Monsignor Sean G. Ogle’s Homily from Tuesday’s Mass on 8/30/22
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CCBQ Mobilizes to Help Migrants Bused In By Texas Governor
By Bill Miller
BROOKLYN HEIGHTS — When the staff at Catholic Charities of Brooklyn and Queens came to work one recent morning, they found asylum seekers from South America sleeping on the sidewalk outside their downtown Brooklyn offices.
Msgr. Alfred LoPinto, CEO of CCBQ, said he remembers how these migrants from Venezuela and Colombia, many with children, arrived by the busloads from Texas after having crossed the U.S.-Mexico border.
The team at Catholic Charities of Brooklyn and Queens served an estimated 200 asylum seekers from Colombia and Venezuela on Monday, Aug. 29, during an information session at St. Charles Borromeo Church in Brooklyn Heights. The migrants also received food boxes (photo below), bags of toiletries, and a hot lunch. (Photos by Bill Miller)
“They came with letters telling them that, from now on, their new residence was 191 Joralemon Street,” Msgr. LoPinto said. “We had them camping out in front of the building. We were just blindsided by the whole thing.”
Still, CCBQ mobilized, first by providing boxes of food and bags of toiletries. They also hosted information sessions conducted by staff and volunteers who spoke fluent Spanish. Two such sessions were held for about 200 people on Aug. 29 at nearby St. Charles Borromeo Church in Brooklyn Heights.
Msgr. LoPinto greeted the attendees in the vestibule and directed them to the information sessions in the front pews. CCBQ also served them a hot meal of chicken, beans, and rice.
During a break, the CEO recounted how federal immigration officials in Texas apparently told the people to find specific addresses for Catholic Charities in New York City.
An estimated 9,000 migrants recently came by bus from Texas to Washington D.C. and New York City. Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, arguing his state was stretched to the limits with the influx of migrants at its borders, directed that they be sent to so-called “sanctuary cities,” like New York City.
However, Msgr. LoPinto said, Catholic Charities officials in the Archdiocese of New York and the Diocese of Brooklyn had no “heads up” that would have allowed them to get ready for the sudden mass arrivals of migrants.
“Who was expecting buses from Texas to drop people off in Times Square? But that’s what they were doing,” he said. “The sad part of it is, had they given notice ahead of time, we could have been more organized and had a much better opportunity to help. But now you just kind of roll with the punches.”
He pledged that CCBQ will continue efforts to help as long as there is money to do so.
“We weren’t prepared financially to take on this responsibility,” Msgr. LoPinto said. “Thank God the St. Vincent de Paul Society has been helping us put together an emergency fund for this effort. With some matching money and some donations from people, we’re at about $300,000.”
Msgr. LoPinto praised the staff, volunteers, and Father Bill Smith, pastor of St. Charles Borromeo, for their prompt response to quickly organize and get services rolling to the people.
“It would be impossible to do this without the parish volunteers,” Msgr. LoPinto said.
Msgr. Alfred LoPinto, CEO of CCBQ, and Richard Slizeski, CCBQ’s vice president for mission, describe challenges they’ve faced helping an unexpected influx of migrants from South America who were bussed to New York City from the border with Mexico. “We were blindsided,” Msgr. LoPinto said. (Photo: Bill Miller)
Richard Slizeski, Catholic Charities’ vice president for mission, said the team at the church is conducting information sessions that are especially welcoming.
“This was a nice addition here at St. Charles because it offers some fellowship,” Slizeski said. “To have this lunch, to serve them, gives a whole different feel to it.
“It has been a 30-plus hour bus ride up from Texas. They’re hungry. They’re confused, disoriented. It’s all terrible.”
Not to mention, added Msgr. LoPinto, the perilous journey the migrants took through South America, Central America, and Mexico.
At the St. Charles Borromeo information session, Alvanys Rondon, a woman from Venezuela, confirmed that the trek through the jungles of Panama was very harsh.
John Gonzalez, CCBQ director of parish and community relations, translated for Rondon, who said the jungle was a rough slog for her 10-year-old daughter. The family had to wade through foliage that tangled their legs and a near-constant quagmire of mud.
The family paused in Mexico for about a month because they had depleted their travel money, Rondon said. There, her husband worked a job long enough for them to get money to continue north.
But every step of the way, she said, the Catholic Church helped her family endure. She expressed deep gratitude for the help they’re now receiving from CCBQ.
“The word she used is bendecida,” Gonzalez said, “which means, ‘blessed.’ ”
John Gonzalez, CCBQ director of parish and community relations, translates for Alvanys Rondon of Venezuela, who describes how her family reached the U.S. for asylum, despite extreme hardships like slogging through dense foliage and mud in the jungles of Panama. (Photo: Bill Miller)
Three Men Robbed the Rectory of Saint Anastasia Church in Queens
Currents News Staff
The NYPD is searching for a group of men accused of burglarizing a Queens parish.
The robbery happened at Saint Anastasia church in Douglaston early Friday morning.
Officials say these three men pried open the church’s rear door and entered the rectory, where they removed a safe, credit cards and approximately $125 before taking off in a light-colored SUV.
Anyone with information is asked to call CrimeStoppers at 800-577-TIPS.
Why Naming Cardinals is the ‘Single Most Important Thing Any Pope Ever Does’
By John L. Allen Jr.
ROME (Crux) — On Saturday Pope Francis created 20 new cardinals, including 16 under the age of 80 and thus eligible to vote for the next pope. It was Pope Francis’ eighth consistory, and whenever we get a new crop of Princes of the Church, several chronic misconceptions tend to head once more into the breach.
Herewith are three conceptual mistakes to avoid in thinking about the men who wear the red.
It’s not about liberals v. conservatives
To begin with, there’s a natural tendency for Western handicappers to try to divide up the cardinals like they do everyone else, meaning in terms of where cardinals stand on the liberal/conservative divide.
This generally works fairly well for Americans and Europeans — it’s not wrong, for example — even if it’s a little reductive — to think that new Cardinal Robert McElroy of San Diego is to the left of the traditional center of gravity within the American bishops’ conference, or that new Cardinal Arthur Roche of the Vatican’s Dicastery for Divine Worship is more progressive than his predecessor, Cardinal Robert Sarah.
The left/right taxonomy tends to break down, however, once you exit Western airspace. Care to take a stab, for instance, at locating new Cardinal Anthony Poola, India’s first Dalit cardinal, on that spectrum? What about Cardinal Virgilio Carmo da Silva of East Timor?
It’s not just that we don’t know which side they are on — it’s that the left/right classification system often just doesn’t apply. Prelates from the developing world often can be quite traditional on doctrine, for instance, but extremely progressive on matters of social justice.
Moreover, their perspectives are informed mostly by their local situations. Presumably, new Cardinal Peter Okpaleke of Nigeria is far more concerned about corruption, sectarian violence and security, the issues that dominate his country right now, than transgender rights or the legal status of abortion, which define the left/right fault lines in America.
The bottom line is that Catholicism is a global faith, a fact increasingly reflected in the College of Cardinals in the Pope Francis era. As a result, we have to stop trying to analyze it in primarily Western terms.
They’re not Vatican experts
There’s also a natural tendency for outsiders to assume that if a guy’s a cardinal, he must know the ins and outs of the Vatican. That’s just not so — in fact, most of these cardinals would be the first to admit that the corridors of power in Rome are every bit as much terra incognita to them as the tundra of the Arctic or the isolated islands of the Pacific.
I’d be willing to bet, for example, that of the 16 new cardinal-electors named yesterday, only two of them likely could name more than, say, three of the 10 defendants currently facing trial in the Vatican for alleged financial crimes.
I’m presuming most could correctly identify Italian Cardinal Angelo Becciu, especially since he’s on the guest list for the cardinals’ get-together — thanks to Pope Francis — despite the fact his privileges were stripped in 2020. But after that, I’d guess none could pick Raffaele Mincione or Gianluigi Torzi out of a lineup, the two lay Italian financiers accused of swindling the Vatican, possibly save for Roche and Cardinal Fernando Vérgez, both of whom work in the Vatican.
Based on 25 years of experience interviewing cardinals, I can testify that the usual dynamic is that we spend some time on the record with me asking the questions and then another few minutes with the recorder switched off while they pose queries about what in the world is going on in Rome. Anybody who covers the Vatican probably has had similar experiences.
This long-standing reality today is compounded by the fact that Pope Francis has named so many cardinals from the world’s peripheries who not only don’t work in the Vatican, but who’ve spent precious little time in Rome over the years. Half the time, the waiter serving them dinner in a Roman trattoria probably could speak more knowledgeably about Vatican power games than they could.
Of course, if you’re a rank-and-file Catholic out there with a concern about the Vatican, there’s nothing wrong with expressing it to your cardinal — they are, after all, supposed to be the pope’s closest advisors. Just don’t necessarily expect him to know any more about what’s actually going on than you do.
They’re not BFFs
Speaking of natural but mistaken assumptions about cardinals, there’s also a tendency to assume that because it’s such a small club — as of yesterday’s consistory, 226 cardinals in all, of whom 132 are electors — they must all be tight.
Yet when Crux recently asked one of the new inductees how many of the world’s cardinals he knew personally, the answer was revealing: “About seven.”
While that reply may be on the low end of the average, it’s nevertheless true that many of today’s cardinals are effectively strangers to one another. Given Pope Francis’ penchant for distributing red hats to improbable locales, that’s the most natural thing in the world — after all, what are the odds, really, that the cardinal of Ekwulobia in Nigeria would be the BFF of his colleague in, say, Singapore or Mongolia?
In fact, many observers assume that the real purpose of the two-day gathering of cardinals that begins Monday isn’t so much to discuss Vatican reform, which is the ostensible motive — after all, as noted above, most of these cardinals don’t know much about the Vatican, and two days is hardly enough to give them a meaningful crash course.
What the session will accomplish, however, is to afford them a chance at least to meet one another and to form some fleeting sense of one another’s concerns and experiences.
All this can’t help but have an impact on electing a pope, whenever that moment may come.
I recall that in 2005, one cardinal who took part in the conclave had a thick briefing book on various reputed papabili, or candidates, which he studied on the flight to Rome, later explaining that he felt compelled to do so because he really didn’t know much about most of them. (In the end, that conclave ended up selecting Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, whom pretty much everyone knew, but no one could be sure of that outcome going in.)
This unfamiliarity has been compounded under Pope Francis, which means that a great deal of what will have to happen the next time the cardinals gather for an election isn’t so much campaigning as introductions.
Perhaps the moral of this story can be summed up as follows.
When you look upon a cardinal, try to moderate your expectations. Yes, they hold the highest office in the church short of the papacy itself — but that doesn’t make them experts on everything, including, frankly, a lot of the stuff you’d really love to know.
Catholic News Headlines for Monday, 08/29/22
Pope Francis created 20 new cardinals over the weekend.
The Holy Father defied rumors that he would announce his resignation during a visit to the tomb of the last pope to voluntarily resign before Benedict.
Catholics in Brooklyn lined up to form a human chain to pray for peace in Ukraine.
Pope Francis Prays Before the Tomb of Pope Celestine V, the First Pope to Resign
Pope Francis knocked three times with a stick made of olive wood to open the holy door of the Basilica of Santa Maria di Collemaggio in L’Aquila.
He is the first pope to open the door since Pope Celestine V, 728 years ago.
The Pope then prayed before the tomb of Pope Celestine V, the first pope to resign, in the Basilica of Santa Maria di Collemaggio in L’Aquila.
Pope Celestine V was a Benedictine monk who was crowned pope in that same cathedral in 1294.
The 20 New Cardinals Greet Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI Together With Pope Francis
At the end of the Consistory, the twenty new cardinals, together with Pope Francis, went to greet Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI.
Presenting the new cardinals to Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI is a custom that Pope Francis started and continues to do whenever he makes new cardinals.
Pope Francis to 20 New Cardinals—Jesus Asks You: ‘Can I Count On You?’
Currents News Staff
In a ceremony in St. Peter’s Basilica, Pope Francis welcomed 20 new men into the College of Cardinals.
Cardinal Arthur Roche, Prefect of the Dicastery for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments, greeted the Pope on behalf of all the new cardinals. He spoke about their new mission of helping Pope Francis carry the cross of responsibility for the Church.
“With great joy, we wish to walk at your side knowing that you have been entrusted with the keys of the Kingdom. It is with gratitude and trepidation, therefore, Holy Father, that we offer you our profound respect and our obedience and, should the Lord wish it, even to the shedding of our blood,” said Cardinal Arthur Roche.
During his homily, the Pope reflected on the dual image of fire in the Gospels. He encouraged the newly appointed cardinals to be animated by the fire of the Holy Spirit to fulfill their mission within the Church.
“Jesus also wants to cast this fire on the earth today; he wants to light it again on the shores of our daily stories. He calls us, each of us, by name. We are not numbers. He calls us by name. He looks into our eyes each one of us, let us look into our eyes and he asks: tell me, you, new cardinals and you, brother cardinals: can I count on you? That is the Lord’s question,” said the Holy Father.
Pope Francis reminded the 20 men to keep their gaze on Christ to help them in their humble service to families, migrants, and the poor.
Each of the new cardinals knelt before the Pope to receive the zucchetto, berretta, and ring as signs of their pastoral ties to the Church. Pope Francis then greeted each cardinal with an embrace of peace.
Catholic News Headlines for Friday, 08/26/22
Pope Francis will create 20 new Cardinals tomorrow.
As busloads of migrants continue to arrive in the Big Apple from the southern border, the city has started placing them in hotels.
A Staten Island priest’s road to sainthood has hit a speed bump.
Homilies in Your Home: Matthew 25:1-13
Monsignor Sean G. Ogle’s Homily from Friday’s Mass on 8/26/22