08.17.12

The Anchor Diocese of Fall River

F riday , August 17, 2012

Easton student’s three-letter project speaks volumes

By Dave Jolivet, Editor

EASTON — Most of us have seen them on area highways, byways and streets — those white and black oval stickers with initials designating destinations from Nantucket (ACK) and Martha’s Vineyard (MV), to the Mars rover, and back. But Easton resident Thomas Healey, a student at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, has changed the play-

ing field a bit.

Healey has produced the familiar oval with a message that touches home no matter where one lives — GbA, God bless America.

The small sticker with a huge message has caught on very well in Healey’s hometown and in a couple of Cape Cod locations, South Yarmouth and the Falmouth Turn to page 18

a celebration of welcome — Cardinal Óscar Andrés Rodríguez Maradiaga of the Archdiocese of Tegucigalpa, left, processes into St. Rose of Lima Church in Guaimaca, Honduras, with outgoing pastor Father Craig A. Pregana, center, and new pastor Father Jonathan Funez during a recent Mass.

Diocese’s Guaimacan mission presence changes, but future is bright as faith abounds

By Dave Jolivet, Editor

message of hope — Thomas Healey, a parishioner of St. Mary’s Parish in Mansfield and a student at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, displays the God bless America oval sticker he developed.

Donly retires after helming Development Office for 15 years

By Kenneth J. Souza Anchor Staff

FALL RIVER — Looking back over his last 15 years as director of the Development Office for the Fall River Diocese, Mike Donly said his experience has been “very rewarding.”

“I don’t often get to meet the people we’re helping, but every once in a while I’ll get a picture of one of the kids that’s being assisted

so I can put a face to the form or application,” he said.

Donly’s affection for the job is apparent in the fact that even though he officially retired at the end of June, he’s still working part-time as a consultant until his replacement is appointed.

“I’m not really in reFortier photo tirement mode yet, because I’m still here doing consulting work,” he said. “I Turn to page 14

NEW BEDFORD — Like a parent watching a child “leave the nest,” on July 14, Father Craig A. Pregana, pastor of the Diocese of Fall River’s mission in Guaimaca, Honduras for the past eight years, handed over the parish to his successor, Honduran native Father Jonathan Funez. “The Mass was a ceremonial ‘taking possession of the parish,’” Father Pregana told The Anchor. “Cardinal Óscar Andrés Rodríguez Maradiaga of the Archdiocese of Tegucigalpa was there, so too were the parish delegates of the Word, many of the young parishioners, and St. Rose of Lima Church was filled. It was a day of mixed emotions.”

When the first mission team from the Diocese of Fall River arrived in Guaimaca, Honduras 12 years ago, the goal was twofold: to assist some of the poorest people on earth with their temporal needs; and to fan the flames of the Catholic faith in an area where anti-Catholic churches are common.

Now, a dozen years later, the parish is back in the hands of Honduran people who are filled with an excitement and pride in their Catholic faith. Father Pregana has now returned to the Fall River Diocese as pastor of Our Lady of Guadalupe Parish at St. James Church in New Bedford, and is also the new diocesan director of the Hispanic Apostolate.

“I’m truly going to miss the people there,” he said. “Especially the young people, who are so very active in the parish life. There are so many more young people doing things for the parish than when I first arrived. The whole parish is more lively in the faith. I hope we priests can get more young people to be involved in their parishes in the Diocese of Fall River, like their Guaimacan peers.”

Father Pregana also said the family ministry in Guaimaca is very strong. “Marriages weren’t very Turn to page 18

familiar face — Father Craig A. Pregana holds a piñata in his likeness, a going away gift from the St. Rose of Lima Family Ministry.

Spreading the message to those who need it most

By Becky Aubut Anchor Staff

NEW BEDFORD — To those who volunteer their time as part of the prison ministry of the Fall River Diocese, the Bristol County House of Corrections in North Dartmouth doesn’t house lost souls, they are just souls waiting to be saved.

As the pastor of Our Lady of Purgatory Parish in New Bedford, it took a serendipitous phone call by the sheriff’s department to bring Father Jack Morrison to its doors. A fire department chaplain at his former parish in North Carolina, Father Morrison received a call asking to give the invocation to

welcome new officers into the sheriff’s department. After giving the blessing, he was asked if he would consider being a permanent part of the ministry.

Five years later, Father Morrison not only celebrates Mass every Friday morning but also hears Confessions every ThursTurn to page 16

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News From the Vatican

August 17, 2012

Vatican magistrates order trial for papal assistant accused of theft

VATICAN CITY (CNS) — Vatican magistrates have formally indicted Pope Benedict XVI’s personal assistant, Paolo Gabriele, on charges of aggravated theft and have indicted a computer technician from the Vatican Secretariat of State on minor charges of aiding Gabriele after he stole Vatican correspondence.

The publication August 13 of the decision of Piero Bonnet, the Vatican’s investigating judge, included for the first time the naming of a second suspect, Claudio Sciarpelleti, the Secretariat of State employee.

Vatican police found an envelope from Gabriele in Sciarpelleti’s desk and arrested him, according to the documents explaining Bonnet’s judgment. While the computer expert gave “contrasting versions of the facts” to investigators, in the end it was determined that there was enough evidence to bring him to trial on a charge of aiding and abetting Gabriele after the fact.

Father Lombardi said the charge against Sciarpelleti carries a “very light” sentence, which is unlikely to include any jail time.

Pope Benedict could have intervened at any time to stop the investigation and legal process and he still has the option of clearing the two laymen without a trial.

If the pope does not intervene, Gabriele and Sciarpelleti would go to trial before a panel of three Vatican judges, all of whom are laymen and professors at Italian universities. Vatican law, like Italian law, does not foresee the use of juries in criminal trials.

Gabriele, who will turn 46 August 19, faces a sentence of one to six years in prison. Under the terms of the Vatican’s 1929 treaty with Italy, a person found guilty and sentenced to jail time by a Vatican court would serve his term in an Italian prison.

Bonnet’s report quoted Gabriele as telling Vatican investigators he acted after seeing “evil and corruption everywhere in the Church” and he was sure Pope Benedict was not fully informed about what was going on.

“I was certain that a shock, even in the media, could be healthy in putting the Church back on the right track,” Gabriele was quoted as saying. “In a certain way I felt infiltrated” by the Holy Spirit, he said.

Gabriele also made it clear that he had discussed with a spiritual adviser his concerns about the Church and his thoughts in taking the documents.

In fact, Bonnet said, the priest affirmed that Gabriele had given him a box full of documents, which the priest told Vatican investigators he burned because he knew “they were the fruit of an act that was not legitimate” and because he feared they would be stolen from his residence which had been burglarized a

few months earlier.

Gabriele was arrested May 23 after confidential letters and documents addressed to the pope and other Vatican officials were found in his Vatican apartment, Bonnet’s report said. Many of the documents were the same as those featured in a January television program by Italian journalist Gianluigi Nuzzi and later published in a book by him.

Most of the documents dealt with allegations of corruption, abuse of power and a lack of financial transparency at the Vatican.

Gabriele told investigators how he met Nuzzi in an apartment near the Vatican and described in detail the measures he and Nuzzi took to avoid detection.

Bonnet said investigators also found in Gabriele’s apartment: a check made out to Pope Benedict for 100,000 euros (almost $123,000) from a Catholic university in Spain; a nugget — presumably of gold — from the director of a gold mining company in Peru; and a 16th-century edition of a translation of the “Aeneid.”

Gabriele was questioned repeatedly over the two-month period he spent detained in a 12-foot-by12-foot room in the Vatican police barracks. He was allowed to return, under house arrest, to his Vatican apartment with his wife and family July 21 and will remain under house arrest until his trial.

The defense lawyers, Carlo Fusco and Cristiana Arru, have said everything their client did, he did for love of the Church and the pope. However, whether or not any of those actions were crimes will be up to Vatican magistrates or a Vatican court to determine, they told reporters.

Fusco had said Gabriele cooperated with Vatican investigators “very broadly” throughout the investigation.

“One thing Paolo repeated to us and to the judge was that he always was and still is motivated by a desire to do something that would be an act of helping, an act of love for the pope,” Fusco said.

The lawyers said Gabriele was not part of any network or conspiracy and they insisted he received no money for what he did.

At the same time, Fusco and Arru said that Gabriele has expressed a desire to speak to the pope and ask his forgiveness. Fusco said that did not mean that Gabriele did anything criminal, but the pope has said he was saddened by what happened and Gabriele is sorry for that.

Fusco also revealed that Gabriele had written “a confidential letter to the pope,” asking for his forgiveness and telling the pope he had acted alone. The lawyer said that because it was not part of the legal process, he had not read the letter, which was given to a commission of cardinals carrying out a separate investigation of leaks.

pope meets a survivor — Former U.S. Rep. Gabrielle Giffords of Arizona and her husband, astronaut Mark Kelly, meet briefly with Pope Benedict XVI at the end of the pope’s weekly general audience recently in Castel Gandolfo, Italy. Giffords was shot and seriously wounded during a political appearance in Arizona in 2011. (CNS photo/L’Osservatore Romano)

Sacred duty: Saints show that Church is holy despite failings

VATICAN CITY (CNS) — Catholic devotion to the saints appears to be alive and well, and Pope Benedict XVI continues to proclaim new saints at a regular pace.

The official calendar of saints’ feast days will grow in October when the pope canonizes seven men and women, including Mother Marianne Cope of Molokai and three lay people: the Native American Kateri Tekakwitha, the Filipino Peter Calungsod and the German Anna Schaffer.

The canonization Mass October 21 will be one of the first big events of Pope Benedict’s Year of Faith, which is designed to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the opening of the Second Vatican Council and to launch a strengthened commitment to the New Evangelization.

According to Cardinal Angelo Amato, prefect of the Congregation for Saints’ Causes, the appeal of the saints and their concrete examples of holiness give them “an undeniably positive role to play in this time of New Evangelization,” since they are living proof that the Church is holy.

In a new book, currently available only in Italian, Cardinal Amato writes that it’s easy to understand how people can question the Church’s holiness when they see the sinful behavior of some of its members. But the good, loving and charitable activities of other members are the best evidence that the Church truly is the holy Body of Christ, he says.

“The holiness of the Church is not the sum of the holiness of its children, but is a spiritual gift received from the Spirit of the Risen Christ,” he writes. “Throughout history, the Church carries the treasure of

its holiness in earthen vessels.

Being aware of that, the historic Church can do nothing other than continually convert to the cross of Christ.”

The saints and martyrs officially recognized by the Church are the “demonstration that the Church, even if it is not already perfect, given the misery of many of its sons and daughters, is not less holy, but continues to produce the fruits of holiness and always will.”

Individual Christians and Christian communities thus have an obligation to pursue holiness “to counterbalance the humiliations” Christ’s Body suffers because of the sins of its members, he writes.

For Jesuit Father Paolo Molinari, who served as an expert at Vatican II and shepherded Blessed Kateri’s sainthood cause for 55 years, saints are not mythic heroes but real men and women who show all Christians that it’s possible to live holy lives no matter where they were born or what their state of life.

It’s not a matter of demonstrating extraordinary courage in a dangerous situation, but “living an ordinary life in an extraordinary way,” a way that “comes from the Spirit of Jesus

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poured into our hearts,” Father Molinari said in an interview with Catholic News Service.

Another great thing about the saints, Father Molinari said, is that they are ready, willing and able today to help the Church’s members along the path of holiness.

The Second Vatican Council “purified” exaggerated practices related to the veneration of the saints, for example, where the faithful would “enter into a church and go to the statue of St. Anthony or St. Rita and touch it, but not even think that the Lord is present in the tabernacle,” he said.

But the council still emphasized the fact that those friends of God are part of the Church and will intervene on behalf of those still living on earth, he said.

Veneration of the saints, the Jesuit said, is a sign of “the link between the Pilgrim Church (on earth) and the ones who have gone to God.” Blessed Kateri is, like all the saints, still part of the Catholic family, concerned about the needs of her kin, Father Molinari said; and so, “being with God, she will probably whisper into the ear of God something of what we say to her.”

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August 17, 2012

The International Church

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Archbishop Hart blasts newspaper for highlighting sacrilegious Liturgy

overwhelmed — Houses swamped by floodwaters in Bulacan province, north of Manila, Philippines, are seen in this aerial photograph released by the Department of National Defense. The government said August 7 that at least 50 percent of metropolitan Manila was under water, displacing nearly 800,00 people. (CNS photo/Department of National Defense/ handout via Reuters)

Church steps in to challenge Indian acceptance of female feticide

NEW DELHI (CNS) — An official in the Indian Catholic Church has endorsed the idea that participants in sex-selective abortions should be charged with murder.

The backing by Holy Spirit Missionary Sister Helen Saldanha, secretary of the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of India Office for Women, comes as momentum builds to end female feticide, a practice that finds families terminating a pregnancy because the child they are expecting is a girl.

Filing criminal charges for killing a child in the womb because of its sex would “change the killer attitude” toward girls in Indian society, Sister Helen told Catholic News Service.

Although the practice of sexselective abortions is illegal under Indian law, there is no provision for criminal prosecution. Recent census statistics indicate that the practice appears to be widespread.

The census data show that the national ratio of girls to boys younger than six years old has dropped from 927 for every 1,000 boys in 2001 to 914 for every 1,000 boys in 2011. In some states, the ratio dropped to 800 girls for every 1,000 boys, according to the census.

“Son preference is a major syndrome that is leading to a decline in the ratio of girl children. Sadly, the advances in medical technology are being used to prevent the birth of millions of unwanted girl children,” Sister Helen said.

Dr. Ruchika Dewan Singh, manager for strategic planning of the Catholic Health Association of India, acknowledged that sex selection is accepted across Indian society even though laws make it illegal.

The call for mandatory murder charges for female feticide has gained momentum in recent weeks. The plan was endorsed in July at a convention of more than 300 leaders from village councils

in northern Indian states where there are now about 800 girls for every 1,000 boys.

A similar call came a week later from officials in Maharashtra state when they urged the national government to amend the Indian Penal Code to require the filing of murder charges against parents as well as physicians involved in female feticide.

The preference for boys is rooted in Hindu culture and the achievement of “moksha,” liberation, only when an individual has a son to perform last rites as mandated by Hindu scripture.

The practice is said to have led to the dowry system that has led to the consideration that female children are a financial liability for a family. The failure to meet dowry demands results in the deaths of thousands of young women annually.

The National Crime Records Bureau recorded 8,391 dowry deaths — women killed because of the failure to meet dowry demands — in 2010. The bureau also recorded more than 94,000 suicides among young women because of dowry harassment by their husband or in-laws in 2010, up from 28,579 in 1995.

Singh of the Catholic Health Association of India said technology has led to the rise in sexselective abortion as well as preconception sex selection.

“With the advent of modern technological procedures like amniocentesis and ultrasound, the sex of the fetus can be easily identified within the first few months of pregnancy and this is done with the intention of abortion if the fetus turns out to be female,” she said.

Though sex-determination tests have been banned since 1994 under the Pre-Natal Diagnostic Techniques Act, Singh acknowledged that such tests are widely carried out in India by unscrupulous medical practitioners.

Apart from that, Singh noted

that costly techniques involving the selection of the sex of a child before conception are used by affluent families.

“Sometimes the (non-Christian) consultant doctors embarrass us (Catholic health care workers), suggesting that our hospitals too should carry out female feticide as the demand for it is very high,” said Indian Missionary Father Tomi Thomas, CHAI director general.

“We are facing the challenge of educating even some of the medical community to shed the social prejudice against the girl child,” Father Thomas said.

CHAI is conducting regular training programs for health workers, including village-level nursing assistants, to change the bias against girls and to counsel couples not to indulge in female feticide.

Sister Cletus Daisy, a member of the Society of Jesus Mary Joseph and a physician in Orissa state, said that “sometimes even educated couples approach us with the demand to abort the female fetus.”

“But we counsel them and tell them, ‘Don’t abort. We will adopt the baby,’” she said.

Even as gender prejudice against girls is much lower in the Christian community, the Catholic Church in India has observed September 8, the birthday of Mary, as a day to celebrate girls since 1997 “to change the killer attitude against girl children,” Sister Helen said.

The Church, she said, introduced a “gender policy” that highlighted the plight of girls in Indian society in 2009. Local dioceses also run programs that actively campaign against sex-selective abortions, she said.

“We have to do much more and make use of our vast network of educational institutions to spread the message of the dignity and equality of the girl child to non-Christian parents,” Sister Helen said.

Melbourne, Australia (CNA) — The Archbishop of Melbourne denounced a local newspaper for its story about a breakaway group of “Inclusive Catholics,” led by a renegade priest who allegedly gave Holy Communion to a dog.

“That anyone would feed the Eucharist to a dog is an abomination,” Archbishop Denis J. Hart of Melbourne said in a recent statement, issued by the archdiocese in response to a report the same day in The Age newspaper.

The paper, he said, had mocked Catholic beliefs by featuring the incident, which occurred at a service conducted by the “Inclusive Catholics” group. Its leader, Father Greg Reynolds, resigned from the Melbourne archdiocese in 2011 and does not have permission to offer Mass or serve as a priest.

“A first-time visitor arrived late at the Inclusive Catholics service in South Yarra with a large and welltrained German shepherd,” writer Barney Zwartz wrote in his account of the group’s August 5 service.

“When the consecrated Bread and Wine were passed around, the visitor took some bread and fed it to his dog,” Zwartz recounted.

“Apart from one stifled gasp, those present showed admirable presence of mind — but the dog was not offered the cup!”

It is unclear, however, whether the “consecrated bread” consumed by the dog was in fact the Holy Eucharist.

The story mentioned that “a

woman, Irene Wilson, led the Liturgy,” while Father Reynolds “played as small a role as he could.” Given Father Reynolds’ minimal participation in the lay-led service, the “consecrated bread” may not have received a valid Eucharistic consecration at all.

Whether or not the “Mass” was valid, Archbishop Hart told The Age that the events portrayed in the story were a source of grave offense for Catholics.

The article, he told the paper in a letter, was written “in bad faith,” with a tone that showed disrespect to “the most fundamental and defining belief” of the Catholic Church.

While the story acknowledged Father Reynolds’ theological dissent and the “illicit” nature of the group’s services, Archbishop Hart seemed displeased by Zwartz’s attempts at cleverness — such as the lead paragraph’s riff on the “Inclusive Catholics” welcoming “every man and his dog.” Zwartz noted that this terminology in itself was not the “inclusive language” that Father Reynolds favors using.

“That you should choose to report the matter in the way that you did can only be understood as an attempt to hold Catholicism up to ridicule,” the Melbourne Church leader wrote in his recent letter to the editor of The Age. Zwatz’s article noted that the community which Father Reynolds is serving consists of about 40 people who gather together every two weeks.

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The Church in the U.S.

August 17, 2012

Pro-Life directors prepare for challenges, celebrate achievements ORANGE, Calif. (CNS) — Pro-Lifers must be joyful in the work they do, said Cardinal Daniel N. DiNardo, chairman of the U.S. bishops’ Committee on Pro-Life Activities.

“This is a beautiful time for us to gather and get energized for a difficult year ahead,” he said as he began his homily at Mass during the recent Diocesan Pro-Life Directors’ Meeting held in the Diocese of Orange.

Sixty directors attended the meeting organized by the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops’ Secretariat for Pro-Life Activities.

Throughout the conference —which was not open to reporters — presentation topics dealt with the challenges facing ProLife ministers and activists in the United States today. Archbishop William E. Lori of Baltimore, who chairs the USCCB Ad Hoc Committee on Religious Liberty, gave the opening keynote.

But on the evening of August 6, the focus was less on the challenges facing Pro-Life workers than on the joy of Pro-Life work.

“We in the Pro-Life movement — because the days can be long — there are moments ... that we may think the work is just a burden on us,” Cardinal DiNardo, of the Archdiocese of Galveston-Houston, said in his homily.

“But Jesus carried the burden first,” he continued, reminding Massgoers that He did so with “joyful obedience.”

“We have to be joyful,” he said.

“No one likes a sour Pro-Lifer!”

Cardinal DiNardo was the principal celebrant at the Mass at La Purisima Church in Orange. Orange Bishop Tod D. Brown and more than half a dozen priests attending the conference concelebrated the Eucharist with the cardinal.

The Mass preceded the celebratory high point of the meeting, the People of Life Dinner Banquet — an event that gave meeting attendees an opportunity to relax with one another and with Diocese of

Orange staff and to celebrate the work of the award recipients: Dr. Vincent Rue and Sister Paula Vandegaer, a Sister of Social Service.

Rue, a psychotherapist who provided the first clinical evidence of post-abortion trauma, “set out to be the most ridiculed ... and vilified man among psychotherapists,” said Mary McClusky, the secretariat’s special projects coordinator, in her introduction.

“Normally someone who made such a discovery would be greeted with acclaim, awards,” she said.

“The official reaction to Vince’s research was basically to ridicule and ostracize him.”

In his acceptance speech, Rue noted that he had seen his father, the vice president of a marriage and family therapists’ association, suffer similarly when he spoke out against pornography long before mainstream America realized how big a problem it was.

“The only thing that matters at the end of the day is we made a difference and stood for the truth,” Rue said.

Based in the greater Los Angeles area, Sister Vandegaer worked as the editor of Heartbeat magazine, founded International Life Services and worked with agencies including Southern California’s Right to Life League, Holy Family Services and the Welfare Bureau of Los Angeles.

She came to Pro-Life work not so much because of the unborn, she said, “but because of my concern about what was happening to the women.”

“The vision the Catholic Church has about the dignity of women is very, very important,” she added.

Addressing herself to Cardinal DiNardo and Bishop Brown, she noted that the work of Church leaders in the Pro-Life movement is vital.

“You’ve taken a beating and have kept the vision going,” she told them. “That’s very, very important for those of us who are on the grassroots.”

a mother’s watchful eye — An image of Our Lady of Guadalupe is seen behind the altar as Bishop Tod D. Brown of Orange, Calif., concelebrates the opening Mass of the Knights of Columbus 130th supreme convention in Anaheim, Calif., recently. More than 2,000 Knights, 12 cardinals and 70 bishops attended the gathering. Pictured at the altar, right, is Cardinal Roger M. Mahony, retired archbishop of Los Angeles. (CNS photo/courtesy of Knights of Columbus)

Challenges to marriage, religious liberty among Knights’ top concerns

ANAHEIM, Calif. (CNS) — Supreme Knight Carl A. Anderson called the number of attendees at the Knights of Columbus 130th supreme convention in Anaheim “a testament to the growth and development” of the international fraternal organization.

More than 2,000 Knights from around the world — many of them with their wives and children — along with 12 cardinals and more than 70 bishops attended the recent convention.

Anderson made the comments at the States Dinner, a high point of the convention that brings Knights together in a celebration of patriotism.

The bishops, archbishops and cardinals attending the dinner processed through a massive exhibit hall in the Anaheim Convention Center, each waving a flag and smiling at the Knights cheering from either side of the aisle. After the clergy reached their seats on the dais, the assembly joined in the national anthems of countries in which the Knights are represented.

Later, as dinner was served, an orchestra performed the anthems of each U.S. state, as well as Canadian provinces.

The celebratory tone carried through the keynote speech of Cardinal Timothy M. Dolan of New York — a member of the Knights of Columbus for more than 30 years — who got a big laugh after thanking Anderson for booking him into the honeymoon suite of the hotel where the convention took place.

He went on to say he wanted to turn his audience’s attention away

from “the crimson tide” of bishops and cardinals seated before them and focus instead on the Knights and their wives, and the Sacrament of Marriage.

“We Catholics are hopeless romantics, you know, when it comes to married love,” he said, recalling something a staff member had said to him when he was the archbishop of Milwaukee. In striving to increase vocations to the priesthood and religious life, Jan Ruidl told him, he was not thinking along the right lines.

“The greatest vocation crisis today is to lifelong, loving, faithful, life-giving marriage,” she said.

“You take care of that one, and you’ll have all the priests and Sisters you need.” “‘For an increase in vocations to the priesthood, consecrated life and the Sacrament of Marriage’ should perhaps become the new phrasing for a prayer of the faithful at every Mass,” Cardinal Dolan went on, referring not to high divorce rates — but to low sacramental Marriage rates.

Other speakers focused on the issue of religious liberty — a hot topic at a convention with “Proclaim Liberty Throughout All the Land” as its theme.

Pointing out that the clergy and the faithful of the United States had launched a robust defense of the fundamental right of religious freedom, Archbishop Richard W. Smith of Edmonton, Alberta, — the newly elected president of the Canadian Conference of Catholic Bishops — noted that their neighbors to the north are also facing many challenges to their religious

freedom.

“Freedom of religion is not merely the right to freedom of worship — it’s the right to live out our beliefs in the public square,” he said. “On an issue of such fundamental importance, we must be vocal.”

In his homily during the opening Mass, celebrated earlier that day, Orange Bishop Tod D. Brown also touched on the issue of religious liberty.

“We face a growing secularism, attacks on the value and gift of human life, attempts to redefine traditional marriage, and serious curtailment of our religious rights,” said Bishop Brown, a Knight of Columbus for 40 years. “Certainly, there is a clear and demanding need today for the New Evangelization called for by Blessed John Paul II and, now, Pope Benedict XVI.” These are difficult times — just as St. Juan Diego lived in difficult times, he said. “In those tumultuous times in Mexico, Our Lady (of Guadalupe) brought a message of love and peace. Millions of native peoples embraced Christianity in the years that followed,” Bishop Brown said.

As the Patroness of the Americas and of the Knights of Columbus, Mary provides a model of how to respond to the Lord’s call, a model that will be all the more important as clergy and lay people around the world begin to respond to the call to the New Evangelization.

“I’m confident,” Bishop Brown said, that the Knights “will be in the front ranks of the evangelizers.”

5 The Church in the U.S. Obama reaffirms support for HHS mandate, downplays controversy

August 17, 2012

Denver, Colo. (CNA/ EWTN News) — President Barack Obama reaffirmed his support for mandatory contraception coverage in an August 8 campaign stop in Denver, drawing criticism from a lawyer representing a Colorado company fighting the mandate on religious freedom grounds.

Matt Bowman, legal counsel with Alliance Defending Freedom, objected to the president’s contention that offering exemptions to the mandatory coverage allows employers to control women.

“The only ‘controlling’ actions in this case involve the president’s command that families abandon their faith just because they want to earn a living or serve their community,” Bowman told CNA. “The government is picking and choosing what faith is and who can live it out, and then targeting religious people with massive

penalties while bureaucrats exempt millions of other people for political reasons.”

President Obama addressed a rally on the Auraria Campus in Denver. He criticized his opponent, presumptive Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney, for favoring legislation the president said would “allow any employer to deny contraceptive coverage to their employees.”

“It would be up to the employer to decide. Your boss, telling you what’s best for your health, your safety,” the president said.

“I don’t think your boss should get to control the health care that you get. I don’t think that insurance companies should control the care that you get. I don’t think politicians should control the care that you get.”

The Department of Health and Human Services mandate requires most employers to

provide insurance coverage for sterilization and contraception, including some abortion-causing drugs. It went into effect for many employers on August 1.

The Alliance Defending Freedom religious liberty group is representing the Coloradobased Hercules Industries, a manufacturer of heating, ventilation and air conditioning units. The company’s Catholic owners object to the mandated coverage, saying it violates their beliefs.

On July 27 a federal judge granted the company an injunction protecting it from the mandate.

The HHS mandate has prompted Catholic leaders and others to seek changes through Congress. The Blunt Amendment, which would have provided broad conscience exemptions for health care coverage providers, was killed in the U.S. Senate March 1 by a 51-48 vote.

‘Right to Pray’ amendment passes by a large majority

Jefferson City, Mo. (CNA) — A constitutional amendment protecting Missouri residents’ right to pray in public passed by large margins in the August 8 election.

Mike Hoey, executive director of the Missouri Catholic Conference, said the vote “repudiated religious intolerance.”

“You don’t have to see bringing religion to the public square as a threat,” Hoey told the St. Louis Post Dispatch. “We see it as positive thing, and most Missourians did too.”

About 83 percent of voters, almost 780,000 people, favored the measure while 17 percent were opposed.

Amendment 2 says that government will not impose religion on Missouri residents or force any citizen to participate in religious activity. It also secures the right of individual or corporate prayer in public or private so long as the prayer does not disturb the peace or disrupt public meetings.

It guarantees elected officials the right to pray on government premises and public property.

The amendment allows students to express their religious beliefs in schoolwork, to opt out of school requirements that conflict with those beliefs, and to exercise their beliefs in private, voluntary and non-disruptive ways.

The amendment also requires public schools to display the U.S. Constitution’s Bill of Rights in “a conspicuous and legible manner.”

Republican State Rep. Mike

McGhee had unsuccessfully sponsored the amendment for years until it passed the legislature in 2011.

Opponents of the measure include the Anti-Defamation League of Missouri and Southern Illinois and Americans United for Separation of Church and State.

They said that the ballot language was misleading in its presentation for not mentioning its rights for students and elected officials.

Karen Aroestey of the regional Anti-Defamation League said the bill is “possibly unconstitutional in its application, so now we’re headed for the courts.”

Alex Luchenitser, associate legal director for Ameri-

cans United for the Separation of Church and State, said that the amendment will allow more taxpayer-funded lawsuits against school districts from individuals “on both sides of the churchstate debate.”

Missouri’s Catholic bishops backed the amendment.

“True religious freedom does not just constitute freedom to worship on Sunday, but also includes the freedom to express one’s faith publicly,” they said recently.

They said the amendment comes at a time when religious values are “becoming marginalized,” and noted that Catholic teaching supports believers’ right to give “their prayerful witness” to the common good of society.

President Obama contended in his Denver speech that the demand for exemptions comes from the “far right” of the Republican Party. However, three Democratic senators voted against killing the Blunt Amendment.

The lack of broad religious exemptions to the mandate has helped fan the controversy. The mandate would apply to many Catholic charities, health care systems, universities and even archdioceses. More than 40 Catholic institutions, including the University of Notre Dame, have challenged the mandate in courts around the country.

The mandate has also brought tens of thousands of people to nationwide protests and caused a diverse number of religious groups, including non-Christians, to decry the mandate’s infringement on religious freedom.

While the Obama Administration has said it will seek a better religious freedom accommodation, its details are still unclear and the mandate is already affecting many secular employers.

President Obama’s Denver speech portrayed the religious freedom issue as settled.

“We recognize that many people have strongly held religious views on contraception, which is why we made sure

churches and other houses of worship, they don’t have to provide it, they don’t have to pay for it,” he said.

“We worked with the Catholic hospitals and universities to find a solution that protects both religious liberty and a woman’s health.”

However, Catholic leaders insist more action is needed.

Cardinal Daniel DiNardo of Galveston-Houston, the chairman of the U.S. bishops’ Committee on Pro-Life Activities, renewed the call for broader conscience exemptions in a recent letter to Congress.

“The fundamental importance of the religious freedom issue at stake demands a timely congressional response,” Cardinal DiNardo said. “Through this mandate, the administration is promoting an approach to religious freedom that is more grudging and arbitrary than any yet seen in federal law.”

Revised and updated ...

2012-2013 Diocese of Fall River Catholic Directory ... Coming this month!!

Published by The Anchor Publishing Company P.O. Box 7, Fall River, Massachusetts 02722 Please ship _____ directories x $18 each, including shipping and handling. Total Enclosed $_____ NAME ____________________________________________ ADDRESS _________________________________________ CITY _____________________ STATE _______ ZIP _____ Please make checks payable to “Anchor Publishing” For more information, email theanchor@anchonews.org, call 508-675-7151, or order online at www.anchornews.org

6

The Anchor ‘Contributions’ to society

They say that famous people die in threes. Well, it looked like Johnny Pesky rounded third, after Gore Vidal and Helen Gurley Brown. However, as you can read in Dave Jolivet’s “My View from the Stands” column in this issue, probably the famous American who died these past few weeks who had the most influence for the good was Nellie Gray.

Please read Dave’s recollections about her.

Here we begin with the “contributions” to society that Helen Gurley Brown left us. The Vatican and United States Bishops Conference websites each have an article penned in the Fall of 2001 (a very ominous time in our history) by Julie Collins, a ---------, entitled, “Teaching Chastity: Mission Impossible?” In laying out the dismal scene, Collins did not blame young people entirely for the current reality. “This moral shift [away from virginity] presents more than a sociological phenomenon for those of us on the front lines of religious formation. The teacher or chaplain brave enough to invite a discussion of human sexuality can feel overwhelmed, enveloped in a whirlwind of ‘feel-good’ relativism. Even sensible and caring young people have been known to stare blankly during such a discussion. They cannot be blamed. They simply reflect the moral world created by their elders — a world inhabited by MTV, Cosmopolitan magazine, and the ‘TV show Temptation Island.’”

Cosmopolitan magazine was not invented by Helen Gurley Brown, but she transformed it from the family and literary magazine it was in the late 19th and early 20th centuries into the “bible” of the “liberated woman,” following upon the publishing success of her 1960 book, “Sex and the Single Girl.”

In honor of her death, many websites have included lists of quotes from Gurley Brown.

Suzanne Murray, the parenting and political editor at “The Stir/Moms Matter 2012,” had a top 10 list of Gurley Brown quotes, ending with “10. Good girls go to Heaven. Bad girls go everywhere.” Murray then added, “I’m not going to Heaven. How about you?”

Last week we discussed the death of two famous atheists and their seeming agreement with what Murray is saying. However, one would assume from the popular “canonization of everyone” mentality [where to prove someone was a good person, we say “he/she wasn’t Hitler”], Murray does not consciously not want to go to Heaven — but she probably does not understand that Heaven is not a place, but is a state of being in which we are totally united to God in love, and thus totally united to all the other saints in love, too.

Blessed John Paul II, in his catechesis to the general audience he had on July 21, 1999, quoted the “Catechism of the Catholic Church’s” teaching about Heaven. “This perfect life with the Most Holy Trinity — this communion of life and love with the Trinity, with the Virgin Mary, the angels and all the blessed — is called ‘heaven.’ Heaven is the ultimate end and fulfillment of the deepest human longings, the state of supreme, definitive happiness (n. 1024).” I would assume Murray and Gurley Brown wanted to be happy, but they seemed to not know what would truly fulfill them. They seem like St. Augustine, before the conversion. We hope that they have many powerful people praying for them, as Augustine’s mother, St. Monica, did for him and his brother and father over several decades (and she was given the blessing of seeing her prayers answered ultimately as she would have wanted, although she had to wait a long time).

Blessed John Paul continued in the audience: “After the course of our earthly life, participation in complete intimacy with the Father thus comes through our insertion into Christ’s Paschal Mystery.” Here we have the difficulty which modern society finds in accepting the cross. We would like to have the joys of Heaven, which come from Christ’s victory on Easter Sunday, but we are reluctant to “take up our crosses” and follow Him through the “Good Fridays” of life (see the article on page three about the threats to the lives of girls, born and unborn in India, because they can’t make their parents’ lives “easier”; the column on page seven by Father Tad Pacholczyk about the “inconvenience” of handicapped children; and especially Genevieve Kineke’s column on page nine, which was written before Gurley Brown’s death, but which responds to the mentality which Gore Vidal and the Cosmo editor shared and promoted).

As we discussed last week, we cannot judge the subjective state of these people’s souls, but we can see how the ideas that they promoted in this life have had a negative impact on our culture (and not just the culture of this country — remember, Gurley Brown was the “International Editor” of each country’s Cosmopolitan edition until the day of her death).

As the old Johnny Lee song states, they were “looking for love in all the wrong places,” trying to find happiness just from the material world.

Back to Pope John Paul discussing Heaven in 1999, he said, “In the context of Revelation, we know that the ‘heaven’ or ‘happiness’ in which we will find ourselves is neither an abstraction nor a physical place in the clouds, but a living, personal relationship with the Holy Trinity. It is our meeting with the Father which takes place in the Risen Christ through the communion of the Holy Spirit.”

We can have an appetizer of Heaven not by doing “whatever we want,” but by encountering our loving God in the Mass and in our neighbor. John Paul said, “This final state, however, can be anticipated in some way today in sacramental life, whose center is the Eucharist, and in the gift of self through fraternal charity. If we are able to enjoy properly the good things that the Lord showers upon us every day, we will already have begun to experience that joy and peace which one day will be completely ours. We know that on this earth everything is subject to limits, but the thought of the ‘ultimate’ realities helps us to live better the ‘penultimate’ realities. We know that as we pass through this world we are called to seek ‘the things that are above, where Christ is seated at the right hand of God’ (Col 3:1), in order to be with Him in the eschatological fulfillment, when the Spirit will fully reconcile with the Father ‘all things, whether on earth or in Heaven’ (Col 1:20).”

As we pray for the dead, and prepare for our own deaths through prayer and loving our neighbor, we ask God to help us to grow in our love for each and every human being, to see in them the treasures that they are, since they were created in the image and likeness of God. May God bring the good work of Nellie Gray to fulfillment and may He heal the damage that other “leaders” have brought to our society.

L

August 17, 2012

Beauty in the New Evangelization

ast week I relaunched this column by ics that were either patently heretical (“Look focusing on the future Pope Benedict’s beyond the bread you eat”) or painfully comment, “The only really effective apologia narcissistic (“Give us the courage to enter the for Christianity comes down to two arguments, song”). namely the saints the Church has produced and Tabernacles began to look more like the art which has grown in her womb.” plain “bread boxes” than the residence of the For us to put out into the deep and faithEternal Son of God. fully carry out the Lord’s command for a Crucifixes began to make Jesus look like New Evangelization today, we need to focus an antiseptic extra-terrestrial stick-figure than not so much on rational arguments per se — the fully human, strong carpenter about whom as important as these are — but on the “argu- St. Claire of Assisi said, even “bathed in ment” of irresistible attraction: the beauty of blood, was more fair than the fairest of men.” faith in response to the beauty of God. Church banners and altar frontispieces For the most part, this column will focus began to look like they were subcontracted on the light of God radiantly shining in those to a first-grade art class at the beginning of saintly men and women, boys and girls, who the school year. put out into the deep in a communion of life Stained-glass windows, rather than and love with God. As we prepare, however, portraying in alluring ways the mysteries of for the beginning of the Year of Faith during our faith, started to become unintelligible the Synod on the New Evangelization in two kaleidoscopic hodge-podges. months, I didn’t want to let the other part of And perhaps most conspicuously uninCardinal Ratzinger’s great insight escape, be- spiring of all have been Missalette covers, cause it partially explains why we’re in need which have consistently portrayed the Lord, for a year of faith and a New Evangelization great figures and mysteries of faith in unapin the first place — as well as indicates the pealing art unrecognizable to human life. path forward.

The New In his Evangelization famous 1985 requires a new book length appreciation interview with for beauty over journalist Vitbanality. torio Messori, That’s “The Ratzinger already started,

By Father Report,” the thanks be to then head of God, with the Roger J. Landry the Vatican’s elevated, often Congregation poetic language for the Doctrine of the Faith spoke about the of the new translation of the Roman Missal. importance of beauty within the Church.

We see it in the stunning monthly “Mag“If the Church is to continue to transnificat” prayer books featuring the best of form and humanize the world, how can she Christian art. It’s evidenced in the beautiful dispense with beauty in her Liturgies, that new hymnals like the Vatican II Hymnal beauty which is so closely linked with love pointing to a quantum leap in the quality of and with the radiance of the Resurrection? vernacular sacred music. And it’s witnessed No. Christians must not be too easily satisin the rediscovery of beauty in Church art fied. They must make their Church into a and architecture as liturgical buried treasures place where beauty — and hence truth — is are being taken from church basements or at home.” acquired through Ebay.

He added, provocatively, that without These are all parts, important parts, in the this beauty, “the world will become the first “arguments” of the New Evangelization. circle of hell,” merely a vestibule for final Reintroducing people to the beauty of the alienation from God. faith is an urgent pastoral need to help people Cardinal Ratzinger went on to describe to perceive the truth, Cardinal Ratzinger a theologian he knew who bragged that he emphasized in a speech to lay people in was a “barbarian,” someone who gave no 2002. “The pastoral life has to foster the importance whatsoever to beauty. He reacted human person’s encounter with the beauty of by saying, “A theologian who does not love faith. To admire the icons and the great masart, poetry, music and nature can be dangerterpieces of Christian art in general, leads ous. Blindness and deafness toward the us on an inner way, a way of overcoming beautiful are not incidental: they necessarily ourselves; thus in this purification of vision are reflected in his theology.” that is a purification of the heart, it reveals We could say the same thing about a the beautiful to us, or at least a ray of it. In “barbarian” pastor, whose aesthetic blindness this way we are brought into contact with the will necessarily be reflected in his preaching, power of the truth.” and about “barbarian” lay people, whose imThe pope built on this connection pairment will influence the way they speak, between beauty and truth in a 2008 questionlive, dress and witness to God and the faith. and-answer session with priests. “The beauThis truth about beauty is key to the New ties created by faith,” he said, “are simply the Evangelization because one of the reasons living proof of faith.” They are a “luminous why we need a New Evangelization is sign of God.” And they communicate an because, since the time of the Second Vatican objective truth. “Christian art is a rational Council — in the context of a movement in art. … It is the artistic expression of a greatly art that has downplayed beauty in favor of expanded reason, in which heart and reason the “interesting” and “creative” — there has encounter each other.” been a widespread obscuring of the beauty of That’s why in trying to introduce others our faith in favor of banality and ugliness. to God, truth and beauty should always be Many venerable churches were iconoclas- conveyed together. “This is proof of the truth tically stripped of so many of their beautiful of Christianity: Heart and reason encounter treasures — paintings, statues, pulpits, exqui- one another, beauty and truth converge.” site altars and communion rails — in favor of And the beauty of the saints — in whose whitewashed walls or third-rate replacements hearts beauty and truth have converged — in a process that earned the pejorative title of and the beauty of art likewise go together. “wreckovation.”

“The more that we ourselves succeed in livMany new churches more readily called ing in the beauty of truth, the more that faith to mind spaceships, restaurants or motor will be able to return to being creative in our lodges than the cross or anything evocative time too, and to express itself in a convincing of the faith. form of art.”

Masterpieces in the treasury of sacred This is what the New Evangelization is music were supplanted by trite melodies about.

(Mass parts, for example, done to the tune of Father Landry is pastor of St. Berna“Take me out to the ball game”) or with lyrdette’s Parish in Fall River.

Putting Into the Deep

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7

The Anchor

August 17, 2012

Loving those with disabilities

any of us have hidden fears and hesitations when it comes to dealing with persons with severe disabilities. Their unfamiliar gestures, behaviors, and limitations can challenge us and infringe on our comfort zones. We may be tempted to apply a different standard when we deal with them. Even very young children with disabilities may suffer discrimination through denial of care as newborns, or through abortion in-utero.

During his presidential campaign, former Pennsylvania Senator Rick Santorum and his wife Karen were often asked by people on the campaign trail about their daughter Bella, who was born with Trisomy 18, a severe genetic defect caused by an extra chromosome. Such children tend to have shorter lifespans, with 90 percent dying during the first year of life. Nevertheless, with proper care, some can live well into their teens, and even into their 20s or 30s. Bella became known to the public during her father’s candidacy in part because of

long hours on the Senate floor several memorable moments lobbying to protect children during the TV debates where who were discovered to have Rick powerfully described “problems” before birth, rather how Bella’s birth and struggles had impacted their family. than allowing them to be targeted for late-term abortions.

Early on, Rick and Karen struggled with the Trisomy 18 diagnosis, and with the way physicians labeled it a “lethal diagnosis” and “incompatible with life.” Because they had already

By Father Tad lost another child at Pacholczyk birth, Rick, almost unconsciously, remained emotionWhen Bella was five ally distant from Bella during months old, she became the first few months of her critically ill and was rushed life. He focused on being the to the emergency room. Rick pillar of strength for the family through the storm. He later grasped her little finger on the gurney where she was lying. described it during one of the public presidential debates this “I remember holding that finger,” he said, “and looking at way: “I decided that the best her, and realizing what I had thing I could do was to treat done. I had been doing exactly her differently and not love what I had said that I had her … because it wouldn’t fought against at the partial hurt as much if I lost her.” birth abortion [hearings]: I had Several years prior to seen her as less of a person Bella’s birth, Rick had sponsored the partial-birth abortion because of her disability.”

His candor is a reminder ban in Congress. He had spent

STEUBENVILLE, Ohio (CNS) — The City Council of Steubenville has not reached a final decision on whether it will keep a silhouette of Franciscan University’s chapel in an unofficial city logo.

News outlets reported in late July that the city has been threatened with a lawsuit by the Wisconsin-based Freedom From Religion Foundation, which claims the use of the chapel image in a public logo raises constitutional questions.

The logo design was unveiled last December, and afterward the foundation contacted the city on behalf of a resident who complained about the religious imagery.

Supporters of keeping the chapel image in the design delivered a petition to the City Council, which met July 31.

Council members said they have not decided whether to adopt the logo as is and fight a lawsuit or choose a new design.

Gary Repella, law director for the city, recently told Catholic News Service there was no indication when the council would reach a decision.

Before putting a final decision on hold, the City Council announced its intention to remove the image of Christ the King Chapel, rather than face

a costly lawsuit. On July 24 the council offered Franciscan University a chance to be represented in the design by another campus building, which the university declined.

“No other campus symbol or architectural feature so immediately identifies the university,” said Michael Hernon, university vice president of advancement, in a recent statement.

“For more than 65 years, Franciscan University of Steubenville has proudly served as an integral part of this community and we were honored to have our chapel included in the new city of Steubenville logo,” he said.

“The city initially included our chapel because it represents Franciscan University, a worldrenowned center of higher learning and one of the largest employers in the region,” he said. “We find it particularly troubling that an out-of-town and out-of-touch group targeted the university for removal from the logo solely because of our religious identity.”

The Herald-Star newspaper reported that Steubenville Mayor Domenick Mucci asked backers of the existing logo design to “stay united” as the city looked at its options.

The mayor said the idea

Making Sense Out of Bioethics

No decision reached on keeping chapel image in Steubenville city logo

for the design “started when the city manager and the City Council thought it would be nice to have a logo that encompasses all aspects of the city.

This council embraced the logo because we all wanted it to be inclusive of everything we have here.”

of the challenges we all face in caring for and loving those with disabilities and physical limitations. Having learned many valuable lessons from their daughter, Rick and Karen now serve as even more vigorous advocates for children with disabilities. They realized they had to immerse themselves in the world of special needs, which Rick described as “a different world,” and one where children like Bella “do not get the care they need unless the parents fight for it.”

I recently had the opportunity to meet Rick and Karen.

Karen described how Bella’s situation was exacerbated by health care professionals who would not treat her with the same dignity and respect as normal children. Surprisingly, some doctors did not even address Bella by her name.

Rick and Karen soon found an exceptional team of physicians who not only called Bella by her name, but were hopeful and positive about her life and possibilities.

Karen also mentioned another couple with a child affected by Trisomy 18. They had been told after delivery that little could be done for their newborn, and the child was placed off to the side, until one of the parents noticed her struggling and sought assistance for her. Other parents spoke to Karen about the subtle but noticeable resistance

among medical staff whenever they brought their child with Trisomy 18 to the hospital for medical attention. The Santorums had experienced similar challenges with caregivers and medical staff. They had to fight to get the prescription for oxygen, and basic medical supplies that Bella needed after she left the hospital; in addition, a hospice physician prescribed what would have likely been, if administered, a lethal dose of morphine.

Discrimination against those with disabilities should never be allowed to gain a foothold in the medical profession, nor be allowed to guide public policy. The true measure of the greatness of a society will always be in terms of how it treats its weakest members, and the authenticity of our own love will be measured by our compassion and acceptance of the disabled and the powerless. God seems to send us children with disabilities to help us grow, to remind us that every soul is of greater importance than its frail body, and to teach us how man’s highest calling is found in his God-like possibility of sharing unconditional love.

Father Pacholczyk earned his doctorate in neuroscience from Yale and did post-doctoral work at Harvard. He is a priest of the Diocese of Fall River, and serves as the director of Education at The National Catholic Bioethics Center in Philadelphia. See www.ncbcenter.org.

8

A

ctor Jim Caviezel tells the story of his interview with film executives and producer Mel Gibson, for a role in the movie, “The Passion of the Christ.”

Jim heard they were looking for extras to be cast in supporting roles. Through a miscommunication, the execs understood he was there to audition for the role of Christ. After questioningly reading the part of Jesus in the script, the embarrassed producers realized he was not the intended lead for the film. Although impassioned and convincing during the audition, Mel Gibson asked Jim how he ever thought he could play our Savior. Jim candidly answered, “Well, I’m 33 years old and my initials are J.C.” He got the part and, as Paul Harvey would say, “and now you know the rest of the story.”

Seldom do things go the way we plan them from start to finish; be it our education or career path, our

August 17, 2012

The Anchor

Where the rubber meets the road

relationships or our life’s for many of the people. goals. We’ve often heard Reading this Scripture paspriests say, “If you want to sage, many of us could be hear God laugh, tell Him expected to raise the same your plans.” In reading the questions had we been in the Gospels, we often hear Jesus preach to the crowds and His closest disciples, and soon Homily of the Week realize they don’t Twentieth Sunday understand what in Ordinary Time He is talking about.

They misinterpret

By Deacon the meaning of His David R. Boucher words or misunderstand His intent.

For two weeks our Gospel readings have crowd. We are called to not centered on Jesus’ “Bread of only recognize Jesus as the Life” discourses. It started Bread of Life; this Sunday, with Jesus miraculously those proclaiming the Gospel feeding 5,000 with five expect to see a few in the barley loaves and two fish. pews cringe at the words, It ends this week with Jesus “Unless you eat the Flesh teaching them that He will of the Son of Man and drink feed His people with His His Blood, you do not have own Body and Blood. Jesus life within you” (Jn 6:54).

Himself is the Bread of Life.

To “eat the Flesh” and “drink This progression of the Blood” is to partake thought is not understood or of the transformed bread accepted by everyone, and a and wine of the Eucharist. misunderstanding emerges In Holy Communion, we

become intimately connected with the Father through the Son. Through this sharing, we abide in one another. It is in this union that our hearts come to know the real presence of Jesus in the Eucharist.

I often wonder if our youth and young adults understand the depth of this shared relationship we have with Christ.

By what means can we truly explain the real presence in the Eucharist? God answered the question for me this week.

We don’t have to explain His presence. People come to know Jesus though God’s intervention in their lives.

One young parishioner radiantly told me of the week she spent at “Convent Camp” the previous week.

The glowing expression in this girl’s face of coming to know Jesus in her week’s encounter and through the Eucharist explained more

than volumes of written works. I was again gifted in being asked to respond to the character and religious principles of a young man preparing for his Eagle Scout Board of Review.

One feels humbled and blessed when the Lord shows us such shining examples of those who, on whatever level, can understand the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist. These young people know in their hearts that only those who actually eat the Flesh of the Son of Man and drink His Blood will have eternal life. This is where the rubber meets the road. By their youthful devotion and faith, they inspire the rest of us to want to know Jesus more intimately on our own level. Similarly, we have only to ask God to show us the Eucharist through the same eyes of faith.

Deacon Boucher serves at St. Francis Xavier Parish in Hyannis.

Upcoming Daily Readings: Sat. Aug. 18, ­­Ez 18:1-10,13b,30-32; Ps 51:12-15,18-19; Mt 19:13-15. Sun. Aug. 19, Twentieth Sunday in Ordinary Time, Prv 9:1-6; Ps 34:2-7; Eph 5:15-20; Jn 6:51-58. Mon. Aug. 20, Ez 24:15-24; (Ps) Dt 32:18-21; Mt 19:16-22. Tues. Aug. 21, Ez 28:1-10; (Ps) Dt 32:26-28,30,3536; Mt 19:23-30. Wed. Aug. 22, Ez 34:1-11; Ps 23:1-6; Mt 20:1-16. Thurs. Aug. 23, Ez 36:23-28; Ps 51:12-15,18-19; Mt 22:1-14. Fri. Aug. 24, Rv 21:9b-14; Ps 145:10-13ab,17-18; Jn 1:45-51.

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he Church’s Liturgy has inspired great choral music for centuries.

Unfortunately, that part of Catholicism’s cultural memory has been somewhat misplaced in recent years. One reason why is the widespread misapprehension among liturgists that 21st-century congregations can only “hear” music of the Andrew Lloyd Weber genre. (One memorial acclamation I heard recently was straight out of the “Les Mis” playbook, the only difference being that the Lord, not Cosette, was the ditty’s alleged subject.) Experience, however, proves that congregations respond gratefully to great music, and there are few classical forms that are better suited to the Roman rite than the motet.

Herewith, then, five wonderful motets, each within the capabilities of a parish serious about its choir and its music, with which

Five great motets

to begin the Great Choral martyrdom; she gave them a Revival: lucrative patent on printing “Sicut cervus” (Giovanni and publishing music. “If Ye Pierluigi da Palestrina). PalLove Me” is, technically, an estrina, the great master of anthem, not a motet, as the Renaissance polyphony, also text — the communion antihit the trifecta of Renaissance choirmaster appointments, serving in Rome as maestro de capella at St. Peter’s, St. John Lateran, and St. Mary Major. This

By George Weigel limpid setting of the Vulgate’s Psalm 41, verse 1, displays Palestrina’s genius at its phon for the Sixth Sunday of most accessible and radiant.

Easter in Year A (Jn 14:15-17) “Sicut cervus” is especially — is in English rather than appropriate for Masses in Latin. Irrespective of the muwhich the texts stress the di- sicological definitions, howvine gift of the Eucharist, the ever, Tallis’s composition is Church’s longing for which an example of English choral is so often symbolized by the music at its most expressive, yearning deer of the psalm. and “fits” well throughout “If Ye Love Me” (Thomas liturgical year.

Tallis). Tallis had the difficult “Ave Verum” (Wolfgang task of keeping his musical Amadeus Mozart). Written in head on his shoulders dur1791 while Mozart was coming the Elizabethan persecupleting “The Magic Flute,” his tion of the Church in Tudor most “Masonic” opera, this England. But Elizabeth I was setting of a 14th-century euso taken with his music, and charistic hymn (perhaps written that of William Byrd, that

by Pope Innocent VI) is widely she not only spared these two and rightly regarded as one of publicly professed Catholics the most beautiful pieces of

The Catholic Difference

music ever composed. Whatever Mozart’s relations with Enlightenment Freemasonry, it strains credulity to think that a non-believer could have written the “Ave Verum.”

“Ubi Caritas” (Maurice Duruflé). Duruflé, who was born in 1902 and died during the second Reagan Administration, was a highly self-critical composer, a musical perfectionist. And in “Ubi Caritas,” he got it exactly right. Taking an ancient Latin text (which scholars believe dates to the first Christian centuries), he preserved the essentials of the hymn’s origins in Gregorian chant and complemented them with a manifestly modern composition, yet one in complete harmony with the Roman Church’s musical tradition. I can’t say that I like his well-known “Requiem” as well as Gabriel Fauré’s, but the Duruflé “Ubi Caritas,” which is especially fitting for Holy Thursday but is appropriate in a variety of liturgical seasons, ought to be a staple of parish music programs.

“O Magnum Mysterium” (Morten Lauridsen). Before I discovered the music of Morten Lauridsen, you would have had a hard time convincing me that great music could be produced out of the University of Southern California: great running backs, obviously; but great chorale music? Well, there it is: USC professor Lauridsen, whose Danish background suggests a Lutheran heritage, has mined the hymn texts of the Roman Missal and the old Roman Breviary for some splendid works, of which my Desert Island Discs choice would be this setting of one of the responsories for the preconciliar Matins of Christmas.

If your son or daughter has been in a high school choir in recent decades, you probably know Lauridsen’s “O Nata Lux,” the frequently performed third part of his cycle “Lux Aeterna.” Both “work” liturgically, but to my mind, “O Magnum Mysterium” is the nobler composition.

George Weigel is Distinguished Senior Fellow of the Ethics and Public and Public Policy Center in Washington, D.C.

August 17, 2012

“Roamin’ Catholics”

Sunday 12 August 2012 — sometimes be perceived to have Falmouth Inner Harbor — Road negative connotations). They Race Weekend come to town in droves and with omeone once gave me a them come additional spiritual coffee mug filled with hard needs. It is the responsibility of candy. The mug was decorated the parishes of Cape Cod to adwith a cartoon image of a priest rushing about while holding a suitcase in his hand. Above the Reflections of a cartoon was the phrase Parish Priest “Roamin’ Catholic.”

I’m finding, dear

By Father Tim readers, that during Goldrick these months of high summer the churches of Cape Cod and the Islands have a unique opportunity dress those needs. to minister to “roamin’ CathoThe summer visitors, first of lics.” Some of the locals call all, want to meet their obligation them “summer guests,” or “sumto participate in Mass on Sunmer visitors,” or even sometimes days and holy days. This means “tourists” (although the latter can that more Masses are required

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The Ship’s Log

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The Anchor during the summer season than at other times of the year. Out of curiosity, I counted the number of Masses provided by the priests of Falmouth on any given summer weekend. The answer is 26. There are four parish churches in the town itself (Falmouth, West Falmouth, North Falmouth, and Woods Hole) and one chapel (Falmouth Heights).

The priests from North Falmouth also cover the parish in Pocasset.

The talk around town is that this year the number of summer visitors here has broken all records. Where do we put them all? There’s no “supersized” church building in the Town of Falmouth. The largest

Competing visions

everyone a degree into giddy ore Vidal has died. joy. Or would it?

Almost unknown to Vidal and his disciples atyoung adults, years ago he tempted to strip all meaning was considered the clever that attaches itself to sexual old man of belles lettres — a intimacy, reducing it to mushocking rake with a bracing tual gratification, a material wit. The wit, though, distilled distraction, a temporary (and through the decades, comes random) colliding of bodies down to us more as vinegar who hold no expectations than aged claret, more snark and relinquish all obligathan savvy. Mores the pity.

We’d love to honor our elders, but it’s hard to do so when they’ve twisted their gifts and flung them so contemptuously at the One who bestowed them.

By Genevieve Kineke Many sources offered collections of his pithy quotes, and one stood apart, tions. With prior planning, gathering many of the silky each collision will remain threads that bind a generation sterile, and if not, it will be of confused souls to a lifeless rendered so in due time. If for worldview: “Sex is. There some reason a child is born, is nothing more to be done the state will tend his needs about it. Sex builds no roads, if the mother cannot. As for writes no novels and sex the burgeoning drawbacks — certainly gives no meaning to such as disease and depresanything in life but itself.” sion — the members of sociTo modern sensibilities, ety must simply manage their there is no shock to this expectations better, and dump quip — its dreary message more money into research. comprises the very wallpaper Is there another way? that stifles and oppresses the Of course, there is. There young, robbing them of richer is God’s Divine plan for vistas that are their birthintimacy, through which right. But years ago, when it each act is a total gift of self. was first uttered, it sounded Reserving the gift for marliberating, refreshing and riage allows two committed new. It formed the mantra of people to avoid lying, and the Sexual Left, who sought permit their bodies to speak to rip marital intimacy from a language of fidelity and its familial context and toss it oblation. After a ceremony in like candy to any who would which each says, “With this stretch out their hands. Surering I thee wed,” the promise ly, shredding the stiff moral is sealed when each promises, obstacles that barred physical “With this body I thee serve.” gratification from those who Then, only, can Trinitarian were unmarried would lift

The Feminine Genius

love breathe fully through their union — spirating more love, more life and the seal of the ages.

These two competing visions stand in stark contrast to one another, competing for the minds of the young.

Surely, most of us fall somewhere between them in the execution of our marital duties — not willing to align ourselves with the materialists, but uncomfortable with the Catholic archetype, which can be so ephemeral in daily life. God knows this.

The question, though, is which one we will embrace as our ideal, and strive to pass to our children in whatever dog-eared form?

The dissident feminist, Camille Paglia, has spoken and written about decadence, and the ways it has manifested itself over the centuries.

She found that, historically, whenever decadence is taken from the fringes of a society and ensconced as its centerpiece — as in Nero’s Rome or Robespierre’s France — that culture is on the verge of collapse.

So we can choose. Either intimacy means nothing and has no bearing on how we order our society, or it is of the greatest significance — both practically and metaphysically. What’s at the heart of culture will predict its survival — and all hearts attached to its driving philosophy.

Mrs. Kineke is the author of “The Authentic Catholic Woman” and can be found online at feminine-genius.com.

of the four parish churches has a seating capacity of 622. There are six priests assigned to those four parishes (plus the parish in Pocasset) — five diocesan priests (Fathers Gerard Hebert, Joseph Mauritzen, Arnold Medeiros, Peter Fournier, and myself) and one Jesuit (Father Frank Moi.) In order to provide 26 weekend Masses, the four Falmouth pastors actively seek the assistance of visiting and retired priests. Sufficient numbers of these are still available. Their willingness and ability to offer their priestly services is invaluable to Cape Cod parishes.

Another Sacrament frequently requested by summer visitors is the Sacrament of Marriage. Unlike many parishes in Southeastern Massachusetts and across the nation, the number of marriages in these parts is up. Hundreds of summer weddings take place on Cape Cod and the Islands every year. You might even say that we are considered a “wedding destination.” Some of those planning marriages grew up in town. Some come from families that have owned cottages here for many generations. A few just like the “seaside wedding” theme and the availability of fine restaurants.

Wedding preparation procedures and Liturgy planning have to be adjusted to fit the situation.

Fortunately, we have six teams of parishioners who volunteer to conduct the wedding rehearsals.

There are currently several wedding-related shows on television. Recently, a telephone call from one of them came into the parish office. In this particular show, the executive producers plan a national contest in which viewers across the country are asked to vote for their favorite from a number of weddings.

Could the TV producers have permission to film a summer wedding scheduled to be held here? Oh my.

Baptisms are also on the rise — and so are funerals. Parents will occasionally seek to have their children baptized in the same church in which they contracted marriage. One widower wanted to arrange his deceased wife’s funeral in the church of their marriage. For him, it gave a sense of closure to the vow “until death do us part.”

I know there is a national organization devoted to assisting Catholics who live in rural areas of the country. I wonder if there’s a comparable organization for Catholic churches in resort towns.

If not, perhaps there should be.

When it comes to parish life and ministry, there are unique considerations in resort communities.

From where I stand, the Catholic parishes on Cape Cod consider sacramental ministry to be the highest priority. This is certainly not to say that the same does not apply to off-Cape parishes, but rather that the sheer numbers of people visiting the area dictate that the Sacraments be made available before all else.

The Sacraments are the core of our Catholic identity.

The summer population in Falmouth, I am told, peaks on “Road Race Weekend.” The race is upon us. We blessed the runners at Mass today, a tradition begun by Msgr. John Regan.

The summer is passing, whether or not we acknowledge the fact.

I notice the goldenrod is already blooming by the roadside. The population will soon begin to decrease as vacations come to an end and our summer visitors return to work and school. With the coming of autumn, there will be time to reflect on how well the faith community meets the needs of the “roamin’ Catholics” among us and how we might continue to meet those needs in the future.

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

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The Anchor

August 17, 2012

Two alumni make their mark at Holy Family-Holy Name School B y B ecky Aubut A nchor Staff

NEW BEDFORD — While most kids are relieved to get away from school each summer, two alumni from Holy Family-Holy Name School in New Bedford eagerly walk in through its doors to take on whatever tasks principal Cecilia Felix has laid out for them.

During their breaks from college, Patrick Grime and Taylor Kuliga are assigned numerous duties, including cleaning every inch of the school, from woodwork to windows to floors; duties that also involve reworking an individual classroom each year from top to bottom, not just cleaning but painting and updating the classroom from chalkboards to whiteboards. However, when Felix greeted the boys this year, she had something different in mind.

“We’re not going to do a classroom this year,” she said, “but I do think we should do something. I wanted the teachers to feel appreciated.

They’re the backbone of this school. They are the school and make it what it is, so how about doing a teachers’ room makeover?”

Described as “a place to eat lunch and get out,” said Armand Houde, the maintenance engineer at the school, the teachers’ room matched every classroom in the school in design and color.

“The boys were really sensitive to making it personal and really a sanctuary for the teachers,” said Felix. “They can eat, work or do outreach; I have to say the boys did their homework by speaking to the teachers about what they’d like to see.”

Drawing on their architectural background from college — Kuliga studies architecture at the New York Institute of Technology while Grime studies architectural drafting at Wentworth Institute of Technology in Boston — the boys

presented their design of the date of their curriculum within tional summer jobs available. new layout of the teachers’ the school, but it soon segued “All the faculty and staff have room to Felix two weeks af- into a part-time job. Though become part of the big, happy ter she proposed the idea, and the boys draw a small wage holy family.” then they got to work. for their work, Felix says “Any other kids who come “I started off here say, ‘I don’t with the cabinets want to come but the work staback,’ but when tion stuck out in my they leave it’s, ‘I mind because I feel want to come back’ that room could be because they don’t used for something realize what kind like that,” said Kuof a school this acliga, as the boys tually is. They get broke the room into high school down into zones. and you’re not The walls went this little kid; this from beige to blue school has it’s own as the middle of the special thing,” said room, space once Kuliga. dominated by a Kuliga left his large square table own distinct mark that doubled as a on the school when workstation and last year he redelunch station, is signed the school’s now solely for eatlogo that is now ing. The food prep painted and vararea has micronished to preserve waves, a fridge and it in the center of cabinets along one the gym floor. wall as opposed to “It was great,” the original design said Kuliga. “Signthat separated the ing it made it an appliances on opofficial deal. What posite ends of the I did was I saw the room. The workold original blue station is now by wave logo from Anchor Persons of the week — Tayitself; a whole wall lor Kuliga and Patrick Grime. (Photo by Becky the high school, is dedicated to the Aubut) and saw the official workspace.

Holy Family logo The boys have and figured why been doing almost all of the their work ethic — occasion- not merge them and update it? manual labor, and the make- ally putting in more hours than It’s basically a deconstruction over has been cost effective by their schedule dictates, includ- of the old one and a reconrefurbishing many of the items ing late nights — goes beyond struction of the new one.” already in the room while add- money.

“I knew I could trust him,” ing newly-spray-painted chairs “They’ve been given good said Felix, adding the design donated from a local ware- modeling,” said Felix. “When is not only found on the gym house.

I look at these young men, I floor but on spirit T-shirts and “The colors and design of see their families and their jackets. “You don’t want to the room were a lot like the families are driven and not break tradition because it’s classrooms so when teachers self-centered. They do a lot of part of our history, but we went on break, they weren’t outreach. I have always felt I needed a spirit piece. We don’t getting away from anything,” could pick up the phone or text have a mascot we can dress said Grime. “Now that it’s go- them anytime and say, ‘I need up as a wave. It worked pering to be updated to a new and help,’ and they will come.” fectly.” different from any room in the “It’s really become more of Houde said he is impressed building, it’s like a getaway.” a family thing coming here,” by the boys’ easy-going and The boys initially started said Grime, when asked why hardworking nature. working at the school while he works part-time for a school “I think they’re fine young doing service hours as a man- when there are more tradi- gentlemen,” he said. “You

don’t see many young people this age have the commitment that they do have. It actually surprises me to see the fire and commitment they have working on this building.”

But time is ticking; a return to non-commuter colleges has the boys conscious of their schedule. Balancing the time to work on the teachers’ room while doing their normal duties of cleaning the entire school has been a challenge, said the boys, and the latest hiccup in the plans — the floor for the teachers’ room was set back due to pricing issues that have since been resolved by changing vendors — didn’t help matters.

“They have pulled allnighters before,” said Felix, “but I’m not worried about it.

They’ll get it done.”

And being known for getting the job done had everyone singing the boys’ praises; the faculty were just as effusive in their compliments as a parade of staff members came through the office during the interview, echoing the positive sentiments of Felix and Houde. When the boys were able to stop blushing after being humbled by the overwhelming number of accolades, they reflected on what the school meant to them.

“It’s definitely pride because I could be a student who graduated, came back and think, ‘Yeah, I’ve been here,’” said Kuliga, “but now I can think, ‘Yeah, I’ve been here. I know every inch of this building.’”

“It’s going to be cool for the rest of our lives because this will really be our first project,” said Grimes. “We’ll be doing things on a much larger scale some day, but we’ll always remember our first project was where we grew up; where our life was shaped, where everything began.”

To submit a Person of the Week nominee, send an email with information to fatherwilson@anchornews.org.

August 17, 2012

Olympic team chaplains helped athletes face up to failings

VATICAN CITY (CNS) — The job of an Olympic team chaplain sometimes involves helping athletes face up to weaknesses of character, said the Italian team chaplain, after one of the nation’s athletes was disqualified on account of drug use.

A chaplain provides spiritual support, friendship and encouragement to the athletes, but he is also there to promote “confrontation, dialogue, reflection, to help them find themselves” when they are lost, said Msgr. Mario Lusek.

From London, where he administered to Italian Olympians, Msgr. Lusek spoke to Vatican Radio recently about Alex Schwazer, who won the gold medal in race walking in 2008, but was disqualified from competing in London August 6 after failing a blood test for doping.

“I believe that darkness is always lurking in the human heart. There are times when you lose that sense of light that carried you through over the course of years,” Msgr.

Lusek said. “I think Alex Schwazer experienced that.”

The athlete was “admired by everyone, and certainly even envied, but at the same time he had his fragility, his anxieties, his fears,” the chaplain said.

People should not forget, he added, that “Olympic athletes are basically youths with all the characteristics typical of being young. Sometimes they aren’t able handle their limitations or fears.”

Msgr. Lusek said Schwa-

zer’s story of doping before the 50-kilometer (31-mile) race should be seen as a cautionary tale of someone who took “dangerous shortcuts to arrive at that goal for which he struggled and prepared” so long.

The chaplain said he’s deeply disappointed in Schwazer, but also filled with “tenderness” for the 27-yearold, and concerned that he can eventually find his way.

11

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waynepowers @ anchornews . org

12

August 17, 2012

The Anchor

Thousands of viewers respond to Pro-Life TV ad’s offer of help

Austin, Texas (CNA) —More than 2,400 viewers responded to an advertisement offering help to women in crisis pregnancies, which aired over 50 times on Black Entertainment Television during summer 2012.

“Women deserve to know about the compassionate help that is available to them, and this campaign accomplished just that,” Heroic Media CEO Brian Follett said in a recent statement about the results of the ad that offered referrals to local pregnancy centers.

“We are thrilled with the 2,400 responses and can’t wait to reach even more women with messages of hope in the coming weeks and months,” said Follett.

Heroic Media’s “call for help” message included a toll-free number for the national “Option Line.”

Viewers could call or send a text message for resources and information about alternatives to abortion.

The advertisement aired on

Black Entertainment Television was targeted toward women facing abandonment or other consequences of an unplanned pregnancy. In it, a woman tells viewers: “A baby is a life you created — a baby that will love you, and need you, in return.”

The message stresses the availability of help, telling women they “don’t have to do this alone.”

Public response to the Pro-Life ad is “encouraging,” said Marissa Gabrysch, director of Marketing, Research and Communications for Heroic Media. She said the response numbers “represent women who are responding to hopeful messages and finding compassionate, practical and free services.”

Heroic Media has run four national television campaigns since 2010. During 2011, the company received more than 146,000 inquiries in response to its messages promoting pregnancy options online, through television, and in outdoor advertisements.

Diocese of Fall River TV Mass on WLNE Channel 6 Sunday, August 19, 11:00 a.m.

Celebrant is Father Thomas C. Lopes, a retired priest of the Fall River Diocese residing at Cardinal Medeiros Residence in Fall River

Transfigured by the Focolare continued from page 20

sive culture begs the question concerning obstacles to conquer.

“Again, being a prideful Bostonian had hid true peace and joy waiting to emerge. I had thought like most of my friends, we had it all figured out. We were full of knowledge. In reality, we were full of something else. All the while, those three young men stayed in my memory month after month, and year after year, as if whispering for me to ‘hang in there,’ to get what they have — love, peace and joy.”

Mary unabashedly continued, “The biggest obstacle for women is that often their husbands don’t want them to get too involved.

They want to be number one. The challenge is to get them to see that, ultimately, the wife after attending Focolare meetings then begins to become a better, sweeter wife to him and act as a better mother for the children. The children actually belong to God — husbands, wives, too. My husband never joined, but never objected. He built tabernacles for the foclarini. They loved him without trying to convert him. Nor did I. We love ’em as they are.”

Unconditional love is one of the greatest attributes that Focolare members embody; a collective mantra opposed to the prevailing winds of our “self-help” culture, which touts its pretentious maxim with brazenness, “If only my spouse would do x, y, or z, then he or she would be perfect.”

“No,” Mary counsels. “We stress relationships with one another; it’s a realm of spirituality that sets us free to hear God’s Word while supplying the energy to serve others. The continuity of the monthly meetings provides discipline, always needed for people to raise their minds to God and more effectively reach out to others. Meditating on the Divine

Word becomes our word of life and is efficacious because Mother Mary assists us so that we can be enlightened, purified and perfected by it.”

Responding to Italian Archbishop Rino Fisichella’s summation of the Year of Faith, which “aims to support the faith of believers who, in their daily trials, never cease to entrust their lives to the Lord Jesus with courage and conviction,” I asked Mary how it related to the Focolare’s July 2012 Word of Life — “To anyone who has, more will be given and he will grow rich; from anyone who has not, even what he has will be taken away” (Mt. 13:12).

Mary responded, “Chiara Lubich had once commented on it, saying, ‘These are the people who see and hear Jesus, but because they assume that they already know all the truth, they do not believe His words or the action that confirm them.’

“The Word of Life that touched me most was,‘Where two or three are gathered in My name, there I am.’ And I only would add, gathered ... in love. With love, we then have the presence of Jesus in our midst, giving us courage and conviction of our faith.

“I’m coming off a Mariopolis in Scranton, Penn. Out of all the ones I’ve been to since the 70s, this is the best one — so many graces.

You witness a habitual happiness in their eyes throughout the Focolare gatherings, at the larger Mariopolises, and also at smaller group meetings.

“Father Stead said something that piqued my interest. He said if people were to live the spirituality that the Focolare proposes that it would transfigure the whole world.

Then he raised a great question that perplexed him: ‘Why hasn’t the Focolare taken off?’

“It’s ourselves. I speak for myself. We think we know it all. In reality, we don’t scratch the surface until we come together and learn how to love as Jesus and Mary.

“In Lisbon, Pope Benedict wrote regarding the Year of Faith which begins Oct. 11, 2012, the 50th anniversary of the opening of the Second Vatican Council, and concludes Nov. 24, 2013, the feast of Christ the King. He penned, ‘What the world is in particular need of today is the credible witness of people enlightened in mind and heart by the Word of the Lord and capable of opening the hearts and minds of many to desire for God and for true life, life without end.’

“That’s the challenge. Focolare’s motto is, ‘To see Jesus Christ in everyone.’”

“My kids noticed a difference in how I treated them. I had thought I loved them, but I came to eventually learn to truly treat them with the dignity that they deserve. The Focolare brings God into the pic-

ture. We’re constantly nourished

by Scripture, which continually guides our daily lives, through the ups and the downs. I wished it were preached from the pulpits!”

Based on your own God-given gifts, have you discovered any new charisms through the Focolare ... or honed old ones?

“The best way that I can answer is through an illustration. During our marriage, after my husband retired, he constantly complained about retirement plans. First night, I got up impatiently. Next morning, I reflected that maybe I hadn’t listened properly. I resolved to try my best the second evening. But no.

Third night same thing, as well as the fourth. On the fifth night, I really intently listened with great effort.

“At the end of the complaint session, my husband pulled out his chair, stood up, walked over beside mine, took me by the hand, raised me up, put his arms around me and gave me the greatest, tightest, most loving hug in our marriage while sweetly saying, ‘You must get tired of listening to me night after night with all this complaining.’

“For the very first time in my life, I felt my husband’s pain, as he felt it. In the Focolare you learn how to listen. Listening is the first step to love, not to just hear, but to truly listen to get to the other person’s heart, taking some of their pain away.”

We hung up. Realizing there wasn’t anything else to cover, I pondered how Mary Langton reflects the prototype of the greatest woman, Mother Mary with a circumcised heart, as a quintessential trait manifest through many focolarini who attend meetings, and therein persevere with one mind and heart, so as to be transfigured, not for her own sake but for spreading the message to others, as Christ had discreetly given to His disciples at The Transfiguration — the preeminent example for summoning the courage to strive for universal unity amidst imminent sufferings.

Chiara Lubich cautioned, “This issue’s ‘The Word of Life’ warns us all against making a grave mistake — accepting the Gospel, making it the object of study, admiration and discussion, but without putting it into practice.”

Mary Langton’s monthly vigilance spans four decades of practicing The Word of Life, along with four million adherents in 182 countries. Indeed, she has a head start on reaching Heaven by commencing her transfiguration.

Rob Grant is a freelance writer for Florida Catholic, and author who is discerning a vocation with the Congregation of The Sacred Hearts of Jesus and Mary in Fairhaven and a frequent guest of Focolare Movement in South Florida.

August 17, 2012

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The Anchor

Archbishop Muller presents positive vision for Vatican’s doctrine office

Vatican City (CNA/ EWTN News) — The new head of the Vatican’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith says he wants the department to play a positive role in the New Evangelization, rather than simply responding to doctrinal problems as they arise.

“The task of this congregation is not only to defend the Catholic faith but to promote it, to give the positive aspects and possibilities of the whole richness of the Catholic faith,” Archbishop Gerhard Ludwig Muller told CNA in a recent interview.

“We must speak about God the Father, the Lord Jesus Christ, the Holy Spirit, and also about Holy Scripture, the great Tradition of the Church, our Creed and our belief. In this way our hearts will be more open and our thinking more profound,” he said.

The 64-year-old former Bishop of Regensburg, Germany was appointed to his new Vatican post by Pope Benedict on July 2.

“The Holy Father did not ask me. He nominated me without discussion,” he laughed. The pope said, “‘you have to do it,’ and you cannot give a negative answer to the wishes of the Holy Father!”

The two German theologians have had a long association.

Archbishop Muller hesitates to use the word “friendship,” since in German it usually refers to someone of the same age bracket, whereas Pope Benedict “is one generation older than me.”

However, Archbishop Muller does still consider their relationship “a friendship ... but he has the role of father and I have the role of son.”

Archbishop Muller still recalls the intellectual impact of Father Joseph Ratzinger’s “Introduction to Christianity,” published in 1968 at the height of the campus rebellions across the western world. “He revindicated our faith and convinced us of the reasonableness of Catho-

lic belief; he re-established our fact, he now occupies the same Church recognizes “everybody but we are the family of God, confidence in the Church,” the Vatican job that Pope Benedict who is validly baptized is in- the Body of Christ,” he said. archbishop remarked. fulfilled from 1981 to 2005. corporated into Christ,” even if On another matter that has He is now in charge of editArchbishop Muller’s lat- they are not in full communion raised questions, his long standing the writings or “Omnia Op- est appointment, however, has with the Catholic Church. ing friendship with the Peruviera” of Pope Benedict XVI, a been met with a degree of critiBut on a more pressing note, an theologian Father Gustavo grand project that will stretch cism from some who allege he Archbishop Muller has to deal Gutiérrez, one of the principle to 16 volumes. holds unorthodox views on a with the issue of the Leader- founders of “Liberation TheolHe described Pope Benedict range of issues — from the per- ship Conference of Women ogy,” Archbishop Muller was as “a great intellectual and an petual virginity of Our Lady, Religious in the United States. similarly robust. important thinker for today,” to the real presence of Jesus In April 2012 the Congregation He explained that there are particularly when it comes to Christ in the Eucharist, to the for the Doctrine of the Faith various schools of “Libera“explaining the depth and rich- relationship of non-Catholic called for a reform of America’s tion Theology,” stressing that ness of our Christian faith” to Christians to the Church. largest female religious group, “we have to make differences contemporary society. after a four-year audit between them” as some are ur Catholic faith is very clear,” or “doctrinal assess- “in the line of a Marxist and “It’s too early to speak about the legacy he explained, “that at the con- ment” concluded there communist analysis of realof this papacy, but in secration during Mass a change occurs was a “crisis” of belief ity” which the Catholic Church a certain sense we can throughout its ranks. would condemn. compare our present so that the whole substance of the bread Earlier this month “I think that Gustavo GutiérHoly Father with the and wine is changed into the whole sub- the group’s president, rez, I know him personally, he great intellectual pon- stance Body and Blood of Jesus Christ, Sister Pat Farrell, sug- is not of this line. He is a very tiffs of history, such as and that this change is rightly called gested that the key good Catholic,” said ArchbishPope Leo the Great in question in their dis- op Muller, who spent 15 sumthe fifth century and transubstantiation. And we have re- cussions with the Vati- mers teaching and working in Benedict XIV in the fused to accept all the other interpreta- can is, “Can one be South America.

18th century.”

He sees the matter as one of tions, consubstantiation, transignifica- Catholic and have a Archbishop Ger- tion, transfinalisation and so on.” questioning mind?” not dividing or separating “the hard Muller was born Archbishop Muller’s love (of) God and the love toin 1947 in the Mainz answer is a clear: “Be- wards our neighbor.” region of Germany cause faith and reason As a native of Mainz, Archinto a family of four — one “These are not criticisms, belong together, it is obviously bishop Muller said he takes great brother and two sisters. He is they are provocations. And not not incompatible to be Catholic inspiration from the region’s still very much a family man, very intelligent provocations at and to have a questioning mind 19th-century bishop, Wilhelm and boasts of being an uncle to that,” he said. “Either they have — but we cannot have negotia- Emmanuel von Ketteler, a pio22 nephews and nieces, with not read what I have written or tions about revealed truth,” he neer of modern Catholic social “number 23 coming soon.” they have not understood it.” said. “We are in communion thinking. His work subsequentHe studied philosophy and “Our Catholic faith is very with the Church only in so far ly influenced the pontificate of theology in the German cit- clear,” he explained, “that at as we accept the whole and the Pope Leo XIII and, in particular, ies of Mainz, Munich, and the consecration during Mass a complete revelation of Jesus his 1891 social encyclical “ReFreiburg, producing not one change occurs so that the whole Christ, all the doctrine of the rum Novarum.” but two doctorates. The first fo- substance of the bread and wine Church.”

It is this vision of Catholic cused on the work of the 20th- is changed into the whole subHe is extremely reluctant, social teaching, the archbishop century Protestant theologian stance Body and Blood of Jesus though, to go to war with the believes, that “helped to reDietrich Bonhoeffer, while the Christ, and that this change is American religious Sisters. In- build a democratic Germany second explored the veneration rightly called transubstantia- stead, Archbishop Muller wants after the war” and which has of saints, “a very Catholic sub- tion. And we have refused to to “come together and not to been repeatedly reflected in ject,” he noted. accept all the other interpreta- struggle against each other or more recent Church docuAfter his studies, he was tions, consubstantiation, tran- be suspicious of each other.” ments such as the Second Vatinamed a professor of dogmatic signification, transfinalisation “We are sisters and brothers can Council’s “Gaudium et theology at the University of and so on.” of Christ and we want to work Spes” and Pope Paul VI’s 1967 Munich “for 16 happy years,” The Church is also equally together, not like a political encyclical “Populorum Prohe recalled with a laugh. A de- clear on the “virginity of Mary, party or a human organization, gressio.” cade ago, Pope John Paul II ap- mother of Jesus, mother of pointed him the Bishop of Re- God, before, during and after gensburg. the birth of Christ,” Archbishop His trajectory in life has been Muller stated. almost identical to his mentor As for inter-Christian relaPope Benedict — an academic tions, the archbishop noted that JUBILEE CHURCH & SHRINE career followed by an episco- in his fourth- and fifth-century 19th Annual Feast Day pal appointment, followed by a debates with the Donatists, St. transfer to the Roman Curia. In Augustine underscored that the Celebration

“O

Shrine of The Little Flower of Jesus

First Shrine To St. Theresa In America

Sunday, August 19, 2012 Rain or Shine

10:30 AM ~ Prayers at Holy Stairs 11:15 AM ~ Stations of the Cross 12:00 PM ~ Lunch & Concert 1:30 PM ~ Outdoor Living Rosary 2:45 PM ~ Procession with St. Theresa 3:00 PM ~ Chaplet of Divine Mercy Solemn Feast Day Mass - Main Celebrant and Homilist: Father Dean Perri (Administrator of St. Casimir Church, Providence, R.I.) Blessing with St. Theresa’s Relic ~ Continuous video showing of St. Theresa’s life ~

• Gift Shop • Food & Refreshments • Canopy - Covered benches at Outdoor Altar • Bus Groups welcome • Priests are invited to concelebrate the Feast Mass • Bring Chairs &s Umbrellas for the sun

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Shrine is located at intersection of Rt. 102 and Rt. 7 in Nasonville (Burrillville), R.I. (near Wright’s Farm Restaurant)

14

The Anchor

Donly retires as diocesan director of Development continued from page one

don’t put a lot of hours in, I’m just doing enough to keep things going.”

Having formerly worked at Coyle-Cassidy High School in Taunton, Donly was named the first director of the newly-established diocesan Development Office back in 1997.

“There was no Development Office here in the diocese when I came on board,” he said. “The Catholic Charities Appeal was part of that. Msgr. Thomas J. Harrington was the director of Catholic Charities and I was director of development. It was kind of an umbrella office and we worked together.”

When Msgr. Harrington retired and stepped down as Appeal director in 2004, Donly took on the additional role as the first-ever lay director of the Catholic Charities Appeal, a position that had always been previously filled by a diocesan priest.

“In the past the Catholic Charities Appeal had been pretty stagnant — and that isn’t a condemnation of any previous director,” Donly said. “It was basically because you had a priest who had other duties who was put in charge of the Appeal with two part-time secretaries, so they did the best they could. Thankfully, through the goodwill of the parishes and people in the diocese, they were successful. But they weren’t able to pay attention to it full-time.”

Since taking over the Appeal nearly a decade ago, Donly has been continually impressed with the generosity of the people in the Fall River Diocese — especially during difficult economic times.

“It’s amazing when you stop and think that the Fall River and New Bedford areas have a very high unemployment rate — among the highest in the state,” he said. “Yet, in the cities we’ve

found that over the last three years the concept of poverty is something they see daily. Almost everyone today knows someone who has lost their job, whose home has been foreclosed on, or who’s had a serious illness in the family. These are things that really hit home and make people step up and want to give more.

I think it’s a real testament to the people of our diocese.”

One of the hallmarks of the annual Catholic Charities Appeal, Donly said, is the fact that it remains a parish-based effort.

“Rather than being a mass mailing from a central office that sends a form letter from the bishop, it comes from each parish,” he said. “You probably know the people sitting next to you on Sunday morning that you are helping. And there’s probably a neighbor who’s being assisted by one of the agencies that we fund who used to be a contributor to the Appeal.”

Donly is also proud of the work his office has done in administering the annual St. Mary’s Education Fund, which raises money to provide scholarships for families that need assistance with tuition so their children can attend one of the Catholic schools in the diocese.

“We get about 1,100 applications from across the diocese every year,” he said. “It’s been successful, but nowhere near as successful as I think it ought to be, because the need out there is unbelievable. I’m a huge advocate of Catholic education, especially the elementary schools because that’s where my career began.”

Over the years Donly has organized very successful fundraising dinners for the St. Mary’s Education Fund that have drawn renowned speakers like news anchor Tim Russert, Red Sox CEO Larry Lucchino, and Pulitzer

Prize-winning author Doris Kearns Goodwin.

“All the money is dispersed for the scholarships — there are no administrative costs, other than the cost of the dinner,” Donly said, adding that there are approximately 700 students who receive financial assistance every year. “I really think that maybe 500 of them wouldn’t be able to go to our schools without it. A few might be able to make it on their own, but most wouldn’t. And it’s important for the schools, too, because if the schools lose too many students, they lose a teaching salary. This helps to keep the whole foundation of Catholic education in the diocese going.”

The Development Office also handles a variety of other things such as assisting parishioners in bequeathing money to their parish or making donations to other diocesan entities.

“If anyone wants to donate anything to the Cardinal Medeiros Residence for retired priests, for example, we’d handle that through this office as well,” he said. “And a lot of our work is just handling the billing for the Catholic Charities Appeal.

People will pledge quarterly or semi-annually and we have to keep that payment process going all year. It can be a very busy place at times.”

Donly is particularly proud of the fact that the Development Office has juggled all these tasks with a staff comprised of just four people, including himself.

“We’re not overstaffed,” he said. “Everything here is done with two-and-a-half secretaries and myself. It’s a frugal operation but it’s not a cheap operation, by any means. We watch how we spend our money and we respect the fact that the money that runs this office is donated money as is the money that runs all our agencies.”

August 17, 2012 Donly praised the efforts of his office staff — Cindy Iacovelli, Doris Desrosiers and Patty Dooley — in keeping things running smoothly.

“Whoever takes over for me, they’ll be inheriting a wonderful staff,” he said. “The people here really have their act together.

Cindy has been working here for almost 20 years and was here before I came in. And Patty has been here about 10 years.”

Citing the fact that they record and publish an accurate accounting of all the money raised for the Appeal and scholarships, Donly also said he’s proud that the office’s stewardship has been carefully maintained over the years.

“People have become much more scrupulous in paying attention to where they are spending their money,” he said. “They want to get the most bang for their buck, which is why I keep hammering the 94 cents out of every dollar.”

Donly was referring to the fact that for every dollar raised in the Catholic Charities Appeal, only six cents is used to cover administrative costs, with the remaining 94 cents going directly to diocesan agencies.

“National fund-raising programs will say that 65 percent of the money raised goes to the cause and only 35 percent is used to raise that money, and I find that despicable,” he added. “I mean 35 cents out of every dollar is used to raise that dollar? I think that’s awful. How wasteful is that? You can understand how people get frustrated.”

When asked if he had any advice for his successor, Donly said he hoped the new development director would take the Catholic Charities Appeal to “another level.”

“I think there are still other ways in which it can be promoted and I’m sure there are other and better ways that it could be

done,” he said. “Obviously the economy leaves a lot to be desired, but nobody has a crystal ball.”

As more parishes merge or close, Donly said it will be a particular challenge to keep up the momentum.

“Those are all challenges that affect the Appeal and the scholarship fund, too,” he said. “A parish’s Mass attendance and demographics will impact the Appeal big time. The largest and most consistent contributors to the Appeal are usually the older folks, so that’s another piece you have to pay attention to when planning for the future.”

As he prepares to ease into retirement, Donly said he hopes to spend more time with his family, especially his six grandchildren and his wife, who will also be retiring in December. He still plans to do some volunteer work, along with doing foster care reviews for the Department of Children and Families and helping with the St. Vincent de Paul Society at his home parish of St. Anthony in East Falmouth.

“I hope to keep my hand in things and I don’t suspect I’ll have a hard time keeping busy,” he said.

But he’s ready to relax a bit more, too.

“I like to fish — I do a lot of saltwater fishing when I get the chance, but it’s usually quite early in the morning,” he added.

And after working for the Fall River Diocese for 44 years — 29 years at Coyle-Cassidy High School and 15 years at the Development Office — he leaves with no regrets.

“I’ve had some bad days, sometimes a bad week,” he said.

“But I never had bad months or bad years. I was never sorry I was doing what I was doing. It’s been a great opportunity and I’ve been fulfilled and surrounded by really great people.”

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August 17, 2012

T

his past Monday, Red Sox Nation was saddened by the death of the heart and soul of the Home Towne Team since, seemingly, the beginning of time.

The venerable Johnny Pesky died at the age of 92.

I was going to dedicate the space in this column to my baseball hero, but newspapers and television shows across the country will remember Johnny all week.

On the same day, Pro-Life Nation lost a hero of its own — Nellie Gray died at the age of 88.

Memorials to her in print and on the airwaves will be far fewer, but to those who knew what Nellie Gray stood for, she was the Johnny Pesky of the Pro-Life movement.

Someone suggested I run a story I wrote about Nellie in the May 8, 2009 Anchor. I thought that was a great idea.

I spoke to Nellie on the phone for the story, and she was an absolute delight. So much so that I wrote that week’s column about my interview with her.

May God grant you eternal rest Johnny Pesky. May God grant you eternal rest Nellie Gray.

The following feature was headlined “The Mother of the ProLife Movement.”

WASHINGTON, D.C. — At the recent Boston Catholic Women’s Conference, Cardinal Sean P. O’Malley said, “When the history of the Pro-Life movement is written, many Pro-Life leaders think Nellie Gray will be considered the Martin Luther King Jr. of the Pro-Life Civil Rights movement.” He added “But to me, she’s going to be the Joan of Arc of the Gospel of Life.” Strong praises indeed, yet every bit justifiable.

There are many other words to describe this 84-year-old champion of the unborn, but none more accurate than “Mother of the March For Life.” For more than 35 years, Texas native Nellie J. Gray has been the adoptive mother of millions of unborn children in the United States, unceasingly working to end the senseless slaughter of the most defenseless of all of God’s creations, the child within in the womb. And like any good mother, she sacrifices everything to protect her children.

As a young woman, Gray served as a corporal in the Women’s Army Corp during World War II. She later earned a bachelor’s degree in business and a master’s in economics. She was an employee of the federal government for 28 years, working for the State Department and the Department of Labor, all the while attending Georgetown University Law School to become a lawyer.

Gray found herself practicing law before the U.S. Supreme Court.

15

The Anchor

A summer rerun that is well worth it

In an interview with The hundreds of thousands of Pro-Life Anchor, Gray indicated she wasn’t advocates descend on Washinga Catholic as a child, but “I had ton, D.C. each year to be the voice elements of the Catholic faith in for the voiceless victims, violently my life.” As a young woman, she killed by trained medical profesencountered a priest who brought sionals. to light what the Catholic Church “Following the march, we had truly was and he tutored her until about $400 left over and we were she joined the Church. trying to decide where we should Gray indicated she had a very donate it. One Knight said we fulfilling life in the Army and need another march next year, so working for the State Department. it went in the coffers.”

When the Roe v. Wade Supreme The March for Life CorporaCourt decision came down in tion was formed in 1974 with 1973 she said, “I knew abortion Gray as president. “It was then was wrong, but I really didn’t pay much attention to the ruling. I felt it was something out of the experience of American life. There was no validity to taking another human life. I didn’t think anyone

By Dave Jolivet would take it seriously.”

Eventually Gray realized the ruling was being taken very seriously. There was a that we established the Life Printugging at her heartstrings to do ciples that would guide the movesomething about it, but she wasn’t ment,” said Gray. “A group of us quite sure what. “I was preparing put them together while in a New to retire soon, and was thinking York airport. We concentrated on about establishing my own prac‘thou shalt not kill,’ but we agreed tice,” she said. the principles should concentrate In ’73 Gray was approached on the positive, not the negative.” by a Pro-Life group in New York Set in the context of the Declarawho had been fighting against tion of Independence, the Life abortion in Albany. “They got Principles demand equal care for my name as someone who could the unborn child and the mother, probably help,” said Gray. “They “no exceptions, no compromise.” knew I knew how to work with The whole basis of March for the government, and it was their Life lies in the Life Principles, the phone call that increased my inter- 1930 encyclical of Pope Pius XI, est in the Pro-Life movement.”

“Casti Connubii (On Christian Later that year she retired from Marriage), and the principles of her professional life and dedicated the Nurembuerg Trials followall of her efforts to the burgeoning ing World War II, all of which in Pro-Life movement — all on a one way or another state that no volunteer basis. person or entity can justify the Gray helped found and later intentional killing of an innocent became president of the March life. “Those three documents, and for Life in the nation’s capital that the words of St. Paul, ‘Evil is not began Jan. 22, 1974. to be done that good may come “I received a call from the from it,’ are what drives March for Knights of Columbus,” she Life,” said Gray. recalled. “I didn’t even know who Gray, who has attended each they were, but they explained of the 36 marches, has seen the their stance against abortion and amount of Pro-Life supporters needed a place to meet to discuss grow, particularly among young plans for a march. That place was people. “Many young people my living room. About 30 people don’t know that one-third of their gathered there and they asked if generation, that’s 50,000,000 I could help get speakers for the people, have been killed through event since I knew Capitol Hill the evil of abortion,” she said. well.

“They are realizing there is no “What I couldn’t get was a justification in killing an innocent master of ceremonies for the human being. We must eliminate event. Politicians didn’t want to this evil intention in this country.” get involved in a march, and peoGray said what keeps her ple at that time weren’t interested motivated to maintain the fight is in marches after the Civil Rights that 50,000,000 babies are killed movement and other things. That each year. “That should make left the emcee job to me.” front-page news in the New York With an estimated 20,000 Times and Washington Post,” she Pro-Life allies, Gray opened many said. “But it doesn’t. The people eyes in this country to the plight are kept in the dark. The feminist of millions of unborn children, movement has manipulated popunone of whom were protected by lar opinion with language like ‘pro their own government. Since then, choice,’ and a ‘woman’s right to

My View From the Stands

privacy.’ After fighting against evil in World War II, I get very upset that we have Americans trying to justify abortion. Americans cannot think they can authorize the killing of an unborn child. Somehow a juggernaut of evil has grown in this country, including Catholics who vote for pro-choice candidates. We will never win this fight until this juggernaut is exposed and eliminated. I just don’t know how we’re going to do it.”

Larry Cirignano is the former executive director of Catholic Citizenship, the Catholic grassroots education organization in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.

He has been working closely with Gray for nearly a year at her office in Washington, D.C. “Nellie has been the anchor of the Pro-Life movement as the central gathering point for the movement every year,” he told The Anchor. “She has forced the issue of the Life Principles and kept everybody’s feet to the fire with no exceptions with equal care for the mother and child.”

Cirignano first met Gray in the early 1990s when the Knights of Columbus got together to do some work in and around her home.

“Last year I painted the back of her house and after going through numerous color samples I had to put a gray primer coat on the front of the house to make it stick,” Said Cirignano. “Nellie likes the color gray,” he mused.

While Cirignano has been friends with Gray for approximately 10 years, he knows of her hard work and dedication to the Pro-Life movement since its inception in 1974. “Many priests cite the March for Life as the reason for their choice of vocation,” said Cirignano. “Father Frank Pavone of Priests for Life says the march was what inspired him to join the priesthood and make the life issue his calling.”

“As a colleague in national Pro-Life leadership, Nellie is always an inspiration to the rest of us,” Father Pavone told The Anchor. “Her determination is seen, for instance, in how, last year, despite the fact that she fell on the day of the March for Life and was in the hospital that night, she nevertheless was present at an all-day meeting of national leaders the very next morning, with a patch on her head.

“But most of all, it was attending the third annual March for Life in 1976 that launched me into the Pro-Life movement as a high school senior — and Nellie’s leadership made that possible.”

Gray has not only spurred vocations to the priesthood in her nearly four decades of Pro-Life

efforts. She has inspired countless individuals to take up the fight for life. “David Berite and the 40 Days for Life movement has inspired a whole new generation of people to get involved,” said Cirignano. “He has had much success in closing down ‘abortion mills’ and saving individual babies one at a time.

“There used to be more than 2,000 abortion mills in the U.S. Now Mark Crutcher at Life Dynamics says there are fewer than 792 death camps. Fewer doctors are willing to commit abortion and fewer neighborhoods are willing to allow new centers to open.”

Cirignano credits Gray’s efforts for inspiring Berite’s involvement. He also said Gray inspired Chris Slattery who runs Expectant Mother Care and Frontline in New York City, and also runs a training academy in the Bronx to teach people how to sidewalk counsel mothers to keep their babies. Judie Brown, president and founder of American Life League also jumped into the fray thanks to Gray. “And so has every person who has ever prayed outside an abortion mill or worked in a center and saved a baby,” he added.

“She has inspired all of these people and the annual gathering has been a boost in the arm to continue to fight and challenge to grow.”

“There is a hard core right-tolife movement in this country,” said Gray. “We need to support the people who believe in equal rights for all life — they must be guided by the Life Principles.

That’s why not one word of the March for Life Life Principles has changed since 1973.”

Prior to presenting Gray the inaugural Culture of Life Award at the recent Boston Catholic Women’s Conference, Cardinal O’Malley said that when the tragic event of Roe v. Wade occurred in 1973, “it caught many of us off guard, and many of us didn’t know how to react. But one of the persons who did know how to react was Nellie Gray. She is my hero.”

Nellie Gray is a hero to many priests, Pro-Life leaders and thousands fighting in the trenches.

And most important of all, she is a hero to countless unborn children who were able to see the light of day thanks to the love, efforts and dedication of their unofficial adopted mother. She would be the first to say she can’t do it alone, and so many others have joined the cause. During this month of the Blessed Mother and Mother’s Day, it would be good for all of us to pray for Nellie Gray and her millions of unborn children, and to thank the good Lord for this unique child of God.

16

The Anchor

Spreading the message to those who need it most continued from page one

day night.

“God works in mysterious ways,” said Father Morrison, who is currently the only Catholic chaplain celebrating Mass at the jail on a weekly basis.

“The first few weeks it was intimidating trying to remember where I was going, but then you find the chapel and get used to setting it up for Mass.”

He follows a strict list of do’s and don’ts; no cell phones, one cannot bring anything in to an inmate, no running errands or exchanging messages for an inmate or family member of an

inmate, and once inside, there are a list of checkpoints and quite a few sets of doors to pass through before he settles into the chapel.

“You never know if you’re going to be able to say the Mass when you get there. If there’s a problem in one of the units — it doesn’t even have to be the unit you’re saying the Mass for — the jail goes into lockdown, which means nobody moves,” he said, adding that has only happened once. “I just say a prayer to God asking me to say something that will help them.

I guess that’s what I do every week; let me try to help them. I don’t feel afraid. When you’re hearing Confessions, it’s faceto-face. I believe they’re in that moment to receive His grace.

Same thing for the Mass, 99 percent of them are there for the Mass.”

Not everyone who attends Mass is Catholic but Father Morrison said he “engages people of all faiths. I’ll ask how many are Catholic and are prepared to receive Communion this morning? Some will say they’re Christian, and it gives me a beautiful opportunity to say that Catholics are Christians too. Most often they’re receptive to what’s being said.”

For 14 years, Residents Encounter Christ has been following the Cursillo format and offering three to four retreats a year, along with weekly meetings, for the men and women of the Dartmouth jail. For six years Deacon Douglas Medeiros of St. Joseph’s Parish in Fairhaven has been part of the REC ministry, an outreach spiritual service that didn’t appeal to him right away when he was ordained a deacon in 2002.

After his ordination, Deacon Jeremiah Reardon wrote him a letter asking if he’d be interested in prison ministry, recalled Deacon Medeiros, but it wasn’t until four years later, and after reading a few books by Richard Rohr, that he was inspired to give it a try.

“It was the way [Rohr] talked about needs and giving back,” said Deacon Medeiros. “The first thing that popped into my head after reading some of his books was the letter that Jeremiah had written me. At that time there were three deacons that were part of the ministry, so he was excited to have another one. He explained to me what the ministry was about.”

About 25 inmates take part in the retreats and 15 to 17 team members will participate in giving talks, singing, praying, reading the Gospel and opening the floor for discussions.

“After the retreat, weekly meetings are established in the jail, so we go in once a week,” he said. “Now the meetings drive the retreats.”

The weekly two-hour gatherings start with a group circle and always begin with an introduction for any potential new members. The most critical rule for meetings said Deacon Medeiros, is “what is said in the room, stays in the room, it enables people to share. Confidentiality is very important, and we encourage active listening.”

August 17, 2012 He added, “It’s amazing the depth at which some of the men and women are touched by the Gospel and can speak to it from their hearts in such a way that we’re blown away. They’re always thanking us, but we’re thanking them for being the living Gospel for us. We get more than we give.”

There is an application process for the retreats, including a safeguard system in place to stop certain inmates from mixing together for safety reasons.

Correspondence between team members and inmates is allowed, but there are certain restrictions such as no team member can sign his or her name or allow personal information to be put in a letter.

“We push that you really need a community when you leave,” said Deacon Medeiros.

“If you don’t have a community fundamentally based in Christ, you’re doing all this work and going back to the same place, and letting the same stuff happen.”

Deacon Medeiros also includes the community in the REC ministry. Some team members are directors of Religious Education at their respective parishes and ask students to write notes of encouragement to the inmates; those palanca notes are placed in bags decorated by students of Bishop Stang High School in North Dartmouth and are treasured by the inmates.

“Some guys never get mail,” said Deacon Medeiros. “They will get a palanca bag but tell us they’re only opening one a day because they’re saving them. Or they’ll tell us that whenever they’re feeling down, they’ll take out some of the letters and read them.”

Some may argue that inmates use visitors as an escape from the humdrum life of a jail cell but Deacon Medeiros counters that argument with the reality that those who receive visitors on a weekly basis face ridicule from fellow inmates.

“I cannot overstate how important this program is to the men and women,” said Deacon Medeiros. “Many say it is the highlight of their week and that all week long they’re looking forward to the meeting. Jail is a very, very difficult place. People who are trying to put their lives back together are often mocked. People who are trying to be spiritual or closer to God; they have to put up with a lot. It’s not easy for them to do this and when they come to the meetings, they get lifted up.”

Deacon Medeiros acknowledges there may be the occasional inmate who clearly is going through the motions, but

team members view those individuals as still benefitting from hearing what they have to say.

People come in and out, and there are the repeat offenders who need to hit bottom a few times to get the message to stick, and then there are the stories of those who only needed to hit the bottom once before walking in Jesus’ footsteps.

A few years ago, a team member worked for a company that installed hearing aids, said Deacon Medeiros. When the team member knocked on a client’s door, a former inmate who had been part of the REC ministry program answered it.

His cell mate had passed away and the former inmate was now taking care of late cell mate’s mother. When the mother was introduced to the team member, an amazing thing happened, said Deacon Medeiros.

“When she realized who he was, she got tears in her eyes and went into a room. She came out with his Bible that we gave him and it’s all dog-eared and worn,” said Deacon Medeiros, and she told the team member, “thank you so much, the last few years of his life were so beautiful.”

Deacon Medeiros and Father Morrison admit that not every aspect of the ministry is easy, but the men know that they are making a difference in the lives of people, many of whom don’t know any differently.

“God doesn’t make garbage, we’re the ones who make the mess,” said Father Morrison.

“So many of these people have no self-worth, and have had no parenting whatsoever. They may have seen their mother or father on drugs or drunk, and know no other way. For them it’s a journey of self-discovery, to learn there’s an alternative to this.”

Father Morrison has witnessed firsthand the calming affect a Mass has had on a roomful of inmates. Some will begin Mass with their arms crossed, but by the end of the Mass they are passing around a sign of their peace. Those are the moments that show the Holy Spirit is working and that Jesus is present.

“I always try to impart this message,” said Father Morrison. “A mistake is a mistake, but it’s not the worst thing in the world. The worst thing in the world is not learning from the mistake. If you think this time inside is hard, this thing that put you here is waiting outside the door when you leave; that’s going to be the hardest part. Will you return and embrace that lifestyle again, or has God given you the opportunity to learn from your time here?”

August 17, 2012

“I

never said no to God, I just never said yes.”

I’ve used that phrase before in several articles but it is perhaps a perfect description and summary of my spiritual life through the age of 31. Actually it wasn’t until 1983 when I lived a Cursillo retreat that my life was finally turned around toward Christ. It has only been in these last 29 years that my life has finally been more focused on discerning what God calls me to be. I am a husband. I am a father. I am an employee. Now, I am also discerning a call to a religious vocation. All are vocations.

You and I are called to the vocation of Christian discipleship. In what capacity and how we live out that vocation might be different for each of us, but we are all called to be Christian disciples. Let’s consider the terms vocation and disciple just so we know what we are talking about.

The English word vocation comes from the Latin vocatio, which means “calling”; the word vocation and the word calling are essentially the same thing, though this is not always obvious in the way people use these words. Experiencing and living by a calling provides a fundamental orientation to everyday life.

A disciple is the one who hears the message and takes it to the world. They hear it and they take it to the world. They don’t keep it. They are to act.

Through Baptism we are invited into a life of discipleship. It is an invitation to prayer and service. Obviously I never got that message even though I attended Catholic schools and universities right through grad school.

What does it mean to be a Christian disciple then? There is an innate tendency in human beings to try to put things in a nutshell — into sound bites, right? So, is there a phrase in the Gospels that contains everything that Jesus came to communicate? Everything we need to know to be a disciple?

Yes, there is indeed one phrase that occurs frequently and with a particular stress on the lips of Jesus. It is the simple demand. Only two words. Anyone want to venture a guess what that phrase is? It’s — follow Me. These two words contain in a nutshell what God wants of us, and what we should regard as the ultimate obligation we have towards God in this life.

The phrase appears at least 20 times in the Gospels. Therefore, we have to conclude that to be a Christian disciple means to follow the Lord. Period. There,

Youth Page

17

The Vocation of Christian discipleship so now you have it. You’re wel- in practice. come. I’m done. Thanks. Next I don’t know about you, but article. OK. Just kidding.

I never got the memo through As I stated earlier, through my 18 years of Catholic school my early life I really didn’t quite education. This was all news to get the message of what it meant me! to be a Christian disciple.

There is no way to get to Let’s look at what it means to be a Christian disciple or disciple of Christ. The most logical place to start might be in looking at Christ for some insight into this —

By Frank Lucca agreed?

Vatican Council II, which took place long before most of you were probknow the Lord except by doing ably even born, released a docuwhat He did, behaving as He ment entitled Lumen Gentium. did and taking His basic prinIt is the Dogmatic Constitution ciples of life and making them on the Church. It states, “There our own. Jesus Himself told us: is no doubt that the essential If you do what I told you to do, vocation of every Christian is you will come to know Who I to follow the Lord as He (Jesus) am! presents Himself in the Gospel In calling us, God asks us (LG 44).” whether we are willing to help In other words, the council Him reach others so that all is stating here that the pattern will be saved. Our calling is an to be followed and the standard invitation from God not because by which everything must be of any merit on our part but just measured is the very Jesus Who because He chose us out of love, walked this earth. We are called because He wanted us. Why He to follow the Jesus Who lived called us will remain a mystery our life and Who suffered our forever. Anyone who asks this death. His actions, His behavior question “Why was I called?” and His attitudes are the pattern will only get the answer God to be followed by everyone who had already given to the chosen calls himself/herself a disciple of people in the Old Testament: Jesus, a Jesus Who walked this “I did not choose you because earth not only in theory but also you were more virtuous, more

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gifted, more suited. No, I chose you because I loved you.” This means we are someone; we have a place in God’s plan; we are important for God’s great design for creation; we are partners; our lives count.

It is not easy at times to hold on to this Divine dimension in our lives.

How does a life of one chosen by God differ from any other life in this world? Outwardly one may see no difference.

It is God’s choosing.

He adds the “extra” and will make it work in spite of our sometimes messing it up — at times even hopelessly. Remember the old saying “God can write straight with crooked lines.”

God’s fidelity prevails over all our failures and unfaithfulness.

If God chooses someone He will stay with this person no matter how unfaithful the person may turn out to be. If something is obvious about God in the Bible it is His faithfulness to us and, in particular, to those whom He has called to help Him accomplish His purposes. If I refuse, God will not stop loving me but He might have to use others to reach me. It was my wife, Kris who God first used to reach me so that I could first say yes!

No one can become a disciple unless it is given to him or her (Jn 6:65). “You did not choose

me, but I chose you” (Jn 15:16).

The call is from eternity even before the one called consciously realizes it.

Discipleship is a long process, which involves the whole person and most probably will take a lifetime. It is ultimately based on an affirmative answer to Jesus’ question directed to Peter: “Do you really love Me, Peter?”

Without being in love with Jesus it will be almost near to impossible to carry on His mission.

Jesus’ Mother Mary was the first disciple. She heard the Word, received the Word, carried the Word, birthed the Word and followed the Word. Her initial response to God’s call was a normal, human one — she asked the question, “How will this be done?” She then responded “fiat” — “Thy will be done.”

She walked in trust knowing that the Holy Spirit was with her. Mary’s journey of discipleship was one of quiet pondering and then action. Shouldn’t ours be the same?

Frank Lucca is a youth minister at St. Dominic’s Parish in Swansea. He chairman and a director of the YES! Retreat and director of the Christian Leadership Institute.

He is a husband and has two daughters and one son-inlaw. He may be reached at stdominicyouthministry@ comcast.net.

18

The Anchor

August 17, 2012

Three small letters equal one large message continued from page one

area. Healey hopes that someday, vehicles across the country will display the sentiment of millions of Americans, of every faith.

“I think it’s a phrase that doesn’t really offend anyone and appeals to many,” Healey told The Anchor. “It’s a good reminder for people to think about.”

The idea for the oval came about through a project in a class he took on entrepreneurship at CMU. “The professor broke us up into groups of six, gave us $100 and told us to come back in threeand-a-half weeks and see who has made the most money,” Healey explained. “I had the oval idea but realized that it couldn’t happen in such a short time, so I pushed the idea aside until later. I took this on as a summer project for myself with the hopes of someday starting my own company.”

Healey took steps along the way that many wouldn’t even consider.

“I may have overdone it a little, but I wanted to see what it would entail,” the mechanical engineer with a minor in business said.

“I obtained liability insurance, a trademark and a copyright.”

The design of the oval utilizes a capital G and A flanking a lower-case b. The phrase “God bless America.” beneath the lettering adds a period, distinguishing it from the song. “The song God Bless America is trademarked

great idea. We gave out 800 stickers that first weekend.”

“I was delighted to assist this young man in his venture,” Msgr.

Avila told The Anchor. “I thought it was a great idea and so did many people in our parish, as indicated by the number of parishioners who took the ovals as they left

one thing for a person to add a sticker to a car with many already attached, but it’s another when someone chooses that sticker as the only one on their vehicle. It says a lot.”

Healey expanded the sticker exposure to Cape Cod shortly after. He asked his former pastor Father George Bellenoit at St. Pius X Parish in South Yarmouth if he would be interested in the stickers. “I’ve known Father Bellenoit since my altar-server days at St. Mary’s and he was for it,” said Healey.

“He bought 250 and distributed them to parishioners in South Yarmouth. That, too, went very well.”

“Tom is an intelligent, creative, and ambitious young man from a solid Catholic family,” Father Bellenoit told The Anchor. “His GbA oval is a brilliant idea which can be interpreted as neither religious nor political. In the short time that the ovals were available at church they disappeared and soon reappeared on cars. I believe his idea has great potential.”

He also delivered the product to St. Patrick’s in Falmouth, St. Elizabeth Seton in North Falmouth, and St. Anthony’s in East Falmouth.

“While I was on the Cape, I also visited a Methodist church and the pastor there bought some,” he said. “He was excited about it.”

Healey is also meeting soon with officials from the Mass.

Knights of Columbus, to see if they will be interested as well.

With the church test-market solidly behind him, Healey ventured into the secular market. He approached a buyer for the Benny’s chain and its 32 stores now carry them. Tedeschi’s food stores are carrying them in their corporate locations and Healey hopes the franchised stores also get on board.

As a member of the CMU football team, Healey is preparing to head back to Pittsburgh for training camp, and he’s already packed up a supply of ovals to market them in Pennsylvania.

The stickers seem to be hitting the market at a time when they’re most needed. With religious freedoms being squeezed from many sides, from many sources, a simple oval appears to be a viable, non-intrusive way for people to express their pride in America and their faith in God. To obtain the GbA oval stickers, visit www.gbaoval.com.

They can also be purchased at Benny’s and Tedeschi’s stores in Southeastern Mass. and R.I.

el and Gustavo Dominguez, IVE, college students in Guaimaca will has blossomed and they are much more confident in themselves and Dominican Sister Maria Cebal- continue. los, and Deacon James Marzilli “The School Bell Project of God. “The faith is alive and vibrant,” Jr. and his wife Jo-Ann. St. Mary’s Parish in Mansfield, Through the years, some of where people sponsor a student he said. “The people now come the personnel changed, with Fa- helping her or him with school together more freely to worship than when the misther Pregana going sion first settled in there in 2004. there.

Now the physi“There are also cal presence of more dangers there only the Domininow. Drug trafcan Sisters reficking is a big mains, but the Fall problem. And with River Diocese’s that there is an commitment to its increase in robHonduran brothberies, murders, ers and sisters enand kidnappings. I dures. was a bit worried “Groups are at the end, not for still committed and scheduled to farewell to a friend — St. Rose of Lima Church in myself, but for the visit Guaimaca Guaimaca, Honduras was overflowing for the recent Mass people there. But celebrating the taking over of the parish by the new pastor their faith remains periodically,” strong, and they said Father Pre- Father Jonathan Funez from Father Craig A. Pregana. work around the gana. “And donations are very much encouraged supplies, is still very much on the dangers.”

Father Pregana said that there through the diocesan Propagation agenda. of the Faith Office with Msgr.

“While we will no longer have were always people of faith in John Oliveira in New Bedford. a priest in Guaimaca, the diocese Guaimaca, but the diocesan misVarious St. Vincent de Paul So- here will remain a vital support sion’s presence helped bring chapels and clinics and schools to the cieties in the Fall River Diocese for the mission.” will continue to work with the soFather Pregana told The An- area. “Also, through the generosciety in Guaimaca, and the John chor that through the years, the ity of Al Makkay and his family Paul II Scholarships that assist 10 faith of the Guaimacan people on Cape Cod, they now have a

TV and radio station there,” said Father Pregana. “They can evangelize to the remote places of the area. So many people generously donated time, talents, and finances. They made a huge impact.”

“The Fall River Diocese just fast-forwarded the progress there,” he added. “I think everything that Cardinal O’Malley had set out to do in Guaimaca was accomplished, and more.

“And it worked both ways. The diocesan presence in Guaimaca also enriched the faithful in Fall River. The interchange of people and resources helped the Guaimacan people and the faithful in Fall River learned about the culture, the sufferings, and the inspiring great faith of their brothers and sisters in Honduras.”

Father Pregana’s farewell from his beloved Guaimaca was bittersweet. “Tears were shed,” he said.

“But the people understood, and I know that I’m needed here. I’m sad to see the mission leave, and I and the Guaimacan people are very grateful for all the Diocese of Fall River has done there. They are strong people with strong faith. The Catholic Church will continue to flourish there.”

and I didn’t want people to confuse this with the song,” Healey added. “The lower-case b also stands out in its uniqueness. It catches your eye. When someone sees the sticker from afar, they don’t see the ‘God bless America.’ in smaller letters, but the small b sticks in their mind and some feel inclined to research what it means.

“Some see it as patriotic, and others see it as more religious. I see it as a good way to get God into a message without offending anyone. And that’s not easy to do these days.”

Healey said he spoke with an atheist, and “He didn’t take offense with it at all.”

Healey has spent most of the summer marketing the oval.

After obtaining the insurance, trademark and copyright, he had 20,000 printed by a U.S. company. “It wouldn’t make too much sense to have the sticker read made in China,” he said.

He utilized his home parish in Mansfield as a test market.

“Msgr. Stephen J. Avila distributed the stickers at weekend Masses,” said Healey. “And the response was better than I expected. Msgr. Avila said many people approached him and said it was a

Mass. I see the stickers all over Mansfield and the surrounding towns. It is a small, but effective way to encourage people to pray for our nation. Thomas is a great young man whose creative idea flows from his personal commitment to his Catholic faith.”

“When I entered the parking lot at church the next weekend, I couldn’t believe how many cars had the sticker,” added Healey.

“And the most surprising thing was that many of the cars had only that sticker on them. It’s

Guaimacan mission’s future is bright with vibrant faith continued from page one

common there years ago,” he said. “And this year, just by July, we had 10 weddings.”

While Father Pregana cherished his time working with the people in Guaimaca, he feels very confident about the man replacing him as pastor. “While Father Jonathan was a seminarian in his fourth year, he and his classmates came to our parish for a course I was teaching on parish administration,” explained Father Pregana. “Little did he or I know he would be returning a few short years later as its pastor.

“Father Jonathan has been ordained for three years, and at first I was a bit hesitant at him replacing me, but he felt good about it and was excited to take on a parish, and I saw God’s hand at work in all of this, and I’m very confident that he will do great things there. The people know him, and I feel he can take the parish to another level. His biggest worry was how to handle the two Rottweilers we have in the rectory for protection.”

In 2000, then-Bishop of Fall River Sean P. O’Malley sent a team of five to establish a mission in Guaimaca: Fathers Paul Canu-

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August 17, 2012

The Anchor

Eucharistic Adoration in the Diocese

MaterCare International seeks support for charter

Acushnet — Eucharistic adoration takes place at St. Francis Xavier Parish on Monday and Tuesday from 9:30 a.m. to 6:30 p.m.; Wednesday from 9:30 a.m. to 9 p.m.; Thursday from 7 a.m. to 5:30 p.m.; Friday from 9:30 a.m. to 9 p.m.; and Saturday from 9:30 a.m. to 2:45 p.m. Evening prayer and Benediction is held Monday through Wednesday at 6:30 p.m.

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 — St. Joseph Church holds eucharistic adoration in the Adoration Chapel located at the (south) side entrance at 208 South Main Street, Sunday through Saturday from 7 a.m. to 9 p.m.

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, every first Friday after the 8 a.m. Mass and ending the following day before the 8 a.m. Mass.

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 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.

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 noon in the Chapel of Reconciliation, with Benediction at noon. 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 eucharistic adoration on Fridays from 8:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. in the chapel.

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 until 6 p.m. in the Daily Mass Chapel. There is a bilingual Holy Hour in English and Portuguese from 5-6 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.

HYANNIS — A Holy Hour with eucharistic adoration will take place each First Friday at St. Francis Xavier Church, 347 South Street, beginning immediately after the 12:10 p.m. Mass and ending with adoration at 4 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 every Friday from 7:30 a.m. to 1 p.m.

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 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.

OSTERVILLE — Eucharistic adoration takes place at Our Lady of the Assumption Church, 76 Wianno Avenue on First Fridays from 8:30 a.m. to 5 p.m.; and every Friday from noon to 5 p.m., with Benediction at 5 p.m.

SEEKONK ­— Our Lady of Mt. Carmel Parish has eucharistic adoration seven days a week, 24 hours a day in the chapel at 984 Taunton Avenue. For information call 508336-5549.

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.

WAREHAM — Every First Friday, eucharistic adoration takes place from 8:30 a.m. through Benediction at 5:30 p.m. Morning prayer is prayed at 9; the Angelus at noon; the Divine Mercy Chaplet at 3 p.m.; and Evening Prayer at 5 p.m.

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 from other parishes are invited to sign up to cover open hours. For open hours, or to sign up call 508-430-4716.

WOODS HOLE — Eucharistic adoration takes place at St. Joseph’s Church, 33 Millfield Street, year-round on weekdays 8:30 a.m. to 5 p.m., and Saturday 9 a.m. to 3:30 p.m. No adoration on Sundays, Wednesdays, and holidays. For information call 508-274-5435.

TORONTO (CNS) — MaterCare International has drafted a “Charter of Maternal Rights” it hopes will be adopted by leaders and decision makers around the world to help stem the high number of maternal deaths.

The charter was drafted with the goal of changing the neglect that mothers in much of the world experience, said Dr. Robert Walley, executive director of the organization of Catholic health professionals working with mothers and babies around the world.

He said paying attention to the needs of mothers and their children has “hardly been a high priority with anybody.”

The preamble to the charter makes the case that “mothers and their babies are among the poorest of the poor and are the most vulnerable physically.”

“They’re marginalized,” Walley said. “There’s about 330,000 mothers (who) die every year, mostly in sub-Saharan Africa” from complications during pregnancy, labor and delivery, and during the six weeks following childbirth.

The charter, which draws its substance from statistics as well sources including the “Catechism of the Catholic Church” and the documents of the Second Vatican Council, focuses on the human rights of mothers, the delivery of maternal health care and necessary actions by obstetricians and midwives to provide adequate health care.

“The causes of maternal deaths are well known, are readily pre-

In Your Prayers Please pray for these priests during the coming weeks Aug. 18 Rev. Msgr. William H. Dolan, Retired Pastor, Holy Family, East Taunton, 1977 Aug. 20 Rev. Bernard H. Unsworth, Retired Pastor, St. Mary, New Bedford, 1982 Rev. Thomas Cantwell, SSJ., Retired, St. Joseph’s Seminary, Washington, 1983 Aug. 21 Most Rev. Lawrence S. McMahon, Bishop of Hartford, Former Pastor, St. Lawrence, New Bedford, 1893 Aug. 22 Rev. Msgr. Manuel J. Teixeira, Pastor, St. Anthony, Taunton, 1962 Rev. William R. Jordan, Pastor, St. Louis, Fall River, 1972 Rev. Msgr. Joseph C. Canty, USN Retired Chaplain, Retired Pastor, St. Paul, Taunton, 1980 Rev. Msgr. John F. Denehy, USAF Retired Chaplain, 2003 Aug. 23 Rev. Thomas F. Clinton, Pastor, St. Peter, Sandwich, 1895 Msgr. Anthony M. Gomes, PA, Retired Pastor, Our Lady of the Angels, Fall River, 1992 Aug. 24 Rev. Peter J.B. Bedard, Founder, Notre Dame de Lourdes, Fall River, 1884 Very Rev. James F. Gilchrist, CPM VG., Vicar General of the Congregation of the Fathers of Mercy, 1962 Rev. Msgr. James E. Gleason, Retired Pastor, St. Patrick, Falmouth, 1987

ventable and can be successfully treated at comparable low cost,” the charter reads. “Proper measures, availability of skilled personnel at the time of birth and prompt emergency obstetrical care if things go wrong may save the lives of 90 percent of the mothers.”

Walley said too many world leaders are focused on population control as opposed to making giving birth safer and healthier worldwide. He said he doubted that world leaders will hear Ma-

terCare’s message.

Walley did see a positive sign, however, in Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s announcement at the 2010 Group of Eight summit in Huntsville, Ontario that Canada would pledge $1.1 billion toward the Muskoko Initiative to improve maternal and child health in developing countries.

In addition, the United Nations in 2011 introduced the Commission on Information and Accountability for Women’s and Children’s Health.

Around the Diocese 8/17

A fund-raiser to benefit June and Don Chouinard will be held tonight from 7 to 10 p.m. at the Elks Lodge in Fall River. Don Chouinard has been coaching baseball at Bishop Connolly High School for more than 30 years and his home was recently destroyed in a fire.

All proceeds will benefit the Chouinard Family. The event will include dinner, a live band, and a large auction for prizes. Tickets will be available at the door.

For more information call Michael Vieira at 508-472-4763 or Derek Viveiros at 774-644-9178.

8/17

A group of 50 youth and young adults from Paris, France will perform in concert on Cape Cod this weekend. Tonight the choir will perform in concert at 7 p.m. at St. Pius X Church in South Yarmouth; tomorrow they will sing at the 4:30 p.m. Mass at Our Lady of Victory Church in Centerville; and the choir will then perform in concert at 7 p.m. on Sunday at the 10 a.m. Mass at Christ the King Church in Mashpee. For more information contact St. Pius X Church (Mark Girardin at 508-432-3130), Our Lady of Victory Church (Dot Lortie at 508-771-1029), or Christ the King Church (Dottie Hiltz at 508-477-2837).

8/19

Have fun while helping the kids at St. Vincent’s Home during the seventh annual Motorcycle Run to be held on Sunday beginning at 9 a.m. The 50-mile bike run will travel through the scenic back roads of Freetown, Dartmouth and Fall River, ending back at St. Vincent’s Home in Fall River for a cookout, raffle and silent auction. For more information, contact Melissa Dick at 508-235-3228.

8/21

The third and final Summer Catholic Reflections Speaker Series will be “The Life and Spirit of Dorothy Day Today” on August 21 at 7 p.m. at Christ the King Parish in Mashpee. Martha Hennessy will speak about her grandmother, Dorothy Day, co-founder of the Catholic Worker Movement which began in 1933. The Catholic Worker movement is committed to non-violence, voluntary poverty, prayer, hospitality for the homeless, the exiled, the hungry and forsaken. Martha will share her experience with “Mary House,” the Catholic Worker House in New York City. The event is free and open to all. For directions or more information visit www.christthekingparish.com.

8/23

A Citizenship Workshop will be held August 23 from 6:30 to 8 p.m. at the Waquoit Congregational Church, 15 Parsons Lane, East Falmouth. Catholic Social Services’ legal staff assists clients with N400 Application for Naturalization and answers questions about the process of becoming a U.S. Citizen. For more information, contact Ashlee Reed at 508-674-4681 or email areed@cssdioc.org. Please bring your Green Card to the workshop.

8/31

A local screening of the acclaimed documentary film “The Sojourners” will be shown at the Riverview Lund Theatre, 551 Route 6A in East Sandwich, on August 31. Directed by award-winning filmmaker Steven Scaffidi, “The Sojourners” tells the story about a father and son who journey to the other side of the world in search of understanding of one of the most mysterious places on earth — Medjugorje, where Mary, the Mother of Jesus, is said to be appearing in modern times. This family-friendly event is open to the public. Doors open at 6 p.m. and the screening will begin at 7 p.m. Afterwards, there will be a film festival style Q&A with the film’s producer/director. For more information or advance tickets email tickets@corpuschristiparish.org or call 508-888-0209, or visit www.thesojournersmovie.com.

9/6

The Lazarus Ministry of Our Lady of the Cape Parish in Brewster is offering a six-week bereavement support program called “Come Walk With Me” that begins September 6 and runs through October 11 from 6:30 to 8 p.m. on Thursdays. The program meets 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. Contact Happy Whitman at 508-3853252 or Eileen Birch at 508-394-0616 for more information.

9/7

The Cape and Islands Prayer Group Deanery invites you to attend a retreat to be held September 7-9 at the Sacred Hearts Retreat Center in Wareham. Father Edward A. Murphy, pastor of St. Anthony Parish in New Bedford, will be the presenter. The theme for the weekend retreat is “Spiritual Warfare.” The retreat begins at 7 p.m. Friday and ends at 3 p.m. Sunday. For more information or to register, call Pat at 508-349-1641 or Pam at 508-759-2737.

20

The Anchor

By Rob Grant Special to The Anchor

FAIRHAVEN — “I was the typical ‘proud Bostonian.’ I went to Mass and Confession and thought that I was doing everything that a good Catholic should. When I joined the Focolare, I realized how much more there was to do. It was subtle, but it was a whole new reality.”

These are the words of Mary Langton from Pocasset who became transfigured by a little known movement within the Church, the Focolare.

During our first but familial phone conversation on a humid late in July afternoon, I asked Mary how she entered.

“A long-time friend from catechism class had met someone who ran a meeting that she’d attended, saying it was incredible.

When she invited me, I said that if I have nothing else better to do then I’d go. That’s when I saw the video.

“I don’t remember anything about it, only there were three men. One from China, a Brazilian, and an Italian. It was as if they were transfigured.

“I was so impressed on how they interacted in the video. Those men emanated something. I knew one thing; they had love and peace in a way I didn’t, and I wanted it.

“Everything began to change. I learned something very simple. To live each mo-

August 17, 2012

Transfigured by the Focolare

ment, to love God and neighbor, and really put it into practice like the members I saw and those men in the video. It was a revelation for me, yet so simple. The sublime ambience put a new coating on life.”

The Focolare is a worldwide movement, born in Trent, Italy in 1943, finding its way to the Bay State in the late 60s.

Mary recalls, “Cardinal Cushing had invited the men (termed focolarino) to the Boston area. In the 70s, some women (referred to as focolarina) came from New York to Boston, once a month. Then a friend, a focolarina, rented a house in Boston. They held monthly meetings. I did everything in my power to attend. I learned about the backbone of the movement; Chiara Lubich, our founder, how she eventually had it approved by the Church.

“In my own little circle, I could concentrate on the little things. How you see Jesus in each person and in every situation made such a difference in how I treated people. Life ran more smoothly, no matter the trial.

“When I look back, (I’m 90 don’t forget), I’m certain that I couldn’t have made it without being a Focolare member. You see Jesus crucified in the trials of others. You see Him in your own problems. He becomes alive in you! This allows you to help others.”

Mary Langton clues us in on the mystery of the transfiguring power available to Fo-

moved by the movement — Pocasset native Mary Langton, a parishioner of St. John the Evangelist Parish has been involved in the Focolare movement for nearly 40 years. (Photo by Lauren Robinson)

colare members who graft themselves onto Chiara’s spirituality.

“Each month, we receive a short Gospel verse called ‘The Word of Life.’ We simply try to live it day after day for a full month.

I send it to 22 other folks. Some know the movement more, some less. The mailings

are a way to evangelize; just any little thing that I can do. I enjoy participating in giving Jesus to the world, like Mary the Mother of God. The official name of Focolare is called ‘The Work of Mary’ because she best reflects the unity we strive to emulate. Many of the Focolare to whom I send The Word of Life live in Florida. Universality and unity are our hallmarks.

“You see, unity is the charism that was given by God to Chiara exclusively. It’s what initiated the movement and sustains it. Pope John Paul II prophetically said, ‘The Focolare would always be run by a woman.’

I shared with Mary how I spoke with Focolare Father Dom Julian Stead O.S.B, author of “St. Benedict — A Rule for Beginners” and who sits on the editorial board for Living City, (Focolare’s magazine) “I know he’s also a great poet,” she stated. Father Stead said that John Paul II promoted the Focolare very staunchly, stressing the “spirituality of communion, and how our faith must be lived in communion, not privately.” “The warmth of the personal relationships with one another permeates members and those we encounter,” Mary concurred, “is very simple. Very loving.”

“The Work of Mary” is one of 12 chief points for Focolare’s communitarian spirituality. “When a priest told me that, I committed.”

Women are great connectors and hardwired to apply their inherent skill to search for ways to bring and to keep people together.

The daunting task to newly unite, or preserve existing unity, in such a distracted and diviTurn to page 12

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