph on “How To Build a Snowman,” and completed it with an art project.

Pre-K3 students at All Saints Catholic School in New Bedford recently enjoyed the snow at an indoor snow table, as they built snowmen and explored the snow in unexpected ways in their own classroom.

St. John the Evangelist School students in grades five through eight were treated to a “petting zoo” of instruments by Joseph F. Taylor, of Bishop Feehan High School, and Julie St. Lawrence. Taylor is the director of the Attleboro school’s Cadet Band and introduced the students to the typical instruments played in a cadet band. Students heard sounds from the flute, clarinet, alto saxophone, trumpet, trombone and snare drum. The SJE Cadet Band program runs from November through June with weekly lessons and two public performances.

The kindergarten class at Holy Family-Holy Name School in New Bedford learned about clouds and precipitation in science class. After the lesson, they had a chance to work with partners to fill cotton balls with drops of water and watch it “rain.”

Each drop was counted to reinforce math skills.

Students and staff from St. James-St. John School in New Bedford recently held a Fairy Tale and Super Hero Day for Pennies for Patients

March 20, 2015

“O

my God, I am sorry for my sins, in choosing to sin and failing to do good. I have sinned against You and Your Church.

I firmly intend, with the help of Your Son, to make up for my sins and to love as I should.”

I have prayed many versions of the Act of Contrition, but this version not only speaks of the simplicity of God’s forgiveness and mercy, but also the awesomeness of His love. The words, “with the help of Your Son,” say it all. We need Jesus!

Giving up something for Lent is great, as long as that something helps another person in some need and helps you become all the better for it. But, have you thought about giving up your sins during this Lenten season?

What a wonderful opportunity we have these 40 days to give up all our sins for the sake of love, God’s love — the love He so desires to give us.

Earlier this month I was blessed to witness, share and take part in our parish’s Lenten Mission and our Confirmation retreat. The theme was all about God’s love for us. For almost an entire week (six days to be exact) 42 young men and women, preparing to receive the Sacrament of Confirma-

Youth Pages Giving it all up for love tion, participated in the misalso part of my family, died sion and their retreat. God’s by suicide almost six years blessing came to all of us on ago. His heart was filled with the Friday night during the so much resentment and unReconciliation talk and the forgiveness that the feeling Sacrament of Confession that became too much for him followed.

Husband-andwife team, Nate and Ashley, spoke to all of us on retreat about this Sacrament of love and shared their personal experience.

By Ozzie Pacheco With their permission I share a part of their talk: “The pain of a broken to bear. As a child he was heart, hurt feelings, abuse abused, and after years of this or betrayal hangs onto our abuse, he was taken from his heart and body. Each day we parents where he then spent remember that someone we years in foster care. When he care about or maybe even no- was 11, my extended family body we care about at all, did adopted both him and his us wrong or vice-versa. It is older sister. He lived a pretty difficult to forgive and I think normal life. He was a great some people do not forgive soccer and baseball player, because in their mind they had many friends and everybelieve they are getting even one loved him. He and I had with the person who hurt our own indoor soccer team them. By not forgiving, they and softball team together. feel that they are in control It was not until after he and in some way have the passed away that I realized power to punish those who his inability to forgive or be have hurt them (Like when forgiven. He was not close you try to make someone feel to God and didn’t think that bad about something they did prayer was an option. For to you by ‘teaching them a lesson’). All of the anger and resentment is a huge burden to bear.

“One of my best friends from high school, who was

Be Not Afraid

some reason, he thought that he had to go through it alone and the burden of not knowing how to forgive ultimately became too heavy.

“When we think of forgiveness we often associate it with forgiving others. But sometimes, we have to forgive ourselves before we can forgive others.”

The result of Nate’s and Ashley’s talk was positive, and obvious, when we got back to the parish, after the retreat, and a personal witness was shared. All the Confirmation candidates felt closest to God and His awesome love during the Sacrament of Reconciliation. What a beautiful thing to witness and experience conversion!

So what are you waiting for? Isn’t it time for you to lay all of your burdens down. Don’t be afraid! Vinny

17

Flynn, in his book “Seven Secrets of Confession” says, “I remember how often I used to go to Confession kind of cringing inside, almost afraid to dare to ask for forgiveness. I was so cowed Spiritually: ‘Oh, please God, I know I don’t deserve it, but please forgive me.’ It was as if I thought He might not forgive me, as if were trying to wring forgiveness out of Him. How silly! Christ isn’t forgiving me now in the confessional. He forgave me 2,000 years ago! I’m just receiving it now.”

Giving it all up for love simply means to give all our sins to Jesus. He doesn’t want us burdened by them. He wants us to be free. And then only in that freedom can we recognize the depth of God’s love for us.

God bless!

Anchor columnist Ozzie Pacheco is Faith Formation director at Santo Christo Parish, Fall River.

Send school, home school, and Faith Formation news to: schools@anchornews.org

Pre-kindergarten students at Our Lady of Lourdes School Taunton display the Lorax faces they made in honor of Dr. Seuss’ birthday.

Some kindergartners at St. Francis Xavier School in Acushnet celebrated Dr. Seuss’ birthday. Students enjoyed a guest reader and participated in various fun and educational classroom activities using the many books and themes from the author.

Pre-kindergarten students made “Cats in Hats,” and kindergartners wore their “Hats” made in art class with Linda Borges at St. Michael School in Fall River in honor of Dr. Seuss’ birthday.

18

March 20, 2015

Beatitudes, Christ and jugglers continued from page one

tion in life.

“Between our junior and senior year in college, we were just trying to figure out what we wanted to do with our lives and this idea of doing this type of ministry together just kind of came bubbling up. We both had gotten a lot out of our youth ministry experience,” said Monterastelli of their time giving talks on retreats as college students, “and wanted to get back to that, so we looked at the gifts we had — we were storytellers and jugglers — and thought those would be an interesting way to have conversations.”

Each presentation is tailored to the demographic of the audience, and Monterastelli said that when talking to teen-agers and youth, he and Farmer know that those still-developing minds are being presented with big theological concepts that are hard to process: “Eternity is a hard thing for a 13-year-old to access,” said Monterastelli, but telling young people to treat others with respect and love because everyone is part of the Body of Christ “is something that really resonates.

“They know what it’s like when they aren’t treated well, and they know what it’s like when they are treated well, and even if they cannot clearly articulate that, they know how significant that is in their lives. You can ask a middle school student to be respectful or pay attention, but you can’t ask a middle school student to stop being 13.”

The men engage their audience by telling parables through sketch comedy, and use juggling and street performance-style art to connect with spectators. Monterastelli and Farmer also share personal testimony of Spiritual realities and explore the Catholic themes of the parables.

“The approach we have in

working with young people is through two very simple messages,” said Monterastelli. “One is ‘you are loved and worthy of love,’ and the second is ‘you are gifted and called where you are.’

The way we live out our Christian identity is in the interactions we have daily, like with our parents or classmates or teachers, and we understand that who we are manifests itself in the small choices, not just in the big choices.”

On March 22 the high school convention will be held at Bishop Stang High School while on March 23, the high school rally will be held at Bishop Stang.

On March 24, the junior high school rally will be held at St. Pope John Paul II High School.

McManus said she knows that many parishes and schools look forward to having their students attend the convention and rallies because “what kids need right now to supplement the youth programs and Religious Education is to hear a witness story because that’s how Christianity is spread.

“The youth convention exists as a way of giving the parishes the big experience of having youth thinking all the same way about Christ. We have parishes that come every year; they look forward to this. There’s nothing like sitting in a room with other parishes and realizing that they are all worshipping the same way. Some of these kids are very outspoken about their faith. They may not be comfortable about evangelizing to a larger group but they may be comfortable if they’re with other kids who feel the same way. This is why I feel this convention is important — they’re going to hear adults speak about their faith but they’re also going to watch the CLI kids, that peer leadership is really important.”

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Mackenzie Long, senior at Bishop Stang High School in North Dartmouth, spoke at this year’s PACE Advocacy Day. (Photo courtesy Fred Kalisz)

Catholic school advocates lobby at statehouse continued from page one

Abigail Adams Scholarship, which provides full tuition for four years at the University of Massachusetts, the seven state colleges and 15 community colleges. Many supporters point out that Catholic school parents are taxpayers and that by educating more than 50,000 students in Massachusetts, Catholic schools save the state some $600,000 annually.

George Milot, principal at the Lower Mills Campus of Pope John Paul II Catholic Academy in Dorchester, said, “There are a lot of people who feel that the kids should get no services because the parents choose to send them to Catholic schools, and it’s their choice, but these are still children of the Commonwealth who deserve services because their parents pay taxes.”

Milot is also a PACE board member and previously served as the Diocese of Fall River’s Superintendent of Schools for a decade.

This years’ Advocacy Day began with supporters gathering in the Great Hall. During the program, St. Bernadette School in Northborough was recognized for receiving the U.S. Department of Education’s Blue Ribbon last year. Only 50 non-public schools are chosen for the honor annually. In order to qualify, schools must have five consecutive years where their students performed within the top 15 per-

cent in standardized testing and show that they are exemplary, high-performing schools.

St. Bernadette’s principal, Deborah O’Neil, said that the ribbon was an affirmation of the school’s hard work and motivation to continue to improve.

“The reminder from the National Blue Ribbon experience is that we need to continue to strive for excellence and to ensure that our Catholic identity is always a consideration and the point from which we plan,” she said.

Grace Rade, a seventhgrader at the school, said, “It is wonderful that we can go to a school where we can celebrate our religion freely.”

Andrea Tavaska, the school’s assistant director of mission and Catholic identity, said the award is a reflection of the exemplary education provided by all Catholic schools.

“It shines a light on all Catholic schools in all four dioceses,” she said.

The rest of the PACE program included addresses by a Catholic school student, a PACE representative and three legislators.

One of those legislators, Rep. Alan Silvia from the 7th Bristol District, said he was honored to support Catholic education and told the students, “The Catholic-Christian values of service, justice and excellence are an important part of your life now

and will be most important in the future.”

Principal Brenda Gagnon from Holy Trinity School in Fall River said that Catholic schools educate the whole child. In addition to strong academics, the schools teach morality and empathy.

Teachers and students said PACE’s Advocacy Day imparts important lessons, while giving students the opportunity to witness their state government in action and to speak directly with their elected representatives. The visit leaves a lasting impression on many of the students for years to come.

“I heard some of the students saying that they would love to work there some day,” Gagnon said.

Many of the students said that the visit showed them that they have a voice and that their opinions are valuable.

Molly Hoefel, an eighthgrade student at St. James-St. John School in New Bedford, said after she learned that Catholic schools miss out on state resources, she wanted to help change that. Her elected representative was open to listening and treated the students like their opinions mattered.

“The biggest thing I got out of this experience was learning that people in the government care about what I have to think and that I have a say in what they do,” she said.

19

March 20, 2015

Eucharistic Adoration in the Diocese Acushnet — Eucharistic Adoration takes place at St. Francis Xavier Parish on Monday from 9:30 a.m. to 8:30 p.m.; Tuesday through Friday from 8 a.m. to 8:30 p.m.; and Saturday from 8 a.m. to 3 p.m. Evening prayer and Benediction is held Monday through Wednesday at 6:30 p.m.

ATTLEBORO — Eucharistic Adoration takes place in the Adoration Chapel at St. Vincent de Paul Parish, 71 Linden Street, from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. daily.

ATTLEBORO — The National Shrine of Our Lady of La Salette holds Eucharistic Adoration in the Shrine Church every Saturday from 1 to 4 p.m. through November 17.

ATTLEBORO — There is a weekly Holy Hour of Eucharistic Adoration Thursdays from 5:30 to 6:30 pm at St. John the Evangelist Church on N. Main St. Brewster — Eucharistic Adoration takes place in the La Salette Chapel in the lower level of Our Lady of the Cape Church, 468 Stony Brook Road, on First Fridays beginning at noon until 7:45 a.m. First Saturday, concluding with Benediction and concluding with Mass at 8 a.m. buzzards Bay — Eucharistic Adoration takes place at St. Margaret Church, 141 Main Street, Monday through Saturday, from 6:30 to 8 a.m.; and every first Friday from noon to 8 a.m. on Saturday.

East Freetown — Eucharistic Adoration takes place at St. John Neumann Church every Monday (excluding legal holidays) 8 a.m. to 9 p.m. in the Our Lady, Mother of All Nations Chapel. (The base of the bell tower).

EAST TAUNTON — Eucharistic Adoration takes place in the chapel at Holy Family Parish Center, 438 Middleboro Avenue, Monday through Friday, 11 a.m. to 10 p.m. On First Fridays, Eucharistic Adoration takes place at Holy Family Church, 370 Middleboro Avenue, from 8:30 a.m. until 7:45 p.m.

FAIRHAVEN — St. Mary’s Church, Main St., has Eucharistic Adoration every Wednesday from 8:30 a.m. to 11:30 a.m. in the Chapel of Reconciliation, with Benediction at 11:30 a.m. Also, there is a First Friday Mass each month at 7 p.m., followed by a Holy Hour with Eucharistic Adoration. Refreshments follow.

Fall River — Espirito Santo Parish, 311 Alden Street, Fall River. Eucharistic Adoration on Mondays following the 8 a.m. Mass until Rosary and Benediction at 6:30 p.m.

FALL RIVER — St. Bernadette’s Church, 529 Eastern Ave., has continuous Eucharistic Adoration from 8 a.m. on Thursday until 8 a.m. on Saturday.

FALL RIVER — St. Anthony of the Desert Church, 300 North Eastern Avenue, has Eucharistic Adoration Mondays and Tuesdays from 9 a.m. to 7 p.m.

FALL RIVER — Holy Name Church, 709 Hanover Street, has Eucharistic Adoration Monday through Friday from 7:30 a.m. to 9 p.m. in the Our Lady of Grace Chapel.

FALL RIVER — Good Shepherd Parish has Eucharistic Adoration every Friday following the 8 a.m. Mass and concluding with 3 p.m. Benediction in the Daily Mass Chapel. A bilingual holy hour takes place from 2 to 3 p.m. Park behind the church and enter the back door of the connector between the church and the rectory.

Falmouth — St. Patrick’s Church has Eucharistic Adoration each First Friday, following the 9 a.m. Mass until Benediction at 4:30 p.m. The Rosary is recited Monday through Friday from 8:30 a.m. to 9 a.m.

MANSFIELD — St. Mary’s Parish, 330 Pratt Street, has Eucharistic Adoration every First Friday from 7:30 a.m. to 6 p.m., with Benediction at 5:45 p.m.

MASHPEE — Christ the King Parish, Route 151 and Job’s Fishing Road has 8:30 a.m. Mass every First Friday with special intentions for Respect Life, followed by 24 hours of Eucharistic Adoration in the Chapel, concluding with Benediction Saturday morning followed immediately by an 8:30 Mass.

NEW BEDFORD — Eucharistic Adoration takes place 7 to 9 p.m. Wednesdays at Our Lady of Guadalupe Church, 233 County Street, with night prayer and Benediction at 8:45 p.m., and Confessions offered during the evening. Please use the side entrance.

NEW BEDFORD — There is a daily holy hour from 5:15-6:15 p.m. Monday through Thursday at St. Anthony of Padua Church, 1359 Acushnet Avenue. It includes Adoration of the Blessed Sacrament, Liturgy of the Hours, recitation of the Rosary, and the opportunity for Confession.

NEW BEDFORD — St. Lawrence Martyr Parish, 565 County Street, holds Eucharistic Adoration in the side chapel from 7:30-11:45 a.m. ending with a simple Benediction NORTH DARTMOUTH — Eucharistic Adoration takes place at St. Julie Billiart Church, 494 Slocum Road, every Tuesday from 7 to 8 p.m., ending with Benediction. The Sacrament of Reconciliation is available at this time.

NORTH DIGHTON — Eucharistic Adoration takes place every Wednesday following 8:00 a.m. Mass and concludes with Benediction at 5 p.m. Eucharistic Adoration also takes place every First Friday at St. Nicholas of Myra Church, 499 Spring Street following the 8 a.m. Mass, ending with Benediction at 6 p.m. The Rosary is recited Monday through Friday from 7:30 to 8 a.m.

NORTH EASTON — A Holy Hour for Families including Eucharistic Adoration is held every Friday from 3-4 p.m. at The Father Peyton Center, 518 Washington Street.

OSTERVILLE — Eucharistic Adoration takes place at Our Lady of the Assumption Church, 76 Wianno Avenue on First Fridays from 8:30 a.m. to noon.

SEEKONK ­— Our Lady of Mt. Carmel Parish has perpetual Eucharistic Adoration seven days a week, 24 hours a day in the chapel at 984 Taunton Avenue. For information call 508-336-5549.

Taunton — Eucharistic Adoration takes place every Tuesday at St. Anthony Church, 126 School Street, following the 8 a.m. Mass with prayers including the Chaplet of Divine Mercy for vocations, concluding at 6 p.m. with Chaplet of St. Anthony and Benediction. Recitation of the Rosary for peace is prayed Monday through Saturday at 7:30 a.m. prior to the 8 a.m. Mass.

Taunton — Adoration of the Most Blessed Sacrament takes place every First Friday at Annunciation of the Lord, 31 First Street. Exposition begins following the 8 a.m. Mass. The Blessed Sacrament will be exposed, and Adoration will continue throughout the day. Confessions are heard from 5:15 to 6:15 p.m. Rosary and Benediction begin at 6:30 p.m.

WAREHAM — Eucharistic Adoration at St. Patrick’s Church begins each Wednesday evening at 6 p.m. and ends on Friday night at midnight. Adoration is held in our Adoration Chapel in the lower Parish Hall. ~ PERPETUAL EUCHARISTIC ADORATION ~ East Sandwich — The Corpus Christi Parish Perpetual Eucharistic Adoration Chapel is open 24 hours a day, seven days a week at 324 Quaker Meeting House Road, East Sandwich. Use the Chapel entrance on the side of the church.

NEW BEDFORD — Our Lady’s Chapel, 600 Pleasant Street, offers Eucharistic Adoration seven days a week, 24 hours a day. For information call 508-996-8274.

SEEKONK ­— Our Lady of Mount Carmel Parish has perpetual Eucharistic Adoration seven days a week, 24 hours a day in the chapel at 984 Taunton Avenue. For information call 508-336-5549.

WEST HARWICH — Our Lady of Life Perpetual Adoration Chapel at Holy Trinity Parish, 246 Main Street (Rte. 28), holds perpetual Eucharistic Adoration. We are a regional chapel serving all of the surrounding parishes. All are invited to sign up to cover open hours. For open hours, or to sign up call 508-430-4716.

Our readers respond In need of our support It was moving to see The Anchor’s editorial of February 6 about the martyrdom of Archbishop Romero.

As Cabinet Secretary for Social Services of the Archdiocese of Boston I was sent on a fact-finding mission to El Salvador following natural disasters in the 1990s. I visited the hospital chapel where Archbishop Romero was gunned down at the altar saying Mass. My priestliaison was insistent that I see the vestments he wore that day. They were hanging in a make-shift Sacristy, distinguished from the others by their blood stains.

Despite misreadings by some observers, Archbishop Romero’s work and words have for some time been touchstones for the Church in Central America, especially so for those believers in the social Gospel. Recognition of Archbishop Romero by His Holiness will hopefully bring more attention to the sacrificial work of so many women religious, clergy, and laity engaged in this work.

They may not need our approval, but they do need our support.

Joseph Doolin Osterville

In Your Prayers Please pray for these priests during the coming weeks

March 22 Rev. Joseph A. Martins, Assistant, St. John the Baptist, New Bedford, 1940 Rev. James T. Keefe, SS.CC., Chaplain, U.S. Army, 2003

March 23 Rev. James F. Kelley, USN Ret. Archdiocese of Anchorage, Former Assistant, St. Mary’s Mansfield, 2003 March 25 Rev. John J. Brennan, SS.CC. Retired Founder Holy Redeemer,Chatham, 1991 March 27 Rev. James W. Conlin, Pastor, St. Patrick, Somerset, 1918 Rev. Antonio P. Vieira, Pastor, Our Lady of Mount Carmel, New Bedford, 1964

Around the Diocese

March 25 is the Solemnity of the Annunciation and it is also the Day of the Unborn Child. The Falmouth Knights of Columbus Council No. 813 invites everyone to join them on March 25 for a Pro-Life Rosary Prayer Service at 7:30 a.m. at St. Anthony’s Church in East Falmouth followed by a Pro-Life Mass at 8 a.m. After Mass, Deacon John Simonis will speak on Pro-Life issues and Anthony Spagone will speak about the mission of Birthright of Falmouth. Light refreshments will be served.

Find a deeper connection with God through the music and story of internationally-celebrated singer/songwriter TAJČI during a free concert to be held March 26 at 7 p.m. at St. Jude the Apostle Parish, 249 Whittenton Street in Taunton. This transformational Lenten experience, entitled “I Thirst,” will include a freewill offering to benefit My Brother’s Keeper. For more information, call 508-824-3330.

The Diocesan Council of Catholic Women will meet on March 28 at Holy Trinity Church, 951 Stafford Road in Fall River. Coffee and light refreshments will be served beginning at 8:30 a.m., with the meeting to follow at 9 a.m. At 9:30 a.m. a program will be presented featuring speaker Joan Jakuboski, RN, BSN, from Elders First. She will discuss geriatric care. Donations of toiletries such as body lotions, hand lotions and tissues will be greatly appreciated and may be given to Nancy Martin, chairman of the Family Concerns Committee.

A Book Fair will be held on March 28 from 8:30 a.m. to 2:30 p.m. at Bishop Stang High School in North Dartmouth. Book donations are now being accepted at the school, with all proceeds to benefit the American Heart Association in memory of former teachers Richard Flynn and Joseph Silva. All are welcome and encouraged to buy gently-used books at great prices. For more information, contact Colleen Silva at csilva@ bishopstang.org.

St. John Neumann Parish, 157 Middleboro Road in East Freetown will be offering an Ecumenical Taizé Candlelight Prayer Service on Palm Sunday, March 29 at 7 p.m. It is a wonderful meditative way to begin the mysteries of Holy Week by quieting and collecting oneself and it helps set the tone for the Sacred days to follow.

The Lazarus Ministry of Our Lady of the Cape Parish in Brewster is offering a six-week bereavement support program entitled “Come Walk With Me” beginning April 9 and running through May 14 from 6 to 7:30 p.m. The program meets for six weeks at the parish center and is designed for people who have experienced the loss of a loved one within the past year. Pre-registration is required and there is a $10 fee for materials. For more information or to register, contact Happy Whitman at 508-385-3252, extension 10, or Judy Pregot at 508-896-8355.

The Diocesan Marriage Preparation Program is looking for married couples who would like to enrich their Marriage while helping engaged couples prepare for their lifetime together. There is also a Re-Marriage Prep Program for couples entering their second Marriages. If you are interested in sharing the joys and challenges of married life, please contact your pastor or the Diocesan Office of Faith Formation at 508-6782828 or email cmcmanus@dfrcs.org.

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March 20, 2015

Attleboro shrine — an Island of Mercy

a.m. to 6 p.m., five days a week.

Our Charism of ReconciliaOthers remember their threetion Our charism (or gift) as con- hour sessions each day. Someone described our ministry as secrated La Salette religious is “celebrating the Sacrament of Reconciliation which includes Reconciliation with everybody the Reconciliation of sinners. else’s parishioners”; that is, the One important aspect of this charism is, for the priests of our community, to celebrate the Sacrament of Reconciliation — or as my mother would describe it, “Going to

By Father Confession.”

Ron Gagne, M.S. From the very inception of our shrine in 1953, we have offered Church at large in our area and sometimes extensive hours of beyond. availability for celebrating the At table recently I asked one Sacrament of Reconciliation. priest, now 85 years old, how Our old-time members menmany people came to Recontion that they remember Conciliation in his 1 p.m. to 2 p.m. fessions being available from 8 session. He said that he and two other priests in that hour celebrated with 42 people. Note that, as has been our custom for many years, after each hour of celebrating, we list how many people we have served. This past year we celebrated with more than 42,000 people, some coming back to active practice of their faith after 30 or even 50 years of being away from the Church.

What a privilege we have to be true “islands of mercy” for these fellow Catholics.

Touching Minds and Hearts We meet and celebrate with The Chapel of Reconciliation at La Salette Shrine in Attleboro. people of many ethnic backgrounds, including English, Spanish, Portuguese, French, and Italian. Some appropriately ask if they can say their “Act of Contrition” in their native language. If we are able, we will respond by giving them absolution in their own language as

ope Francis, in his Message for Lent 2015, pleads: “Dear brothers and sisters, how greatly I desire that all those places where the Church is present, especially our parishes and our communities, may become islands of mercy in the midst of the sea of indifference!”

I live at the La Salette Shrine in Attleboro. As I was sitting at the supper table recently, it occurred to me that I can testify to the fact that our shrine and the hundreds of La Salette Missionary priests, Brothers and Sisters who have served here — over the past 62 years and counting — have been a true “island of mercy.” We are living examples of the hope which Pope Francis expresses so well.

Guest Columnist

well.

Often after their Confession, people will thank us for being available to celebrate with them.

One person mentioned to me that she thought it was nice that I didn’t speed through the absolution but said it slowly and with feeling.

I always do my best to be present and compassionate.

I asked some of our priests what people have said to them about their feelings about celebrating the Sacrament with us at the shrine. They said: — Your presence and availability; — Your compassion for me; — The option to be anonymous (we offer the options of confessing either face-to-face or behind the screen); — A choice of confessors and the many languages they speak; — I don’t know your priests personally; — You listen very well; — I’m not rushed and can ask questions.

Not many people know that we also celebrate with many priests from around the area at almost any time of the day.

We have a buzzer system and the priest on duty is always available for priests in our area.

Often these priests, after their celebration, thank us directly for being here and doing this with them. That, too, is a great privilege of our ministry of Reconciliation.

Why do we offer the Sacrament of Reconciliation so often?

Again, I asked our priests why we continue this long

tradition of offering the Sacrament for so many hours a day.

They answered: — This is wonderfully fulfilling for me as a priest; — By doing this, we express well our charism of Reconciliation; — It’s a wonderful compliment to all the other services we offer here — daily and weekend Masses, regular healing services for English, Spanish and Portuguese pilgrims, and our many other programs and retreat offerings and services; — A wonderful opportunity for us to accompany others and offer them compassion and mercy on their journey of faith; — This is a real source and opportunity for evangelizing and welcoming people back home to our family of faith.

In this year of Consecrated Life, we are choosing to respond to Pope Francis and his frequent reminder that we are to be compassionate and merciful people as a Church. Our shrine is offering two special days of availability for the Sacrament of Reconciliation. On the last Friday and Saturday of March — March 27-28 — we will be available for the Sacrament of Reconciliation from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m., as we have done in our early days as a shrine.

God Clothes us with Goodness and Mercy In all that we do as Church, it’s important to remember that it is God Who is in charge, God Who leads us, God Who saves us. We are but servants who walk together on the road back to the Father. As Pope Francis also reminds us: “Christians are those who let God clothe them with goodness and mercy, with Christ, so as to become, like Christ, servants of God and others. It is my prayerful hope that this Lent will prove Spiritually fruitful for each believer and every ecclesial community.”

To this we should all answer a soulful, “Amen!”

La Salette Father Gagne is originally from Hartford, Conn., and is director of Communications for the La Salette Missionaries, Province of Mary, Mother of the Americas, author and editor of La Salette publications, monthly contributor to the Religious Section of the Attleboro Sun Chronicle, and has written or edited more than 1,000 articles on La Salette, available on his province’s website: lasalette. org.