Currents News Staff
The Star of Bethlehem is what led the wise men to see the newborn baby Jesus.
Archaeologists have discovered what may be the home in Nazareth where Jesus grew up.
Ken Dark, Professor of Archaeology and History at the University of Reading joined Currents News from London to discuss his latest discovery.
By Emily Drooby
From running water to tiny woven baskets, the details are what makes Corpus Christi Church’s unique nativity scene so engaging.
“The main event is the same, but the other features are so different and so detailed, where you have pots and pans hanging and fishing gear and flower pots, it’s just amazing,” explained parishioner Irene Tiranno.
The crèche sits among the Christmas decor at the Woodside, Queens church.
The work of art sprung from a conversation between crèche artist Alexander Lateo and parish administrator Monsignor Jonas Achacoso, back in October.
At the time the piece was sitting in a basement, unseen by the world. Two short months later, it had been installed.
The piece uses the statues from the church’s old crèche. Everything, including the time it took to set up and refinish the old statues, was donated for free. It’s a ray of sunshine during a difficult year.
“I am so impressed with it, it is really a new shining light on our church that I think we desperately need in the time of the coronavirus pandemic,” José Ramos, a parishioner, told Currents News.
The inspiration to forgo a standard crèche for this more unique piece came from Pope Francis.
In December of 2019, the Holy Father signed an Apostolic letter on the importance of the Nativity scene, encouraging everyone to set up a crèche, “because this is a way for us to really evangelize, to make the message of the birth of our Lord to be known, and engage people into contemplating the real message of Christmas,” explained Msgr. Jonas.
He adds that because this is different from a standard scene, he sees people taking an extra moment to view and talk about it. To him, that says it’s working — people are contemplating.
“The work of art is speaking to them and they’re more engaged in contemplation,” he explained.
The unique nativity scene will be on display at Corpus Christi Church until January 11. It’s located at 31-30 61st Street in Woodside, Queens.
Currents News Staff
Car after car lined up for a box of food to have on holiday tables in Wayne County in Raleigh, North Carolina. The line was filled with people like Theresa Carter, who lost her job six weeks ago.
“It’s the holidays, you know what I’m saying,” Theresa said. “Look at the people out here. This is ridiculous.”
She’s one of many who said a $600 dollar stimulus payment will help with one bill or two. But not more.
“It would be just to pay the rent,” said another person waiting for a box of food. “It would not help with food, gas or car payment.
“It’s gotten worse,” said Cassandra Lee, who was also on line. “People need all the help they can get. That’s why we’re in this long line now, trying to get the food that we can get.”
The Three In One Family Center organized the drive. Their founder, Gregory Quick, says this is the worst he’s ever seen it.
“Is $600 enough to help the families out here today? No, because that money has already been spent,” he said. “Basically for those that have been affected by the pandemic, lots of times their bills are behind.”
His wife Cassandra says people are running out of options.
“Kind of brings about a shame because they did everything right,” she explained. “And they thought, ‘Never would I be in line for this.’”
Currents News Staff
Republicans and Democrats are coming close to agreeing on a spending bill and COVID-19 relief package.
The deal includes a laundry list of measures:
$300 a week in enhanced unemployment insurance benefits.
$25 billion for rental assistance and an eviction moratorium extension
$82 billion dollars for schools
$13 billion for food assistance
That $82 billion for education includes $4.5 billion for governors to spend at their discretion. It remains to be seen if the $2.7 billion set aside for private schools will include Catholic schools.
It seems neither party is thrilled about stimulus checks at $600 per adult.
“So direct payments — which were not in the Republican bill —to America’s working families,” said Pelosi. ”I would have liked them bigger but they are significant, and they will be going out soon.”
Some lawmakers say they fear they might not have enough time to actually read the text of the bills before they vote.
“I want to see what’s in it but it’s probably not going to be pretty but better than nothing,”said Republican Representative Adam Kinzinger of Illinois. “It’s’s how government works. We’re sitting here December what? 20, 21 today? We should have done this weeks and weeks ago.”
For weeks, many Americans have been struggling to stay afloat, and waiting in long lines for free food — people like south Florida’s Deborah Hightower who says she lost her job twice since the pandemic began.
“I’m very independent and do not like to ask for help. But sometimes, you just have to do,” she told Currents News. “God humbles you.”
Votes on the final relief package and the $1.4 trillion spending bill for the new fiscal year could pass by the end of Dec. 21.
By Currents News Staff and John Lavenburg
WINDSOR TERRACE — Archbishop Thomas Wenski of Miami joined a couple hundred South Floridians Wednesday at St. John’s Nursing Center to become the first U.S. Bishop to receive a COVID-19 vaccination.
Despite a lifelong fear of needles and injections, Archbishop Wenski said he got the vaccine to “lead by example.”
“I think it’s important for two reasons. To express confidence in the effectiveness of the vaccine, but also in the ethical acceptability of the vaccine,” he said. “There are still a lot of people nervous about it for many reasons.”
[Related: U.S. Bishops Urge Vaccination, but Avoid Morally Compromised Vaccines if Possible]
St. John’s is located near Fort Lauderdale, part of Catholic Health Services in the Archdiocese of Miami. Wednesday was the start of its vaccination campaign. There were just north of 200 people — split between staff and residents — that received the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine, greenlit for emergency use by the Food and Drug Administration on Dec. 11. Vaccinations started to be administered in the U.S. on Monday.
As of Thursday afternoon, Archbishop Wenski hadn’t experienced any side effects from the vaccination.
The archbishop arrived at St. John’s for the vaccination around 1 p.m. He had already sent in a consent form the day before, so all he had to do was go through a temperature check and coronavirus questionnaire before he got the shot.
In pictures on the archdiocese’s website, Archbishop Wenski has his eyes shut amidst a wince while the nurse stuck the needle into his right arm. He insists it was nothing more than an annual flu shot.
“The experience was fine. The shot didn’t hurt. It was no worse than the flu shot I got a few months ago, and it’s certainly a lot easier than some of those times they draw blood from me,” he said.
Afterward, he had to stay 15 minutes at St. John’s to make sure there weren’t any side effects. He’ll return to the nursing home on Jan. 6 for his second dose.
Earlier this week, the U.S. bishops’ conference issued a statement encouraging Catholics to get coronavirus vaccination because it’s a “moral responsibility for the common good,” even if some vaccines are connected to abortion-derived cell lines.
The Pfizer and Moderna vaccine — likely to be approved by the FDA by the end of the week – used abortion-derived cell lines in confirmatory testing, but not in the design, development, or production. Therefore, the bishops consider the connection “very remote from the initial evil of the abortion.”
Archbishop Wenski also sent the priests in his diocese material from the National Catholic Bioethics Center to answer any objections parishioners might have. The NCBC had similar comments to the bishops, encouraging Catholics to get the vaccine.
Archbishop Wenski also noted it’s important for people of all ages to get vaccinated, not just emergency workers or those in the high-risk population.
“It was amassed for the common good. It’s a positive thing to do,” he said. “And if somebody says, ‘I’m young and healthy, I’m not afraid of the virus, if I get it, I’ll recover’ that may be true for some people. But the vaccination doesn’t just protect yourself, but by getting vaccinated, you also protect others from the spread of the virus.”
Currents News reports secular and religious news from the Catholic perspective.
Some of the top stories on this newscast:
A COVID relief bill could be approved before Christmas, but where is the relief for struggling Catholic Schools?
Stimulus money is coming too late for one Brooklyn store owner who is being forced to close her doors after four decades.
A man who desperately needs a kidney already helped save one life with a billboard plea at the crossroads of the world — could it be his turn next?
One of the Magi’s three gifts to baby Jesus, frankincense, is disappearing. Why the medicinal tree could be near extinction.
By Emily Drooby
Christine’s Beauty Salon is a staple of the mostly residential neighborhood of Windsor Terrace, Brooklyn. It’s a place that feels more like a home than a business, because for 45 years it’s been owner Cristina Ayala’s second home.
But soon, it will be gone.
Cristina opened up shop a few years after moving to Brooklyn from Colombia back in the 1970s. Working there with her husband was their American dream.
“My customers were always wonderful, they became my family,” she told Currents News.
Those customers and that space became a place of solace when tragedy struck her family.
“This is my home, this is my home,” she said. “You know, after I lost my husband, it was very painful, and I was able to go on because of all of my customers.” Her husband passed about six years ago.
Soon the shop will close, and the pandemic is to blame.
In New York the number of open small businesses has decreased about 24 percent since the start of the pandemic, according to Harvard-run database, TrackTheRecovery.org.
Many have been forced to close their doors because of a lack of revenue, and Cristina is now one of them.
It has been the perfect storm. During the beginning of the pandemic, she was forced to shut down for three months. Once she was able to reopen, she saw an estimated 70 percent drop in her average revenue.
She has also had a lot of customers moving, all part of a greater trend of people leaving New York City because of the pandemic. Cristina was also unable to negotiate cheaper rent with her landlord, and currently pays several thousand dollars a month
“I could not keep the place open anymore, it’s very painful,” she explained.
Even with the promise of the vaccine and a stimulus bill, she said she can’t make it.
The devout Catholic and parishioner of Holy Name of Jesus Church has been leaning on God for help.
“I have a lotta, lotta, faith in God,” she said. “And I believe that whatever happens, there’s a reason why. And I’m going to take it from there, and one day at a time.”
The shop will be closed by January 1. Cristina plans to offer at-home services for her loyal and longtime customers.
By Currents News and Carol Glatz
VATICAN CITY (CNS) — The Gospel of Matthew never details how many Magi came from “the East,” but it makes it clear they traveled to pay homage to “the newborn king of the Jews” and “offered him gifts of gold, frankincense and myrrh.”
Beyond their great monetary value, scholars say, the gifts had deep symbolic significance: gold for the Christ child’s nobility as king of the Jews; frankincense, which was burned in religious ceremonies, for his divinity; and myrrh, which was used on cuts or wounds and in the anointing of corpses, to prefigure his role as healer and foretell of his death.
Both myrrh and frankincense have exceptional medicinal qualities, which would have made them a very useful and thoughtful gift for the Holy Family, said Anjanette DeCarlo, chief sustainability scientist for the U.S.-based Aromatic Plant Research Center.
“At that time, infant mortality was high,” and frankincense and myrrh were “two of the most potent anti-microbial substances in the ancient medicine cabinet,” DeCarlo told Catholic News Service in a video call from Vermont, where she teaches at St. Michael’s College in Colchester.
“From a Christian perspective, he’s the most important baby ever born and, of course, wouldn’t you bring that baby something to ensure” he could stay healthy, she said.
What is not healthy, however, is the future of frankincense.
Highly sought after for its religious, medicinal and household purposes, it is one of the oldest traded commodities in the world, spanning at least 5,000 years.
An aromatic resin, frankincense is harvested from the “tears” that seep from cuts made to a variety of boswellia tree species, which grow in the harsh, dry climates of Yemen and Oman in the Arabian Peninsula, of Eritrea, Ethiopia, Somalia and Sudan in East Africa, and in northwestern India.
These trees are in severe decline and one species in particular — the boswellia papyrifera, which grows in conflict-rife regions of Ethiopia and Sudan — risks going extinct in the next 50 years, said DeCarlo, who also heads the Save Frankincense project. A study published last year in the journal, Nature Sustainability, predicted frankincense resin production will be halved in the next 20 years.
The Catholic Church is a major consumer of frankincense since incense has an important place in its liturgies.
Dried gum grains are burned over hot coals in a censer or thurible to incense the altar, the book of Gospels, offertory gifts, sacred images and the people participating in the Mass, with the smoke symbolizing sanctification, purification and the prayers of the faithful rising up toward God.
Billowing upward, the smoke draws people’s gaze with it to remind them of heaven, and the incense aroma is a reminder of the transcendence of the Mass.
Burning frankincense also activates different channels in the brain to alleviate anxiety or depression, according to researchers from Johns Hopkins University and the Hebrew University in Jerusalem.
“It promotes a feeling of connection and spiritual enlightenment,” which is why burning frankincense has been an integral part of many different religious rites and rituals for millennia, said Stephen Johnson, an organismal biologist and frankincense researcher.
“Religions have a very important role to play” in helping not just to preserve, but to regenerate frankincense sources and support harvesters, he told CNS in a video call from Seattle.
“It is absolutely possible for us to take care of trees, take care of harvesters, take care of their communities and take care of ourselves,” he said. “Everybody involved in the supply chain should benefit.”
After years of working in Somalia and developing ethical and sustainable harvesting standards, Johnson said he decided to establish his own business and projects that show what regenerative supply chains look like.
Regeneration tries to leave ecosystems, communities and plants better off by using profits to support research, conservation and community development and by making sure harvesting communities have access to fair prices and greater opportunities, he said.
This new way of doing business has to happen now, DeCarlo said. “Ten years from now will be too late.”
Most existing trees are “the last of their generation,” with no young trees taking their place, she said, and over-tapping trees hurts their ability to regenerate, stay healthy and survive.
Conflicts and climate change worsen already harsh conditions, and local communities are under great pressure to clear the land to grow crops for survival, she added. Also, grazing cattle love to chew on the tender baby leaves of new growth.
Johnson and DeCarlo both insisted that frankincense buyers, including Catholic churches and the essential oil industry, must demand transparency and traceability in the source of the resins and accountability in making sure harvesters are paid fairly.
“Today, we have the ability to go directly to the source, to talk to the actual harvesters and to employ technologies that allow us to track products all along the supply chain and make sure that that is all being done ethically” and in a way that allows the trees and the communities to flourish, Johnson said.
Without such controls the industry is “very open to corruption and/or decline,” and “it’s not helping the people on the ground, it’s not helping the companies that want to do the right thing” and it doesn’t help the consumers who “don’t want to be killing trees or hurting communities or being complicit in something that isn’t sustainable,” DeCarlo said.
“We desperately need the Catholic Church to step in,” she said, for example, by promoting regenerative supply chains and tree growing with programs to adopt trees and help struggling nurseries, even on a parish, school or individual level.
It is a direction that aligns with Pope Francis’ call for caring for creation, said DeCarlo.
As a Catholic, she said, “I always felt that if he knew really what was happening with frankincense, he would get involved. That this is something so near and dear to us. The fact that it was brought to baby Jesus is not a small matter.”
Currents News Staff
The holidays may not be what we’re used to this year, but that doesn’t mean you can’t have your own very special Christmas at home. A Vatican christmas cookbook has 100 recipes from inside the walls of the Holy See that you can see on your tables this Christmas.
Currents News spoke with the cookbook’s creator, Chef and former Swiss Guard David Geisser about why he thought it was important to release the cookbook during the Christmas season – especially the pandemic.
If you’d like to prepare your own Vatican Christmas at Home, go to sophiainstitue.com.
By Jessica Easthope
These days it seems like everyone is looking down. But Marc Weiner wants you to look up.
That’s because he’s hoping someone — anyone — will see these two billboards that tower over Times Square. On the electronic displays is Marc’s picture and his story. To put it simply: he needs a kidney.
“It’s about living donors and for me, I’m sending out the awareness because I still need a kidney,” said Marc. “I still need someone to donate one.”
This isn’t the first time Marc’s story has been seen at the “crossroads of the world.” In 2018, Marc got creative in his search for a kidney. Through his wife Lisa’s job and some friends, they put a billboard up in Times Square.
Hundreds of thousands of people saw Marc’s billboard every day, but it only took one to give him hope.
“For me, I always thought it would be a friend or a family,” said Marc. “That didn’t happen and out of nowhere, this selfless individual saw this billboard and wanted to donate to me.”
That person was Mike Lollo. Mike was working as an NYPD detective at the time when he read about Marc’s story and decided he was going to help. Unfortunately, Mike wasn’t a match for Marc. But he was for a woman in Pennsylvania named Ruth, and one year ago, Mike saved Ruth’s life by giving her his kidney.
“You don’t need to be a match,” said Mike. “Blood type doesn’t matter, geography doesn’t matter, whoever’s seeing this wherever you are, you could be Marc’s living donor.”
Exposure like this usually comes with a hefty price tag. Just ask Denise Levine, the woman in charge of what gets put up on these screens.
Denise knows a compelling ad when she sees one, so she knows this one is priceless.
“It brings life and happiness and it helps people,” said Denise, chief revenue officer at Branded Cities. “If we need help, we can get Marc help. We can help people and save lives.”
As for Marc, he hit some speed bumps on his journey for a kidney, but he’s now cancer-free and once again putting everything into his search.
“I’m hoping that I will find a donor soon,” said Marc. “I’m cancer-free. I’m looking forward to having that so I don’t have to be on dialysis anymore. I’m with Mike celebrating his anniversary of donating a kidney, and hopefully my chance will come soon.”
Marc’s match is out there, and just like his Times Square billboard, the search could be over in an instant. All it takes is a little courage and a lot of kindness.
“The idea that people, strangers, individuals are coming forward and are wanting to help is just surreal,” said Marc, “and I hope I can help someone in a similar situation.”
It’s been more than two years since Mike and Marc met. They now have become advocates for living kidney donation.
“I now have extended family in Pennsylvania,” said Mike. “I have Marc and I really know someone is going to see this and they’re going to press that link because it’s the right thing to do.”
Marc is still waiting, and while he didn’t get a kidney from Mike, he did get a friend. Now all he needs is you.
Dawn del Mastro-Churma, the president of the company that owns the billboard, donated the space to the Weiners for free at two minutes an hour, a fee that would normally cost $30,000 a month.
Marc is still looking for his life-saving kidney. For more information on his story and how to become a living donor, visit www.kidney4marc.org.