Category: 2023 News

LAFLIN — JMJ Radio, the only Catholic radio station serving northeastern Pennsylvania and the Diocese of Scranton, has begun 2023 facing new challenges and opportunities to reach more faithful, as it moves up the FM dial from 98.9 to 104.5.

The recent development coincides with JMJ’s 15^th anniversary of broadcasting the “Good News,” which it will celebrate on March 19 — the Feast of Saint Joseph.

According to station owners Ed Niewinski, who also serves as president, and his wife, Carol Ann, JMJ had been broadcasting on both 750 AM and 98.9 FM, covering the Scranton and Wilkes-Barre listening areas via a leased translator. However, the translator’s owner recently notified the Niewinskis the lease would not be renewed.

“We were totally shocked and disappointed by this news,” Ed said. “Without a translator our coverage area would be extremely limited. We also would not want to be tied into a lease again if possible.”

As far as Ed and Carol Ann are concerned, the whole ordeal was a blessing in disguise. “With God’s help,” they indicated, a purchase agreement was entered into with a new translator that will now allow JMJ Catholic Radio to broadcast on a much more powerful station — 104.5 FM — beginning on Feb. 2.

The new station has the capability to reach more than 320,000 listeners spanning the Scranton/Wilkes-Barre market, the Southern Tier of New York state, and well into the Scranton Diocese, including the Poconos and Hazleton areas.

“All of this comes with a huge price tag,” Ed and Carol Ann noted, “but our board of directors gave its unanimous approval to purchase this translator to ensure the long-term future of JMJ Catholic Radio.”

Through the gracious support and hospitality of the Oblates of Saint Joseph religious congregation, led by their local rector, Saint Joseph Oblate Father Paul McDonnell, the station’s studio is comfortably housed at the OSJ Seminary building on Route 315 in Laflin.

As a member of the JMJ board, Father McDonnell is joined by fellow Oblate priest and seminary resident, Father Joseph Sibilano, and Father Brian Van Fossen, pastor of the Diocesan parish communities of Our Lady of Mount Carmel, Hunlock Creek, and Saint Faustina Kowalska, Nanticoke.

From their seminary home, which they share with the Saint Joseph Oblates Chapel, JMJ provides a live audio broadcast of the chapel’s daily noon Mass. The Catholic radio station also airs the weekly Saint Ann Novena from the Basilica of Saint Ann in West Scranton on Monday at 10:30 a.m., and the Mass in Spanish celebrated every Saturday at 7 p.m. at Annunciation Parish, Hazleton.

“JMJ Radio is an affiliate of EWTN (Eternal Word Television Network), offering the very best in Catholic programs, and also airs a number of locally produced shows,” Ed remarked.

The JMJ owner also emphasized there is an urgent need — more than ever — for prayerful and financial support to keep Catholic radio on the air in the Diocese of Scranton.

JMJ Radio is a 501(c) Pennsylvania corporation, and tax-deductible donations may be sent to: JMJ Radio, P.O. Box 851, Pittston, PA 18640.

JMJ also broadcasts from their stations in Hazleton, Dushore, Laceyville, Altoona and State College. The radio station can be contacted at (570) 287-4670 or www.jmj750.com, which livestreams their programming 24 hours a day.

WASHINGTON (OSV News) – The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops affirmed its “united position” in opposition to taxpayer funding for abortion procedures, invoking the teaching of Pope Francis, following recent remarks by President Joe Biden.

During a Jan. 30 gaggle with reporters on the South Lawn of the White House, a reporter said to Biden, “Catholic bishops are demanding that federal tax dollars not fund abortions.”

Biden replied, “No, they are not all doing that,” adding, “nor is the pope doing that.”

The USCCB’s president, Archbishop Timothy Broglio of the U.S. Archdiocese for the Military Services, refuted the president’s remarks in a Feb. 1 statement. He said the U.S. bishops are united in their opposition to both abortion and the use of taxpayer funds to finance those procedures.

“As we are taught by Jesus, human life is sacred,” Archbishop Broglio said. “God calls us to defend and nurture life from the moment a new human being is conceived. The Catholic Church has been clear and consistent in this teaching.”

Archbishop Broglio added that the “Catholic bishops of the United States are united in our commitment to life and will continue to work as one body in Christ to make abortion unthinkable.”

“As the Holy Father, Pope Francis, has said, ‘It is not right to ‘do away with’ a human being, however small, in order to solve a problem. It is like hiring a hitman,'” the archbishop said. “Taxpayer funding of abortion would force people of good conscience to participate in this grave evil against their will. It would contradict our right to live in accord with the tenets of our faith. Our nation is better than that. I pray that we will protect every child no matter his or her age, and open our hearts to respond to mothers in need with love and support rather than the violence of abortion.”

The USCCB previously sent a Jan. 27 letter to the congressional sponsors of the “No Taxpayer Funding for Abortion and Abortion Insurance Full Disclosure Act” (H.R.7 and S.62), in support of the legislation.

Some media outlets cited the USCCB letter to suggest that Biden was denying the USCCB’s stance, but Biden was not listed as a recipient of that letter, which was addressed to Sen. Roger Wicker, R-Miss., and Rep. Chris Smith, R-N.J.

KINSHASA, Congo (CNS) – Ladislas set a machete under the crucifix. Bijoux laid a wicker mat there. And Emelda dropped military fatigues.

The three of them and other victims of violence in eastern Congo told Pope Francis horrifying stories of watching their families be slaughtered or of being kidnapped or raped repeatedly by militia members.

Pope Francis had planned to go to Goma in the violence-torn North Kivu province, but increased fighting forced him to cancel the trip to the East to protect the crowds that would gather to see him.

Instead, the pope invited about 40 victims of violence in the East to the apostolic nunciature in Kinshasa Feb. 1.

Ladislas Kambale Kombi, 16, said he watched his father being hacked to pieces with a machete and his mother being kidnapped, leaving him alone with his two little sisters. “Mom hasn’t come back. We don’t know what they did with her.”

Léonie Matumaini, an elementary school student, said she watched militia members stab her family; then, she said, they gave her the knife and dared her to bring it to the army.

Kambale Kakombi Fiston, 13, was kidnapped and held for nine months. He asked the pope to pray for children still captive in the forest.

Bijoux Mukumbi Kamala, holding one toddler and with another strapped to her back, stood in front of the pope as a friend read her testimony because she does not speak French. The 17-year-old said her “Calvary” began in 2020 when rebels kidnapped her.

“The commander chose me. He raped me like an animal. It was an atrocious suffering,” Bijoux wrote. “He raped me several times a day, whenever he wanted, for hours. This went on for 19 months — one year and seven months.”

When she and another young woman escaped, she was pregnant. “I have twin daughters who will never know their father.”

Father Guy-Robert Mandro Deholo read a testimony prepared for the meeting by Désiré Dhetsina “before she disappeared without a trace a couple months ago.”

She had survived the rebel attack Feb. 1, 2022, on the Plaine Savo displacement camp near Bule and, she wrote, she had seen “the savagery: people cut up like butcher’s meat, women disemboweled, men decapitated.”

Maiming is not uncommon, Father Mandro Deholo told the pope, holding up his left hand, which is missing a finger. As he spoke, two women in the audience raised their arms — one was missing a hand, the other was missing both. The priest accompanied the two women up to the pope, who touched their mutilated stumps and laid his hands on their heads in blessing.

On their behalf, the priest laid an axe at the foot of the crucifix placed near the pope.

Emelda M’karhungulu also had a friend read her testimony about what began on a Friday night in 2005 when she was kidnapped by armed men and “kept as a sexual slave and abused for three months.”

“They made us eat maize meal and the flesh of the men they killed,” she said. Those who refused were killed and fed to other hostages.

And, she said, “they kept us naked so we wouldn’t run away.”

“We put under the cross of Christ the clothes of the armed men who still strike fear in us because of the countless heinous and unspeakable acts of violence they continue to this day,” she said. “We want a different future. We want to leave behind this dark past and be able to build a beautiful future. We demand justice and peace.”

The testimonies, Pope Francis said, leave listeners without words. “We can only weep in silence.”

But he did use the meeting to express his closeness to all the people disappointed that he was not traveling to Goma and, especially, to “condemn the armed violence, the massacres, the rapes, the destruction and the looting” that continue to sow terror in the lives of the people of Congo.

“Put away your weapons, put an end to war. Enough,” he told those responsible.

In a country where sexual violence is a common weapon of war, Pope Francis offered special words of consolation to women and girls and strong warnings to those who would target them.

“I pray that women, every woman, may be respected, protected and esteemed,” he said. “Violence against women and mothers is violence against God himself, who from a woman, from a mother, took on our human condition.”

Later the pope welcomed to the nunciature representatives of six Catholic charitable programs working in the country, including programs run by the Focolare Movement and by the Community of Sant’Egidio.

The witness of helping others without expecting anything in return and of working with them to identify real needs and long-lasting solutions is something the nation needs, the pope said.

“Those who are prosperous, especially if they are Christians, are challenged to share what they have with those who lack the bare necessities,” the pope said. “This is not a matter of benevolence, but of justice. It is not philanthropy, but faith. For, as Scripture says, ‘faith without works is dead.'”

(OSV News) – A priest who offered up his suffering from cancer for the sake of clerical abuse victims said he has experienced a miraculous healing following a June 2022 pilgrimage to the Marian shrine at Lourdes, France.

Father John Hollowell, a priest of the Archdiocese of Indianapolis, told OSV News that doctors have said his brain tumor, diagnosed in 2019, has disappeared.

“I had an MRI two weeks after I got back from Lourdes (at the end of June 2022),” said Father Hollowell, who first announced the news in a Jan. 30 video message on his YouTube channel. “All that remained was scar tissue from the surgeries.”

In 2020, Father Hollowell learned that a series of fainting spells and dizziness were the result of an oligodendroglioma – a brain tumor usually occurring in white and non-Hispanic males between the ages of 35 and 44. About 1,200 individuals in the U.S. are diagnosed with the tumor each year.

But the rare form of cancer was not entirely a surprise to the priest.

“In 2018, I made a prayer that I would be willing to suffer for the victims of the Catholic clergy’s sexual abuse,” he told OSV News. “And then a month later, I had what I know now was the first seizure from the brain tumor.”

The diagnosis was not confirmed until Feb. 11, 2020, the feast of Our Lady of Lourdes, by doctors at the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota.

“I knew it was the answer to the prayer I had made two years earlier,” said Father Hollowell, noting he celebrated Mass that same day in the “stunningly beautiful” chapel at the clinic’s St. Mary’s Campus.

Before surgery at Mayo, the priest took to his now-closed Twitter account, letting his 20,000 followers know in a Feb. 13, 2020 post that he planned to “embrace this (illness) willingly” for clerical abuse survivors.

The offering gained national attention, prompting hundreds of tweets and emails of gratitude from around the world.

About a month later, Father Hollowell returned to Mayo for surgery, taking with him “the names of about 180 victims” who had contacted him.

“I literally prayed for them every day,” he told OSV News. “I had a wristband on my arm that said ‘For the victims.'”

The procedure revealed that “some fingers from the tumor had gone deeper into my brain than the neurosurgeon expected,” he said.

The surgery also coincided with the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in the U.S., and Father Hollowell remained at Mayo, having developed infections from the surgery, which was followed by two more operations as well as radiation and nine months of chemotherapy.

The Archdiocese of Indianapolis granted Father Hollowell a medical leave of absence from his assignments, which include pastoring two Indiana parishes — Annunciation Catholic Church in Brazil and St. Paul the Apostle in Greencastle — and serving as a Catholic chaplain at DePauw University in Greencastle and at Putnamville (Indiana) Correctional Facility.

Father Hollowell said his chemotherapy, which was marked by “a lot of complicating factors,” prompted side effects that included depression and even suicidal thoughts.

He completed that treatment and returned to his parishes by July 2021, reporting for MRI scans every three months. By January 2022, scans showed the tumor was starting to regrow, joined by a second tumor on his pituitary gland.

“I was totally fine with dying,” Father Hollowell told OSV News. “It’s actually a prayer I had started to make: ‘If I am able to offer up my life in reparation for the crimes of priests, I would do that willingly.'”

At the same time, he booked a June 2022 trip to Lourdes — site of 18 Marian apparitions experienced by St. Bernadette Soubirous in 1858 — to see if he might be one of the thousands who claim to receive healing from visiting the shrine.

He also had another objective.

“I thought … if I’m healed, that might help draw some of my family members and friends who had fallen away (from the practice of faith) back to church,” Father Hollowell told OSV News.

The trip, which he undertook alone, proved to be “a nonstop adventure,” he said, one that saw him getting lost while walking from a train station to the shrine, and almost missing his spot in line to splash himself with the sanctuary’s famed spring waters.

At times, he found himself “at the point of tears,” he said.

Yet Father Hollowell said “the greater experience” was seeing “thousands of my prayers, not related to my health,” answered.

Two weeks after his return — with parishioners already telling him he “looked a lot healthier” — an MRI showed Father Hollowell’s oligodendroglioma was gone. Issues from the growth on his pituitary gland “stopped when I got back from Lourdes,” he said.

Now, doctors have told Father Hollowell to report for MRIs every seven, rather than three, months.

But he’s not planning to submit his case to Lourdes’ medical officers for consideration.

“As a parish priest, I feel like I don’t even have the time to go through all of that, (getting) a miracle approved,” he told OSV News. “I don’t really need doctors to tell me I have a miracle, even though I do.”

And if his cancer returns, he is prepared.

“If it comes back, that’s God’s will, and I’m totally at peace with whatever that is,” said Father Hollowell. “I’m not afraid, and that can only come from the Holy Spirit. Jesus says to just worry about one day at a time.”

(OSV News) – The experience of the sacrament of penance in the Roman rite will be slightly different this Lent, thanks to approved changes in the English translation set to take effect in a few weeks.

Starting Ash Wednesday — which takes place this year on Feb. 22 — the prayer of absolution will include three modifications, so that the revised version will read as follows:

“God, the Father of mercies,
through the death and resurrection of his Son
has reconciled the world to himself
and poured out [formerly “sent”] the Holy Spirit for [previously “Holy Spirit among us for”] the forgiveness of sins;
through the ministry of the Church
may God grant [instead of “give”] you pardon and peace.
And I absolve you from your sins
in the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.”

The new text was adopted by the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops during its Spring 2021 meeting, with the Vatican’s Dicastery (then-Congregation) for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments approving the text in April 2022. As of April 16, 2023, the Second Sunday of Easter known also as Divine Mercy Sunday, the revised formula for absolution is mandatory.

“The essential part of the absolution formula has not changed,” said Father Andrew Menke, executive director of the USCCB’s Secretariat for Divine Worship, during an Oct. 25, 2022, webinar co-sponsored by his office and the Federation of Diocesan Liturgical Commissions.

During his presentation, Father Menke admitted the bishops had debated whether the minor changes were worth undertaking. However, he said the consensus favored striving for a more accurate translation from the Latin.

Father Menke noted penitents “who can be a little scrupulous” might panic if priests — many of whom “have said this prayer literally thousands of times” — inadvertently use the old form of absolution.

“They might be concerned (that absolution) doesn’t count,” he said.
Yet he stressed that “the heart of the sacrament” remains intact, and the absolution is still valid.

While not a major alteration, the update to the text nonetheless offers “a wonderful opportunity to reiterate and teach the importance of the sacrament of penance as a staple for living the Christian life,” Father Dennis Gill, director of the Office for Divine Worship at the Archdiocese of Philadelphia, told OSV News ahead of a Jan. 31 webinar he plans to give on the topic. “It’s also a wonderful opportunity to catechize about the sacrament itself.”

Father Menke noted in his October 2022 webinar that the updates are part of a broader effort by the Vatican to ensure accuracy in the translation of liturgical texts.

“It’s not due to anything against the Latin texts,” he said. “It’s based on the fact that the Holy See instructed the bishops of the world at the beginning of the 21st century that our translations needed to be more accurate.”

Liturgical texts have been revised throughout church history under papal direction: St. Pius V modified both the breviary and the missal in response to the Council of Trent, while St. Pius X, Pope Pius XII and St. John XXIII, who convened the Second Vatican Council, all significantly furthered such efforts.

Noting several difficulties in the practical application of Vatican II’s liturgical reforms, St. John Paul II stated in his 1998 apostolic letter “Vicesimus Quintus Annus” the need “to remedy certain defects or inaccuracies, to complete partial translations … (and) to ensure respect for the texts approved.”

The 2001 document “Liturgiam authenenticam,” issued by the Vatican’s then-Congregation for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments, developed the scope of the project, which first resulted in the 2011 full retranslation of the Roman Missal.

Since then, “we’ve dutifully been going through the books one by one with the assistance of ICEL (the International Commission on English in the Liturgy) and preparing new editions of these books,” said Father Menke in his presentation.

So far, he said, new English translations of liturgical books have been completed for confirmation (2015), matrimony (2016), exorcism (2017), the dedication of a church (2018), the blessing of oils (2019), the baptism of children (2020) and ordination (2021).

The updates do not imply that “the (older versions) are heretical,” Father Menke told OSV News Jan. 30. “It’s just that church authorities have determined we might do better.”

The translation process is a rigorous one, with plenty of opportunities for bishops to review and reconsider the proposed updates, he added.

ICEL contracts with translators who prepare texts for consideration by the 11 bishops’ conferences that are full members of the commission: Australia, Canada, England and Wales, India, Ireland, New Zealand, Pakistan, the Philippines, Scotland, South Africa, and the U.S.

The bishops representing those conferences in ICEL then evaluate the translators’ work and, once approved, texts are then provided to the various bishops’ conferences for evaluation by all of their members.

Each bishops’ conference decides whether to implement and publish the eventual final version, Father Menke told OSV News.

As the translations are completed, he looks forward to a slightly slower work pace.

“There’s been this (ongoing) change for the last 10 years or so, with new books coming out,” said Father Menke. “I hope 10 years from now we’ll start a period of stability that will last a long time.”

PHILADELPHIA (OSV News) – A Catholic pro-life activist has been found not guilty of charges that he violated a federal law protecting access to abortion clinics, thereby avoiding a possible 11-year prison sentence.

Mark Houck, known for his sidewalk counseling outside a Philadelphia abortion facility, was tried in U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania on two charges under the federal Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act, or FACE Act, for allegedly assaulting an abortion clinic volunteer in October 2021.

The 1994 law prohibits intentional property damage of a facility that provides “reproductive health services,” including those related to abortion, and prohibits using “force or threat of force or … physical obstruction” to “injure, intimidate or interfere with” someone entering an abortion clinic.

Charges against Houck stemmed from two separate incidents Oct. 13, 2021, where Houck allegedly assaulted the victim — identified in the indictment as “B.L.” and named in trial proceedings as Bruce Love — who was acting as a volunteer escort at the reproductive health care clinic. Houck maintained he was instead defending his young son from harassment by Love.

Jurors in the trial, which began on Jan. 24, remained deadlocked on a verdict as of Jan. 27. By midafternoon on Jan. 30, however, they had reached a verdict resulting in Houck’s acquittal.

“We are, of course, thrilled with the outcome,” stated Peter Breen, executive vice president and head of litigation at the Chicago-based Thomas More Society, which represented Houck in the proceedings. “Mark and his family are now free of the cloud that the Biden administration threw upon them. We took on the Goliath — the full might of the United States government — and won. The jury saw through and rejected the prosecution’s discriminatory case, which was harassment from day one. The Biden Department of Justice’s intimidation against pro-life people and people of faith has been put in its place.”

Ashley Garecht, vice chair of the Pro-Life Union of Greater Philadelphia, told OSV News she and fellow pro-life advocates were “overjoyed” Houck has been acquitted.

“We are grateful that truth won out in Philadelphia,” she said. “Most of all, we just praise God for his protection and provision for Mark. We know so many people have been praying for him, and that courtroom was full of many rosaries.”

VATICAN CITY (CNS) – Pope Francis has chosen Chicago-born Archbishop Robert F. Prevost of Chiclayo, Peru, to succeed Canadian Cardinal Ouellet as prefect of the Dicastery for Bishops and president of the Pontifical Commission for Latin America.

The Vatican announced Jan. 30 the retirement of Cardinal Ouellet and the appointment of Archbishop Prevost.

The archbishop, who is 67, holds degrees from Villanova University in Pennsylvania and the Catholic Theological Union in Chicago and a doctorate from the Pontifical University of St. Thomas Aquinas in Rome. An Augustinian friar, he joined the Augustinian mission in Peru in 1985 and largely worked in the country until in 1999 when he was elected head of the Augustinians Chicago-based province. From 2001 to 2013, he served as prior general of the worldwide order. In 2014, Pope Francis named him bishop of Chiclayo, in northern Peru.

As prefect of the Dicastery for Bishops, Archbishop Prevost will lead the Vatican body responsible for recommending to the pope candidates to fill the office of bishop in many of the Latin-rite dioceses of the world. Recommendations made by the dicastery are typically approved by the pope. Archbishop Prevost has been a member of the dicastery since November 2020.

He will also oversee the Pontifical Commission for Latin America, established in 1958 by Pope Pius XII to study the church in Latin America, where nearly 40% of the world’s Catholics reside.

Archbishop Prevost speaks English, Spanish, Italian, French, Portuguese and can read Latin and German.

Cardinal Ouellet has been prefect of the Dicastery for Bishops and president of the Pontifical Commission for Latin America since 2010. He had submitted his resignation from his curial positions as is required upon reaching the age of 75 in June 2019, but Pope Francis did not accept it.

In recent months, Cardinal Ouellet has been accused of sexual misconduct by two women when he was archbishop of Quebec from 2003 to 2010. Cardinal Ouellet has denied both allegations and sued one of the accusers for defamation in December 2022, seeking $100,000 in damages.

Archbishop Prevost will take up his new roles beginning April 12, 2023.