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ACCEPT
The Catholic War Veterans and Auxiliary of the U.S.A. are brainstorming from their base in Bellerose, Queens.
They’ve served their country, and now they serve God. The organization has reached out to help anyone and everyone it can for the last 78 years. Now it’s time to map out the future.
Their numbers are dwindling so they’re upping their recruitment efforts to ensure they can continue their work well into the future.
“We try to tell them how important it is that we need them people because who’s going to take our place when we pass away or move and so we need to get the younger generation involved,” said New York State Commander Bruce Lubkeman.
Want to be a member? You must be a practicing Catholic and a veteran or related to a veteran who has served in active duty for at least six months. But what the team does knows no boundaries.
“We’re unique because we cross the lines, not only Catholics but we talk to all religious people, we help everybody as a veteran especially those who are coming back from one of the wars,” Lubkeman said.
After WWII, the Catholic Veterans had more than 250,000, now they’re down to about 8,000.
Most of their members are from the Vietnam War generation, and just five percent have fought in Iraq and Afghanistan, a population that’s been difficult to recruit.
“I know what they went through, what they see over there, there are a lot of suicides across the board, they just can’t handle coming back, they have a lot of problems with what they see,” said Lubkeman.
Recruitment used to happen in church, but as less and less young people are attending mass, membership numbers have plummeted.
“We know what they’ve gone through and it’s a form of isolation,” said National Commander David Crum.
But the organization knows it can still help. They’ve provided financial support, been a liaison between veterans and the VA and gotten through to those who have sacrificed their emotional wellbeing fighting for freedom.
“Any veteran deserves what we can give them, they gave the ultimate sacrifice, giving up their time, liberty and possibly everything for this country, and whatever we can do, we’re going to repay them as best we can,” Crum said.
This year, the men are spending Veterans Day packing up supplies to send to American troops in Ukraine. One of the many ways they continue their service – and fill what they say is a significant void.
“They wrote us a letter saying they didn’t have anything. It boggles my mind how we can send troops there and not have the equipment and facilities they need to keep their jobs up,” said Crum.
They’re no longer on the front lines, but their call to serve hasn’t been silenced, it’s gotten louder.
ROME — Since his election in March 2013, Pope Francis has made dialogue with Islam a cornerstone of his papacy, traveling to several majority-Muslim nations, meeting with top Islamic leaders, and drawing careful public distinctions between genuine religion and extremist fundamentalism.
Furthering this agenda was one of the primary motives of his Nov. 3-6 visit to Bahrain, which marked the second time he has traveled to a Persian Gulf nation after making a high-profile trip to Abu Dhabi in February 2019.
Since then, he has made a string of visits to other majority-Muslim countries, including a visit to Morocco in March 2019, a March 2021 trip to Iraq, and his visit to Kazakhstan in September.
In Abu Dhabi, Pope Francis signed a landmark document on human fraternity promoting Catholic-Muslim dialogue with Sheikh Ahmed al-Tayeb, the former president of Egypt’s prestigious Al-Azhar university, widely considered the most authoritative theological institution in Sunni Islam and the Grand Imam of the Al-Azhar Mosque.
During his visit to Iraq last year, Pope Francis was received by Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, one of the world’s most authoritative Shiite clerics.
Al-Tayeb, who Pope Francis has met with several times since first welcoming him to the Vatican in 2017, was also present at a high-profile interfaith summit in Astana that drew Pope Francis to Kazakhstan earlier this year.
Pope Francis traveled to Bahrain to attend the “Bahrain Forum for Dialogue: East and West for Human Coexistence,” a major interfaith summit that saw the participation of top leaders of world religions, including members of Bahrain’s regional Muslim Council of Elders; Patriarch Bartholomew of Constantinople, spiritual leader of the world’s Orthodox Christian community; a representative of the Russian Orthodox Church; and rabbis from the United States.
In addition to the forum, Pope Francis also met privately with al-Tayeb and held a public encounter with Bahrain’s Muslim Council of Elders, during which he stressed the importance of fraternal dialogue and getting to know one another.
“Increasingly we need to encounter one another, to get to know and to esteem one another, to put reality ahead of ideas and people ahead of opinions, openness to heaven ahead of differences on earth,” he said, telling the leaders that, “We need to put a future of fraternity ahead of a past of antagonism, overcoming historical prejudices and misunderstandings in the name of the One who is the source of peace.”
To this end, al-Tayeb also used the pope’s visit to propose a historic Shia-Sunni summit in his Nov. 4 closing speech for the Bahrain forum, calling on Muslim scholars across the world “of every doctrine, sect and school of thought to hold an Islamic dialogue, a dialogue around unity, cohesion and reproachment, a dialogue for Islamic fraternity, void of division, discord and, more especially, sectarian strife.”
Should such a meeting take place, al-Tayeb said it should focus on “commonalities and meeting points, with an understanding of differences.”
“Let us together chase away any talk of hate, provocation, and excommunication and set aside ancient and modern conflict in all its forms and with all its negative offshoots,” he said.
Senior scholars at Al-Azhar and the Muslim Council of Elders are ready to host a summit “with open hearts and extended hands, so we can sit down together on one roundtable to put aside our differences and strengthen our Islamic unity on positions which are known to be pragmatic and serve the goals of Islam and its law, which prohibits Muslims from giving in to calls for division and fragmentation,” he said.
Sunni and Shiite, which split in the 7th century and maintain different traditions in terms of religious practice, are the two major branches of Islam. In many places, there is tension between the two communities, and at times, these tensions have led to violent conflict in several countries throughout the Middle East.
Pope Francis’ own engagement with the Muslim world has largely been with Sunnis. However, his trip to Bahrain offered him the opportunity to further outreach to the Shia community.
Bahrain is 70% Muslim, with around two-thirds belonging to the Shia tradition and one-third, including the ruling Al Khalifa family, adhering to Sunni Islam.
Conflict between the two branches in Bahrain is well known and has led several human rights groups and advocates to accuse the ruling Sunni family of widespread discrimination against the Shia community, including a crackdown on dissent and arbitrary arrests, as well as the mistreatment of prisoners.
While in Bahrain, Pope Francis did not decry alleged human rights violations publicly, but he did urge authorities to strengthen their commitment to human rights by abolishing the death penalty and working to end religious discrimination.
In his opening speech, Pope Francis noted that Bahrain’s constitution bans discrimination based on “sex, origin, language, religion or creed” and insists that “freedom of conscience is absolute” and that “the state guarantees the inviolability of worship.”
These are commitments, he said, that “need constantly to be put into practice” to ensure that “religious freedom will be complete and not limited to freedom of worship” and that equal dignity and opportunities will be afforded to “each group and for every individual.”
Yet before all of these guarantees, he said, is “the right to life” and the need “to guarantee that right always, including for those being punished, whose lives should not be taken.”
Pope Francis made another appeal on behalf of prisoners in his final speech with bishops, clergy, and religious, saying prisoners bear the face of Jesus and that “the way in which these ‘least ones’ are treated is a measure of the dignity and the hope of a society.”
He also offered encouragement to Bahrain’s Catholic community, which numbers around 80,000 in a country of around 1.5 million, most of whom are expat workers from the Philippines and India.
Bahrain is home to the Arabian Gulf’s first Catholic church, which opened in the capital city of Manama in 1939, as well as its largest, the Our Lady of Arabia Cathedral, which opened last year in the town of Awali and was built on land gifted by His Majesty King Hamad.
Speaking during a Nov. 5 Mass with Catholics in Bahrain and those who traveled from neighboring countries, Pope Francis urged them to always act with love, especially amid difficult and even oppressive situations, as this is the only path to peace.
Conflict, disagreement, and oppression will always be present, he said in his homily, saying Jesus’s own response to these situations is to ask his disciples to “remain always, faithfully, in love, despite everything, even in the face of evil and our enemy.”
While a human reaction seeks revenge, Jesus shows a different and seemingly “unthinkable” way, which is to turn the other cheek.
“That is what the Lord asks of us,” he said. “Not to dream idealistically of a world of fraternity, but to choose, starting with ourselves, to practice universal fraternity, concretely and courageously, persevering in good even when evil is done to us, breaking the spiral of vengeance, disarming violence, demilitarizing the heart.”
What Martha Hennessey thinks her grandmother would like most about Staten Island’s newest ferry is, it’s free.
“I’m glad that it’s free because the working class does need all the help it can get commuting to work.”
After all, her grandmother, Dorothy Day, spent most of her life working with and advocating for the working class, poor and marginalized.
“She believed in the God-given dignity of us all and she saw Christ in the least among us and because of that work God willing Dorothy Day will someday be Saint Dorothy Day,” said New York City Department of Transportation’s Staten Island borough commissioner Roseann Caruana.
Dorothy Day is considered one of the most influential lay people in the history of American Catholicism. She was a journalist and radical convert who helped establish the Catholic Worker Movement during the height of the Great Depression. She spent years of her life on Staten Island and loved the nature that surrounded it, she said it’s where her conversion took place.
“She was very strongly moved by being close to nature, it brought her closer to God as well and so Staten Island does represent a beautiful part of her life,” said Hennessey.
“I think she would be proud that this is a free ferry and workers commute on it every day, she commuted on it and loved the beauty of the surroundings of Staten Island and it really helped her conversion to Catholicism,” said Catholic Worker Deborah Sucich.
And now the ferry bearing her name will transport thousands of working people a day from Staten Island to Manhattan. Many say the hope now is the ferry will bring day one step closer to canonization.
“I suppose every little bit helps to garner the name recognition,” Hennessey said.
“I really do think her name will be more spoken and people will look up who she is and be inspired by the radicalness of her devotion to the poor and to her faith,” said Sucich.
The Dorothy Day ferry will make its first official trip to Manhattan before the end of 2022.
PHOENIX (CNS) — Ahead of the Nov. 8 midterm elections, Arizona’s Catholic bishops alerted voters to “unapproved political efforts” they said are being carried out by a number of organizations and publications claiming to represent the Catholic Church on a variety of issues on the ballot.
In a joint statement released Oct. 31 by the Arizona Catholic Conference in Phoenix, the prelates said these entities are “calling themselves ‘catholic’” but they “do not represent the Catholic Church.”
They “cover various ends of the political spectrum and often engage in partisan political endeavors,” the statement added.
Canon 216 of the Code of Canon Law “stresses that no initiative can lay claim to the title ‘catholic’ without the consent of the competent ecclesiastical authority,” the bishops said. “The use of the name ‘catholic’ implies that the initiative in some way represents the Catholic Church.”
“Hence the competent authority — in most instances the local bishop — must give permission for any entity, endeavor or movement to call itself ‘catholic,’” they added. “Those who do so without permission are in violation of church teaching and law.”
“We must stress that the Catholic Church is always politically nonpartisan,” the bishops continued. “Moreover, it is worth recalling that the Catholic Church has a long tradition of our beliefs influencing our personal politics — not our personal politics trying to influence our faith. When we reverse those two, we place ourselves outside the tradition and teachings of the Catholic Church.”
The bishops pointed Catholics to a YouTube video with further reflections from them on the matter at https://bit.ly/3DqIjST.
The statement was signed by Bishop John P. Dolan of Phoenix; Bishop James S. Wall of Gallup, New Mexico, whose diocese includes a portion of Arizona; Bishop Edward J. Weisenburger of Tucson; and retired Bishop Thomas J. Olmsted of Phoenix, who is apostolic administrator of Holy Protection of Mary Byzantine Catholic Eparchy.
To help U.S. Catholics sort through ballot issues and their choices for public offices, the U.S. bishops offer guidance in their quadrennial election document, “Forming Consciences for Faithful Citizenship: A Call to Political Responsibility.”
It does not tell Catholics how to vote but how to “form their consciences, apply a consistent moral framework to issues facing the nation and world, and shape their choices in elections in the light of Catholic social teaching.”
The document has been offered as a guide to Catholic voters every presidential election year since 1976. It has been updated and revised at four-year intervals to reflect changes in the issues confronting the country since it first appeared.
A PDF of the document in English and Spanish is posted on the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops’ website at faithfulcitizenship.org, along with additional resources.
On the USCCB’s YouTube channel at bit.ly/31DHDGN are five videos in four languages — English, Spanish, Tagalog and Vietnamese — that explore various aspects of Catholic social teaching while reflecting the teaching of Pope Francis.
One example of bogus publications the Arizona bishops alerted Catholic voters about is the Arizona Catholic Tribune, which was the subject of a Nov. 1 story in the Green Valley News, a secular news outlet based in Green Valley, Arizona.
“The truth? It’s a fake newspaper,” said the headline. “‘Paper’ in your mailbox isn’t from Catholic Church.”
A reader alerted reporter Mary Glen Hatcher to the fake paper. Hatcher confirmed with the Phoenix Diocese that it was not an official Catholic publication.
The reader, Linda Houck, highlighted some headlines she said she found offensive: “One positions Sen. Mark Kelly next to the words ‘Most Unjust and Extreme … Ever Seen,” Hatcher wrote. “While another full-page spread seems to connect Arizona’s public school teachers with ‘child sexualization.’”
Houck told the Green Valley News that she was “just very offended by this paper” and that it would be sent to her “like they know who I am.”
“All I know is that people are going to believe what they’re reading,” she said, “and it’s very sad when people start believing stuff like this and don’t even question it — they might just think if the Catholic Church believes it, then it must be true.”
The Tribune paper in Arizona is reminiscent of a similarly named unofficial Catholic publication that was circulated during the general election in 2020, particularly in Wisconsin.
On Oct. 22, 2020, less than two weeks before Election Day, Catholics in the Diocese of Green Bay began receiving the Wisconsin Catholic Tribune, an eight-page broadsheet published and owned by Franklin Archer Publishing in Chicago.
Some months earlier, The Compass, Green Bay’s official diocesan newspaper, had published a report about the Tribune, which was not affiliated with any official Catholic entity.
The June 12, 2020, story, “Website uses Compass content in violation of copyright law,” revealed the Tribune was taking stories from The Compass and other diocesan newspaper websites and using them on its own website.
After the story was published, the Tribune stopped the practice and instead began using information from parish bulletins and websites. The paper also included a listing for contacts in each of Wisconsin’s five dioceses, with the names and email addresses of each diocesan bishop.
The list, under the heading of “Contact your local diocese,” gave the newspaper more credibility, said a Compass reader who alerted the diocesan newspaper to the Tribune hitting homes a couple weeks before the election that year.
The organ is the soundtrack to Connor Whalen’s life. He taught himself how to play the organ by ear when he was 9-years-old and played his first full mass at 12.
“I’ve watched videos and read some books and practiced, it’s not easy, ya know,” he said.
He started playing on Immaculate Heart of Mary Church’s old organ, and now, as the church’s organist and music director, he plays a brand new one that’s just his.
“It brought me much closer to God and I’m really happy that I’m able to play my part and help with the liturgy because having a pipe organ,” Connor said.
Immaculate Heart of Mary spent $350,000 on an Opus 765 Kilgen organ. Pastor, Father Ilyas Gill said it was worth every penny.
“Music is a major part of our liturgy and without music the mass becomes very dry and through music our liturgy becomes very alive and people rejoice over this,” said Fr. Gill.
But not many churches are willing or have that kind of money to spend. One of the many factors causing a nationwide organist shortage.
“It is a challenge especially for smaller parishes that are struggling just to keep the doors open to fund a professional musician to help lead the services,” said J.W. Arnold, the marketing and communications specialist for the American Guild of Organists.
The American Guild of Organists has seen its membership fluctuate over the years.
Right now there are 13,000 members. The Brooklyn chapter has 48 members – one decade ago there were 58.
“It’s something that’s alive and vibrant and there’s still a purpose for it and our mission is to educate and support our members but also educate our pastors, why should you spend money on a salary for an organist,” said Gary Di Franco, dean of the Brooklyn chapter.
But finances isn’t the only reason for dwindling numbers. The pandemic drove some organists away and a full return to parish life hasn’t yet happened. And Guild officials say as more parishes make a move toward more contemporary services, the organ is being played off.
But not for Connor. He says if anything will bring people back to mass, it’s his organ’s 1,429 pipes.
“It creates such a beautiful rich sound to fill the space of the church, as you walk into that church it brings people closer to God and it really uplifts people and it’s that kind of sound that makes people want to come back,” he said.
Connor said the solution to the shortage is more access and education.
“There’s not a lot of education around here, we need to have more training, include more programs especially for people who are very young,” he said.
Immaculate Heart of Mary’s organ setup is worth $1M but Fr. Gill says having a gifted organist, willing to pay and evangelize with music is priceless.