Dominus Jesus Christus (Philippians 2:11)

Pope's blessing sends demons on their way

2012-02-03T09:29:00.000+11:00

VATICAN CITY - A blessing by Pope Benedict XVI exorcised the devil from two howling men during a general audience in St. Peter's Square in 2009, a leading Catholic exorcist says in an upcoming book.

Extracts from the book by Gabriele Amorth, a well-known exorcist for the diocese of Rome who has already written two books on treating demonic afflictions, were published in Panorama magazine on Thursday.

The Vatican has stated that the pope did not perform a formal exorcism on the men.

Amorth said two of his helpers brought the men, known only as Giovanni and Marco, to the audience to see the pope, where they began to shake, becoming increasingly agitated and showing violent signs of being possessed.

When one of the helpers asked Giovanni to control himself, he said "I am not Giovanni" in a voice that was not his own, before throwing himself on the floor along with Marco when the pope's car arrived, Amorth said.

"The two possessed men fell to the floor and banged their heads on the ground. The Swiss guards watched but did nothing, perhaps they have seen how the possessed react when faced by the pope before?" Amorth said.

"The pope began to wave to the crowd and Giovanni and Marco started to howl, drool, shake and fly into a rage. The pope did not get flustered, he raised an arm and blessed the four people.

"The possessed were then hit by a wild jolt, their whole bodies were hit. They flew three metres backwards... and howled no longer," he said.

The Vatican's spokesman Federico Lombardi told AFP that the pope had no idea who the men were or that they were there that day.

"Even if the facts are true, it's not correct to talk about a formal exorcism by the pope, who was not warned or aware of their presence. The pope had no intention to perform an exorcism," he said.

Exorcism is an ancient practice of evicting demons from a person or place, and exists in several religions.

Jean Paul II is said to have performed several exorcisms in the Vatican in 1982 and 2000.

Braveheart letter to Pope returns to Scotland

2012-01-15T06:19:00.001+11:00

By David Kerr

William Wallace of Scotland's name written in Latin:

Edinburgh, Scotland, Jan 13, 2012 .- A 14th-century letter asking Pope Boniface VIII to look favorably upon the Scottish patriot Sir William Wallace during his visit to Rome has been returned to Scotland.

“This document is an enigma,” said George MacKenzie, head of National Records of Scotland at the unveiling ceremony in Edinburgh on Jan. 12.
“It’s a letter from the French king to his officials at the Vatican mentioning Wallace, but we don't know what his business was with the Pope. What we do know is that the document still fascinates, 700 years after it was written.”
The life of Sir William Wallace was famously portrayed by Mel Gibson in his 1995 Oscar-winning film “Braveheart.” Until Jan. 12, the letter about the real-life Wallace was held in England, since being discovered in the Tower of London in the 1830s.

The letter was originally written in 1299, when Wallace traveled to the court of Philip IV of France to try and persuade him to support the Scots against Edward I of England. A year after Wallace’s arrival, Philip IV wrote the letter in question to his agents in Rome.

The letter, begins, “Philip by the grace of God, king of the French, to his beloved and loyal people appointed at the Roman Court,” and commands the French officials to “ask the Supreme Pontiff to consider with favor our beloved William le Wallace of Scotland, knight, with regard to those things which concern him that he has to expedite.” It is signed at the royal castle of Pierrefonds on the Feast of All Saints, Nov. 7, 1300.

“We do not have a lot of tangible links with Wallace as most of the documentation has been destroyed, so to have something that Wallace actually touched is a massive boost for Scotland,” said Duncan Fenton of the Society of William Wallace, who had campaigned for the return of the letter.

The document suggests that Wallace intended to visit the papal court of Pope Boniface VIII, but it is unknown whether he actually reached Rome.

Wallace was later betrayed and captured by English forces near Glasgow in 1305. He was then taken to London where he was executed following a show trial at Westminster Hall. Scotland’s freedom was subsequently secured, however, when Pope John XXII recognized the country’s independence in 1320.

“I am delighted to welcome the Wallace letter back to Scotland,” said Scottish Culture Secretary Fiona Hyslop. “To have it here in Scotland, where it can be viewed by the Scottish public, is very significant indeed.”

The historic document will now go on public display this summer at the Scottish Parliament in Edinburgh, alongside another rare letter associated with Wallace that dates back to 1297.

KATERI TEKAKWITHA: FIRST NATIVE NORTH AMERICAN SAINT

2011-12-21T06:54:00.000+11:00

VATICAN CITY, 20 DEC 2011 (VIS) - The Holy Father yesterday signed decrees acknowledging miracles attributed to the intervention of seven blesseds (four women and three men) who will shortly be canonised. One of the new blesseds is Kateri Tekakwitha, the first native North American to be raised to the glory of the altars.

   Kateri Tekakwitha was born in 1656 in Ossernenon (present-day Auriesville, U.S.A.). Her father was a Mohawk chief and her mother a Roman Catholic Algonquian who had been educated by French missionaries. At the age of four she lost her family in a smallpox epidemic which also left her disfigured and with poor eyesight. Adopted by a relative, the chief of neighbouring clan, she continued to nurture an interest in Christianity and was baptised at the age of 20.

   The members of her tribe did not understand her new religious affiliation and she was marginalised, practising physical mortification as a path of sanctity and praying for the conversion of her relatives. Having suffered persecutions which put her life at risk, she was forced to flee to a native American Christian community in Kahnawake, Quebec where she made a vow of chastity and lived a life dedicated to prayer, penance, and care for the sick and elderly. She died in 1680 at the age of 24. Her last words were: "Jesus, I love you". According to tradition, Kateri's scars disappeared after her death to reveal a woman of great beauty, and numerous sick people who participated in her funeral were miraculously healed.

   The process of canonisation began in 1884. She was declared venerable by Pius XII in 1943 and beatified by John Paul II in 1980. As the first native North American to be beatified she occupies a special place in the devotion of her people. Her feast day falls on 14 July.

Grass's recollection of young Ratzinger

2011-12-19T06:49:00.000+11:00

O Wisdom, O holy Word of God, you govern all creation with your strong yet tender care. Come and show your people the way to salvation.

Pope Benedict XVI, who even as a young Joseph Ratzinger, had been imbued with a certain wisdom:

Günter Grass, in his memoirs (Peeling the Onion, 2006), thinks he recalls an encounter with the young Joseph Ratzinger while both were held in an American prisoner-of-war camp in 1945. The young Grass, a Nazi who had been proud to serve in the Waffen-SS, was taken aback by this soft-spoken, gentle young Catholic. The future pope played dice, quoting St. Augustine in the original while he did so; he even dreamt in Latin. His only desire was to return to the seminary from which he had been drafted. “I said, there are many truths,” wrote Grass. “He said, there is only one.”

He was 16, at the time.

The Holy Shroud

2011-12-17T14:25:00.000+11:00

New research from ENEA on the sacred Linen kept in Turin

Enea, the National Agency for New Technologies, Energy and Sustainable Economic Development, has published a report on five years of experiments conducted in the ENEA center of Frascati on the “shroud-like coloring of linen fabrics by far ultraviolet radiation”. “Simply put: we tried to understand how the Shroud of Turin was imprinted by an image so special that it constitutes its charm, and poses a great and very radical challenge, "to identify the physical and chemical processes capable of generating a color similar to that of the image on the Shroud. "

In the following article will see how this research developed (the complete version can be found at this link: opac.bologna.enea.it/RT/2011/2011_14_ENEA.pdf ).

Scientists (Di Lazzaro, Murra, Santoni, Nichelatti and Baldacchini) start from the last (and only) comprehensive interdisciplinary exam of the sheet, completed in 1978 by a team of American scientists from Sturp (Shroud of Turin Research Project). A starting point which all too often those who write about and dissect the Shroud prefer not to take into account, in spite what is evidenced by available information verified by an accurate control on “peer reviewed” journals, that is, approved by other scientists in objective and independent ways. The Enea report, with a lot of fair play and almost "en passant", very clearly refutes the hypothesis that the Shroud of Turin might be the work of a medieval forger. The hypothesis was supported – against many weighted arguments – by the results of the disputable and probably biased - C14 measurements; a test whose credibility has been rendered very fragile not only by objective difficulties (the possibility that the fabric is contaminated is very high, especially since its historical journey is only partially known), but also from proven factual errors of calculation and the inability to obtain “raw data” from the laboratories for the necessary controls. In spite of repeated requests. An omission which in itself can throw a heavy shadow over the scientific accuracy of the episode.

The report notes: “The double image (front and back) of a scourged and crucified man, barely visible on the linen cloth of the Shroud of Turin has many physical and chemical characteristics that are so particular that the staining which is identical in all its facets, would be impossible to obtain today in a laboratory, as discussed in numerous articles listed in the references.   This inability to repeat (and therefore falsify) the image on the Shroud makes it impossible to formulate a reliable hypothesis on how the impression was made.

In fact, today Science is still not able to explain how the body image was formed on the Shroud. As a partial justification, Scientists complain that it is impossible to take direct measurements on the Shroud cloth. In fact, the latest in situ experimental analysis of the physical and chemical properties of the body image of the Shroud was carried out in 1978 by a group of 31 scientists under the aegis of the Shroud of Turin Research Project, Inc. (STURP). The scientists used modern equipment for the time, made available by several manufacturers for a market value of two and a half million dollars, and took a number of non-destructive infrared spectroscopy measurements, visible and ultraviolet, X-ray fluorescence, thermograph, pyrolysis, mass spectrometry, micro-Raman analysis, transmission photograph, microscopy, removal of fibrils and micro-chemical tests”. The analysis carried out on the Shroud did not find significant amounts of pigments (dyes, paints) nor traces of designs. Based on the results of dozens of measurements, the STURP researchers concluded that the body image is not painted nor printed, nor obtained by heating. Furthermore, the color of the image resides on the outer surface of the fibrils that make up the threads of the cloth, and recent measurements of fragments of the Shroud show that the thickness of staining is extremely thin, around 200 nm = 200 billionths of a meter, or one fifth of a thousandth of a millimeter, which corresponds to the thickness of the primary cell wall of the so-called single linen fiber. We recall that a single linen thread is made up of about 200 fibrils.

Other important information derived from the results of the STURP measurements are as follows: The blood is human, and there is no image beneath the bloodstains; the gradient color contains three-dimensional information of the body; colored fibers (image) are more fragile than undyed fibers; surface staining of the fibrils of the image derive from an unknown process that caused oxidation, dehydration and conjugation in the structure of the cellulose of the linen”. In other words, the color is a result of an accelerated linen aging process”.

As already mentioned, until now all attempts to reproduce an image on linen with the same characteristics have failed. Some researchers have obtained images with a similar appearance to the image of the Shroud, but nobody has been able to simultaneously reproduce all microscopic and macroscopic characteristics. “In this sense, the origin of the Shroud image is still unknown. This seems to be the core of the so-called “mystery of the Shroud”: regardless of the age the Shroud, whether it is medieval (1260 - 1390) as shown by the controversial dating by radiocarbon, or older as indicated by other investigations, and regardless of the actual importance of controversial historical documents on the existence of the Shroud in the years preceding 1260, the most important question, the “question of questions” remains the same: how did that body image appear on the Shroud?”.

There are two possibilities, the scientists write, on how the sheet of the Shroud was placed around the corpse: placed above and below (not in full contact with the whole body stiffened by rigor mortis) or pressed on the body and tied in order to be in contact with almost the entire body surface.

“The first method is supported by the fact that there is a precise relationship between the intensity (gradient) of the image and the distance between the body and the cloth. Furthermore, the image is also present in areas of the body not in contact with the cloth, such as immediately above and below the hands, and around the tip of the nose. The second method is less likely because the typical geometric deformations of a three dimension body brought into contact in two dimension sheet are missing. Moreover, there is no imprint of body hips. Consequently, we can deduce that the image was not formed by contact between linen and body”.

It is this observation, “coupled with the extreme superficiality of the coloring and the lack of pigments” that “makes it extremely unlikely that a shroud-like picture was obtained using a chemical contact method, both in a modern laboratory and even more so by a hypothetical medieval forger”.   “There is no image beneath the blood stains. This means that the traces of blood deposited before the image was. Therefore, the image was formed after the corpse was laid down. Furthermore, all the blood stains have well-defined edges, no burrs, so it can be assumed that the corpse was not removed from the sheet. “There are no signs of putrefaction near the orifices, which usually occur around 40 hours after death. Consequently, the image is not the result of putrefaction gases and the corpse was not left in the sheet for more than two days”.

One of the assumptions related to the formation of the image was that regarding some form of electromagnetic energy (such as a flash of light at short wavelength), which could fit the requirements for reproducing the main features of the Shroud image, such as superficiality of color, color gradient, the image also in areas of the body not in contact with the cloth and the absence of pigment on the sheet. The first attempts made to reproduce the face on the Shroud by radiation, used a CO2 laser which produced an image on a linen fabric that is similar at a macroscopic level. However, microscopic analysis showed a coloring that is too deep and many charred linen threads, features that are incompatible with the Shroud image. Instead, the results of ENEA “show that a short and intense burst of VUV directional radiation can color a linen cloth so as to reproduce many of the peculiar characteristics of the body image on the Shroud of Turin, including shades of color, the surface color of the fibrils of the outer linen fabric, and the absence of fluorescence”.

“However, Enea scientists warn, "it should be noted that the total power of VUV radiations required to instantly color the surface of linen that corresponds to a human of average height, body surface area equal to = 2000 MW/cm2 17000 cm2 = 34 thousand billion watts makes it impractical today to reproduce the entire Shroud image using a single laser excimer, since this power cannot be produced by any VUV light source built to date (the most powerful available on the market come to several billion watts )”.

However the Shroud image “has some features that we are not yet able to reproduce – they admit - for example, the gradient of the image caused by a different concentration of yellow colored fibrils that alternate with unstained fibrils”. And they warn: “We are not at the conclusion, we are composing pieces of a fascinating and complex scientific puzzle”.   The enigma of the image of the Shroud of Turin is still “a challenge for intelligence”, as John Paul II said.

Catholic Girl killed in Faisalabad, a "martyr of the faith"

2011-12-07T07:29:00.002+11:00

Faisalabad (Agenzia Fides) - The local Catholic Church calls her "a martyr of the faith": Mariah Manisha was a Catholic girl from Faisalabd who was killed a week ago by a Muslim man who had kidnapped her and intended to marry her. Fr. Zafal Iqbal, a Catholic priest from Khushpur, where the 18-year-old Mariah’s family live, reports to Fides that "the girl resisted, she did not want to convert to Islam and she did not marry the man, who killed her for this. She is a martyr".
The case was brought by Fr. Iqbal to the attention of the Commission "Justice and Peace" and the Bishop of Faisalabad, Mgr. Joseph Cutts. "The culprit was arrested and police are investigating. We hope that justice is done, while the community is sad and upset", notes to Fides Fr. Iqbal. "Cases like these occur daily in Punjab" confirms to Fides Fr. Khalid Rashid Asi, general Vicar of the diocese of Faisalabad. "It is very sad, Christians, often girls, are helpless victims".
Another case solved in past days, is that of the Catholic 72-year-old from Faisalabad, Rehmat Masih, released a week ago, after 2 years in prison and of immense suffering, following a false accusation of blasphemy. (PA) (Agenzia Fides 02/12/2011)

New (non-embryonic) stem cells could fix hearts

2011-12-02T07:06:00.000+11:00

By Belinda Tasker, AAP Medical Correspondent, AAP December 2, 2011, 4:01 am

A rare type of stem cell could hold the key to mending a broken heart.

Australian scientists have discovered a new type of stem cell in mouse hearts which they believe plays a vital role in maintaining the muscle and its vessels.

They hope the cells could one day be used to regenerate and repair the hearts of people who have suffered a heart attack or heart disease.

The scientists from the Victor Chang Cardiac Research Institute in Sydney and University of NSW made the discovery during a seven-year study of heart stem cells in mice.

Lead researcher professor Richard Harvey said it appeared the heart stem cells' main role was to replace damaged vessels.

"In an injury situation where many of the vessels are killed and great slabs of tissue die, like in a heart attack, you need to replace muscle and vessels," he said.

"We think these cells are intimately involved in the regeneration of the heart and replacement of the old heart tissue as the organism ages."

Heart disease is the leading cause of death in Australia, accounting for 16 per cent of all deaths in 2009.

Drugs used to treat the disease and heart attacks aim to protect the muscle from working too hard.

But stem cell therapies offer the potential to regenerate damaged or diseased heart muscle and tissue.

Separate research carried out in the United States recently found when bone marrow stem cells were injected into adults they successfully replaced damaged heart muscle and got it to pump better.

Prof Harvey said the heart stem cells discovered in Australia had the potential to provide even better results.

The newly-discovered cells work in a similar fashion to bone marrow stem cells - which help repair damaged tissue in several different organs - but are specifically dedicated to keeping the heart healthy.

Prof Harvey believed the heart cells could one day be combined with other stem cells in a new type of regeneration therapy to treat damaged hearts.

Currently, stem cells are mainly used after being extracted from the body and grown in a laboratory before they are injected back into a patient to repair a damaged or diseased organ.

However, Prof Harvey said the discoveries about how the heart stem cells work could help scientists determine the best way to stimulate them in the body so they could race directly to damaged areas and repair them.

The Australian researchers plan to carry out more studies to see if human hearts contain the same type of stem cells found in mice. If so, they plan to test the cells in animals before carrying out clinical trials with heart patients.
The seven-year Australian research project was published in the journal Cell Stem Cell on Friday.

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Healthy fetus aborted in mix-up

2011-11-24T01:33:00.000+11:00

AAP November 24, 2011

A healthy 32-week-old fetus has been aborted in a mix-up at Melbourne's Royal Women's Hospital.

The Herald Sun says doctors had advised a woman who was having twin boys that one of them had a congenital heart defect that would require years of operations, if he survived at all.

She made the decision to abort but at 2.30pm on Tuesday the wrong baby was injected, ending the life of the healthy fetus.

The paper says the mother then underwent an emergency caesarian section to end the life of the sick child.

A hospital spokeswoman apologised for the distressing clinical accident and said a full investigation was under way.

A friend of the woman said the family was struggling with the tragic circumstances.

"She went to the hospital with two babies and now she has none," the friend said.

"And she had the heartache of giving birth to her sick baby. She's traumatised."

An ultrasound clinician checked three times before the abortion because she didn't want to make a mistake.

The woman's husband, a nurse, a doctor and the ultrasound clinician, who was reportedly inconsolable because of the mistake, were in the room at the time of the procedure.
The Herald Sun believes the family is considering legal action.

Researcher thinks Pius XII went undercover to save Jews

2011-11-05T12:19:00.000+11:00

By David Kerr

Rome, Italy, Nov 4, 2011 - The Jewish New Yorker who has made it his life’s work to clear the name of Pope Pius XII of being anti-Semitic believes the wartime pontiff actually went undercover to save the lives of Jews in Rome.

Gary Krupp came across the evidence in a letter from a Jewish woman whose family was rescued thanks to direct Vatican intervention.

“It is an unusual letter, written by a woman who is alive today in northern Italy, who said she was with her mother, her uncle, and a few other relatives in an audience with Pius XII in 1947.” Next to Pope Pius during the meeting was his Assistant Secretary of State, Monsignor Giovanni Montini, the future Pope Paul VI.

“Her uncle immediately looks at the Pope and he says, ‘You were dressed as a Franciscan,’ and looked at Montini who was standing next to him, ‘and you as a regular priest. You took me out of the ghetto into the Vatican.’ Montini immediately said, ‘Silence, do not ever repeat that story.’”

Krupp believes the claim to be true because the personality of the wartime Pope was such that he “needed to see things with his own eyes.”

“He used to take the car out into bombed areas in Rome, and he certainly wasn't afraid of that. I can see him going into the ghetto and seeing what was happening,” says Krupp.

Krupp and his wife Meredith founded the Pave the Way Foundation in 2002 to “identify and eliminate the non-theological obstacles between religions.” In 2006 he was asked by both Jewish and Catholic leaders to investigate the “stumbling block” of Pope Pius XII’s wartime reputation. Krupp, a very optimistic 64-year-old from Long Island, N.Y., thought he had finally hit a wall.

“We are Jewish. We grew up hating the name Pius XII,” he says. “We believed that he was anti-Semitic, we believed that he was a Nazi collaborator—all of the statements that have been made about him, we believed.”

But when he started looking at the documents from the time, he was shocked. And “then it went from shock to anger. I was lied to,” says Krupp.

“In Judaism, one of the most important character traits one must have is gratitude, this is very important, it is part of Jewish law. Ingratitude is one of the most terrible traits, and this was ingratitude as far as I was concerned.”

Krupp now firmly agrees with the conclusions of Pinchas Lapide, the late Jewish historian and Israeli diplomat who said the direct actions of Pope Pius XII and the Vatican saved approximately 897,000 Jewish lives during the war. Pave the Way has over 46,000 pages of historical documentation supporting that proposition, which it has posted on its website along with numerous interviews with eye-witnesses and historians.

“I believe that it is a moral responsibility, this has nothing to do with the Roman Catholic Church,” says Krupp, “it has only to do with the Jewish responsibility to come to recognize a man who actually acted to save a huge number of Jewish lives throughout the entire world while being surrounded by hostile forces, infiltrated by spies and under the threat of death.”

Krupp explained that Pope Pius used the Holy See’s global network of embassies to help smuggle Jews out of occupied Europe. In one such instance, the Vatican secretly asked for visas to the Dominican Republic– 800 at a time – to aid Jewish rescue efforts. This one initiative alone is estimated to have saved over 11,000 Jewish lives between 1939 and 1945.

Closer to home, the convents and monasteries of Rome—neutral territory during the war—were used as hiding places for Jews.

Krupp speculates that the wartime actions of Pope Pius XII, whose birth name was Eugenio Pacelli, can be further understood in the light of his own personal history. His great boyhood friend was Guido Mendes who hailed from a well-known Jewish family in Rome. Together they learned the Hebrew language and shared Shabbat dinners on the Jewish Sabbath.

Later, upon his election to the papacy in 1939, A.W. Klieforth, the American consul general in Cologne, sent a secret telegram to the U.S. Department of State explaining Pope Pius’s attitude towards Nazism in Germany.

The new Pope “opposed unalterably every compromise with National Socialism,” Klieforth wrote, after a private chat with the pontiff in the Vatican. The two men had got to know each other during Archbishop Pacelli’s 12 years as nuncio in Germany.

Pope Pius, explained Klieforth, “regarded Hitler not only as an untrustworthy scoundrel but as a fundamentally wicked person,” and “did not believe Hitler capable of moderation.” Hence he “fully supported the German bishops in their anti-Nazi stand.”

Krupp describes the reputation of the wartime Pope as both glowing and intact until 1963, when German writer Rolf Hochhuth penned his play “The Deputy.” It portrayed Pope Pius as a hypocrite who remained silent about Jewish persecution.

The Pave the Way website carries evidence from a former high-ranking KGB officer, Ion Mihai Pacepa, who claims that the tarnishing of the Pope’s reputation was a Soviet plot.

Krupp explains how the communists wanted to “discredit the Pope after his death, to destroy the reputation of the Catholic Church and, more significantly to us, to isolate the Jews from the Catholics. It succeeded very well in all three areas.”

But he also firmly believes that a fundamental revision of Pope Pius’s wartime record is now well underway. “The dam is cracking now, without question,” he says.

Ironically, perhaps, Krupp says he meets more resistance when he speaks at Catholic parishes than in Jewish synagogues. “Many Jews,” he explains, “have been extremely grateful, saying, ‘I’m very happy to hear that. I never wanted to believe this about him,’ especially those of us who knew him, who were old enough to know him.”

Adult Stem Cells: Is the Media Catching On?

2011-10-23T12:49:00.000+11:00

When it comes to stem cell research, adult stem cells (ASC) have been outperforming their unethical, embryonic counterparts for years now. While embryonic stem cell (ESC) research only just last year began its very first trial on humans and is still trying to overcome issues with tumor formation and other harmful, deadly side-effects in animal studies for the past 20 years, adult stem cells have been successfully used in numerous adult studies for years and for many different diseases and conditions. The reaction from the media, as well as many in the scientific community, has been to ignore or belittle the positive results of ASC research while touting the “hope” and “promise” of ESCs. But, I recently came across a few articles that are way out of the norm for both the media and the mainstream scientific community.

First. ESPN The Magazine has an interesting article this week about how many professional athletes are seeking stem cell treatments for their injuries – adult stem cell treatments. Most recently, Indianapolis Colts quarterback Peyton Manning traveled to Europe for a treatment using his own fat cells to help his ailing neck. Other notable athletes to travel abroad for similar treatments are Pittsburgh Steelers wide receiver Hines Ward, NFL defensive end Jarvis Green and Yankees starter Bartolo Colon.

What is really amazing about the ESPN article is that it does not mention embryonic stem cells. At all. The entire article is focused on the development of treatments with adult stem cells and how progress of this research in the United States is being slowed down by the FDA.

Another interesting, but short, article is this opinion piece in New Scientist “In praise of stem-cell simplicity.” It is a rare acknowledgement by a very ESC research friendly scientific publication acknowledging of the effectiveness of ASC research. What’s more, they do it without a hint of skepticism, though they still maintain that “all avenues” of stem cell research should continue.

I definitely don’t think either of these articles indicates a shift towards a much more Adult Stem Cell friendly media, but they’re refreshing to see, nonetheless.

The papers of Apostolic Visitor, Giuseppe Ramiro Marcone reveal the Holy See’s commitment to helping Jews persecuted by Nazis

2011-08-12T16:15:00.001+10:00

2011-08-09 L’Osservatore Romano: While the Second World War was blazing on the European continent, Benedictine abott, Monsignor Giuseppe Ramiro Marcone, was sent, in the summer of 1941, by the Holy See to the Croatian episcopate, as an Apostolic Visitor, to look after the Catholic interests in that country.

   Detailed instructions from the Secretary of State of the Holy See clearly state that Abbot Marcone’s mission had “a completely spiritual and religious aim…from which it follows that the Most Reverend Abbot Marcone visiting the Kingdom of Croatia…will endeavor to avoid official contact with the governing authorities, in such a way that his mission be, and appear to be, in accordance with the desires of the Holy See, of a strictly religious nature...Particularly, the Most Reverend Prelate will advise and support Monsignor Stepinac and the Episcopate in combating the evil influence of neo-pagan propaganda which could be exercised in the organization of the new state.”

    Only three weeks after his arrival, the diligent Apostolic Visitor sent a detailed report to the Holy See in which he described, in an abundance of detail, the precarious condition of the Jews in Croatia. The Roman Curia did not delay in replying, and on September 3rd, a letter from the Secretariat of State reached him containing precise directives which the Pope’s representative was advised to follow scrupulously: “Moderation is recommended regarding the treatment of Jews who reside in Croatian territory.” I

    In reality, as Marcone’s secretary, Don Giuseppe Masucci, writes in his diary of the events, beginning on February 10, 1942, Abbot Marcone was asked to approach, with a certain swiftness, the Ustasa authorities to plead the cause of the Jews who were about to be taken to concentration camps; the prelude to the wicked “final solution to the Jewish problem.” S.S. Captain, Franz Abromeit, had been sent to Croatia to oversee the transfer of 5,500 Jews who – between August 13-20, 1942 – were removed from Croatian concentration camps and put on five trains destined for Auschwitz.

   Seriously worried for the precipitation of events, Chief Rabbi of Zagreb, Miroslav Shalom Freiberger, in the late afternoon of February 10, 1942, decided to immediately call on the Pope’s representative. In Don Giuseppe Masucci’s diary the entry reads, “Chief Rabbi Dr. Freiberger presented himself to me at 6 pm, out of breath, and communicated to me that the city is full of notices announcing that all Jews, without distinction, must present themselves to the police. I told him that I would ask to speak with the Chief of Police the following day, and ask for an explanation. He added that the situation was very urgent because they would have already arrested everyone that night. So I telegraphed Dido (Eugen Kvaternik) saying that I had an extremely urgent matter to discuss with him and that there was no time to waste; he told me that I could come at 7 pm. At 7 pm I went to him and at length spoke, implored him and begged on behalf of these unfortunate Jews. I told him that mixed marriages should not be considered Jewish, but as part of the Catholic Church.”

The Police Chief , “was fairly pensive and immediately gave the order to publish in the newspapers that the notices were annulled. That all Jews in a mixed marriage should not be further disturbed, and that those who were still alive in concentration camps should be immediately released.” Abbot Marcone then took it upon himself to organize the transport of a small group of Jewish children – among whom was the son of the Chief Rabbi of Zagreb – through Hungary and Romania to safety in neutral Turkey.

   As a sign of his gratitude, Rabbi Freiberger sent a letter to the Pontiff, on August 4, 1942, in which he expressed his deepest thanks for the sacrifice of many Catholic religious in assisting the Jews, and hoped that the Vatican would continue in this direction: “Full of respect, I dare come before the throne of Your Holiness to express, as Grand Rabbi of Zagreb and spiritual head of the Jews in Croatia, my most profound gratitude, and that of my congregation for the goodness, without limits, that the representatives of the Holy See and the heads of the church have shown to our poor brothers.”

By Giovanni Preziosi

The Solitary Witness of Blessed Franz Jägerstätter

2011-08-11T07:36:00.000+10:00

Aug 9th, 2011 by Omar F. A. Gutierrez

Linz is in upper Austria, and in the soil of Linz and its surrounding villages and towns, amidst the rolling hills that ease up and down along the Salzach and Inn rivers, there is something in the water that seems to make men there determined persons. At times this is not a good thing. Adolph Eichmann was brought up in Linz. Adolph Hitler was born in Braunau am Inn, near the German border along the Inn River which flows into the Salzach. But in the case of a Blessed whom we remember today, this determined nature is a great example to us of the social teaching of the Church in practice.

Franz Jägerstätter

Born in the village of St Radegund just 21 miles from Brauanau am Inn, Franz Jägerstätter was an illegitimate child of Franz Bachmeier and Elisabeth Huber. The father was killed during the first World War, the war to end all wars, and in 1917 Elisabeth married Heinrich Jägerstätter who quickly adopted the young lad.

Franz was a good school boy by all accounts, scoring well in math and history and very well in writing and religion. As a young man, however, he was a bit of a wild one. In fact the Wild One is exactly appropriate since it was Franz who first introduced the small village to the motorcycle. He was in the habit of drinking too much at the pub. He gambled quite a bit. He was a hard worker, but he played hard too. He was prone to getting into fights with the young men in neighboring villages, and he did enjoy pursuit of the fairer sex.

In the definitive biography of Franz Jägerstätter, In Solitary Witness by Gordon C. Zahn, the author notes how the villagers remember their late Radegundian. His wild youth was practically extolled as a virtue. He was considered a great guy, easy to be around, outgoing and the life of parties. He was a leader amongst his group of friends and was well liked for his joviality and normalcy. All of that would change of course, that is with a kind of conversion in Franz he would change and the attitudes of the villagers would change as well. In 1933 – as much as we can tell – it seems that Franz fathered an illegitimate child of his own, a girl who would grow up to be Hildegard Auer. This was not the rarest of things. Indeed, it is said that families may at time encourage daughters to secure a good marriage by doing such a thing. But this was not the case here, or if it was Franz was not going to heed the shotgun. He skipped town. Whether he was trying to escape responsibility or was driven out by the other young men of the town for this indiscretion or he believed he needed to find a job to better support this new life, it is not clear. All we know is that he left, worked in the mines, made some money and when he came back he began to be a different man.

By 1935 he was more diligent about prayer. He educated himself about the faith by reading Scripture and borrowing books from the parish. There was an adult education class being offered by the pastor that he attended. In 1936 he had seemingly come all the way around to full devotion to his faith. In a letter to his godson, he wrote:

I can say from my own experience how painful life often is when one lives as a halfway Christian; it is more like vegetating than living.

He was taken with the idea that to be a Christian meant to live it authentically. Thus, he pursued it passionately, determinately. He would no longer be the vegetative Christian who feigns at devotion but does not allow the waters of faith to induce action. In that same year he married Franziska Schwanginger, a devout Catholic woman. After the wedding the two traveled to Rome for their honeymoon, a rare adventure for humble peasant farmers from Upper Austria. They arrived in Rome and received a papal blessing for their marriage. These events solidified the zealous love for the faith that Franz Jägerstätter had been cultivating.

The dashing Franz on his motorcycle with (L-R) his sister, mother, father and the local butcher who snuck into the shot.

It is at this point that the villagers, in their retelling of Franz’s life, begin to grumble a bit at the religious “fanaticism” of their neighbor. He would sing hymns while gathering hay. He would take breaks during the day to say a prayer or two, or perhaps to read a holy text. He would fast in the mornings until he could receive Holy Communion at the noon Mass – a significant feat considering how early farmers get up and how hard they work in the morning. He stopped gambling. He stopped frequenting the pubs as much. It was all madness to them. Indeed some of them claim that he was mentally deranged.

But isn’t that interesting? It is the personal and open devotion of this simple man that is called madness by the town-folk. This is madness as the winds of war began to blow hard and hot over the Austrian landscape. While Hitler and Mussolini signed a compact, while the German Fuehrer plans to annex Austria, Franz’s signing to Mary our Mother whilst forking hay is thought to be lunacy. Isn’t it the case that the piety of others may make us uncomfortable? Are we often afraid of being socially aggressive by praying in public, saying grace at a restaurant? What do people think of us?

This lunacy of Franz’ would begin to affect his life most acutely because in 1938 Germany announced the Anschluss or the “link-up” between Germany and Austria. The move by Hitler to annex Austria was opposed by Chancellor Kurt Schuschnigg who tried to rally the people of Austria towards a referendum against unification. However, Hitler would have none of it. He effectively invaded Austria in March. A referendum was had in April with just under 100% support for German take-over. One of those who voted against it was Franz Jägerstätter.

In point of fact Franz was the only man in his town to vote against the Anschluss. He believed the Nazi party to be a great evil and a harm against the Church. In perhaps one of the saddest moments for the Catholic Church during the real madness of the Second World War, Cardinal Innitzer of Vienna supported the unification and encouraged Catholics for vote for it. The Cardinal believed that Germany would respect the Catholic Church of Austria and that anything was better than Communist influences from the East. But the peasant from St. Radegund knew better. Franz knew that Hitler was no friend of the Church and that he would destroy all that he touched. He compared the actions of the Austrian Church to that of the Jews who chose arabbas over our own dear Lord. Innitzer would of course learn to regret his decision.

In the years following these events Franz Jägerstätter would rail in solitary voice against the Nazi regime every chance he got, even to the point of refusing their money. One of the fascinating aspects of Jägerstätter’s life – and one that ought to give us great pause as we consider the social doctrine of the Church – shows Franz arguing with neighbors that this new State authority did not have the right to try to feed the poor or care for the widows in St. Radegund. This was the responsibility, so he argued, of the people and not the State. So, though his own family did not live well, he would gather food stuffs and personally deliver them to the poor so that they didn’t have to take the tainted “charity” of the Nazi government.

He wrote once, “Anyone who wishes to practice Christian charity in his deeds can manage to provide the poor with something for their sustenance without” such State intervention. Franz Jägerstätter would also refuse emergency farm grants after a hailstorm. He rejected the advance of the Nazi Folk Community, the Winter Relief Collection and the People’s Welfare Fund. He could be called the Apostle of Subsidiarity in that he resisted the imposition of the State, the national socialist state, on the lives of Christians whose responsibility it was to care for the poor and widowed.

The parish church

In 1940 he becomes a third order Franciscan and the sacristan for his parish. One of the funny little stories in relation to this is that he would close the church doors as soon as Mass was started in order to force those who showed up late to go through the embarrassing task of having to knock and be let in. In the boldness of his nature, he would also advise his parish priest about what to say in the homilies and how to motivate the people into deeper devotion for the Lord. His pastor took his advice many times.

In the same year he was called up to serve in the Nazi army and at first he did respond to the call. He went through basic training but was given a waiver to return to St. Radegund. This may have been because of age, or the fact that he had three daughters now, or that he was a farmer. Whatever the reason, when he returned after the short military training he began to seek the advice of priests and his bishop about whether it was moral for him to fight for this unjust regime in this unjust war.

They all, to a man, would say later that Franz’s arguments were clear and logical. He would lay out the moral reasoning with precision and passion that he could not and ought not fight for the German side. This was a man in complete control of his faculties. Yet each of them would say to Franz that he had to consider the needs of his family, his wife and three daughters as well. Each of them would tell him that he had duties to the State and that he could join the German effort. But Franz was never convinced. On February 22 of 1943, Franz Jägerstätter was called up for military service by the German high command. He traveled to Enns to report for duty, all the way weighing in his mind and heart what he was to do. How could he leave his family behind? Would there be retribution against them? How does he turn his back on Christ, though? Ought not perfection be the goal of the spiritual life?

On March 1^st, after consulting a priest friend once more, a young priest who Franz noted was too comfortable in accepting the monthly stipend for clergy from the Nazis, he responded to the military attaché that he would not fight. He was arrested immediately and taken to Linz. He wrote many letters to his family, to his wife, trying to console them and to give them advice about farming the land. He is sure his decision is the right one, but he is pained for his family. Nevertheless, he notes in a letter to a friend the following:

Again and again people stress the obligations of conscience as they concern my wife and children. Yet I cannot believe that, just because one has a wife and children, he is free to offend God by lying (not to mention all the other things he would be called upon to do). Did not Christ Himself say, ‘He who loves father, mother, or children more than me is not deserving of My love?’

This photo was sent to Franz while at the Berlin prison. The sign reads "Dear Father, come soon!"

Note that this is not political claptrap he is spewing. There is no visceral call for political overthrow or bloody revolution. Jägerstätter is simply responding what Christ’s call to be holy, to be virtuous, to live the Gospel in full. This is important. Franz Jägerstätter is not so much the political dissident who deliberately gets arrested to prove a point. In fact, at one point he suggests to the Germans to allow him to be a medic so that he mightserve in this capacity. They ignored the request. No, Franz was not the long-haired radical sticking it to the man. He was a man in love with Christ Jesus who only wanted to live authentically the Christian life. This was, in Nazi Germany, too much to ask.

On July 6 he was moved to Berlin to stand trial, which was rather quickly done. On this day in 1943 he was beheaded by guillotine. He was 36 years old.

His family survived the war, though they suffered much. The villagers looked after them to a certain degree, but many chalked up Franz’ fate to the lunacy of his faith. For this reason, if not for many others, the life of Blessed Franz Jägerstätter is sobering. He was not viewed as a hero in St. Radegund. He was seen as an irresponsible man who did not take proper care of his family. A father’s role, they argued, is to maintain the means of life for his family. But Franz Jägerstätter saw it differently, and believed he was winning for his family a far greater wealth.

He wrote:

Therefore we must do everything in our power to strive toward the Eternal Homeland and to preserve a good conscience. Then, even if our enemies attack us and even if they are armed, they will not be able to tear us away from this Homeland. Though we must bear our daily sorrows and reap little reward in this world for doing so, we can still become richer than millionaires – for those who need not fear death are the richest and happiest of all. And these riches are there for the asking.

He understood the true wealth of the Kingdom of God, where Christ is King and the evil of the Nazi power is but a nuisance to life. He exemplifies what can happen to the authentic Christian in the community of the world, the world that rejects the Holy Spirit because it cannot see the Holy Spirit. Here is what he writes about Christian persecution:

Since the death of Christ, almost every century has seen the persecution of Christians; there have always been heroes and martyrs who gave their lives – often in horrible ways – for Christ and their faith. If we hope to reach our goal some day, then we too must become heroes of the faith. For as long as we fear men more than God, we will never make the grade. O this cowardly fear of men! Because of a few jeering words spoken by our neighbor, all our good intentions are thrown overboard. Of course even the most courageous and best Christians can and will fall, but they will not lie for long in the filth of sin. Instead they will pull themselves together and raw new strength from the sacraments of Penance and Holy Communion and strive on to their goal. And should anxious days come up on us when we feel we are being crushed under the weight of our troubles, let us remember that God burdens none of us with a heavier cross than he can bear.

None of us. Thanks be to Christ Jesus for giving us Blessed Franz Jägerstätter, and long live Christ the King.

Documents Reveal Pius XII Saved 11,000 Roman Jews

2011-07-23T19:24:00.001+10:00

Pave the Way Foundation Announces Findings

By Jesús Colina

ROME, JULY 22, 2011 (Zenit.org).- The direct action of Pope Pius XII saved the lives of more than 11,000 Jews in Rome during the Second World War, according to documentation recently discovered by historians.

Pave the Way Foundation representative for Germany, historian and investigative researcher Michael Hesemann, discovered a number of very important original documents in his research of the open archives of Santa Maria dell Anima Church, which is the National Church of Germany in Rome.

The U.S.-based foundation, founded by Jew Gary Krupp, announced the findings in a statement sent to ZENIT.

"Many have criticized Pius XII for remaining silent during the arrest and when trains left Rome containing 1,007 Jews who were sent to the death camp Auschwitz," Krupp stated. "The critics also do not acknowledge Pius XII's direct intervention to end the arrests of Oct. 16, 1943."

"New discoveries prove that Pius XII acted directly behind the scenes to end the arrests at 2:00 p.m., on the very day they began, but who was powerless to stop the ill-fated train," he added.

According to a recent study by researcher Deacon Dominiek Oversteyns, there were 12,428 Jews in Rome on Oct. 16, 1943.

"Pope Pius XII's direct action saved the lives of over 11,400 Jews," Krupp explained. "On the morning of Oct. 16, 1943, when the Pope learned of the arrests of the Jews, he immediately ordered an official Vatican protest with the German ambassador, which he knew would no doubt be fruitless.

"The Pope then sent his nephew, Prince Carlo Pacelli, to meet with Austrian Bishop Alois Hudal. Bishop Hudal, head of the National Church of Germany in Rome, was by some accounts, sympathetic to the Nazi's and had good relations with them. Prince Carlo Pacelli told Hudal that he was sent by the Pope, and that Hudal must write a letter to the German Governor of Rome, General Rainier Stahel, to demand that the arrests stop."

Bishop Hudal's letter to General Stahel stated: "Just now, a high Vatican source [...] reported to me that this morning, the arrest of the Jews of Italian nationality has started. In the interest of a peaceful dialogue between the Vatican and the German military command, I ask you with urgency to give order to immediately stop these arrests in Rome and the surrounding area. The German reputation in foreign countries requires such a measure and also the danger that the Pope would openly protest against it."

The letter was then hand-delivered to General Stahel by a close confidant to Pope Pius XII, German Father Pancratius Pfeiffer, superior general of the Society of the Divine Savior, who personally knew General Stahel.

The following morning, General Stahel responded by telephone: "I forwarded the affair immediately to the local Gestapo and to Himmler personally, Himmler ordered that, concerning the special status of Rome, these arrests are to be stopped immediately."

These events are further confirmed by the testimony obtained during the investigation of relator (high Judge) to the cause of Pius XII, Jesuit Priest Father Peter Gumpel.

Father Gumpel stated that he personally spoke to General Dietrich Beelitz, who was then liaison officer between Kesselring's office and Hitler's command. General Beelitz listened in to the Stahel-Himmler telephone conversation and confirmed that General Stahel used a threat of military failure to Himmler if the arrests were to continue.

Exemptions

An additional document titled "The direct actions to save innumerable persons of the Hebrew nation" states that Bishop Hudal managed -- through his contacts with Stahel and Colonel Baron von Veltheim -- to get "550 religious colleges and institutions to be exempt from inspections and visitations of the German military Police."

Just in one of these places, the Institute of St. Joseph, 80 Jews were being hidden.

The note also mentions the involvement "for a great part" of Prince Carlo Pacelli, the nephew of Pius XII. "The German soldiers were very disciplined and respected the signature of a high German official ... Thousands of local Jews in Rome, Assisi, Loreto, Padua etc. were saved due to this declaration."

Michael Hesemann stated that it is obvious that any public protest by the Pope when the train departed could have triggered the resumption of the arrests.

In addition, Hesemann explains that Pave the Way has on its Web site the original SS order to arrest 8,000 Roman Jews, who were to be sent to the work camp at Mauthausen -- to be held as hostages -- not the death camp in Auschwitz. One may speculate that the Vatican may have felt they could negotiate their release.

We have learned that it was also Bishop Hudal who was acknowledged by the Vatican as actively participating in helping some Nazis war criminals escape arrest after the war's end.

Because of his political position, Bishop Hudal was persona-non-grata at the Vatican and in fact, was chastised in writing by the Vatican Secretary of State, Cardinal Giovanni Battista Montini (later Pope Paul VI), for even suggesting that Vatican help any Nazi escape arrest.

Gary Krupp, President of Pave the Way, further commented that "Pave the Way has devoted vast resources in order to obtain and post publicly all of this information for historians and scholars. Curiously, none of the most outspoken critics of Pope Pius XII, has bothered to either come to the open Vatican Archives (completely opened since 2006 up to 1939) for original study, or even accessed our restricted free Web site, according to sign in sheets in Rome and our registration records."

Krupp further commented that he has the sincere hope that the scholarly representatives of the Roman Jewish community, research original materials only steps from their homes.

"I believe they will find that the very existence today of what Pope Pius XII called 'this vibrant community' is because of the secret efforts of Pope Pius XII to save every life," said Krupp. "Pius XII did what he could, while under the threat of invasion, death, surrounded by hostile forces and infiltrated by spies."

Elliot Hershberg, chairman of Pave the Way Foundation, added: "In the service of our mission, we are committed to try to bring some resolution to this controversy, which affects over 1 billion people.

"We have used our international connections and trust to obtain and post on our free restricted Web site over 46,000 pages of original documents, original news articles, video eyewitness, and scholarly interviews in order to spoon-feed this documentation to the historians and scholars.

"The international publicity from this project has yielded new documentation almost weekly, which show how we have moved to eliminate the academic logjam that has existed since 1963."

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Abortion Data Uncovered

2011-07-11T20:51:00.000+10:00

Handicapped Babies Culled

By Father John Flynn, LC

ROME, JULY 10, 2011 - Disturbing information about late-term abortions and the elimination of handicapped babies was released this week by the British government.

It showed that for England and Wales there were a number of abortions carried out on babies suffering from cleft palates, club feet, and Down syndrome.

The statistics didn't come easily, as the BBC explained in its July 4 coverage of the matter.

In 2003 the Department of Health decided to stop publishing information on late-term abortions following a widespread outcry when it became known that abortions were being carried out on babies with a cleft palate.

Subsequently the ProLife Alliance made a request under the freedom of information laws for the details on these abortions to be released. The Department of Health refused to do so and it was only as a result of a High Court order that the data is now public.

The tables that are now on the Department of Health's Web site cover cases of abortions carried out for reasons of genetic defects or handicaps and also abortions carried out on girls under the age of consent, which is 16 years of age in England and Wales.

In a press release dated July 4 the ProLife Alliance welcomed the release of the information, following what it described as "a David and Goliath legal battle." The organization made its request in February 2005.

A sentiment not shared by Ann Furedi, chief executive of the British Pregnancy Advisory Service, which provides abortions. "The publication of these statistics after a campaign by the anti-abortion lobby reveals little more than their own vindictiveness," the BBC reported.

Discrimination against the disabled

In 2010, 482 babies with Down syndrome were aborted. Ten of these were over 24 weeks old. Another 181 were aborted due to a family history in inherited disorders. In total, there were 2,290 abortions in 2010 for reasons of some handicap or genetic problem. Of these 147 were performed after 24 weeks of gestation.

In a public statement the Society for the Protection of Unborn Children (SPUC) expressed its concern over the abortion data.

Anthony Ozimic, SPUC's communications manager, commented: "Between 2001 and 2010, the number of abortions on the ground of disability rose by one third, 10 times that of abortions generally."

"It is clear that legal abortion is a system which discriminates, fatally, against the disabled," he added.

Of course England and Wales are hardly alone in this selective elimination. Currently around 6,000 children affected with Down syndrome are born each year in the United States. The number has dropped since the widespread introduction of prenatal screening.

There was an 11% decline in the period 1989 to 2006, at a time when the number would have otherwise been expected to rise significantly, according to a June 12 report by the Associated Press on the topic of prenatal testing.

There were also significant numbers of abortions carried out on girls under the age of consent in England and Wales. In 2010 there were 3,718 abortions among those aged under 16. Broken down this shows 2,676 abortions to those aged from 14-15, 906 to 13-14 years old, 134 to 12-13 years old, and two to girls aged 12 or under.

In total there were 35,262 abortions performed on girls aged under 16 in the period 2002-10.

The latest information is not the only cause for concern about abortion in England and Wales. The number of abortions has risen by 8% during the last decade. In a press release dated May 24 the Department of Health said that the total number of abortions in 2010 was 189,574 -- 8% more than in 2000 (175,542).

The abortion rate was highest at 33 per 1,000 for women aged 19 and 20. Single women accounted for 81% of the abortion total. Overall, 91% of abortions were carried out at under 13 weeks gestation, with 77% at under 10 weeks.

Medical abortions, in other words those done by taking pharmaceuticals, accounted for 43% of the total, a notable increase compared to a decade ago, when they were only 12% in 2000.

Michaela Aston, from the campaign group Life, said she was concerned about the trend for women rushing in to have earlier abortions.

"It is vital that women are given time to think through their options, especially since data from other countries suggests that the introduction of 'cooling off' periods before abortion can play an important role in reducing abortion rates, as women and their partners or families have more time to look at all their choices," the Telegraph newspaper reported May 24.

Repeats

The report by the Department of Health also showed that more women are having multiple abortions. In 2010, 34% of women who aborted had already had an abortion. This is up from 30% in 2000.

The dangers of having a high number of abortions at a young age, or having multiple abortions, was highlighted in a study recently published. Research carried out on more than a million pregnancies in Scotland over a period of 26 years demonstrated that women who have had an abortion are more likely to give birth to a premature baby and to suffer other complications.

According to a report on the study published in London's Times newspaper on July 5 women who have had one termination are 34% more likely to have a premature birth than those pregnant for the first time.

This rises to 73% higher than for women having a second baby, who normally have a lower risk of a premature birth.

Sohinee Bhattacharya, of the University of Aberdeen, led the research, which is still at the preliminary stage and has not yet been published.

Moreover, the risk of giving birth before term rise notably if a woman has had more than two abortions. One in five women who has had four terminations will give birth before 37 weeks, compared with fewer than one in 10 women who have had only one, the Times reported.

Bhattacharya explained that the risk of a premature birth is about 6%, while for women who have had one abortion it rises to 10%.

Even though the numbers of women who will be affected by this are relatively small, Josephine Quintavalle, of the ProLife Alliance, told the Times that it provided solid evidence of the impact of abortion on health.

"Whatever one's position on the ethics of abortion, it is more than obvious that alerting patients to the very real and incremental risks of future miscarriage should now be an essential part of informed consent protocols," she said.

Moral conscience

On Feb. 26, Benedict XVI addressed the members of the Pontifical Academy for Life, who were gathered for their annual meeting. One of the topics discussed was the trauma suffered by women who have undergone abortion.

The Pope pointed out that the psychological distress that women who have aborted experience "reveals the irrepressible voice of the moral conscience and the most serious wound it suffers every time that human action betrays the innate vocation to the good of the human being, to which it bears witness."

He also criticized the fathers who leave pregnant women on their own.

Benedict XVI commented that we are in a cultural situation where there has been an eclipse of the sense of life, which has weakened the perception of the gravity of abortion. No clearer evidence could be provided than the recent news from Britain.

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Fr. Emil Kapaun beatification cause heads to Rome

2011-07-07T06:01:00.000+10:00

U.S. Army chaplain Fr. Emil Kapaun’s cause for beatification is headed to Rome, an event the Diocese of Wichita celebrated with a July 1 Mass at the Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception.

Fr. John Hotze, episcopal delegate for the office of Fr. Kapaun’s beatification and canonization, said the event marks the culmination of years of work and also celebrates the “gift” of Fr. Kapaun.

“The fact that we, unlike any other diocese in the United States, in the world, have been blessed by the example of this saintly man, Father Emil Kapaun, boggles my mind,” he said in a June 30 statement. “How can we do anything less than give praise to God for this gift and strive to follow the example of Father Kapaun’s selfless giving.”

Fr. Kapaun, a native of Pilsen, Kansas, served in the Korean War. He courageously rescued wounded soldiers from the battlefield, risking his own life to prevent their execution at the hands of the Chinese.

He was captured by North Korean and Communist Chinese forces after he volunteered to stay behind on a battlefield with the injured.

The priest’s service to his fellow prisoners has become legendary among those who knew of him. Scores of men attributed their survival to his work tending the starving and the sick.

Fr. Kapaun died in a prison camp hospital on May 23, 1951. The Diocese of Wichita has investigated his life since 2001 and officially opened the cause for his beatification on June 29, 2008.

Andrea Ambrosi, a lawyer investigating the case for the Vatican, told the Wichita Eagle he thinks Fr. Kapaun has a good chance to be raised to the altars.

“He showed that there was not just a devil working on the battlefields of the war, but something else.”

The investigator said Kapaun’s candidacy is unique compared with the hundreds of other cases he has investigated because it is so full of action and detailed. While most cases involve “very holy” priests and nuns who have miracles attributed to them, Fr. Kapaun’s story involves far more deeds of heroism, sacrifice and action.

Ambrosi has investigated two alleged miracles involving prayers for Fr. Kapaun’s intercession.

In 2006 Avery Gerleman, then 12 years-old, was near death for 87 days. She recovered after her parents prayed to Kapaun.

In October 2008 Chase Kear, a college track athlete, inexplicably survived a severe pole vaulting accident. His skull was fractured from ear to ear and caused some bleeding on his brain. Doctors said he would likely either die in surgery or from a post-surgery infection.

However, family and friends joined in petitions to Fr. Kapaun. Kear survived the surgery and left the hospital only a few days after the incident.

Doctors said both recoveries were medically inexplicable.

Ambrosi said the intensity of the priest’s devotees is “incredible.”

Several Catholic parishes and many parishioners pray for Fr. Kapaun’s intercession every week at Masses and many call upon him when loved ones become ill.

Fr. Hotze said that the diocese has finished collecting information that will “hopefully, with the grace of God, prove Father Kapaun worthy of beatification and then canonization as a saint of the Catholic Church.”

Ambrosi and other investigators must now closely study 8,268 documents about the chaplain’s deeds and sacrifices in the Korean War. Those documents are being sent to Rome.

If canonized, the priest would become the third American-born saint.

Israeli diplomat praises Pope Pius XII for saving thousands of Jews during the Holocaust

2011-06-24T11:07:00.000+10:00

By Martin Barillas Thursday, June 23, 2011

At a presentation of a Yad Vashem medal to a Catholic priest who saved Jews during the Holocaust, an Israeli ambassador spoke of Pius XII.

Apparently breaking with a taboo among critics of the Catholic Church and of Pope Pius XII – who reigned during the Second World War and the Holocaust – Israel’s ambassador to the Vatican has recognized that the pontiff did actually save thousands of Jews during the years of Nazi predation.

Ambassador Mordechai Lewy affirmed on June 23 that “as of the raid of 16 October 1943 and the days following in the ghetto of Rome, the monasteries and orphanages of the religious orders opened their doors to Jews, and we have reason to believe that this occurred under the supervision of the highest authorities of the Vatican, who were aware of these measures.” The diplomat spoke at a ceremony in which a Catholic priest, Gaetano Piccinini of the order founded by Don Orione, was post-humously awarded a medal honoring him as numbering among righteous Gentiles.

Media reports in Italy claim that it was Pope Pius XII, who is largely dismissed as having done little to save the victims of the Holocaust, who transmitted an appeal to religious orders through his Secretary of State, Cardinal Luigi Maglione. The pontiff’s desire that the Jews of Rome be sheltered from the Nazi storm was transmitted in conversations and messages so as to avoid Nazi reprisals. Besides the approximately 5,000 Jews who took refuge in Rome’s convents, schools, and monasteries, several thousands more were sheltered at the papal village at Castelgandolfo in Rome.

Ambassador Lewy said “the fact that the Vatican could not prevent the departure of the train that took the captives from Rome to the extermination camps can only have contributed to reinforcing the desire, on the part of the Vatican, to offer its own premises as a refuge for Jews.” In any event, continued the diplomat, “we must recognize that the train that left on 18 October 1943 was the only convoy that the Nazis managed to organize in Rome for Auschwitz.”

In view of these facts, Ambassador Lewy affirmed that “it would be a mistake to say that the Catholic Church, the Vatican or the Pope himself were opposed to activities to save Jews. It is quite certain that it was to the contrary: they always gave the help that they could.”

Some historians, despite contrary claims made by writers such as John Cromwell, argue that it was the Catholic Church that saved more Jews than any other institution during the Second World War and the Holocaust. Historian Pinchas Lapide, an Israeli consul to Italy in the 1960s, claimed that this number may amount to 750,000. Renowned British historian Sir Martin Gilbert, who has written about righteous Gentiles who gave their lives to save Jews, has also praised the work of Pope Pius XII.

The Jewish Virtual Library, a website dedicated to the history and culture of the Jewish people, wrote however of the wartime pope, “Pope Pius XII's (1876-1958) actions during the Holocaust remain controversial. For much of the war, he maintained a public front of indifference and remained silent while German atrocities were committed. He refused pleas for help on the grounds of neutrality, while making statements condemning injustices in general. Privately, he sheltered a small number of Jews and spoke to a few select officials, encouraging them to help the Jews.”

Pope Pius XII did receive thanks during his lifetime for his actions to save Jews. At the end of the Second World War, Chief Rabbi Israel Zolli of Rome entered the Catholic Church and took the name Eugenio in homage to the Pope whose baptismal name was Eugenio. In addition, a wealthy Italian senator and member of Italy’s Jewish community presented the pope with a luxurious villa in the center of Rome that still serves as the Vatican’s nunciature to the Italian Republic.

Golda Meir, who would go on to become a prime minister, spoke as Israel’s foreign minister in 1958 and praised Pope Pius XII following his death. Speaking on behalf of her government, the US-born Meir said that “during the ten years of Nazi terror, when our people suffered the horrors of martyrdom, the Pope raised his voice in condemnation of the oppressors and to lift up the victims.” While the pope had spoken generally against the extermination of human beings, his critics still maintain that he could have done more.

Speroforum editor Martin Barillas is a former US diplomat, who also worked as a democracy advocate and election observer in Latin America. He is also a freelance translator.

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Blessed Juan de Palafox, Archbishop and Viceroy (1600-1659)

2011-06-07T07:52:00.001+10:00

On June 5, Cardinal Angelo Amato will beatify Juan de Palafox in El Burgo de Osma, Soria, Spain. Palafox was a statesman and priest who was born in the year 1600 in Navarre, Spain. His parents abandoned him at birth, but thanks to his self-determination and intelligence he became viceroy of Mexico.

The Postulator of his cause for beatification, Father Moriones says, "Before becoming an ordained priest, he was a fiscal counselor of war. Once he became a priest he asked the King to remove him from that council, which always dealt with violence. Instead he wanted to serve in a job that was more peaceful. He was assigned to work with the Indian Concil. There he would monitor all missions in America, defending the rights of the Indians and serving the needs of dioceses that were somewhat far.”

In Mexico, he would spend six months with the diocese and another six months working in matters of the royal kingdom. During that time, the future viceroy improved the economy and brought seemingly forgotten cases to trial. As a bishop he united several priests, improved their training and completed the construction of the cathedral.

He died in El Burgo de Osma in 1653. Thirteen years later, when his beatification process began, his body was incorrupt.

On February 26, 2009 the Vatican recognized the miraculous healing of a priest, who was cured through the intercession of Juan de Palafox. On February 8th, 2010, pope Benedict XVI, approved his beatification.

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Benedict XVI recalled the saintly qualities of Blessed Juan de Palafox y Mendoza, noting that the 17th-century Spanish bishop was not only profoundly spiritual, but also a "tireless pastor and defender of the Indians."

At the end of a public Mass in Zagreb, Croatia, where he was celebrating the first National Day of Croatian Catholic Families, the Pope sent a greeting in Spanish to those who were celebrating the beatification of Bishop Palafox in Burgo de Osma, Spain.

Juan Palafox was born in Fitero, Spain, in 1600, and in 1639 he was appointed bishop of Tlaxcala, Mexico (currently the Archdiocese of Puebla). He was characterized as a reformer who sought to protect the indigenous peoples from mistreatment.

For a period of a few months in 1642 he was the archbishop of Mexico City and the viceroy of New Spain. In 1653, he returned to Spain as the bishop of Osma (currently the Diocese of Osma-Soria), and he remained there until his death in 1659.

The Pontiff described Bishop Juan de Palafox as a "an outstanding bishop of seventeenth-century Mexico and Spain," and "a man of vast culture and profound spirituality."

He added that the prelate was "a great reformer, a tireless pastor and defender of the Indians."

"May the Lord grant to his Church many holy pastors like Blessed Juan," said the Pontiff.

Cardinal Angelo Amato, prefect of the Congregation for Saints' Causes, presided at the beatification ceremony, which was attended by some 3,000 faithful, 200 priests and 30 bishops.

Among those present included Archbishop Victor Sánchez Espinosa of Puebla, Mexico, and Archbishop Renzo Fratini, the apostolic nuncio in Spain.

At the beginning of the beatification ceremony, Bishop Gerardo Melgar Viciosa of Osma-Soria highlighted Bishop Palafox's "generosity" with the poor, and the indelible mark he left on the diocese.

Cardinal Amato recalled in his homily that Bishop Palafox was a holy man whose pastoral zeal consisted essentially "in extirpating evil and planting what is holy and good."

"In his life he experienced the glory of the loftiest offices and the humiliation of disgrace and isolation, which he accepted with heroic faith and an authentic Christian spirit," the cardinal added.

The bishop's process of beatification was opened in 1726, but was suspended in 1777.

Under Pope John Paul II, the bishop's cause was resumed in 2003, and in 2009 the Vatican recognized the bishop's heroic virtue. In 2010, the Vatican attributed the miraculous cure of Father Lucas Fernandez de Pinedo of tuberculosis to the intercession of Bishop Palafox.

On June 22, the relics of the newly blessed will arrive in Mexico and be venerated in Mexico City, San Miguel del Milagro, Tlaxcala and Puebla.

The Story of a Missionary Proclaimed Blessed

2011-05-25T11:36:00.000+10:00

His name is Clemente Vismara.

He spent his life in the missions.

He planted the Church where Christianity had never come before.

An ordinary sanctity, that simply put into practice the Sermon on the Mount

by Sandro Magister

ROME, May 23, 2011 – The beatification of John Paul II was a great event. "But there are also other exemplary witnesses of Christ, much less known, whom the Church joyfully points out for the veneration of the faithful": this is what Benedict XVI said at the "Regina Cæli" two Sundays ago.

Humble, ordinary saints – including those who will never get a halo – are a key theme in the preaching of pope Joseph Ratzinger. For him, the saints are "the greatest apologia for our faith." Together with art and music, he has often added; and much more than the arguments of reason.

Made by a pope who is a great theologian and thinker, this statement might come as a surprise. But it is perfectly in line with another of his characteristic traits: that of putting theology at the service of the "faith of the simple."

The saints – Benedict XVI has said on various occasions – are the "great luminous trail on which God passed through history, we see that there truly is a force of good which resists the millennia; there truly is the light of light."

One of these lights will be lit to wider attention on June 26, the day of the feast of Corpus Domini, when in Milan a priest will be beatified, Clemente Vismara, who died in 1988 at the age of 91, years spent to the last in missionary territory, in a remote corner of Burma.

His biography is the account of that ordinary sanctity which so pleases this pope who has called himself a "humble laborer in the vineyard of the Lord."

The profile of the new blessed reproduced below was written by one of his confreres who know him very closely: Fr. Piero Gheddo, also a member of the Pontifical Institute for Foreign Missions, who has also spent decades as missionary in the "ancient" style that dates back to the apostles themselves. It was not for nothing that John Paul II asked Fr. Gheddo to write him an outline for the 1990 encyclical "Redemptoris Missio," aimed at reinvigorating the genuine missionary spirit in an age in which it seems to have gone out of style.

In Buddhist Burma, today called Myanmar, Catholics are little more than one out of one hundred inhabitants. But if the Christian faith is rooted there, it is due precisely to a missionary like Vismara, soon to be beatified.

It is due to the "luminous trail" radiated by his holiness.

This profile of the new blessed written by Fr. Gheddo was published on "Asia News," the online agency of the missionary institute to which Fr. Vismara belonged.

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BLESSED CLEMENTE VISMARA

by Piero Gheddo

On Sunday, June 26 in Piazza Duomo in Milan Father Clemente Vismara (1897-1988) will be beatified. In 1983, on the sixtieth year of his mission in Myanmar, the Episcopal Conference proclaimed him "Patriarch of the Burma".

Born in 1897 in Agrate Brianza, he took part in the First World War, as a trench soldier, emerging from battle with the rank of sergeant and three medals for military valour. He understood that "life has value only if you give it for others" (as he wrote), and thus he became a priest and missionary of PIME in 1923 and left for Burma. Arriving in Toungoo, the last city with a British governor, he spent six months in the bishop's house to learn English, then he set off for Kengtung, an almost unexplored land of forest, mountains and inhabited by tribal people, still under the domination of a local king (saboà) sponsored by the British. After fourteen days of riding he arrived at Kengtung where he would remain for three months to learn the local languages and then the superior of the mission accompanied him to Monglin, reached after six days on horseback, his last destination on the border between Laos, Thailand and China.

It was October 1924 and in 32 years (in the midst of World War II, a prisoner of the Japanese), Clemente Vismara, out of nowhere, built three parishes: Monglin, Mong Phyak and Kenglap. He wrote to Agrate: "Here I am 120 kilometres from Kengtung, if I want to see another Christian I have to look in the mirror". He lived with three orphans in a mud and straw shed. His apostolate was to tour the tribal villages on horseback, to pitch his tent and make himself known: he brought medicine, pulled rotten teeth, adapted to life with the tribals, the climate, dangers, food, rice and spicy salsa, hunting for meat. From the outset he took in orphans and abandoned children in Monglin to educate them. Later he founded an orphanage that became home to between 200 to 250 orphans. Today he is invoked as the "protector of children" and a lot of the graces received concern children and families.

A life lived in conditions of extreme poverty, Clement wrote: "This is worse than when I was in the trenches on the Adamello and Monte Maio, but I wanted this war and I have to fight to the end with God's help. I'm always in the hands of God." Gradually a Christian community was born, the Sisters of the Child Mary came to help, he founded schools and chapels, factories and rice fields, irrigation canals, he taught carpentry and mechanics, built brick houses and brought new crops, wheat, corn, silkworms, vegetables (carrots, onions, salad – "the father eats grass," the people would say).

Soon-to-be Blessed Clement founded the church in a corner of the world where there are no tourists, but only opium smugglers, black magicians and guerillas from different backgrounds, he brought peace and stabilised nomadic tribes within the territory who, through the schooling and health care, have raised their standards of living and now have doctors and nurses, artisans and teachers, priests and nuns, bishops and civil authorities. Many of them called Clement and Clementina.

In 1956, when he founded the Christian citadel of Monglin and converted fifty villages to faith in Christ, the bishop moved him to Mongping, 250 kilometers from Monglin in the vast diocese of Kengtung, where he had to start from scratch. Clemente wrote to his brother: "I obey the bishop because I understand that if I do things my own way then I do them wrong." At the age of sixty he began a new mission and also founded here the Christian town and parish of Mongping, a second parish in Tongtà and left another fifty Catholic villages in his wake.

He died June 15, 1988 in Mongping and is buried near the church and the Grotto of Lourdes, which he built. On his grave visited by many non-Christians fresh flowers and lit candles are never lacking. Now, 23 years later, June 26, 2011, Father Clemente Vismara is to be declared a blessed of the Church Universal and is the first blessed of Burma. A rapid cause for beatification, given the usually long time needed for these Roman "processes".

Why is Father Clemente Vismara being declared Blessed? In life he did not perform miracles, have visions or revelations, he was not a mystic nor a theologian, he made no great works nor had any extraordinary gifts. He was a missionary like the rest, so much so that when we discussed the opening of his beatification cause here at PIME, some of his confreres in Burma said: "If you declare him Blessed you need to declare all of us here blessed who have led the same life he did". In 1993 I went to Kengtung with two missionaries who had been with Clement in Burma and we asked the Bishop Abraham Than, "Why do you want father Clement declared blessed?" He said: "We had many PIME missionaries saints who founded dioceses, including the first Bishop Erminio Bonetta, still remembered as a model of evangelical charity, and others whose memory is still alive. But none of them have sparked this devotion and this movement of people who declare them saints, like Father Vismara. In this I see a sign from God to start the diocesan process."

As one of his brothers said: "Vismara saw the extraordinary in the ordinary." At eighty years he had the same enthusiasm for his vocation as a priest and missionary, peaceful and joyful, generous to all, trusting in Providence, a man of God despite the tragic situations in which he lived. He had an adventurous and poetic vision of the missionary vocation that made him a fascinating character through his writings, perhaps the most famous Italian missionary of the twentieth century.

His trust in Providence was proverbial. He had no budgets or estimates, he never counted the money he had. In a country where the majority of people in some months suffer from hunger, Clement gave food to all, he never turned anyone away empty-handed. The PIME Brothers and Sisters of the Child Mary would reproach him for taking in too many children, old people, lepers, disabled, widows, mentally unbalanced. Clemente always said: "Today we all ate, tomorrow the Lord will provide." He trusted in Providence, but across the world he wrote to donors for support and help with articles in various magazines. He spent his evenings writing letters and articles by candlelight (I have collected over 2000 letters and 600 articles.) It must be added that the writings of Father Vismara, poetic, adventurous, inflamed with love for the poorest, have attracted many vocations to the priesthood and missionary life, not only in Italy.

Clemente represents well the virtues and the values of the missionaries to be passed down to future generations. In the last half century, mission to the nations has dramatically changed, but always remaining to be what Jesus wants, "Go into all the world, proclaim the Gospel to every creature." But the new methods (responsibility of the local church, inculturation, interreligious dialogue, etc..) must be experienced in the spirit and continuity of the ecclesial tradition that dates back to the Apostles.

Clemente is one of the last links in this glorious Apostolic Tradition. He was in love with Jesus (he prayed a lot!) in love with his people, especially the small and the least and wrote: "These orphans are not mine, but God's, and God never allows us to lack the necessary". He lived to the letter what Jesus says in the Gospel: "Do not worry too much, saying, 'What shall we eat? What shall we drink? How will we dress?'. The ones who do not know that God cares for all these things. But if you look for the Kingdom of God and do his will, everything else God will give you and more "(Matt. 6:31-34). Utopia? No, Clemente was a living reality, which brings joy to the heart despite all the problems he had.

I visited Burma in 1983, at 86 he was still parish priest at Mongping. I wanted to interview him about his adventures and he told me: "Forget my past I have told that story too many times. Let's talk about my future” and he spoke to me about the villages to visit, schools and chapels to be built, the requests for conversion that came from various parts. As a confrere said: "He died at 91 without ever being old." He had kept the enthusiasm of the early days of his mission.

Father Clemente Vismara is one of about 200 PIME missionaries who since 1867 until the present have been based in northeastern Burma in six of the 14 dioceses in Myanmar: Toungoo, Kengtung, Taunggyi, Lashio, Loikaw and Pekong, with about 300 thousand baptized, indigenous bishops, priests and nuns, more than half of Catholics in Burma.

Clemente is one of many who, all together, are a good example of the missionary tradition and spirit of the PIME, that continues to assist the Church of Myanmar in various ways, among other things, in taking on their missionary vocations, training them and sending them into the institution's community present on every continent to proclaim Christ and found the church in other nations.

Allies Urged Pope Pius XII not to protest publicly against Nazi brutality

2011-05-18T14:46:00.000+10:00

British, US Document Unearthed

ROME, MAY 17, 2011 - The United States and Great Britain discouraged Pope Pius XII from speaking out against Nazi brutality, warning the Pope that a public protest could have grave consequences.

The Allies' recommendation is reported in a document unearthed recently by the New York-based Pave the Way Foundation, founded by an American Jew, Gary Krupp.

Krupp asserted that these revelations help to give context for the way in which Pius XII handled the Nazi horror.

The document is correspondence between the British representative to the Holy See, Sir D'Arcy Osborne, and Myron Taylor, his U.S. counterpart.

A Nov. 7, 1944, note signed by Taylor's assistant, Franklin C. Gowen, reports to Taylor that Osborne "called and said that he feared the Holy Father may make Radio appeal on behalf of Jews in Hungary and that in his appeal he may also criticise what the Russians are doing in occupied territory."

"Sir D'Arcy said something should be done to prevail upon the Pope not to do this," the note added, "as it would have very serious political repercussions."

Krupp showed ZENIT another note between the envoys' offices that references a letter about help for Jewish refugees. The note "clearly states that the letter must be destroyed in order to prevent it from falling into enemy hands," Krupp said.

Osborne wrote the May 20, 1944, note to Harold Tittman, another of Taylor's assistants.

The British representative tells the U.S. envoy's assistant that he will destroy the letter, saying that if it were to fall into enemy hands it would incriminate a priest called Father Benedetto.

Krupp observed that the destruction of documents was necessarily common during the war. "There are some critics who do not seem to understand that this is why so many written orders also had to be destroyed," Krupp noted.

News

Further information about the Catholic response to the Holocaust has been uncovered by Dimitri Cavalli, a journalist, researcher, and contributor to Pave the Way archives and publications. He has located documents from an international Jewish press called the JTA (Jewish Telegraph Agency).

One release dated June 28, 1943, reports Vatican Radio denunciations of the treatment of Jews in France.

A few days earlier, June 25, 1943, the JTA reported the denunciation in German of anti-Semitic actions in Slovakia.

Cavalli also discovered a May 19, 1940, Jewish Chronicle magazine published by B'nai B'rith featuring Pope Pius XII's picture on the front cover with the lead article titled the Pope's Jewish scholars.

This article reports how the Vatican was hiring Jewish academics who were fired by Italian institutions due to Mussolini's anti-Semitic laws.

The JTA also reported a confrontation between Cardinal Pierre-Marie Gerlier, archbishop of Lyon, when he was visited by Nazi authorities in France.

The Nazis told the archbishop they would leave the Church alone, if the cardinal and other clergy would not oppose the anti-Jewish laws and would stop protecting Jews.

The cardinal responded that the French clergy did not engage in politics but "is obeying the Pope." He cut short the confrontation telling the Nazis, "You no doubt know that the Holy Father has condemned the anti-Semitic laws and all anti-Jewish measures."

Another JTA article, from Feb. 5, 1943, reported a strong condemnation of Nazi theories from Cardinal Jusztinián Györg Serédi, archbishop of Esztergom.

On the same page is a short article on how Mussolini is reported to be relaxing his Jewish racial laws in order to try to strengthen his relations with the Vatican.

The Jewish Chronicle of London dated Sept. 9, 1942, reports that Joseph Goebbels, minister of propaganda in Nazi Germany, printed 10 million pamphlets in multiple languages for distribution in Europe and Latin America, condemning Pope Pius XII for his pro-Jewish stance.

Proof

Krupp told ZENIT that "to date, Pave the Way foundation has amassed over 46,000 pages of news articles, original documents, research materials, along with numerous eyewitness video testimonies, and audio and video files answering the 47 questions left unanswered by a Jewish Catholic study session in 2001."

This material is available at the Pave the Way site.

Elliot Hershberg, Pave the Way chairman, said the abundance of material unearthed and recorded by the foundation gives plenty of material to scholars studying the Vatican's response to the Nazi regime, even as the Vatican archives on this period are still unopened.

Hershberg said the foundation is aware of the Vatican’s eagerness to complete the cataloguing process and to open the archives as soon as possible. Benedict XVI has quintupled the numbers of trained archival personnel to complete this tedious work, he explained, adding that with more than 31 million documents needing to be sewn into books, numbered page by page, and summarized, this job is difficult.

Hershberg pledged that in the meantime, Pave the Way will continue to research and post all documents relative to this period in order to hasten the resolution of this 47-year-old obstacle between Jews and Catholics worldwide.
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On the Net:

Pave the Way Foundation: www.ptwf.org

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Shahbaz Bhatti: "I Want to Serve Jesus"

2011-03-07T21:00:00.000+11:00

Excerpt of Interview With Pakistani Minority Minister

VATICAN CITY, MARCH 6, 2011 - Here is an excerpt from the 2008 book-length interview with Shahbaz Bhatti, the Pakistani Federal Minister for Minorities who was assassinated last week.

The book is titled Christians in Pakistan or Where Hope Is Tested (Marcianum Press, 2008). In this excerpt, Bhatti reveals his motivations for being an outspoken advocate for religious freedom.

* * *

I was offered high government positions and asked to quit my struggle but I always refused to give up even at the cost of my life. I said: "No, I want to serve Jesus as a common man". I am happy with this devotion. I do not want popularity; I do not want any position. I want just a place at Jesus' feet.

I want that my life, my character, my actions speak for me and indicate that I am following Jesus Christ. Because of this desire, I will consider myself even to be more fortunate if -in this effort and struggle to help the needy, the poor, to help the persecuted and victimized Christians of Pakistan - Jesus Christ will accept the sacrifice of my life. I want to live for Christ and I want to die for Him.

I do not feel any fear in this country. Many times the extremists wanted to kill me, many times they wanted to put me in prison, they threatened me, they harassed me and they terrorized my family. Even my parents, my mother and my father, were asked by the extremists few years ago to stop their son from continuing with his mission, this struggle to help the Christians and the needy. Otherwise they would have lost me. But my father always encouraged me. I said: "Until I live, until my last breath, I will continue to serve Jesus, to serve the poor humanity, the suffering humanity, the Christians, the needy, the poor".

I want to share that I am very much inspired by the Holy Bible and the life of Jesus Christ. The more I read the New and Old Testament, verses from the Holy Bible, the word of God, the more it gives me strength, determination. When I see that Jesus Christ sacrificed His everything and our Lord sent His Son for our redemption and salvation, I ask myself how I can follow that path of the Calvary. And our Lord said: "Come to me, hold your cross, and follow the path". The verses I like the most from the Holy Bible read: "I came to you when I was hungry, when I was thirsty, when I was imprisoned".

So when I see the poor people, I think Jesus might have come to me. Hence I always try to help, along with my colleagues, those in need, the hungry, the thirst.

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Shahbaz Bhatti (9 September 1968 – 2 March 2011) was a Pakistani politician and elected member of the National Assembly from 2008. He was the first Federal Minister for Minorities from 2008 until his assassination on 2 March 2011 in Islamabad. Bhatti, a Roman Catholic, was an outspoken critic of Pakistan's blasphemy laws and the only Christian in the Cabinet. Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan claimed responsibility for his killing and called him a blasphemer of Muhammad.

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Bhatti had been the recipient of death threats since 2009, when he spoke in support of Pakistani Christians attacked in the 2009 Gojra riots in Punjab Province. These threats increased following his support for Asia Bibi, a Pakistani Christian sentenced to death in 2010 for blasphemy. The United States had tried to obtain increased security for him and get him an armored car but was unsuccessful.]

According to the BBC, he was traveling to work through a residential district, having just left his mother's home, when his vehicle was sprayed with bullets. At the time of the attack he was alone, without any security. His driver reports having stopped the car and ducked when he saw armed men approaching rather than attempting to evade the threat. Bhatti was taken to a nearby hospital, but he was pronounced dead on arrival. The group Tehrik-i-Taliban told the BBC that they carried out the attack, because Bhatti was a "known blasphemer." A Roman Catholic who had criticized Pakistan's blasphemy law, his death follows that of Punjab governor Salman Taseer, who was also assassinated amid the controversy over the blasphemy law.

On the day following Bhatti's assassination, hundreds of Christian demonstrators reportedly took to the streets across Punjab, with protesters burning tires and demanding justice.

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St Joan of Arc's Heresy Trial and Death: The Details

2011-02-24T07:45:00.000+11:00

By Taylor Marshall

Jeanne d'Arc malade est interrogée dans sa prison par le cardinal de Winchester by Hippolyte Delaroche, 1824

Here's the details of the trial and death of Joan of Arc in easy bullet points:

Joan claimed that Saint Margaret, Saint Catherine, and Saint Michael spoke to her.
Joan's trial for heresy was politically motivated in the midst of the Hundred Years war between England and France (think Shakespeare's Henry V in order to get a picture of the political climate).
England resented Joan's support of the French crown. Joan's reputation as a French prophetess and saint needed to be destroyed if England were to have a "divine claim" on northern France. The person and success of Joan of Arc symbolized that God was on the side of the French.
Under ecclesiastical law, Bishop Cauchon lacked jurisdiction over the case against Joan of Arc.
Clerical notary Nicolas Bailly, commissioned to collect testimony against Joan, could find no adverse evidence. Without evidence the court lacked grounds to initiate a trial. They opened a trial anyway.
Contrary to canon law, Joan was denied a legal adviser.
Joan asked for French churchean to be present at her trial. Her request was denied.
Asked if she knew she was in God's grace, she answered: 'If I am not, may God put me there; and if I am, may God so keep me.'" Notary Boisguillaume later testified that at the moment the court heard this reply, "Those who were interrogating her were stupefied."
Several court functionaries later testified that the official transcript was altered in her disfavor. Many clerics served under compulsion, including the inquisitor, Jean LeMaitre, and a few even received death threats from the English.
According to church law, a woman under trial should have been placed in an ecclesiastical prison under the supervision of nuns. Instead, the English kept Joan in a secular prison guarded by male soldiers. Joan complained "a great English lord had entered her prison and tried to take her by force."
Bishop Cauchon denied Joan's appeals to the Council of Basel and the pope, which should have stopped his proceeding.
The twelve articles of accusation that summarize the court's finding contradict the already doctored court record.
Joan, being illiterate, signed an abjuration that she could not read. The court later substituted a different abjuration for the official record.
Joan claimed that she wore male clothing and armor so that she would not be molested or raped by males on the battle field and in camp. Joan was intent on preserving her virginity.
She was condemned and sentenced to burning at the stake on 30 May 1431.
She begged two priests, Father Martin Ladvenu and Father Isambart de la Pierre, to hold a crucifix before her as she burned so that she could see Jesus Christ.
The English burned her body twice to reduce her remains thoroughly to ashes. They cast all her ashes into the Seine River in order to prevent any collection of relics. Their action reveals that there was already a strong belief among the populace that Joan was a saint.
Her executioner, Geoffroy Therage, later stated that he "greatly feared to be damned" on account of his part in the death of Joan of Arc.

One-legged Afghan Red Cross worker set to be hanged after converting to Christianity

2011-02-09T07:23:00.001+11:00

Christians pray during a mass at a church in Kabul.

An Afghan physiotherapist will be executed within three days for converting to Christianity. Said Musa, 45, has been held for eight months in a Kabul prison where he claims he has been tortured and sexually abused by inmates and guards. Mr Musa, who lost his left leg in a landmine explosion in the 1990s, has worked for the Red Cross for 15 years and helps to treat fellow amputees.

He was arrested in May last year as he attempted to seek asylum at the German embassy following a crackdown on Christians within Afghanistan. He claims he was visited by a judge who told him he would be hanged within days unless he converted back to Islam. But he said he would be willing to die for his faith. He told the Sunday Times: 'My body is theirs to do what they want with. 'Only God can decide if my spirit goes to hell.' Defence lawyers have refused to represent him, while others have dropped the case after receiving death threats. Mr Musa was arrested after a TV station showed western men baptising Afghans during secret ceremonies.

"Democratic" Egypt will send Apostates to their death

2011-02-04T07:54:00.001+11:00

The Egyptians in revolt are asking for more freedom, but they also want the death penalty for those who convert from Islam to another religion. A major survey on the most populous Muslim country of northern Africa and the Middle East

by Sandro Magister

ROME, February 3, 2011 – Much of the Egyptian population that in recent days has rebelled against the thirty-year regime of Hosni Mubarak says that it prefers democracy to any other form of government.

At the same time, however, and in an overwhelming majority, they want those who commit adultery to be stoned, thieves to have their hands cut off, and those who abandon the Muslim religion to be put to death.

This is the result of a survey conducted in Egypt and in six other majority Muslim countries by the Washington-based Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life, the world leader for research in this field:

The other six countries surveyed are Turkey, Lebanon, Jordan, Pakistan, Indonesia, and Nigeria.

The case of Egypt is getting special attention these days. But comparisons with the other countries are also of great interest.

For example, democracy is held to be the best form of government by 59 percent of Egyptians, while in Turkey and Lebanon it gets even more support, 76 and 81 percent respectively.

In Egypt, however, 22 percent of the population maintains that in some circumstances a nondemocratic government is preferable.

On the relationship between politics and religion, almost half of Egyptians think that Islam already has a strong influence on politics. And among those who think this way, 95 percent believe it is a good thing.

In general, 85 out of 100 Egyptians believe that Islam has a positive influence on politics, against only 2 percent who see it as a negative. But in Lebanon and Turkey, the unfavorable views exceed 30 percent.

In a runoff between modernizers and fundamentalists, 59 percent of Egyptians say that they side with the fundamentalists, against 27 percent who root for the former. In Lebanon and Turkey, the sides are flipped: 84 and 74 percent respectively are with the modernizers, while 15 and 11 percent align themselves with the fundamentalists.

More than half of the Egyptians, 54 percent to be exact, among both men and women, are in favor of the separation of the sexes in the workplace. While in Lebanon and Turkey, those against it are between 80 and 90 percent.

When asked to give their views on Hamas, Hezbollah, and al-Qaeda, in Egypt 49 percent say they are in favor of Hamas, 30 percent of Hezbollah, and 20 percent of al-Qaeda.

These views are partly influenced by whether one is Sunni or Shiite. The Egyptians are Sunni, as is Hamas, while Hezbollah is Shiite.

In any case, support for Hezbollah in Egypt has been falling for several years. It stood at 56 percent in 2007, 54 percent in 2008, 43 percent in 2009, and 30 percent in 2010.

And although it is in the minority, support for suicide terrorists is growing. In Egypt, 20 percent justify this, while in 2009 15 percent did.

Returning to the death penalty for those who abandon Islam, called for by 84 percent of Egyptians, it must be pointed out that those who want it are men and women, old and young, educated and uneducated, without distinction.

In Jordan, the level of support for sentencing apostates to death rises all the way to 86 percent. It is only in Lebanon and Turkey that support is low, at 6 and 5 percent respectively.

Producing the movie: "There be Dragons"

2011-01-02T15:26:00.001+11:00

"There be Dragons"

St. Josemaría Escrivá, Civil War and Forgiveness
Interview With "There Be Dragons" Movie Director
By Jesús Colina

ROME, JAN. 1, 2011 - This Spring, a movie will be released that will feature as one of the leading characters St. Josemaría Escrivá, founder of Opus Dei, with themes of war, love and forgiveness.

ZENIT spoke with Roland Joffé, the director of the new movie, "There Be Dragons," who is also known for directing the films "The Mission" and "The Killing Fields."

The forthcoming movie is set during the Spanish Civil War and features themes such as saintliness and betrayal, love and hatred, forgiveness and violence, and finding meaning in everyday life.

ZENIT interviewed Joffé at the beginning of this year that marks 75 years since the outbreak of the war, about the story behind this film and the highlights an audience can expect.

ZENIT: What does the title -- "There Be Dragons" -- refer to?

Joffé: Medieval maps labeled unknown territory with the words "Hic sunt dragones" -- "here be dragons."

Because I didn't really know what was coming next when I started, researching and writing this screenplay, or how it would quite end, "There Be Dragons" seems like a very apt title -- I was going a little off my map into unchartered territory, into themes of what saintliness might be, themes of religion and twentieth century politics and into the past of another country.

I was struck by Josemaría's statement that God is found in "everyday life," and that everyday life, in his case, was the Spanish Civil War.

I wondered: How could one find the divine in war? But then the same question can be asked of all the fundamental challenges in life, and how we face them: How we respond to hatred and rejection, or the desire for revenge and justice -- all those dilemmas are heightened in wartime.

Those dilemmas are, in a sense, the "dragons" of the film -- turning points in our lives where we're faced with potent choices, choices that are going to affect our future.

"There Be Dragons" is about the very different choices that people take at those turning-points -- temptations, if you like -- and how hard it is, and yet how necessary, to escape cycles of hatred and resentment and violence.

ZENIT: The movie is set in the context of the Spanish Civil War, which is in a certain sense the paradigm for violence that leads to more violence, and violence that makes no sense. Faced with a scene such as this one -- a scene of fratricidal violence -- is there room for hope?

Joffé: Yes -- but it's extremely hard. So many horrible, horrendous acts between people seem unforgivable, unredeemable, impossible to move beyond.

But forgiveness is possible! Cycles of violence can be halted, as President Mandela demonstrated in South Africa. Forgiveness has been possible for many heroic people in Rwanda, and offered and taken by many brave Palestinians and Israelis.

Josemaría also claimed that ordinary people were quite capable of being saints -- and I think this kind of heroic forgiveness is what he was talking about.

The inexhaustible possibility of forgiveness is what offers room for hope. But the price is high: It takes a deep sense of what it is to be fully human, a deep feeling for compassion -- and a firm, individual, and yes, heroic resolve not to be caught up in prevailing hatreds, but to fight them with unremitting love.

Most of the action in the movie takes place during the Spanish Civil War, but it flips between that backdrop and 1982.

There are many generations involved in this story: The past casts a shadow over the present. What connects them is Robert, a journalist asked to do a story about Josemaría Escrivá at the time of his beatification. He discovers that his father Manolo was a childhood friend of Josemaría's, and was in the seminary with him -- though their lives took dramatically different paths. Robert and Manolo are estranged, but the film brings them together at the same time as the terrible truth about the past is revealed.

So this is also about a father and a son, and the truth that needs to be faced in order to overcome what is between them.

This is very much a movie about love, about the strength of its presence and the arid and terrifying world that we inhabit in its absence.

Civil wars are most appalling because they pit brother against brother, family against family. By the end of the Spanish Civil War, half a million people had died.

A civil war is a powerful metaphor for a family. As in civil wars, family members take sides and split up; old resentments become sources of hatred. We don't forgive our aunt for doing this, we don't speak to our father because he left our mother, we don't speak to our mother because she went off with a man, or we don't speak to our son because he chose a different profession than what we expected. Those are the civil wars of our everyday lives. "There Be Dragons" is about both kinds of civil war.

Essentially we've all got to choose whether to hang on to our resentments or find a way of conquering them.

Life can be seen as a series of injustices, of rejections and hurts, or as full of opportunities, of chances to conquer those dragons through the overwhelming desire to replace hatred with love and connection.

Many people have it in them to make that heroic choice. They realize that they can make a choice to be free. They have the strength of character to understand that hate is a prison.

No one who hates can be free. Haven't we seen so many examples of this in the years since the First World War? On the other hand, when people choose to love, the impartial observer can feel it in them -- the sense of freedom, of compassion, of giving.

Finally, we all face this choice. Even Robert, the agnostic and materialist, is asked to choose between love and hate -- to, in a sense, fight the world with love, or as Aline puts it, "to fight God with love."

So this is what this movie is about for me. Forgiveness unlocks what's been frozen. It touches everything human inside the one who is forgiven as it touches everything human in the one who forgives.

Love doesn't, cannot, always come easily. It can't come with a sense of superiority; it can only come with a sense of humility and shared humanity. And yet it has a powerful beauty. It says: "Yes, step out of yourself. You think you can't forgive?" Well, you won't know if you can forgive until you've done it.

And how do you forgive? You forgive by empathizing. You forgive by being that other person. By abandoning demonization, by not saying, "I'm better than that person, I could never do that," but by looking at that person and saying, "That could be me."

So yes, there is room for hope -- even in the most painful, tragic and appalling circumstances, where hope seems impossible.

ZENIT: Does this movie speak to believers, or to nonbelievers?

Joffé: "There Be Dragons" takes faith seriously.

It takes sainthood seriously. But its appeal goes well beyond a religious audience.

The question presupposes a separation that is actually phony. We all live in a troubled world; we all deal with the pain and joy of everyday life, and though we may bring different interpretations of reality to bear on this experience, we all in the end inhabit the same torn and troubled world.

This is a film about believers and non-believers. I was deeply touched by Josemaría's sense that we are all potential saints, his belief that everyone was finally capable of slaying their own dragons.

I hope people watching the film will see in it their own struggles with their own dragons, and recognize his point that no saint ever became a saint without struggle.

The film is also about many forms of love. Ildiko's love for Oriol is a particular kind of love. Her love for making a better world is another kind of love. Manolo's love for Ildiko is yet another type of love, even though it's bound up with jealousy and resentment. The love that Manolo craves and eventually receives is again another very particular kind of love.

These different kinds of love all come together like a spider's web of individual threads, and each thread seems separate, but then the realization dawns that they are all part of a greater whole, attached to the same thing, and leading to the same point, to the same center.

In the end, all these different strands of love that look so different will come back to one fundamental point: "Is this love greater than my self-love?" That's a rich question. And much politics of the early twentieth century was engaged in it.

However, it poses yet another question of deeper complexity. If this passionate love is based on an ideal, or on an idealization, if it is accepting of only one model of human behavior, how does it avoid sliding into bigotry or demonization? Since the Enlightenment this has been a major question.

In the cause of the love of the greater good, many acts of gross humanity have been committed. It seems to me that only by understanding the tragic fallibility of all human beings and all human endeavors can we find a path to understanding and that deep empathy, that sense of oneness with others, that offers freedom from demonization and cycles of unredeemed violence.

This is not a Catholic movie, but it's about a key theme in Christian theology and in all Christian churches, as well as in many other religions.

All religions understand that human beings, in their relationships with each other, play out divine choices -- choices that profoundly affect others and the world around them. That interconnectedness is the basis of love -- what we do for or against others affects us and them because we are all bound together.

ZENIT: How much of the character of Josémaría Escrivá, who is now a saint in the Catholic Church, based on fact, and how much is based on fiction?

Joffé: Of all the characters in the movie, Josemaría is the only one that existed in history, the only one about whom there are plenty of records and evidence.

I believe that the representation of Josemaría that we have in terms of his kind of lovingness, his sense of humor -- which undoubtedly he had -- was brought out by the events of his life and that it's actually very close to who he really was.

I wanted to find an honest viewpoint in portraying his character, and to take his faith at face value, as he did. I suppose the convention with saints is to see them, in weird opposition to the whore with the heart of gold, as men with hearts of lead; but that's just a comfortable convention.

In fact Josemaría's story is that of a man who goes through the extraordinary step of simplifying his life around a pure and powerful love for God. This love for God becomes an organizing principle that gives him a shape and a kind of simplicity and strength.

But that doesn't make him dull or flat, because this love existed in the real world, and the fruit of that existence in the real, often cruel, harsh world, must for any honest man be doubt: doubt in God and doubt in goodness. This doubt is deeply, profoundly fertile.

Love is not spoon-fed to us, as a sine qua non. It has to be fought for. It's what we as human beings have to bring to the table.

We have to find this love deep within ourselves, understanding the dark beauty of our own and other people's frailty. In a profound sense that seems to me to be what the story of Christ demonstrates.

If we are believers we still have to find this love deep in ourselves and offer it to God and his rich creation. If we are not believers we must still find it and offer it to other human beings regardless of politics or race or religion.

ZENIT: Did you have previous ideas about how to represent the Spanish Civil War, or some of the characters, such as St. Josemaría Escrivá?

Joffé: I didn't know much about Josemaría before I was asked to film the movie.

What actually happened was that at one point one of the producers of the movie had come to Holland to persuade me to the do the movie. And he brought various books and materials with him that included a DVD of Josemaría.

We had a very, very nice dinner together, and I walked home thinking: "I don't really want to do this. I've got another project that I really want to do that is set in India and I've worked a long time to get this ready." In other words, I was thinking that it was a very, very nice offer and I really appreciated the meal, but I should say no.

It was a summer evening so I went into the garden, had a glass of white wine, put the DVD into my DVD player, and sat at my computer to type a little letter saying: "Dear X, thank you so much. I appreciate that you've come all this way, but I really think you should look somewhere else."

In the background, however, the DVD was playing and a moment in the story catches my eye, which is Josemaría addressing a large group of people, maybe in Chile, or Argentina, I'm actually not sure where it was, and a girl raises her hand and says, "I've got a question to ask."

And Josemaría says, "Yes, please."

And she says, "I'd like to convert to Christianity."

And he says, "Yes?"

And she says, "But my parents are Jewish and they are not very happy about the idea."

Josemaría, without batting an eyelid, says: "Oh my dear, no, no, honoring your parents is very, very dear to God. God doesn't ask you to dishonor your parents, make your parents unhappy. Absolutely not! What you feel in your heart is what you feel in your heart. No, no, no, don't upset your parents -- don't make your parents feel bad. There's absolutely no need for that."

I looked at that moment in the video and I thought to myself: "What a wonderful moment. What a kind of unexpected and wonderful moment, particularly from an organization which everybody thinks it's bound to say the opposite."

I looked at my computer and I thought, "Wait a minute." I turned the DVD off. I stopped the letter. I went into my screenplay mode and I wrote a scene where Josemaría meets a man who's dying, who he knows from before, who tells him he's Jewish and thinking of converting.

I wrote the whole scene, all the while thinking: "I really want to see that in a film. But I'm never going to see it in a film if I don't do this film, am I? Where would it fit into any other film?"

Instead of the first letter I was going to write, I wrote instead: "Dear X, I'm really interested in doing this project, providing I'm left to follow my own devices, and you're not expecting me to follow any party lines, and if you accept the fact that I'm not very bright and I'll do the best I can, but I have to follow my own truth. If that's okay, I would really love to do this project."

That is pretty much what happened. I had no real preconceptions of Josemaría, some knowledge of course, but mostly I had this moment I experienced with the DVD that sparked my interest in doing the movie.

I was presented with a story about a man that I read, and realized I really respected this man. In fact, more than simply respecting him, I felt that that he enshrined something in his struggle that would speak to all human beings in a rather wonderful way, and that's the story I wanted to tell, and that's what the movie is about.

The Spanish Civil War, of course, was equally complex to deal with. It would have been easy to take sides, but that would have betrayed the central thrust of the way that I wanted to tell this story.

History is notoriously partisan, written by the victors and rewritten by the vanquished. Many will simply believe the rumor or myth that they find most palatable and I am sure we're going to battle some opinions about what Opus Dei is or was, about who Josemaría was, and what the Spanish Civil War was really "about."

I wanted to show what was going on in Spain during the civil war without partisanship. In fact Spain was going through, in a very condensed period of time, something that Britain, for instance, had been through and absorbed for a hundred years.

Industrial revolution, stark class ideologies, plus in Spain loss of empire and economic instability -- in Spain things were drawn starkly, more in black and white. It was actually very easy for Spanish society to fracture and very easy -- in the thinking of the time -- to take ultimate and utterly opposing views about social justice, the role of the Church, and so on.

Eventually, as is the nature of these social tensions, the more extreme views started tugging the others apart. As the center weakened, the two opposing poles began to get stronger.

Both sides in the Spanish Civil War had ideals and a sense of their own virtue. In common with similar political movements in the rest of Europe, people on both sides of the political divide began to demonize the other.

But what in Europe became national divides in Spain remained fratricidal and left psychological scars that are deep and hard to heal. What was happening in Spain was wounding and complicated and really split families in a most painful and harrowing way.

Brother chose differently to brother, but does that mean they're no longer brothers? If it does mean they are no longer brothers -- if we're willing to kill our brothers for the sake of what we believe -- then what does that ask about the value of our choices?

ZENIT: Did working on this film influence you somehow in your personal life?

Joffé: Let me answer the question in the following way: I'm not really very religious but I was asked to write about a man who was.

I had to take a step back and say: "When I write about Josemaría, I must take at face value -- utterly, honestly, and truthfully -- everything that Josemaría is telling me he stood for, that his life was about, and that his religious experience was about. I must read about religious experience without prejudice, honestly; and just let it look at me in the face."

I read a lot about religious experience. I was moved and delighted to find how many scientists ( in particular physicists) were deeply involved in experiencing God, and I was moved to find that the divide between science and religion that has become so much the current thinking of our time was in fact false.

I came to understand the great discovery of modern physics that our sense of reality is based on the models of it we make in our brains, but that there are therefore many models of reality.

Many of them are insufficient to explain all things, but suitable to explain some; they offer us a new way of understanding what in fact reality or realities may be and that this understanding in no way precludes the idea of God or a spiritual dimension to the grand universe that we inhabit, but rather that the way that science has led us to redefine and reinterpret what is real offers us also a chance to reinterpret and redefine the spiritual.

I probably won't know for a few years how this experience has affected me. I think something profound takes a little bit of time to reveal itself for what it really is.

Therefore, I found a very odd thing out of filming "There Be Dragons," which is that, rather than this being a lonely experience, which I thought it might be, I found it extremely engaging and not lonely at all.

To suddenly think, "Well let me lay aside my simple answers and just live with the question," was to me wonderfully compelling and made me feel very, very close to this process of living in a way I don't think I've felt before. And I'm not sure now where that might lead.

The movie: "There be Dragons"

2011-01-02T15:11:00.000+11:00

See this movie:(click on the link)

There be Dragons

COMMUNIQUÉ OF THE HOLY SEE PRESS OFFICE:

2010-12-18T07:47:00.002+11:00

REGARDING THE EIGHTH ASSEMBLY OF CHINESE CATHOLIC REPRESENTATIVES (BEIJING, 7-9 DECEMBER 2010)

1. With profound sorrow, the Holy See laments the fact that from 7 to 9 December 2010 there was held in Beijing the Eighth Assembly of Chinese Catholic Representatives. This was imposed on numerous Bishops, priests, religious and lay faithful. The manner in which it was convoked and its unfolding manifest a repressive attitude with regard to the exercise of religious liberty, which it was hoped had been consigned to the past in present-day China. The persistent desire to control the most intimate area of citizens’ lives, namely their conscience, and to interfere in the internal life of the Catholic Church does no credit to China. On the contrary, it seems to be a sign of fear and weakness rather than of strength; of intransigent intolerance rather than of openness to freedom and to effective respect both of human dignity and of a correct distinction between the civil and religious spheres.

2. On several occasions the Holy See had let it be known, first and foremost to the Bishops, but also to all the faithful, and publicly, that they should not take part in the event. Each one of those who were present knows to what extent he or she is responsible before God and the Church. The Bishops in particular and the priests will also have to face the expectations of their respective communities, who look to their own Pastor and have a right to receive from him sure guidance in the faith and in the moral life.

3. It is known, moreover, that many Bishops and priests were forced to take part in the Assembly. The Holy See condemns this grave violation of their human rights, particularly their freedom of religion and of conscience. Moreover, the Holy See expresses its deepest esteem for those who, in different ways, have borne witness to their faith with courage and it invites the others to pray, to do penance and, through their works, to reaffirm their own will to follow Christ with love, in full communion with the universal Church.

4. Addressing those whose hearts are full of dismay and profound suffering, those who are wondering how it is possible that their own Bishop or their own priests should have taken part in the Assembly, the Holy See asks them to remain steadfast and patient in the faith; it invites them to take account of the pressures experienced by many of their Pastors and to pray for them; it exhorts them to continue courageously supporting them in the face of the unjust impositions that they encounter in the exercise of their ministry.

5. During the Assembly, among other things, the leaders of the so-called Episcopal Conference and of the Chinese Catholic Patriotic Association were appointed. Concerning these two entities, and concerning the Assembly itself, the words written by Pope Benedict XVI in his 2007 Letter to the Church in China continue to apply (cf. nos. 7 and 8). In particular, the present College of Catholic Bishops of China cannot be recognized as an Episcopal Conference by the Apostolic See: the "clandestine" Bishops, those not recognized by the Government but in communion with the Pope, are not part of it; it includes Bishops who are still illegitimate, and it is governed by statutes that contain elements incompatible with Catholic doctrine. It is deeply deplorable that an illegitimate Bishop has been appointed as its President. Furthermore, regarding the declared purpose to implement the principles of independence and autonomy, self-management and democratic administration of the Church, it should be remembered that this is incompatible with Catholic doctrine, which from the time of the ancient Creeds professes the Church to be "one, holy, catholic and apostolic". It is therefore lamentable also that a legitimate Bishop has been appointed President of the Chinese Catholic Patriotic Association.

6. This is not the path that the Church must follow in the context of a great and noble nation, which attracts the attention of world opinion for its significant achievements in so many spheres, but still finds it hard to implement the demands of genuine religious freedom, despite the fact that it professes in its Constitution to respect that freedom. What is more, the Assembly has rendered more difficult the path of reconciliation between Catholics of the "clandestine communities" and those of the "official communities", thereby inflicting a deep wound not only upon the Church in China but also upon the universal Church.

7. The Holy See profoundly regrets the fact that the celebration of the above-mentioned Assembly, as also the recent episcopal ordination without the indispensable Papal mandate, have unilaterally damaged the dialogue and the climate of trust that had been established in its relations with the Government of the People’s Republic of China. The Holy See, while reaffirming its own wish to dialogue honestly, feels bound to state that unacceptable and hostile acts such as those just mentioned provoke among the faithful, both in China and elsewhere, a grave loss of the trust that is necessary for overcoming the difficulties and building a correct relationship with the Church, for the sake of the common good.

8. In the light of what has happened, the Holy Father’s invitation – addressed on 1 December 2010 to all the Catholics of the world to pray for the Church in China which is going through a particularly difficult time – remains pressing.

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2010-12-17T16:08:00.000+11:00

Relationships Based on Faith, Not Formulas!

CatholicMatch, unlike many websites which target Catholics, is faithful to the teachings and values of the Catholic Church. As such, we provide a service which allows our members to be guided by their values and relationship with God - not with scientific formulas.

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Mary Glowrey (1887-1957): Australian witness to hope in India

2010-12-06T12:11:00.000+11:00

Robyn Fahy And Fr Dan Strickland MGL

When in early January 1920, a brass plate disappeared from the front of 82 Collins St, Melbourne, an extraordinary story remained untold for many years. The plate bore the inscription, Mary Glowrey, M.D. Eye, Ear, Nose and Throat Specialist.

Mary Glowrey was born in 1887 at Birregurra in Victoria. Of Irish descent, she was the third of nine children born into a loving and prayerful family. Each night the Rosary was said and with it a prayer for priests and doctors. Mary, recalling that practice many years later, wrote: "When my brother and I were respectively priest and doctor, I sincerely hoped that many another mother added that 'trimming' to the Rosary."

Mary's outstanding academic achievements would earn her a University Exhibition, an invaluable cash scholarship and, pursuing her literary interests, she began studying for a Bachelor of Arts at the University of Melbourne in 1905. However, after a great deal of prayer and the encouragement of her father, Mary switched over to the medical course and graduated in 1910 with a Bachelor of Medicine and Bachelor of Surgery.

After completing her residency in New Zealand, she returned to build her own successful private practice in Melbourne, later working at St Vincent's Hospital and the Royal Victorian Eye and Ear Hospital.

God's call

A chance reading in 1915 of a pamphlet about the appalling death rate amongst babies in India fundamentally changed the direction of her life. Falling to her knees, Mary finished reading the pamphlet and knew God was calling her to help the women and children of India.

Meanwhile, Mary's busy schedule of external commitments continued. In 1916, she was elected as the first General President of the newly formed Catholic Women's Social Guild, now known as the Catholic Women's League of Victoria and Wagga Wagga. Deeply concerned about the economic and social inequities that women faced, this inspired group of young Catholic women sought to change society through prayer and action. This was the first large scale organising of Catholic women in Victoria.

During this busy time, Mary also studied for a higher medical degree with a particular emphasis on obstetrics, gynaecology and ophthalmology in preparation for her medical missionary work. She became a Doctor of Medicine in December 1919.

In January 1920, Mary left her thriving career as an eye, ear, nose and throat specialist and, surrendering herself completely to God's will, sailed for India to become a medical missionary with the Congregation of the Society of Jesus, Mary and Joseph in Guntur. Pope Pius XI later bestowed a special blessing on her medical work and, as Sister Mary of the Sacred Heart, she became the first nun-doctor missionary.

A woman of profound faith and brilliant achievement, she placed the remainder of her life at the service of the medical and spiritual needs of the people of India.

In time the small dispensary in Guntur grew into St Joseph's Hospital where Mary, for many years the lone doctor, trained local women to be pharmacists, nurses and midwives to help stem the tide of suffering.

Countless patients flocked to see the "gentle Sister Doctor" who often travelled to visit the sick and dying in outlying villages, crouching down to treat patients on the earthen floors of their small straw huts. She also studied and made extensive use of traditional Indian medicines.

Mary was said to radiate Christ by word and example and she never attempted anything without praying to the Holy Spirit, knowing that with such help all things are possible.

Recognising the vital need to promote the Christian use of medicine, Mary founded the Catholic Hospital Association of India in 1943. Her vision was the establishment of a Catholic Medical College in order to train professionals whose medical care would be grounded in an understanding of the absolute inviolability of human life and be placed at the service of life.

Suffering

For the last two years of her life, Mary shouldered the Cross of excruciating physical pain and suffering which she bore with extraordinary courage and patience. The sisters who witnessed her apostolate of suffering have described the calm, serene joy radiating from Mary's face, which struck all who approached her.

On 21 November 1956, the Feast of Our Lady's Presentation, Mary was sent a new and lasting cross. In trying to help her nurse, she grasped the rail of her bed with her 'good' right arm but the bone had become brittle as a result of the cancer that had now spread throughout her body and the arm broke, never to be mended. She just had to lie on her bed bearing her added suffering, accepting God's will as she had always sought to do. Her only regret, in her own words, "I have not done enough. I could have done more."

When Mary finally died on 5 May 1957, her last words were, "Jesus, Mary and Joseph" and "My Jesus, I love you". At her requiem Mass, the Bishop of Guntur described Mary as a "special creation of God ... a great soul who embraced the whole world." It was in Bangalore, where Mary Glowrey so courageously lived the final months of her life, offering her suffering to God for her dreams for India, that St John's Medical College was eventually built a little over a decade after her death. One of her fellow sisters was amongst the first intake of medical students.

To obtain a copy of the prayer for the cause of Dr Mary Glowrey, please send a self-addressed, stamped envelope to the General Secretary of the Catholic Women's League of Victoria and Wagga Wagga, Mary Glowrey House, 132-134 Nicholson St, Fitzroy, Vic, 3065.

Free e-book "Son of God: Daily Gospel year A-1"

2010-12-04T11:13:00.001+11:00

A free e-book (1300 pages) offering a reflection on the Gospel for every day of the present liturgical year, Year A-1.

Click on the following URL, and you will be taken to a page from which you may download, free of charge, your e-book. It is copyright, but you are free to use it for personal reading.

The e-book is offered in DNL and PDF formats, with a separate PDF format also compatible with any usual electronic reader. You have your choice.

URL for the free e-book "Son of God: Daily Gospel Year A-1" is as follows:

www.catholic-thoughts.info/ebook/

Free e-book "Son of God: Daily Gospel year A-1"

2010-12-04T11:02:00.000+11:00

YouTube notice of a free e-book (1300 pages).

The e-book provides a reflection on the Gospel of every day of the present liturgical year, December 2010 to November 2011.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ye1AKK4CPdQ

Kings of Controversy

2010-11-19T21:38:00.000+11:00

Was the Kingdom of David and Solomon a glorious empire —or just a little cow town?

It depends on which archaeologist you ask.
By Robert Draper

The woman sitting on a bench in the Old City of Jerusalem, round-faced and bundled up against the autumn chill, chews on an apple while studying the building that has brought her both fame and aggravation. It doesn't really look like a building—just some low stone walls abutting an ancient terraced retaining wall 60 feet high. But because the woman is an archaeologist, and because this is her discovery, her eyes see what others might not. She sees the building's position, on a northern escarpment of the ancient city overlooking Jerusalem's Kidron Valley, and she imagines an ideal perch from which to survey a kingdom. She imagines the Phoenician carpenters and stonemasons who erected it in the tenth century B.C. She imagines as well the Babylonians who destroyed it four centuries later. Most of all, she imagines the man she believes commissioned and occupied the building. His name was David. This, she has declared to the world, is most likely the building described in the Second Book of Samuel: "King Hiram of Tyre sent … carpenters and masons, and they built a house for David. And David realized that the Lord had established him as king over Israel, and that He had exalted his kingdom for the sake of His people Israel."

The woman's name is Eilat Mazar. Munching and gazing, she is the picture of equanimity—until a tour guide shows up. He's a young Israeli man accompanied by a half dozen tourists who assemble in front of the bench so they can view the building. The moment he opens his mouth, Mazar knows what's coming. The tour guide is a former archaeology student of hers. She's heard how he brings tourists to this spot and informs them that this is NOT the palace of David and that all the archaeological work at the City of David is a way for right-wing Israelis to expand the country's territorial claims and displace Palestinians.

Mazar jumps up from the bench and marches over to the tour guide. She chews him out in a staccato of Hebrew, while he stares passively at her. The gaping tourists watch her stalk off.

"You really need to be strong," she mutters as she walks. "It's like everyone wants to destroy what you do." And then, more plaintively: "Why? What did we do wrong?"

The archaeologist gets into her car. She looks stricken. "I feel like I'm really getting sick from stress," she says. "I've lost years from my life."

In no other part of the world does archaeology so closely resemble a contact sport. Eilat Mazar is one of the reasons why. Her announcement in 2005 that she believed she had unearthed the palace of King David amounted to a ringing defense of an old-school proposition under assault for more than a quarter century—namely, that the Bible's depiction of the empire established under David and continued by his son Solomon is historically accurate. Mazar's claim has emboldened those Christians and Jews throughout the world who maintain that the Old Testament can and should be taken literally. Her purported discovery carries particular resonance in Israel, where the story of David and Solomon is interwoven with the Jews' historical claims to biblical Zion.

That narrative is familiar to any student of the Bible. A young shepherd named David from the tribe of Judah slays the giant Goliath from the enemy tribe of the Philistines, is elevated to king of Judah following the death of Saul at the close of the 11th century B.C., conquers Jerusalem, unites the people of Judah with the disparate Israelite tribes to the north, and thereupon amasses a royal dynasty that continues with Solomon well into the tenth century B.C. But while the Bible says David and Solomon built the kingdom of Israel into a powerful and prestigious empire stretching from the Mediterranean to the Jordan River, from Damascus to the Negev, there's a slight problem—namely, that despite decades of searching, archaeologists had found no solid evidence that David or Solomon ever built anything.

Then Mazar sounded her trumpet. "She knew what she was doing," says fellow Israeli archaeologist David Ilan of Hebrew Union College. "She waded into the fray purposefully, wanting to make a statement."

Ilan himself doubts that Mazar has found King David's palace. "My gut tells me this is an eighth- or ninth-century building," he says, constructed a hundred years or more after Solomon died in 930 B.C. More broadly, critics question Mazar's motives. They note that her excavation work was underwritten by two organizations—the City of David Foundation and the Shalem Center—dedicated to the assertion of Israel's territorial rights. And they scoff at Mazar's allegiance to the antiquated methods of her archaeological forebears, such as her grandfather, who unapologetically worked with a trowel in one hand and the Bible in the other.

The once common practice of using the Bible as an archaeological guide has been widely contested as an unscientific case of circular reasoning—and with particular relish by Tel Aviv University's contrarian-in-residence Israel Finkelstein, who has made a career out of merrily demolishing such assumptions. He and other proponents of "low chronology" say that the weight of archaeological evidence in and around Israel suggests that the dates posited by biblical scholars are a century off. The "Solomonic" buildings excavated by biblical archaeologists over the past several decades at Hazor, Gezer, and Megiddo were not constructed in David and Solomon's time, he says, and so must have been built by kings of the ninth-century B.C.'s Omride dynasty, well after David and Solomon's reign.

During David's time, as Finkelstein casts it, Jerusalem was little more than a "hill-country village," David himself a raggedy upstart akin to Pancho Villa, and his legion of followers more like "500 people with sticks in their hands shouting and cursing and spitting—not the stuff of great armies of chariots described in the text.

"Of course we're not looking at the palace of David!" Finkelstein roars at the very mention of Mazar's discovery. "I mean, come on. I respect her efforts. I like her—very nice lady. But this interpretation is—how to say it?—a bit naive." (National Geographic December 2010)

Pius XII and saving the Jews

2010-11-08T21:15:00.000+11:00

http://www.logosinstitute.org/LogosReviewNine/PIUS_XII_and_the_Genocide.pdf

Obama’s Radical Past

2010-10-22T07:30:00.001+11:00

His connection to socialism isn’t all ancient history, either.
By Stanley Kurtz
ARTICLE Publication Date: October 12, 2010

On the afternoon of April 1, 1983, Barack Obama, then a senior at Columbia University, made his way into the Great Hall of Manhattan's Cooper Union to attend a "Socialist Scholars Conference." There Obama discovered his vocation as a community organizer, as well as a political program to guide him throughout his life.

The conference itself was not a secret, but it held a secret, for it was there that a demoralized and frustrated socialist movement largely set aside strategies of nationalization and turned increasingly to local organizing as a way around the Reagan presidency -- and its own spotty reputation. In the early 1980s, America's socialists discovered what Saul Alinsky had always known: "Community organizing" is a euphemism behind which advocates of a radical vision of America could advance their cause without the bothersome label "socialist" drawing adverse attention to their efforts.

A loose accusation of his being a socialist has trailed Obama for years, but without real evidence that he saw himself as part of this radical tradition. But the evidence exists, if not in plain sight then in the archives -- for example, the archived files of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), which include Obama's name on a conference registration list. That, along with some misleading admissions in the president's memoir, Dreams from My Father, makes it clear that Obama attended the 1983 and 1984 Socialist Scholars conferences, and quite possibly the 1985 conclave as well. A detailed account of these conferences (along with many other events from Obama's radical past) and the evidence for Obama's attendance at them can be found in my new book, Radical-in-Chief: Barack Obama and the Untold Story of American Socialism.

The 1983 Cooper Union Conference, billed as a tribute to Marx, was precisely when Obama discovered his vocation for community organizing. Obama's account of his turn to community organizing doesn't add up. He portrays it as a mere impulse based on little actual knowledge. But that impulse saw Obama through two years of failed job searches. Clearly he had a deeper motivation. The evidence suggests he found it at the Socialist Scholars conferences, where he encountered the entrancing double idea that America could be transformed by a kind of undercover socialism, and that African Americans would be the key figures in advancing community organizing.

The 1983 conference took place in the shadow of Harold Washington's first race for mayor of Chicago. Washington was not only Obama's political idol, he was the darling of America's socialists in the mid-1980s. Washington assembled a "rainbow" coalition of blacks, Hispanics, and left-leaning whites to overturn the power of Chicago's centrist Democratic machine. Washington worked eagerly and openly with Chicago's small but influential contingent of socialists, many of whom brought the community organizations and labor unions they led onto the Washington bandwagon.

America's socialists saw the Harold Washington campaign as a model for their ultimate goal of pushing the Democrats to the left by polarizing the country along class lines. This socialist "realignment" strategy envisioned driving business interests out of a newly radicalized Democratic party. The loss was to be more than made up for through a newly energized coalition of poor and minority voters, led by minority politicians on the model of Harold Washington. The new coalitions would draw on the open or quiet direction of socialist community organizers, from whose ranks new Harold Washingtons would emerge. Groups like ACORN and Project Vote would swell the Democrats with poor and minority voters and, with the country divided by class, socialism would emerge as the natural ideology of the have-nots.

Figures pushing this broader strategy at the 1983 Socialist Scholars Conference included ACORN adviser Frances Fox Piven and organizing theorist Peter Dreier, now a professor at Occidental College and an adviser to Obama's 2008 presidential campaign. That is to say, Obama's connection to socialist ideologues didn't end with his recruitment into the ranks of community organizers. It began there and blossomed into a quarter century of intricate relationships with both on-the-record and in-all-but-name socialists. I've spent the last two years in the archives unraveling the connections. Here are a few.

By the mid-1980s, James Cone, Jeremiah Wright's theological mentor, had struck up a close cooperative relationship with the DSA. Cone and a prominent follower spoke at the conferences Obama attended. Shortly after the 1984 conference, Cone joined Reverend Wright in Cuba, where they expressed support for the Cuban social system as a model for the United States. Wright touted his Cuba trips to his congregation for years. Obama would have quickly discovered Wright's ties to the liberation theologians he'd first learned of at the Socialist Scholars conferences. The connection helps explain Obama's choice of Wright as his pastor.

A little-known Chicago training institute for community organizers, the Midwest Academy, is in many ways the key to Barack Obama's political rise. The Midwest Academy was closely allied to the DSA, which sponsored the Socialist Scholars conferences in New York. Most Midwest Academy leaders remained quiet about their socialism. Inspired by the success of the American Communist "Popular Front," and by 19th-century American reformers who used populist and communitarian language to achieve socialist ends through incremental legislative means, the Midwest Academy's leaders advocated a strategy of stealth.

In the '70s and '80s, theory was put into action in a series of "populist" coalitions quietly controlled by the socialist leadership of the Midwest Academy and the DSA. The Citizen/Labor Energy Coalition, for example, fought a series of legislative battles against oil and gas companies. Its signature proposal was its call for a public energy corporation to "compete" with private companies.

Officials from the Midwest Academy network trained Obama, supplied him with funds, and got him appointed head of Illinois Project Vote. Years later, Obama sent foundation money to the Midwest Academy. Barack and Michelle Obama ran a project called "Public Allies" that was effectively an extension of the Midwest Academy. Alice Palmer, the Illinois state senator who chose Obama as her successor, was once a high official in the Midwest Academy network. Several Midwest Academy leaders advised Obama's 2008 presidential campaign. Academy founder Heather Booth is now a key figure in coordinating grassroots support for the president's budget, health-care, and financial-reform plans.

The leaders of the Midwest Academy were eager to avoid public exposure of their socialism. Yet they trusted Obama enough to put him on the board of their satellite organization, Chicago Public Allies, and to succeed one of their own as state senator.

As I detail at length in Radical-in-Chief, deceptions and glaring omissions about his radical past reach far beyond Obama's involvement with the Socialist Scholars conferences and the Midwest Academy. Archival documents reveal that Obama lied during the 2008 campaign about his ties to ACORN. New evidence confirms that Obama has hidden the truth about his relationships to Jeremiah Wright and Bill Ayers. The unknown story of Obama's deep involvement with a radical group called UNO of Chicago is revealed. The claims of candidate Obama and his mentors that he shunned Saul Alinsky's confrontational tactics turn out to be a sugary fairy tale. The obfuscating techniques of Obama's memoir, Dreams from My Father, are exposed.

The pattern of misdirection upon which President Obama's political career has been built has its roots in the socialist background of community organizing. ACORN, Reverend Wright, and Bill Ayers were all routes into that hidden socialist world, and that is why Obama has had to obscure the truth about these and other elements of his past. More important, the president's socialist past is still very much alive in the governing philosophy and long-term political strategy of the Obama administration.

As we move into the first national election of the Obama presidency, Americans are confronted with a fateful choice. Either we will continue to be subject to President Obama's radical and only very partially revealed plans for our future, or we will place a strong check on the president's ambitions. Knowing the truth about Obama's past is the best way to safeguard our future.

Stanley Kurtz is a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center and author of Radical-in-Chief: Barack Obama and the Untold Story of American Socialism.

The nun's habit

2010-10-20T11:13:00.002+11:00

By Sr. Mary Catharine of Jesus Perry, OP

Patheos' "The Habit of Witness" series features essays written by consecrated Catholic women and men sharing their encounters and experiences while dressed in the habit. In this second installment, a monastic nun explains the meaning of the habit, and how it is a daily witness to the sister, herself.

I am a cloistered nun and leave the monastery only for necessary business. One cold January I was at our sister monastery in the Bronx and had accompanied another nun who had business in NYC. My first trip to the Big Apple! The prioress had insisted that we have a little treat so we stopped in a café, anxious to get warm with a cup of coffee.

Imagine the scene: a little café full of people, either bustling about or chatting at tables while warming their frozen hands around steaming cups of java. Two nuns walk through the door and it seems like all eyes turn their way. One patron calls out, "Sisters, you have made a lot of people happy today!"

We smiled our biggest smiles, the words warming our frozen cheeks. But what does one say to that?

I felt so small, so human, and so humbled that I just wanted to drop down on the floor and say, "I'll try harder, I promise!"

Most nuns and sisters could tell numerous stories about people's reactions to the habit -- all good; all humbling; all manifesting how the habit speaks a universal language and points to the reality of God. People notice the wedding ring and wonder why I wear one, while children respond to the habit most perceptively, asking, "Are you God's wife?" There are the smiles as people walk by, the waves from across the street.

But the habit is primarily a witness to the person wearing it. In the first years after the Edict of Milan in 313, as the persecutions stopped, Christians flocked to the desert to give their lives totally to God, as completely as if they were being martyred.

Even then monks and nuns put on the habit, symbolizing their total dedication to God. Slowly as time went on the vows signified this consecration, but originally it was the habit: often a poor, rough garment, rather like what poor slaves wore.

In our Dominican tradition, on the day the young nun receives the habit she is clothed piece-by-piece, by the prioress and novice mistress. It is a passive action. The new sister kneels there and the tunic, belt, scapular, cappa, veil, rosary, and crucifix become the symbol of her intention to become transformed by Christ into the new person reborn through obedience, transfigured by Christ Crucified.

In our monastery the new novice sews none of her future habit. This is because in being given the monastic habit, being given clothing not her own, she becomes a member of this monastic community. From this day forward everything she uses -- including everything she wears -- belongs to the community. With the community she holds all things in common like the first Christian Community of the Acts of the Apostles. She throws in her lot with this communio trusting that through them God will provide for what she truly needs.

The experience of one's clothing day remains etched in heart and mind. For Dominican nuns, that means etched in lines that are black and white! White for purity; black for penance. Two years after her clothing, a novice will profess vows, and a black veil will be placed on her head signifying that she has become "recognized as a house of prayer . . . and a temple of intercession for all people."

That's a tall order. Humanly it is not possible. It is only because God wants it so that the newly professed nun can carry the world in her heart.

We human beings need symbols to remind us that we are not made for this world but, as St. Elizabeth Seton used to say, we are "children of eternity." Each piece of the habit reminds the person wearing it that she is made for God. The tunic reminds her of the baptismal garment, the scapular is the yoke of Christ and sign of the Virgin Mary's protection. The leather belt reminds her to follow the commandments and the ways of justice. The cappa, the black cape of the Dominican order, symbolizes that Christ her Beloved has wrapped her in the garments of joy!

Daily she prays as she places the veil on her head, "He has placed a sign upon my brow that I may admit no other lover than Him."

A nun is still very much a woman and like all women needs to hear that she is loved. If she forgets the language of love, the habit will no longer have meaning to her. The habit is one such token of Christ's love for His bride if she has ears to hear and eyes to see. Such love can only radiate joy!

Read another account in "The Habit of Witness" series: According to Plan.

Sr. Mary Catharine of Jesus Perry, OP is the novice mistress of The Monastery of Our Lady of the Rosary in Summit, New Jersey. Their blog may be found at monialesop.org.