By Katie Vasquez
New York State is facing a major pro-life loss – the abortion capital of the country recently voted to enshrine the procedure into the state’s constitution.
More than 60 percent of voters in New York said yes to Proposition 1, but pro-lifers in the city are continuing the fight, saying their defense of the unborn won’t be deterred. Witness For Life, a group that advocates for the unborn, was outside a Planned Parenthood in Brooklyn on November 9.
By Currents News
A Coney Island bagel store that’s filling a hole in the market by employing formerly homeless veterans is officially open.
When you walk into Cyclone Bagels on Surf Avenue in Brooklyn, New York, Army veteran Anthony Jackson is at the register.
He and other vets make up 50% of the business’s workforce. When he returned home from Vietnam, Anthony struggled with substance abuse and some health issues. But then Cyclone Bagels helped him get his act together, and now his job means everything.
“It did save my life,” he tells Currents News.
Cyclone Bagels is open 7 days a week from 7 am to 3 pm.
Excitement is growing in the Diocese of Brooklyn for the 2025 Jubilee. The year-long celebration in Rome begins in just over a month, and nearly 140 parishioners from Brooklyn and Queens will be packing their bags to attend.
After five years of silence, the iconic bells at Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris are ringing out for the first time since the 2019 fire.
A new Brooklyn bakery, Cyclone Bagels, is serving up fresh treats while offering jobs to formerly homeless veterans.
A World War II hero’s Purple Heart, missing for over 30 years, was found 15,000 miles from his New Jersey home just days before Veterans Day.
By Katie Vasquez
Right now Peter’s Way Tours is busy planning their most important trip for 2025.
“We started almost a year ago on booking pilgrimages for the Jubilee,” Peter Bahou, founder and president of Peter’s Way Tours, tells Currents News. “The Jubilee is once every 25 years.”
In preparation for the momentous occasion, Peter’s Way has nearly 140 people in the Diocese of Brooklyn planning to head to Rome for the Jubilee year. It’s a time when people of faith are encouraged to embark on pilgrimages, repent their sins, and focus on their spiritual life.
“It’s a time of conversion. It’s a time of getting closer to the Lord,” Father Robert Adamo, pastor of St Ephrem Church in Brooklyn, explains. His parishioners in Dyker Heights are excited to fly to Rome next year. Fr. Adamo will be taking nearly two dozen parishioners, and the anticipation is already building.
“[They’re] taking the brochures, they’re reading about it, [about] the different places we’re going,” says Fr. Adamo, “So, yes, there is a lot of enthusiasm and a lot of excitement about it.”
While there are a multitude of events for everyone in the church including clergy, young people, armed forces, artists and so much more, St Ephrem is choosing to go during Lent, a time when Fr. Adamo believes people are seeking a connection with Christ.
“It is a time when people generally feel it is a time they want to do more spiritually,” he explains.
Bahou, founder of Peter’s Way Tours, says the thousands of other pilgrims traveling across the globe to Rome have made the planning difficult. “We are doing very well for the Jubilee. However,” he notes, “we received many other requests which we cannot accommodate. Hotels, especially during the peak season in Rome, are taken, sold out. But it’s going to be a tremendous year for the Jubilee” nonetheless, he believes.
Fr. Adamo says the trip is well worth it for the rewards they’ll receive: “If we do reconciliation and prayer and going through the Holy doors, there’s indulgences… spiritual gifts that we gain in this time of Jubilee.”
Immaculate Conception Church in Astoria, Queens is also planning to send a group in June, 2025, and 80 young people from the Diocese of Brooklyn will head to Rome in July.
If you would like to join one of the groups going to Rome, head to https://www.petersway.com/.
By Katie Vasquez
For five years Father Andrew Dutko has served in the Diocese of Paterson, New Jersey. But, he says once upon a time he was on a different path of service.
Throughout most of his adult life Fr. Andrew was in the Marine Corps. He later met the love of his life when he went back to school for mathematics.
“It took me several months, but I finally wore her down and she agreed to go on a date with me,” he tells Currents News of his wife Barbara. They were married for nine years before the unspeakable happened.
“We went to bed on December 26th, I woke up” he recalls. Barbara, however, did not.
Fr. Andrew’s grief turned into anger at God. In his sadness, he went to work as a military contractor in Afghanistan and stopped attending Mass for a month.
“I was walking around in the middle of the night shouting the rosary, just just hoping that someone would kill me,” he explains. This was until an encounter with a Navy chaplain helped Fr. Andrew realize his calling.
“I realized that God was the only thing I still found valuable, so I couldn’t throw him out of my life,” he says. Now, Fr. Andrew is hoping to combine both his lives of service as he prepares to become a Navy chaplain himself.
The New Jersey priest wants to be there for the men and women who serve this country, especially when considering that as of 2021, 17 veterans and active military committed suicide per day in the U.S.
He asks, “Could just by me walking around the ship like and bringing Jesus to them, just in conversation, could that have made a difference?”
While he asks this question, knows with certainty that he has a guardian angel helping him along the way.
“I’m trying to live like the person she fell in love with,” he says when reflecting on the memories he has of his wife. “But this is just one more step in fulfilling that, making her proud from heaven.”
Fr. Andrew heads off for training on January 12, 2025, and expects to be offering pastoral care to military members by the spring.
His service comes at a crucial time – the U.S. military is in dire need of chaplains. The Archdiocese for the Military Services U.S.A. says that while 25% of the U.S. Armed Forces are Catholic, Catholic priests only make up 7% of chaplains.
Currently, just 196 priests are providing pastoral care for 300,00 men and women in uniform. The Archdiocese says this gap has been growing since aging priests are retiring faster than they can be replaced.
Nearly 140 pilgrims from the Diocese of Brooklyn are preparing for a journey of faith to Rome for the 2025 Jubilee Year, an event that occurs once every 25 years.
The Jubilee is a time for Catholics to embark on pilgrimages, seek repentance, and renew their spiritual lives.
Lent, a period of reflection and preparation in the Catholic Church, was chosen intentionally for the pilgrimage.
The 2025 Jubilee promises to be a meaningful time of spiritual renewal for thousands of pilgrims worldwide.
On Election Day, Proposition 1 legalized abortion on demand in New York, prompting Bishop Robert Brennan to offer guidance on how Catholics can protect life moving forward.
Bishop Brennan was also in Douglaston, Queens, on the morning of November 7 to celebrate a special Mass for deceased bishops, priests, and deacons at the Immaculate Conception Center.
November marks Black Catholic History Month, and St. Thomas Aquinas Church in Brooklyn is celebrating with a praise concert to honor black Catholic culture and support a youth mission trip.
Young people in the Diocese of Brooklyn are dedicating themselves to service. We have the story of a St. John’s University student who spends her free time volunteering at Zion Tabernacle Church’s food pantry in Ozone Park, Queens.
by Katie Vasquez
One day a week, you will likely find Julia Goncalves in the office of Holy Family Church in Fresh Meadows where she is also a parishioner.
“I think my work strengthened my faith because I’m here interacting with the parishioners and I get to see the church in action. It fortifies that bond that I have here with Holy family,” said Goncalves.
But her day doesn’t end here, the St John’s University student heads to the Jamaica campus.
Catching up on school work as a government and politics major with a minor in French.
Although this is her second year, the Queens resident came in with enough college credits from Archbishop Molloy high school that she is technically a junior.
When doing her college search, the Catholic college always came up as her number one choice.
“At the end of the day, it was St John’s that kind of won out. All my family had gone there and I knew of the great opportunities. I knew how the staff was going to be very helpful,” said Goncalves.
St John’s has a focus on the Vincentian mission of giving back so Julia started volunteering at Zion Tabernacle Church food pantry in Ozone Park her first year and continued coming back.
“You know that you helped people and you get to see all of them, too,” said Goncalves, “I guess it’s more about the corporal works of mercy. it’s a very physical giving back.”
And she believes these experiences will give her a global perspective that will help after she graduates.
“I’d love for my future work to be giving back and to be leaving things better than I found it. Hopefully this job does it a little bit, but in the future I’d love for my profession with government and politics to emanate that,” said Goncalves.
The 19 year old plans to study abroad and complete internships as she wraps up the next two years.
By Michael Rizzo and Currents News
Misinformation, disinformation, fake news. It’s around us 24/7 on social media, and bombards us in all forms of media. It’s a big topic in my journalism courses at St. John’s University, where I teach my
students how to avoid it: Verify everything, provide balance in your stories, and be unbiased in your reporting.
But the news consumer in me also sees how disinformation is widening that dark hole that leads us down factually incorrect paths. It’s especially important this election. How can we know what to choose if we’re lied to about the facts?
Combatting it with calls to change the First Amendment is fraught with danger. Once you start curtailing more freedoms of expression, you run the risk that other Constitutional protections, like freedom of religion, could be next. Perhaps the embrace we need to make is with something intangible but powerful: our faith.
First, we need to have faith in what is right. Good journalism tells facts with context, offers multiple perspectives, and does not advocate but informs. Bad journalism and deliberately false reporting
are the opposite.
Armed with that faith, it also takes action. Perhaps it means sacrificing our presence on a website encouraging disinformation. It is better to discard these small parts of our lives than run the risk
of potentially malevolent results.
It means supporting news organizations that embody the ethics of good journalism and tell stories other news outlets don’t report. The Tablet tells stories that the secular media ignores and speaks to people with views that other outlets don’t include.
Reading and supporting this publication are tangible ways to show your faith in good journalism. Consider removing yourself from that news silo of just one perspective over and over. Try out other news outlets to see their reporting on your community. When you find the ones that tell those stories properly, add them to your action list of who to follow.
In 2018, Pope Francis described journalists as “protectors of news” and said that “ensuring the accuracy of sources and protecting communication are real means of promoting goodness, generating trust, and opening the way to communion and peace.” Let’s stand with these protectors to promote understanding, correct information, and reporting in which we can believe.
Michael Rizzo is an associate professor and director of the journalism program at St. John’s University. You can find more of his writing and insights at thetablet.org.
By Currents News
According to political analyst Ryan Burge of Eastern Illinois University, the fact that the 2024 U.S. presidential election was largely over by midnight on November 6 night is indicative that the race for the White House between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris wasn’t even close.
The associate professor of political science tells Currents News that this election season President-Elect Donald Trump seems to have made inroads with basically every single group of voters.
Burge, who also conducts polls on the interaction between religion and politics, says Catholics had a big say in the election outcome: “White Catholics are becoming, every election cycle, an increasingly stronger GOP voting block.” Not only this, he explains, “but one thing we’re seeing is the Hispanic vote mattered a whole lot and I think Hispanic Catholics were a huge part of that.”
Despite Puerto Rico being disparaged at a Madison Square Garden Trump rally, Hispanics helped carry the former president to victory once again.
According to CNN exit poll results, 56%t of catholic voters supported Trump, while 41% backed Vice President Kamala Harris. While issues important to Catholics – like abortion and immigration – were factors when they cast their ballots, there’s one issue that Burge says trumped the rest.
“It’s not even being a Catholic, it’s being an American,” he explains. “Having to pay for gas and groceries – I think if you look at the data it’s about the economy, economy, economy. I think clearly what we see is this was a referendum on that one topic of, ‘Are you financially doing better today than you were doing four years ago?’ and it looks clearly like a lot of Americans said, ‘No, I’m not’”
With the results settled, among those congratulating President Trump on his win was the president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, Archbishop Timothy Broglio. He asked Catholics to pray for the President-Elect as well as all leaders in public life, that they may rise to meet the responsibilities entrusted to them.