Pope Francis – in the middle of his eastern European trip – highlighting the importance of the cross during a Mass in Slovakia.
Tuesday morning saw the National Catholic Prayer Breakfast in Washington, D.C.
It’s been nearly two weeks since the remnants of hurricane Ida washed over New York City.
Currents News Staff
Music played as Pope Francis arrived in the largest neighborhood for the Roma ethnic community in Europe.
Some 350-thousand Roma people, commonly referred to as gypsies, live in Slovakia – many in poverty and often isolated from others.
The Holy Father called for integration and condemned the discrimination they face.
Earlier Pope Francis celebrated the Feast of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross – one of the most significant feast days in the Byzantine Rite.
During his homily he urged the faithful not to reduce the cross to an object of devotion or a political symbol, but to embrace its real meaning.
“Crucifixes are found all around us: on necks, in homes, in cars, in pockets. What good is this, unless we stop to look at the crucified Jesus and open our hearts to him, unless we let ourselves be struck by the wounds he bears for our sake,” said the Pope.
By Inés San Martín
KOŠICE, Slovakia (Crux) — Speaking at the largest Roma impoverished community in Europe, Pope Francis said they are not in the margins of the Catholic Church, but at its center, and that they should be at the center of society too, integrated and not hidden from view.
“All too often you have been the object of prejudice and harsh judgments, discriminatory stereotypes, defamatory words, and gestures,” Pope Francis said. “As a result, we are all poorer, poorer in humanity. Restoring dignity means passing from prejudice to dialogue, from introspection to integration.”
Often dubbed the pope of the peripheries, Pope Francis has made a point of visiting those who are on the margins of society during his trips outside of Italy, and on Tuesday he visited the Luník IX district, a neighborhood built in the 1970s to house some 2,500 people, most of them military and police. Today, twice as many people live here, virtually all of them from the Roma community, commonly known as gypsies. Many two-bedroom apartments are shared by intergenerational families with little or no access to natural light and basic services such as running water, gas, and electricity.
Luník IX is only 15 minutes away from the center of Košice, the country’s second largest city, but it seems like an ocean away from the majestic St Elizabeth Cathedral, or the city center’s historic buildings and romantic streets.
Though technically addressing the Roma community, Pope Francis was also talking to the entire country, as the community of some 500,000 Roma living in Slovakia often face discrimination due to long-rooted stereotypes of them being scam artists, lazy and uneducated.
According to the pontiff, where there is a concern for the human person, patience and concrete efforts to foster integration, these efforts will bear fruit, even if not immediately.
“Judgement and prejudice only increase distances,” Pope Francis said. “Hostility and sharp words are not helpful. Marginalizing others accomplishes nothing. Segregating ourselves and other people eventually leads to anger. The path to peaceful coexistence is integration: An organic, gradual and vital process that starts with coming to know one another, then patiently grows, keeping its gaze fixed on the future.”
The future, he said, is the children, because the future belongs to them, and they should be the ones guiding the decisions made by the adult population: “Their great dreams must not collide with barriers that we have erected. Our children want to grow together with others, without encountering obstacles and exclusion. They deserve a well-integrated and free life. They are the ones who should motivate us to make far-sighted decisions based not on hasty consensus, but on concern for our common future.”
This integration is still far down in the future for the Roma in Slovakia: Statistics show that over 90% of the adult population living in this district are unemployed, and most of the children don’t go to the one school available to them in the neighborhood.
Pope Francis also thanked the many volunteers who are engaged in the process of integration, because it requires great effort but often encounters misunderstandings and ingratitude, “even within the Church.”
The state, NGOs, and security forces have all abandoned Luník IX, with the Catholic Church — with the help of the Salesian missionaries — being the only institution that has been willing to stay long enough to break the barrier of mistrust that the Roma often have when it comes to outsiders.
The impoverished community is plagued by loan sharks, fights between clans, racism, and degrading living conditions in dilapidated buildings that lack heating in a city that easily reaches freezing temperatures all winter.
“Holy Father, we believe that your presence in this place contributes to all of us achieving a greater unity despite the diversity and we walk on the road to a more peaceful coexistence, through mutual esteem, reconciliation, and forgiveness,” said Salesian Father Peter Bešenyei, director of the center the order has in the neighborhood.
Pope Francis thanked the priest for the order’s work, and urged them to persevere in the path they’ve undertaken, even if it might not “yield immediate results, but is nonetheless prophetic, for it embraces the least of our brothers and sisters.”
“Do not be afraid to go out to encounter the marginalized,” he said. “You will find that you are going out to meet Jesus. He awaits you wherever there is need, not comfort; wherever service rules, not power; wherever incarnation, not self-indulgence, is required. Those are the places where he will be found. I ask all of you to overcome your fears and to leave behind past injuries, confidently, step by step: in honest work, in the dignity born of earning our daily bread, in fostering mutual trust, and in praying for one another.”
Slovak Salesian Father Marian Deahos told journalists that he’s uncertain about just how much the Roma will actually embrace the pope’s call for integration but agreed that both they and the rest of the country need to hear it.
“Many in this country have extreme-right views, many are racist, and it’s important that he calls us to be open,” he said minutes before the pope’s arrival.
“They have their images of Mary and Jesus in their homes, but it’s difficult for us to help them understand the importance of the Eucharist,” Father Deahos acknowledged.
By Emily Drooby and Paula Katinas
WOODSIDE — When Father Christopher O’Connor hears that the weather forecast calls for rain, he says to himself, “Oh, no!”
One can’t blame him for that reaction, especially after what he and his parishioners at St. Mary’s Winfield Church went through on Sept. 1 when the remnants of Hurricane Ida caused a rainstorm so severe, it flooded the lower church, destroyed the parish Adoration Chapel and a faith formation classroom and drowned church pews in 10 feet of water.
The painstaking work of repairing and rebuilding the lower church is expected to cost more than $1 million.
Insurance will cover the costs but that doesn’t mean the headaches are over for Father O’Connor, the church’s pastor. His days are filled with meetings with insurance adjusters, contractors, and representatives from Catholic Charities Brooklyn and Queens. “As pastor, I’m the one responsible for everything overall,” he said.
The cleanup is still going on — more than a week after the storm. “Ninety-nine percent of the water is out. There still is a little bit of water because it’s seeping out from the walls,” Father O’Connor said.
The chapel walls had to be torn down. The demolition work started on Sept. 8.
“That was hard. I think that was the first time I got a little emotional,” Father O’Connor admitted. “I try to be on an even keel. But when I went to the chapel and they were tearing down the walls, it was hard because we just opened it in February. A lot of time and effort went into it. And prayer.”
The Adoration Chapel had opened Feb. 1 — exactly seven months to the day before the storm.
The parish is determined to rebuild the lower church and the chapel, as well as the faith formation classroom, which was used by Confirmation students.
“The contractor who built the classroom and the chapel is coming back. He already knows he’s doing it again,” Father O’Connor said.
The first step is to complete the massive post-storm cleanup. Among other tasks, workers will have to make sure all of the moisture is out so that mold doesn’t get a chance to set in. The boiler is probably salvageable, he said. Electrical switches and outlets will be replaced.
“I’m a fixer by nature, so I just plan. Some instruction has been given to every contractor on what we need to go forward. A lot of the work was new, so it’s really just replacing what we just did,” Father O’Connor said.
The storm has left scars in the form of terrifying memories. The water was so powerful, it literally knocked down a brick wall underneath a staircase leading to the lower church. The street outside the church, 48th Avenue, became a river, lifting cars up and carrying them with the current. At one point, the NYPD sent in a diver to check the cars to make sure no one was inside.
Parishioners have offered help in the form of manpower and monetary donations. Father O’Connor, in turn, is concerned about them.
“Some of our parishioners are homeless right now. Their basement apartments were flooded. I know of at least three families that are looking for a place and there may be a fourth,” he said.
Catholic Charities is working with the displaced families. And Father O’Connor has been calling real estate agents.
Father O’Connor is confident the church will be able to rebuild. “Jesus will help us,” he said.
A massive cleanup is also taking place at other churches and schools in the diocese.
St. Bartholomew Church, Elmhurst, sustained flooding to its chapel as well as to the rectory.
The gymnasium at St. Bartholomew Catholic Academy was flooded, according to Principal Denise Gonzalez.
“The gym floor is still wet,” she said on Sept. 13, nearly two weeks after the storm. “We have to air it out to prevent mols”
Gonzalez said repairs can begin once all the moisture is out of the gym.
Father Rick Beuther, pastor of St. Bartholomew, was on the phone with officials from the diocese on the night of the storm, Gonzalez said. “Father Rick was great. He called the diocese and the insurance company came right away to take pictures,” she said.
Congresswoman Grace Meng, who represents Elmhurst, visited the church and the academy Monday morning to get a first-hand look at the cleanup.
Meng also visited with an eighth-grade class.
“She explained FEMA to them and how it works,” Gonzalez said, referring to the Federal Emergency Management Agency.
They’re fundraising for anything not covered by insurance. Donations can be made on their give central account here: GiveCentral which can also be found on their main website: www.stmarysofwinfield.com
By Currents News Staff
Afghan writer Ali Ehsani reached out to Pope Francis in August, asking for his help in getting a Christian family hiding in Kabul on a flight our of the country. The Holy Father was moved by their story, and sent Ehsani a message, while mobilizing Vatican diplomats to help the family in need.
“I told them that the Pope was praying for them,” Ali said, “that he was thinking of them during that time, and that they should remain calm. They said: “Let’s hope they will be able to save us.” In the end, they managed to make it to Italy.”
By mid-August, the Vatican acted with other institutions to get them out of Kabul. The Italian military took them to Rome, where they are now being cared for by the “Meet Human” foundation.
EU politician, Silvia Costa, was a vocal advocate for their evacuation. On Twitter, she announced their safe arrival in Italy. One of the family members that appears in her photo wanted to give Pope Francis the shirt he wore when he escaped from the Taliban and began his new life.
“This is a typical clothing item in Afghanistan that a young Afghan boy was wearing when he fled the country and arrived here in Italy,” Ali said. “In those four to five days in which they were fleeing, he always wore this shirt. He even had it on at the Kabul airport, where the picture was taken.”
The Holy Father deeply appreciated the gift from a family targeted for refusing to renounce their Christian faith.
Pope Francis is in Slovakia. Yesterday, the Holy Father was in Budapest. He referenced a growing anti-immigrant sentiment happening in countries like these.
Members of the NYPD gathered at Mass at Our Lady of Guadalupe Church in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn to remember the lives lost on September 11.
It’s back to school for one million public school students here in New York City and the day got off to a shaky start.
Despite the challenges of the pandemic, one priest in the Diocese of Brooklyn opened up a food pantry to help the needy and now, Father Dwayne Davis is being recognized as a COVID-19 hero.
By Currents News Staff and Inés San Martín
BRATISLAVA (Crux) — Speaking to civil authorities in Slovakia, a country that for decades was under one-party Communist rule, Pope Francis warned against the “single-thought” system of consumerism and ideological colonization.
“In these lands, until just a few decades ago, a single-thought system stifled freedom,” Pope Francis said on Sept. 13. “Today another single thought-system is emptying freedom of meaning, reducing progress to profit and rights only to individual needs.
Today, as then, the salt of the faith acts not by reacting in worldly terms, by engaging in culture wars, but by quietly and humbly sowing the seeds of God’s kingdom, especially by the witness of charity.”
The pontiff also said that it’s his hope that Slovaks won’t allow the rich “flavors of your finest traditions” to be ruined by the “superficiality of consumerism and material gain. Or by forms of ideological colonization.”
Though he didn’t go into specifics, Pope Francis has often used the term “ideological colonization” to refer to issues pertaining to the family and life, including abortion and euthanasia.
The pontiff’s words came Monday after a private meeting with President Zuzana Čaputová, a 48-year-old mother of two who became the youngest president in the history of Slovakia in 2019.
During his remarks to civil authorities and the diplomatic corps, Pope Francis made a point of supporting the European Union as nationalistic sentiments fueled by populist leaders grow, particularly in the countries of the Visegrád group — Hungary, Slovakia, Czech Republic, and Poland.
Čaputová is an exception, and in her remarks she warned against populism, national selfishness, fundamentalism and fanaticism, and the exploitation of religion for political objectives.
The leader of a nation that is at the heart of Europe, surrounded by countries such as Poland and Hungary that often resort to pro-Christian messages to ban Muslim refugees from the Middle East, she underlined that any form of anti-Semitism and religious intolerance is irreconcilable with Christianity.
In his remarks, Pope Francis said fraternity is necessary for the “increasingly pressing process of integration.”
“All the more so, in these days when, after long and trying months of pandemic, fully conscious of the difficulties to be faced, we look forward with hope to an economic upturn favored by the recovery plans of the European Union,” he said.
However, the pontiff added, this cannot mean succumbing to impatience and the lure of profit.
Economic recovery, he argued, is not in itself sufficient in a world that is currently itself “a crossroads, in which all are interconnected.”
The pontiff said Slovakia is called to be “a message of peace in the heart of Europe,” particularly as “battles for supremacy are waged on various fronts.”
“May this country reaffirm its message of integration and peace,” he said. “And may Europe be distinguished by a solidarity that, by transcending borders, can bring it back to the center of history.”
To the Catholic hierarchy: The center of the Church is not the Church
After his meeting with the country’s civil authorities, he addressed Slovakia’s Catholic leaders.
“Living within the world means being willing to share and to understand people’s problems, hopes and expectations,” he said during a meeting with the bishops, priests, and religious men and women in Bratislava’s Cathedral of St. Martin. “This will help us to escape from our self-absorption, for the center of the Church is not the Church!”
He urged those present to leave behind the “undue concern for ourselves, for our structures, for what society thinks about us,” and instead become immersed in the lives of peoples and try to address their spiritual needs and expectations.
Answering his own question as to what people expected, he said freedom, creativity, and dialogue.
Freedom, Pope Francis said, is the key to humanity, as human beings were created free, and as Slovakia learned during the years of Communist rule, whenever freedom is attacked, violated, or suppressed, humanity is disfigured and violence, coercion and the elimination of rights follows.
The Church too can fall into this temptation, believing it’s “better to have everything readily defined, laws to be obeyed, security and uniformity, rather than to be responsible Christians and adults who think, consult their conscience and allow themselves to be challenged.”
“A Church that has no room for the adventure of freedom, even in the spiritual life, risks becoming rigid and self-enclosed,” he said. “Some people may be used to this. But many others — especially the younger generations — are not attracted by a faith that leaves them no interior freedom, by a Church in which all are supposed to think alike and blindly obey.”
Speaking about creativity, Pope Francis argued that faced with the loss of the sense of God and of the joy of faith, it is useless to complain and “hide behind a defensive Catholicism, to judge and blame the world. We need the creativity of the Gospel.”
Lastly, speaking about dialogue, he said that a Church that forms the faithful in interior freedom and responsibility is able to be creative by tapping into their history and culture, capable of engaging in dialogue with the world: “Those who confess Christ without being ‘ours,’ with those who are struggling with religion, and even with those who are not believers.”
Later in the day, Pope Francis was scheduled to meet with representatives of Slovakia’s Jewish community and pay a visit to the Bethlehem center, run by the Missionaries of Charity, the religious order founded by Mother Teresa of Calcutta.
Currents News Staff
Pope Francis was greeted with cheers from the crowd and a welcome from Archbishop Stanislav Volensky, the president of the Slovak bishops’ conference, as he walked into the Cathedral of St. Martin to meet with clergy and other religious leaders.
The Holy Father began his speech expressing his desire to walk with the church in Slovakia.
“The Church is not a fortress, a stronghold, a lofty castle, self-sufficient and looking out upon the world below,” Pope Francis said.
Pope Francis encouraged freedom, creativity and dialogue to keep the church from becoming self-absorbed. He even gave the clergy some practical advice to keep their homilies to 10 minutes.
“A professor I had would say that a homily should have internal coherence: an idea, an image and an emotional effect, so that people go home with an idea, an image and something that moved their heart,” the pontiff said.
By Jessica Easthope
Father Dwayne Davis looks at a glass door full of pictures that’s become known as the “wall of fame” at St. Thomas Aquinas Church in Flatlands, Brooklyn.
In the pictures are the more than 60 volunteers who helped out at the parish food pantry during the height of the pandemic.
“In a real sense that wall of fame is part of our parish history, when we tell our COVID story that’s definitely going to be a part of it,” said Father Davis.
He says he wouldn’t be a COVID-19 hero without all those people, that’s what his new award says. He was given it by Brooklyn Borough President and democratic Mayoral candidate Eric Adams.
From April to August of 2020, St. Thomas Aquinas opened a food pantry that quickly became a massive operation. It was the first parish pantry to have a drive-up option. And in that time, it fed more than 69,000 families.
“People were struggling trying to make ends meet,” he said. “Some people had money to pay the rent but not get food and for us to be able to help them in that way was a great joy.”
Father Davis says the food pantry’s reach will forever be part of parish history, but more than that it’s part of its legacy.
By Jessica Easthope
Members of the NYPD gathered over the weekend to remember the lives lost on September 11, 2001. 23 officers died that day, but many more have died since due to 9/11 related illnesses.
NYPD Chaplain Monsignor Robert Romano recognized them during mass at Our Lady of Guadalupe church in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn.
Family members of officers killed in the terrorist attacks sat with department officials who recognized their service and sacrifice.
“When we say we never forget we really mean it and this is part of that continuance where we get together, we honor those who have fallen, we honor their sacrifice and we keep their memory alive,” said NYPD Commissioner Dermot Shea.
“9/11 is still a part of us, I buried a police officer only last week, he died of 9/11 disease and we have several other people in the hospital, who are battling 9/11 diseases every day,” said Monsignor Robert Romano the NYPD’s Assistant Chief Chaplain.
More than 200 NYPD officers have died of 9/11 related illnesses.