Category: 2023 News

WASHINGTON (OSV News) – Not in Washington for the 2023 March for Life? Have no fear. Pro-life advocates from around the country can mark the 50th anniversary of the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1973 Roe v. Wade decision by virtually participating in events being held in the nation’s capital in conjunction with the national march.

The opening and closing Mass of the National Prayer Vigil for Life Jan. 19-20 in the Great Upper Church of the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception will be livestreamed at www.nationalshrine.org/mass.

An all-new morning rally, Life Fest, sponsored by the Sisters of Life and the Knights of Columbus, takes place Jan. 20 from 7:30-10:30 a.m. EST and can be followed at www.lifefest2023.com.

The National Prayer Vigil for Life is hosted by the national shrine, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops’ Secretariat of Pro-life Activities and The Catholic University of America’s Office of Campus Ministry.

The vigil “is a time to praise God for the great gift of the recent Supreme Court Dobbs decision, overturning the tragic Roe v. Wade decision made almost a half-century ago,” said Kat Talalas, assistant director of pro-life communications at the USCCB.

In its June 24 ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the court reversed its prior jurisprudence in its Roe decision, which had declared abortion a constitutional right.

“State and federal legislators are now free to embrace policies that protect preborn children and their mothers,” Talalas said in a statement. “Yet, there is still a great need for prayer and advocacy from the faithful, as there will be intensified efforts to codify Roe in legislation and policies at the state and federal levels.”

The opening Mass for the vigil takes place at 5 p.m. EST Jan. 19 with Bishop Michael F. Burbidge of Arlington, Virginia, chairman of the USCCB’s Committee on Pro-Life Activities, as the principal celebrant and homilist.

The Mass will be immediately followed by a Holy Hour for life. This will start off a series of nationwide Holy Hours throughout the night broadcast from dioceses across the country listed on the USCCB’s website, www.usccb.org.

The nationwide vigil concludes at 8 a.m. EST Jan. 20 with a closing Mass to be celebrated by Auxiliary Bishop Joseph L. Coffey of the U.S. Archdiocese for the Military Services.

Life Fest is a three-hour rally taking place ahead of the National March for Life at the 4,200-seat Entertainment & Sports Arena in Washington. The welcome begins at 7:30 a.m. (EST), and the event will feature speakers, music, Mass and Eucharistic adoration. 

The speakers include Sister Bethany Madonna of the Sisters of Life; Sister Mary Casey, who also is a Sister of Life, and her twin, Casey, who has Down syndrome; David Scotton, who was placed for adoption after his birth mother left an Indiana abortion clinic in 1993; and Tricia and Pete DeMaios, who work to educate people about the suffering inflicted by abortion by sharing their own story about abortion and the toll it took.

Singer and guitarist Father Isaiah Hofmann, a Franciscan Friar of the Renewal, and worship leader and songwriter Sarah Kroger will perform for the crowd.

In a Dec. 20 news release announcing the inaugural event, the Sisters of Life and the Knights of Columbus said their hope is Life Fest will “inspire and educate a new generation on the next steps for a new spirituality of love and life, one foundational to building a culture of life in the post-Dobbs era.”

“We see a profound opportunity to build the culture of life in a new way,” said Sister Maris Stella, a Sister of Life. “We want to serve the church in her most urgent need — that of the cause of human life, sharing the good news of God’s plan for life and love.”

Supreme Knight Patrick Kelly called the end of Roe “a crucial milestone, but we should not mistake the ruling as the end of abortion. The fight to protect life will now evolve at the state level but a united stand before national lawmakers is still essential.”

Kelly noted that 50 years ago the Knights helped launch the National March for Life, which has become “the largest annual human rights demonstration in the world.” 

A March for Life Rally begins at noon on the National Mall, followed by the March for Life along Constitution Avenue to the steps of the U.S. Capitol Building. The March for Life organization will livestream the rally via Facebook and its YouTube channel.

WASHINGTON (OSV News) – The annual observance of the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity began as an octave of prayer, sermons and conferences encouraged by Pope Leo XIII and Anglican leaders. But the celebration picked up steam following the Second Vatican Council committing the Catholic Church to this path.

During his 53 years as a priest — and even before that — Father James Gardiner, director of special projects at the Franciscan Monastery of the Holy Land in Washington, has had something to do with promoting the annual Week of Prayer. The week was first celebrated Jan. 18-25, 1908, by Father Paul Wattson and Mother Lurana White, Episcopal co-founders of the Franciscan friars and sisters of the Atonement, who entered into full communion with the Catholic Church the following year.

Father Gardiner highlighted a number of documents promulgated by the Catholic Church since Vatican II, which created a “great ecumenical ferment as we trooped and snooped through one another’s sacristies and sanctuaries,” he said.

“There was a kind of ecumenical euphoria that set in” in the U.S. and around the globe, he noted.

Among the Catholic Church’s many documents on ecumenism and interfaith relations is Vatican II’s Decree on Ecumenism (“Unitatis Redintegratio”), promulgated Nov. 21, 1964, which taught that ecumenism — the restoration of unity among all Christians — should be everyone’s concern. It stated genuine ecumenism involves a continual personal and institutional renewal.

The following year, the Declaration on the Relationship of the Church to Non-Christian Religions (“Nostra Aetate”) was issued, defining the church’s position on interreligious dialogue.

In 1999, the Catholic Church’s “Joint Declaration on the Doctrine of Justification” with the Lutheran World Federation provided a common basis for understanding how people are justified and saved.

Ten years later came Pope Benedict’s “Anglicanorum Coetibus,” the papal constitution that created the personal ordinariates enabling Anglicans and Episcopalians to enter the Catholic Church and have a permanent home for their Anglican heritage, which the late pope called a “treasure to be shared.”

Pope Francis later authorized all the ordinariate liturgical books known collectively as “Divine Worship,” marking the first time the Catholic Church had officially adopted into its public worship liturgical elements that had developed within a Reformation church context.

This year’s observance has as its theme “Do Good; Seek Justice,” taken from the Book of Isaiah, which is a timely one, Father Gardiner noted but he also remarked on the significance of last year’s theme to churches’ ecumenical. It was selected by the Middle East Council of Churches: “For we have seen his star in the East and have come to worship him” (Mt 2:2).

“I remember proposing that ecumenists, like the Magi, would do well to find yet another route back to Christian unity,” Father Gardiner told OSV News, “not because enormous progress has not already been made, but because too many of the faithful and their pastors are laboring under the impression that we’ve gone about as far as we can go.”

Ecumenical relationships “need to be studiously nourished throughout the year,” he remarked.

He also emphasized that “the role of prayer” needs to be prioritized during the Week of Unity, because “as we know,” prayer “changes not God, but the one who prays to God.”

TOULON, France (OSV News) – Sister André, a Daughter of Charity and the world’s oldest known person, died at age 118, a spokesman of the nursing home where she died told AFP agency on Tuesday.

“There is great sadness but … it was her desire to join her beloved brother. For her, it’s a liberation,” David Tavella, speaking for the Sainte-Catherine-Labouré nursing home, told AFP.

Sister André, a Catholic convert raised in a Protestant family, was born Lucile Randon Feb. 11, 1904. It was 10 years before World War I, Theodore Roosevelt was president of the United States, New York opened its first subway line and U.S. Army engineers began work on the Panama Canal. She also lived through the 1918 Spanish flu pandemic and through 10 pontificates.

Sister  André died Jan. 17 in her sleep at her nursing home in Toulon, on France’s Mediterranean coast, Tavella said.

An avid listener of Vatican Radio, the French nun sent well wishes to the radio operation on the occasion of its 90th anniversary in 2021. Sister Andre, who was blind, was a “dedicated listener of the radio that offers her a window of the world” and supports her prayer life, Vatican News reported Feb. 11, 2021.

Last year, for her 118th birthday, Sister André received a birthday card from French President Emmanuel Macron. 

In April 2022, she met reporters over tea in the house where she lived. 

“People say that work kills. For me, work kept me alive,” she said. “I kept working until I was 108.”

Sister  André used to say the biggest joy of her life was when two of her brothers returned home from World War I.

VATICAN CITY (CNS) – Christians must develop a pastoral heart to care for those who have not heard the Gospel or who have left the fold, Pope Francis said.

“By being with Jesus, we discover that his pastoral heart always beats for the person who is confused, lost, far away,” the pope said at his weekly general audience Jan. 18. “Jesus never said, ‘Let them sort themselves out,’ he went out to find them.”

Pope Francis encouraged Christians to model themselves on Jesus, the Good Shepherd, longing for those who have left the church just as a shepherd longs for lost sheep, rather than treating them as “adversaries or enemies.”

“When we meet them at school, work or on the streets of our city, why don’t we think instead that we have a beautiful opportunity to witness to them the joy of a Father who loves them and has never forgotten them?” the pope asked.

Being a shepherd is not merely a job, but a “true and proper way of life: 24 hours a day,” he said. Jesus, the Good Shepherd, “does not just do something for us, but he gives his life for us.”

The pope encouraged the pilgrims and visitors gathered in the Vatican’s Paul VI Audience Hall to reflect on how God seeks out those who distance themselves from him, saying that many Christians may have followed Jesus for a long time but “have never wondered if we share his feelings, if we suffer and we take risks.”

“The Lord suffers when we distance ourselves from his heart,” he said, “but in response to this suffering he does not withdraw, rather he risks. He leaves the 99 sheep who are safe and ventures out for the lost one.”

“Do we feel similar emotions?” the pope asked.

Without a love that suffers and takes risks for others, Pope Francis said, “we risk being pastors only for ourselves.”

At the end of his catechesis, the pope greeted a group of pilgrims from Congo, where he will travel Jan. 31, and asked for prayers for the country.

He also remembered Father Isaac Achi, who was killed Jan. 15 when bandits set fire to his parish rectory in Minna, Nigeria.

“So many Christians continue to be the target of violence, let us remember them in our prayers,” said the pope.

WASHINGTON (OSV News) – James Griffin, executive director of the Durandus Institute for Sacred Music & Liturgy, said the annual Week of Prayer for Christian Unity “was instilled” in him at the parish church of his youth, Our Lady of Atonement Church in San Antonio.

The weeklong Christian ecumenical observance, taking place Jan. 18-25 this year, “is important for all Christians” but has “even greater significance” for Catholics coming from the Anglican tradition, Griffin told OSV News.

Our Lady of Atonement Church in San Antonio was founded in 1983 with the permission of Archbishop Patrick F. Flores. It began with a few converts from the Episcopal Church, a member of the global Anglican Communion. Today Our Lady of the Atonement is part of the Houston-based Ordinariate of the Chair of St. Peter, a Roman Catholic diocese with Anglican traditions established by Pope Benedict XVI in 2012, which includes 40 other Catholic parishes and communities in North America.

One of those parishes, St. Timothy’s Ordinariate Catholic Church in Sykesville, Maryland, will co-sponsor a solemn choral evensong Jan. 25 at the Cathedral of Mary Our Queen in Baltimore, using the Ordinariate form of the Liturgy of the Hours’ evening prayer that reflects their Anglican tradition in full Catholic communion. Father Armando Alejandro, St. Timothy’s parochial administrator, will officiate and Baltimore Archbishop William E. Lori will preach the sermon.

Griffin will be the emcee for the service, which will be dedicated to Pope Benedict XVI, who died Dec. 31 at age 95.

In 2009, Pope Benedict, in response to petitions for Catholic unity from various groups of Anglicans and Episcopalians, created an apostolic constitution, “Anglicanorum coetibus,” which established personal ordinariates – essentially Catholic dioceses where membership is personal rather than territorial – so individuals and parishes could become fully part of the Catholic Church and still live out their Catholic faith through their Anglican patrimony. Pope Francis has confirmed the initiative, by both approving all the ordinariates’ liturgical books, as well as expanding their missionary mandate to include evangelizing the unbaptized, other Christians not yet in full communion, and baptized Catholics who no longer practice the faith.

The Week of Prayer for Christian Unity is a joint effort of the Vatican’s Dicastery for Promoting Christian Unity and the World Council of Churches. It begins on the Jan. 18 feast of the Confession of Peter (“Thou art the Christ, the Son of the Living God” Matthew 16:18). Its final day, Jan. 25, is the feast of the Conversion of Paul.

The 2023 theme is “Do Good; Seek Justice,” taken from the first chapter of Isaiah.

Other events planned around the United States include an afternoon ecumenical service and concert Jan. 18 at the chapel of the Interchurch Center in New York, hosted by the Graymoor Ecumenical & Interreligious Institute.

In California, for the 17th year, Archbishop Salvatore J. Cordileone of San Francisco and Greek Orthodox Metropolitan Gerasimos will lead solemn vespers together Jan. 23 at St. Pius X Catholic Church in Redwood City, California.

The Ecumenical Institute for Ministry in New Mexico has organized a pilgrimage for the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity for participants from “diverse Christian traditions” to “heal and build up the body of Christ … as they walk, talk, worship, pray, and sing and listen together.” People also can participate virtually in a self-directed pilgrimage.

The Week of Prayer for Christian Unity began as the Church Unity Octave. It was celebrated for the first time Jan. 18-25, 1908, by Father Paul Wattson and Mother Lurana White, Episcopal co-founders of the Society of the Atonement, at Graymoor, the headquarters of the Franciscan Friars and Sisters of the Atonement in Garrison, New York.

A year later, the friars, the sisters and 13 of their lay associates were received into full communion with the Catholic Church. The Atonement priests, sisters and brothers work for reconciliation and healing through the unity of men and women with God and one another, in fulfillment of the mandate from Jesus Christ’s prayer to God the Father in the Gospel of St. John: “that they all may be one.”

Father Wattson, who is a candidate for sainthood, had high hopes that the entire Anglican Communion would be “reincorporated with Rome,” said Griffin, who was raised by an Episcopal father and a Seventh-day Adventist mother. He became a Catholic in 2005 when he was 18.

“Many of those hopes have not been realized, not in our lifetime, but we see other Christian churches pray for Christian unity. … Most Christians realize our divisions between each other are not the way God intended for us to operate,” Griffin told OSV News.

Each year, in advance of the Week of Prayer, an international committee co-sponsored by the Vatican and the World Council of Churches invites a local ecumenical group to propose a scriptural theme.

The year’s theme was selected by the Minnesota Council of Churches in the aftermath of the May 25, 2020, death of George Floyd in Minneapolis while in police custody and the trial of the police officer responsible for his death.

“The entire scriptural passage for the theme is Isaiah 1:12-18, lamenting a lack of justice among the people of God. Yet, it also promises redemption by encouraging acts of justice,” said Father James Loughran, a Franciscan Friar of the Atonement, who is director of the Graymoor Ecumenical & Interreligious Institute. He made the comment in a post on the institute’s website.

Father James Gardiner, another Atonement friar who has long been involved in ecumenical and interfaith efforts, told OSV News this year’s theme for the week “couldn’t be more timely.”

“Given the news each day,” he said, “the theme offers enormous possibilities for praying and preaching.”