Category: Diocese of Scranton News

(OSV News)- Two disappeared Ukrainian Greek Catholic priests seized by Russian forces from their church in Berdyansk in November 2022 have been released after months of captivity, according to Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy.

Redemptorist Fathers Ivan Levitsky and Bohdan Geleta, who served at the
Church of the Nativity of the Most Holy Theotokos in Berdyansk, were among 10 prisoners who have been returned to Ukrainian authorities.

“Thank you to everyone who did everything possible so that we can breathe our own air. It is hard to believe that I am in my native land,” said Father Levitsky after his release, according to the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church’s website.

Zelenskyy announced the news in Ukrainian June 28 on his Facebook page.

“We have managed to free 10 more of our people from Russian captivity, despite all the difficulties,” wrote Zelenskyy, who recognized “the Holy See’s efforts to bring these people home.”

Moments after Zelenskyy’s announcement, the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church posted the news on its website, along with images of the two priests taken during their imprisonment by Russia. Both appeared to have lost significant amounts of weight, particularly Father Geleta, and their heads were shaved. The priests gazed directly at the camera, holding up religious medals in their right hands and raising their left thumbs. Father Geleta smiled.

Speaking from Ukraine to OSV News a few hours after the priests’ release, Archbishop Borys A. Gudziak of the Ukrainian Catholic Archeparchy of Philadelphia, told OSV News, “We still don’t know what kind of condition (they are in) and what kind of trauma they endured.

“We are glad that they’re safe and we hope they can recover from this ordeal,” he said, describing the priests as “confessors of the faith,” an honorific title historically used to describe Christians who have publicly professed Christ amid persecution.

Also freed along with the two priests were Nariman Dzhelyal, deputy head of the Mejlis of the Crimean Tatar People, who was captured in Crimea in 2021; civilians Olena Piekh and Valeriy Matiushenko, held captive since 2017-2018; and five civilians captured in Belarus: Mykola Shvets, Natalia Zakharenko, Pavlo Kupriienko, Liudmyla Honcharenko and Kateryna Briukhanova.

“All of them are now free and home in Ukraine,” announced Zelenskyy. “We will definitely free all our people.”

The two priests participated in a scheduled June 29 prayer breakfast hosted by Zelenskyy in Kyiv.

Archbishop Visvaldas Kulbokas, apostolic nuncio to Ukraine, said the return — which saw him among those greeting the priests in Kyiv at 2 a.m. on June 29 — was “a very joyful moment, which encourages all of us to continue to pray for all the prisoners, because their fate is very difficult; some of them have been in captivity for several years.”

The archbishop called for “concrete initiatives” to secure additional exchanges, “because every life is precious for all of us, especially in God’s eyes.

Information regarding the whereabouts of Father Levitsky and Father Geleta has been uncertain since their capture. Most recently, the two were thought to be in detention at Russia’s Kalinin Labor Camp in Horlivka, located in Ukraine’s Donetsk region, which is currently under Russian occupation.

Earlier in June, Felix Corley of Forum 18 — a news service that partners with the Norwegian Helsinki Committee in defending freedom of religion, thought and conscience — told OSV News that information was “the closest I think we’ve come to actually confirming at least where they are.”

The Donetsk Exarchate of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church, to which the priests belong, told Forum 18 June 3 that it had received no news of the two priests. Previously, Father Levitsky was thought by Yevhen Zakharov of the Kharkiv Human Rights Protection Group to be held in an investigation prison in Russia’s Rostov region, while Father Geleta was believed to be in custody at a separate investigation prison in Russian-occupied Crimea. Father Geleta is known to suffer from an acute form of diabetes.

Both priests had refused to leave their parishioners following Russia’s full-scale invasion in February 2022, which continued attacks launched in 2014 against Ukraine. Shortly after Father Levitsky and Father Geleta were captured, Major Archbishop Sviatoslav Shevchuk, head of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church, said he had received “the sad news that our priests are being tortured without mercy.

Corley had reported earlier in June that Tatyana Moskalkova, Russia’s human rights commissioner, claimed on Telegram May 23 that Russia had proposed exchanging two unnamed Catholic priests for two Orthodox priests.

The 47-year-old Father Levitsky and 59-year-old Father Geleta are the only two Catholic priests known to be in Russian detention, said Corley.

Moskalkova — who has been sanctioned by several nations, including the U.S. — said in her Telegram post that “Ukraine, for absolutely unknown reasons, did not agree to such an exchange.”

Major Archbishop Shevchuk had repeatedly called for the release of the two priests, and has echoed Pope Francis’ pleas for an “all-for-all” prisoner exchange between Russia and Ukraine.

“I recently visited the Catholic priests in their place of detention and made sure that the conditions corresponded to international standards,” Moskalkova claimed, without indicating the date and location of the alleged meeting. “On their part, only one request was made, to see their family and friends as quickly as possible.”

“We had heard rumors before that at least one of them was there in that camp,” Corley told OSV News. “So it does seem to me that that’s the most likely place where they were, at least at the beginning of May, when (Moskalkova) was there.”

He noted that Moskalkova was in occupied Donetsk May 3 and visited Horlivka with the Russian-appointed human rights official for the region, Darya Morozova. Corley’s May 30 written inquiries to the offices of both Moskalkova and Morozova, asking to confirm the location and condition of the two priests, have yet to receive a response.

Father Andriy Buchvak, chancellor of the Donetsk Exarchate, had told Forum 18 his office had no confirmation that Moskalkova had in fact visited the priests, but said that her reference to them was a “good sign” they had remained alive after 18 months in captivity.

Corley also noted on the Forum 18 website that Father Levitsky and Father Geleta had “appear(ed) to be facing criminal trial, under false charges related to weapons, explosives, and allegedly ‘extremist’ texts the Russian occupation forces claim to have found” in their Berdyansk church.

Even the attempt to charge the priests under Russia’s criminal code is a breach of international law, Corley told OSV News.

“The international community recognizes these territories as occupied and you can’t impose new laws on occupied territory. You’re supposed to leave the laws that pre-existed in force,” said Corley, pointing to the Geneva Conventions. “It seems that in the case of two Greek Catholic priests, they’re going to bring them to trial under the Russian criminal code. … (but) if they are to bring them to trial, it should be under the Ukrainian criminal code (for) anything that they’ve done which was against Ukrainian law.”

In addition, said Corley, those who have been “jailed by the Russians in (occupied) Crimea and other places … (are) normally transferred to prisons in Russia to serve their sentences, and again, that would be against the Geneva Conventions.”

Article 49 of the Fourth Geneva Convention specifically bans deportations, transfers and evacuations from occupied territory, while Article 76 states that “protected persons accused of offenses shall be detained in the occupied country, and if convicted they shall serve their sentences therein.”

Numerous substantiated accounts of torture during Russian detention also violate the Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment, which Russia ratified in 1987, and which requires those who engage in torture to be punished, said Corley.

As part of a broader crackdown on a number of religious communities in Ukraine, Russian occupation authorities are also planning to try Ukrainian Orthodox Church (UOC) priest Father Kostiantyn Maksimov on charges of “espionage,” Corley noted. The 41-year-old priest, who was seized by Russian occupation forces in May 2023, faces a prison term of 10 to 12 years if convicted.

Father Stepan Podolchak, a priest of the Orthodox Church of Ukraine, was captured Feb. 13 in Russian-occupied Kherson, taken from his home for while barefoot, with a bag over his head, according to Corley. The priest’s body, bearing bruises and a possible bullet wound to the head, was found on the street of his village, Kalanchak, two days later.

A Protestant woman in her early 50s has been under arrest by Russian forces since early 2024 for remarks “apparently related to Ukraine” during “a meeting at a private house,” said Corley, who noted that the woman — who remains unnamed since “publicity could … make her situation worse” may be facing criminal trial under Russian occupation officials.

Muslim clergy have also been subjected to duress and torture, Corley reported.

In December, the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church, or UGCC, announced it had obtained a copy of an order signed a year earlier by Yevgeny Balitsky, the Kremlin-installed head of the occupied Zaporizhzhia’s military-civil administration, declaring that the church had been banned and its property was to be transferred to his administration. Also banned by the order were the Knights of Columbus and Caritas, the official humanitarian arm of the worldwide Catholic Church.

VATICAN CITY (CNS) – Pope Francis said he truly hopes to celebrate the 1,700th anniversary of the First Ecumenical Council of Nicaea in Turkey in 2025.

“It is my hope that the commemoration of this highly significant event will inspire all believers in Christ the Lord to testify together to their faith and their desire for greater communion,” he told a delegation of Orthodox leaders during a meeting at the Vatican June 28.

The delegation representing the Orthodox Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople was in Rome for the June 29 feast of Sts. Peter and Paul.

The pope thanked the group for Orthodox Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew’s invitation to celebrate the anniversary “near the place where the council met. It is a trip that I truly wish to make.”

Pope Francis, likewise, invited the delegation and the faithful they represent to come to Rome for the Holy Year 2025. He asked them to accompany and support “with your prayers this year of grace, so that abundant spiritual fruits may not be lacking. It would also be very nice to have you present.”

“Dialogue between our churches poses no risk to the integrity of the faith; rather, it is a necessity arising from our fidelity to the Lord and leading us to the whole truth through an exchange of gifts and under the guidance of the Holy Spirit,” he said.

He encouraged the work of the Joint International Commission for Theological Dialogue between the Catholic Church and the Orthodox Church, “which has embarked on the study of delicate historical and theological issues.”

“It is my hope that the pastors and theologians engaged in this process will go beyond purely academic disputes and listen with docility to what the Holy Spirit is saying to the life of the church. And, at the same time, that what has already been studied and agreed upon will find full reception in our communities and places of formation,” he said.

“There will always and everywhere be resistance to this, but we must move forward with courage,” the pope added.

The council, which began meeting in May 325, gave birth to the Nicene Creed, affirmed the full divinity of Christ and set a formula for determining the date of Easter. The city of Nicaea is known today as Iznik.

(OSV News) – With less than a month to go, more than 40,000 Catholics have registered for the National Eucharistic Congress, the pinnacle of the U.S. bishops’ National Eucharistic Revival. Organizers expect the July 17-21 congress, held in Indianapolis, to be a watershed moment, igniting American Catholics’ belief in and devotion to Jesus’ real presence in the Eucharist. Here are six things to expect:

1. Lots of people.

As of late June, around 40,000 people had registered for the congress’s five-day pass, with thousands more signed up for single-day passes. That puts the congress’s attendance, especially for its weekend events, close to Lucas Oil Stadium’s 45,000-person capacity for this style of an event, said Tim Glemkowski, CEO of National Eucharistic Congress, Inc.

With this many people in one space — and the congress events spread over the expanse of the stadium and adjacent Indiana Conference Center — Glemkowski suggested attendees not focus on packing their personal schedules, but rather make time for rest and reflection.

“Take care of your human needs, and don’t try to overdo it,” he said. “Let the Lord lead you through an experience of a day instead of trying to maximize and be sort of everywhere.”

2. Mass, Eucharistic adoration and processions.

The Eucharist is the heart of the congress. The congress kicks off Wednesday evening July 17 with a “revival session” — the first of five, daily gatherings in Lucas Oil Stadium focused on Eucharistic adoration and worship.

Wednesday’s revival session opens with a huge Eucharistic procession that connects the National Eucharistic Pilgrimage — the eight-week, four-route pilgrimage with the Eucharist underway that culminates in Indianapolis for the congress — with the National Eucharistic Congress itself. That procession will include Bishop Andrew H. Cozzens of Crookston, Minnesota, board chairman of National Eucharistic Inc., entering the stadium with a huge monstrance.

Another major procession is planned for Saturday afternoon July 20 in downtown Indianapolis, and children who have recently made their first Communion are invited to wear their first Communion attire.

Meanwhile, Mass will be offered morning and afternoon in multiple languages. Local parishes will also host Byzantine Divine Liturgy and also Mass according to the 1962 Roman Missal (widely known as the traditional Latin Mass) on Thursday and Friday afternoons.

Throughout the congress, perpetual adoration will be held across the street from the Indiana Convention Center at the historic St. John the Evangelist Church, which Glemkowski described as the congress’s “spiritual hub.” St. John is holding evangelistic, nighttime prayer events following the congress’s revival sessions, as well as offering other forms of hospitality, including coffee and food, throughout the congress.

3. Speakers and musicians.

The congress brings together more than 50 popular Catholic speakers, leaders, media personalities and musicians under one roof for five days. Household names such as Bishop Robert E. Barron, Father Mike Schmitz and Jonathan Roumie are speaking during evening revival sessions, with Grammy-nominated musician Matt Maher leading worship on Saturday night.

Thursday, Friday and Saturday daytime schedules include “impact session” tracks and afternoon breakout sessions featuring other Catholic leaders, speakers and experts.

While many of the speakers are popular in Catholic circles, they were chosen because of their gifts in connecting a personal encounter with Jesus to mission, Glemkowski said.

“We have remarkably well known, impactful people in the church gathering for this moment,” he said. “Everyone is just trying to … lend their gifts and their support to this moment of renewal.”

The Indiana Convention Center will also offer two music stages that will feature groups such as The Hillbilly Thomists, The Vigil Project and Liveloud. A third stage is dedicated to podcasting, with shows including “Godsplaining” and “The Crunch” recording before an audience.

4. The arts and exhibits.

Also at the congress will be several exhibits related to Jesus and the saints, a musical theater performance, and programming for kids and families, as well as a dynamic expo hall.

The National Shroud of Turin Exhibit features a replica of the famous burial shroud believed to have covered Jesus in the tomb and invites viewers through a high-tech experience to consider what it terms the “world’s greatest mystery.” The Eucharistic Miracles Exhibit, originally created by soon-to-be St. Carlo Acutis (a special intercessor for the Eucharistic revival), explores Eucharistic miracles around the world. Meanwhile, a chapel with relics from Blessed Carlo and other saints associated with the revival — such as St. Manuel González García and St. Paschal Baylon — will be open for prayer and veneration.

Several exhibits and performances are geared for families. Afternoon programming includes Catechesis of the Good Shepherd atriums, which offer Montessori-style faith formation for children up to age 12, and the CatholicHOM Immersive Family Experience, which will feature an interactive puppet show.

On Thursday, “Bernadette de Lourdes, the Musical” — a theatrical performance about the Marian visionary of Lourdes, France — will be staged in Lucas Oil Stadium at 6:30 p.m. ahead of the evening’s revival session.

Meanwhile, an expansive expo hall in the convention center will be open each day with booths and displays featuring apostolates, ministries, religious orders, publishers and “makers of all types,” according to organizers.

Glemkowski likened the performances, exhibits and vendors to a town square during a festival, offering a “cultural hub” that fosters a sense of community.

“There’s a more enfleshed and embodied experience of the communion of the church that’s represented in the entire expression of the congress, that’s more than going from talk to talk to talk,” he said.

5. Service.

An encounter with the Eucharist should spur the church to seek out the “least and the lost,” Glemkowski said, which is why several outreach opportunities will be highlighted at the congress. On Thursday and Friday, attendees can pack meals for people who are hungry with the Indianapolis-based Million Meal Movement. The Denver-based Christ in the City will also train small groups of people to encounter men and women who are chronically homeless in Indianapolis.

Meanwhile, the congress includes several evangelization efforts, with evening invitations to passersby to light a candle or join adoration at St. John the Evangelist Church, and Catholics with Michigan-based St. Paul Street Evangelization prepared to share about Jesus’ real presence in the Eucharist with onlookers during Saturday’s Eucharistic procession.

Glemkowski noted that Catholic Relief Services’ staple Lenten service effort Project Rice Bowl came out of the 41st International Eucharistic Congress in Philadelphia in 1976.

“This connection between the Eucharistic heart of the church and its Eucharistic mission is very clear in these moments,” he said.

6. Commissioning.

Between a morning revival session and a closing Mass, the final day of the congress includes a “great commissioning,” which organizers compare to “a new Pentecost,” where attendees “will be sent out to joyfully proclaim the Gospel in every corner of our nation.”

That commissioning is not just for congress attendees, but for the wider church, Glemkowski said.

“The people who are gathered there at the congress are gathering on behalf of the entire people of God, the church in the United States,” he said. “The commissioning that happens at the congress is for the whole church in the United States — everybody who tunes in on EWTN or Relevant Radio, who just hears about the congress, all of us. We’re inviting a new Pentecost, to say, ‘Lord, we want to return to you with our whole hearts so that you might make us fruitful in our life as a church.'”

The congress kicks off the National Eucharistic Revival’s third and final year, the Year of Mission, where Catholics are invited to accompany Catholics no longer practicing the faith back to the church, and to grow more deeply in their understanding of what the Eucharist requires of their own lives.

The U.S. bishops’ Walk with One initiative encourages Catholics to recognize “the one person over the next year that you’re uniquely being sent to on mission,” Glemkowski said.

“It’s a small task” for an individual, he said, “but if millions of us — 5 million, 10 million Catholics — do that all together, just go accompany an individual wherever they’re at in their life, in their journey, in their story, that could be a very powerful, concrete thing we do as a church that could really change a lot of lives.”

(OSV News) – “I think my heart is going to explode,” said Montse Alvarado, describing the way she expects to feel when she gathers with tens of thousands of Catholics to adore the Eucharist at Indianapolis’ Lucas Oil Stadium in July. “It feels like so much beauty at a moment when our country and our world is in the midst of war and so much pain, just to see this be our church’s response — wow, what a witness.”

The United States’ first event of its kind in more than half a century, the National Eucharistic Congress is expected to draw more than 40,000 Catholics July 17-21 for five days of prayer, speakers, liturgies and worship, all centered on Jesus in the Eucharist.

Speakers showcase a “who’s who” in Catholic evangelization, including Bishop Robert E. Barron of Winona-Rochester, Minnesota, and founder of Word on Fire; Father Mike Schmitz of the Diocese of Duluth, Minnesota, and host of “The Bible in a Year” podcast; Sister Josephine Garrett, a member of the Sisters of the Holy Family of Nazareth and host of the “Hope Stories” podcast; and Jonathan Roumie, who portrays Jesus in “The Chosen.”

The event is the pinnacle of the National Eucharistic Revival, a three-year initiative the U.S. bishops launched on Corpus Christi Sunday in June 2022 to renew Catholics’ love for and understanding of Jesus’ real presence in the Eucharist.

Alvarado, EWTN News president and COO and one of three emcees for the congress’s daily “revival sessions,” told OSV News June 21 she expects the congress to be a source of American Catholics’ spiritual unity, strengthened identity and renewed vigor through the Holy Spirit.

“I’m excited for people to connect with the church,” she said, and “for the church to encounter itself.”

The congress begins Wednesday night in Lucas Oil Stadium with the first of the four evening revival sessions, with Eucharistic adoration, speakers and worship music. The event opens with a major procession with the 30 young adult “perpetual pilgrims” from all four routes of the eight-week National Eucharistic Pilgrimage. The pilgrims set out with the Eucharist on Pentecost weekend from points in California, Connecticut, Minnesota and Texas to meet in Indianapolis for the congress, covering a combined 6,500 miles — many of them on foot — as they encountered Catholics at parishes and other sacred and secular sites for Mass and other worship experiences, Eucharistic processions and fellowship.

The congress’s opening procession will culminate in Bishop Andrew H. Cozzens of Crookston, Minnesota, entering the stadium with the Eucharist in a “massive” monstrance designed for the congress, leading to a time of silent adoration. Then participants will hear from Bishop Cozzens and the evening’s other keynote speakers, Cardinal Christophe Pierre, the Holy See’s apostolic nuncio to the United States; and Sister Bethany Madonna, a Sister of Life in Phoenix.

As with each congress evening’s revival session, Alvarado will be emceeing along with Sister Miriam James Heidland, a sister of the Society of Our Lady of the Most Holy Trinity and co-host of the “Abiding Together” podcast; and Father Josh Johnson, a priest of the Diocese of Baton Rouge, Louisiana, and host of the “Ask Father Josh” podcast. Worship will be led by Dallas’ Dave and Lauren Moore, the founders of Catholic Music Initiative.

Thursday, Friday and Saturday have similar schedules. The days begin with Relevant Radio’s Family Rosary Across America with Father Rocky Hoffman, followed by Mass, with English, Spanish and youth options, celebrated by key American prelates such as Cardinal Timothy M Dolan of New York, Cardinal Seán P. O’Malley of Boston and Cardinal Wilton D. Gregory of Washington.

Following Mass, attendees are encouraged to remain in the stadium or head to the adjacent Indiana Convention Center for one of seven “impact session” tracks being held in both locations. With names like Encounter, Renewal and Empower, each track is tailored for particular audiences — including ministry leaders, families, youth and priests — and features well-known Catholic leaders, experts and speakers.

Following lunch, afternoon breakout sessions on Thursday, Friday and Saturday dive into a range of topics, from apologetics to social action, with more than 40 speakers over three days.

Varied styles of liturgies will be offered Thursday and Friday afternoons, with options including Masses in English and Vietnamese (Friday only), as well as Byzantine Divine Liturgy and Mass according to the 1962 Missal (widely known as the “traditional Latin Mass”) offered at nearby parishes.

Thursday, Friday and Saturday afternoons also include a range of additional exhibits and experiences: the National Shroud of Turin Exhibit, which features a replica of the famous burial shroud believed to have covered Jesus in the tomb; the Eucharistic Miracles Exhibit, originally created by soon-to-be St. Carlo Acutis (one of the Eucharistic revival’s patrons); a chapel with relics from Blessed Carlo and other saints associated with the revival; Catechesis of the Good Shepherd atriums, which offer Montessori-style faith formation for children up to age 12; and the CatholicHOM Immersive Family Experience, which will include an interactive puppet show.

On Thursday, “Bernadette de Lourdes, the Musical” — a theatrical performance about the Marian visionary of Lourdes, France — will be staged at Lucas Oil Stadium at 6:30 p.m.

Thursday and Friday will also include an opportunity to pack meals for the hungry with Indianapolis-based Million Meal Movement. The Denver-based Christ in the City will also train small groups of people to encounter chronically homeless men and women in Indianapolis.

Meanwhile, an expansive expo hall in the convention center will be open each day from noon to 6:30 p.m. with booths and displays featuring apostolates, ministries, religious orders, publishers and “makers of all types,” according to organizers. The convention center will also host three stages with rotating music acts and live podcast shows.

A key congress highlight is Saturday’s 3-5 p.m. Eucharistic procession through downtown Indianapolis, which is expected to make a visual and spiritual impact on the city.

On Wednesday to Saturday, revival sessions begin in Lucas Oil Stadium at 7 p.m. Thursday’s keynote speakers are Father Schmitz and Mother Olga of the Sacred Heart, founder and servant mother of the Daughters of Mary of Nazareth in the Archdiocese of Boston. Friday’s speakers are Sister Josephine and Father Boniface Hicks, a Benedictine monk of St. Vincent Archabbey in Latrobe, Pennsylvania, and the event includes prayer for healing and reparation and a Eucharistic procession.

Saturday’s revival speakers are Bishop Barron; Roumie; Catholic media personality Gloria Purvis, and Tim Glemkowski, current CEO of National Eucharistic Congress Inc., the nonprofit organizing revival events, especially the congress and pilgrimage. Catholic musician Matt Maher will lead worship during Eucharistic adoration.

On Sunday, the congress’s final day, the revival session is in the morning, with speakers Mother Adela Galindo of the Servants of the Pierced Hearts of Jesus and Mary, who founded a bilingual “religious family” of religious sisters and brothers, priests and laypeople; and Chris Stefanick, founder of Real Life Catholic.

The congress ends with a “great commissioning,” which organizers have compared to “a new Pentecost,” where attendees “will be sent out to joyfully proclaim the Gospel in every corner of our nation.” The congress will close with a 10 a.m. Mass celebrated by special papal envoy Cardinal Luis Tagle, pro-prefect of the Section for the First Evangelization and New Particular Churches of the Holy See’s Dicastery for Evangelization.

As the event draws near, Glemkowski said he is excited to watch it unfold.

“There’s movement and energy and it’s focused on Jesus, and we’re asking for the Holy Spirit to fall on the church in a new way,” he told OSV News June 26. “The communion of the church is going to be so powerful and prominent.”

Speaking to fellow bishops June 14 at the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops’ Spring Plenary Assembly in Louisville, Kentucky, Bishop Cozzens, board chairman of National Eucharistic Congress Inc., pointed to the encouragement Pope Francis gave congress organizers when they met with him June 19, 2023.

“I’m reminded and encouraged often by the words of our Holy Father to us,” Bishop Cozzens told the bishops. “‘The National Eucharistic Congress,’ he (Pope Francis) said, ‘marks a significant moment in the life of the church in the United States. May all that you’re doing be an occasion of grace for each of you, and may it bear fruit in guiding men and women, throughout your nation, to the Lord who, by his presence among us, rekindles hope and renews life.'”

The congress kicks off the National Eucharistic Revival’s third year, the Year of Mission, which encourages Catholics to intentionally accompany someone on his or her faith journey back to the Catholic faith through its “Walk with One” initiative.

The year also invites Catholics to become Eucharistic missionaries, which would take them, Bishop Cozzens said, “deep into the mystery of the Eucharist” and how that affects their life. Bishop Cozzens’ book on the topic, written with Glemkowski and titled “For the Life of the World: Invited to Eucharistic Mission,” was published June 24 by Our Sunday Visitor.

The July congress is the 10th National Eucharistic Congress, occurring 83 years after the Ninth National Eucharistic Congress in St. Paul, Minnesota.

“We won’t wait another 83 years before the 11th National Eucharistic Congress,” Bishop Cozzens told the bishops. “We all know that the work of renewing the life of the Eucharist in the church is a generational work. Many countries have regular national Eucharistic congresses, including places like Italy and Mexico.”

The next U.S. national congress may be in 2033, Bishop Cozzens said, in honor of the “year of redemption” – the 2,000th anniversary of Jesus’ death and resurrection.

Catholics who have only recently felt moved to attend the Eucharistic congress need not wait another nine years, however; Bishop Cozzens told bishops that day passes and hotel rooms are still available for the congress in July.

“For five days, Catholics are going to take over a-one-and-a-half-square-mile radius of downtown Indianapolis,” Glemkowski said. “I’m so excited for people to come and just have that experience of, ‘Oh, this is a huge deal, like, this is a big thing that’s happening in this city.’ You’re going to spend five days wrapped in the communion of the church in a way that I think a lot of us are going to miss when it’s over.”

VATICAN CITY (CNS) – Pope Francis appointed two special commissioners to start work on building an agrivoltaic system on a Vatican property outside of Rome that could supply the whole of Vatican City’s energy needs.

“There is a need to make a transition to a model of sustainable development that reduces greenhouse gas emissions into the atmosphere, establishing the goal of climate neutrality,” he said in an apostolic letter issued “motu proprio,” on his own initiative.

The letter, titled “Brother Sun,” was dated June 21, the summer solstice and the longest day of the year. The Vatican published the letter June 26.

“Humanity has the technological means needed to tackle this environmental transformation and its pernicious ethical, social, economic and political consequences, and among these, solar energy plays a key role,” he wrote.

The pope called for the building of an agrivoltaic plant on Vatican property about 11 miles outside of Rome in the area of Santa Maria di Galeria where an array of short wave directional antennas of Vatican Radio are located.

Agrivoltaic systems are a series of solar panels that coexist with crops, livestock or both, such as by having panel arrays on top of greenhouses, interleaved among fields or elevated above them so they can still be used for agricultural purposes.

The future installation will be projected to “ensure, not only the power supply of the radio station existing there, but also the complete energy support of Vatican City State,” he wrote.

The pope appointed two special commissioners to spearhead the project: the president of the commission governing Vatican City State, Cardinal Fernando Vérgez Alzaga, and the president of the Administration of the Patrimony of the Holy See (APSA), Archbishop Giordano Piccinotti. APSA directly administers Vatican real estate and properties.

He appointed the two presidents to be “extraordinary commissioners with the full capacity to carry out the necessary acts of ordinary and extraordinary administration,” and he ordered the Vatican Secretariat of State to facilitate the commissioners’ “every request and work to ensure that nothing is lost in that territory, which has been available to the Holy See” after it was ceded by Italy in an accord in 1951.

The Vatican has been seeking to drastically reduce its environmental impact by adopting more renewable energy sources, pursuing a goal of zero emissions by 2050 and assembling a net-zero-emissions fleet of vehicles by 2030.

In 2022, The Vatican joined the 1992 United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change and the 2015 Paris Agreement.

The pope said that by having the Vatican join the framework convention, which asks countries commit to limiting the increase of greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere, he “intended to contribute to the efforts of all states to offer, in accordance with their respective responsibilities and capacities, an adequate response to the challenges posed to humanity and our common home by climate change.”

VATICAN CITY (CNS) – When Pope Francis became the first leader of the Catholic Church to address a Group of Seven summit, a gathering of leaders from the world’s most developed economies, he thrust one of the world’s oldest institutions into the heart of a global debate on the development of cutting-edge technologies.

Artificial intelligence, the pope warned presidents and prime ministers in southern Italy June 14, runs the risk of locking the world order in a “technocratic paradigm.”

“No innovation is neutral,” the pope told the leaders. Rather technology “represents a form of order in social relations and an arrangement of power, thus enabling certain people to perform specific actions while preventing others from performing different ones.” He added that technology “always includes the worldview of those who invented and developed it.”

Often seen as an institution at the crossroads of the world — a bridge between East and West, Global North and Global South — the Vatican, with Pope Francis at the helm, is positioning itself as a partner to discuss AI ethics with key players in its development to break down the impending technologic divide before it is established.

Only recently has the pope made AI a central theme of his pontificate. He chose artificial intelligence as the theme for his messages for World Day of Peace and World Day of Social Communications this year. The Pontifical Academies for Sciences and Social Sciences recently held a conference on AI and well-being that brought industry leaders to the Vatican to discuss technology’s impact on human flourishing.

Since 2020, the Pontifical Academy for Life has been promoting the “Rome Call for AI Ethics,” a document intended to promote a sense of responsibility on ensuring developing AI technologies remain at the service of humankind and do not threaten its dignity. Microsoft, IBM and Cisco have all signed the document, and leaders of major world religions will sign it as well during a July meeting in Hiroshima, Japan.

The Centesimus Annus Foundation, a Vatican nonprofit organization that seeks to promote the church’s social teaching on finance and economics, hosted a June 21-22 conference to discuss generative artificial intelligence and the “technocratic paradigm” mentioned by Pope Francis.

Among the speakers – academics and leaders in government and industry – was Franciscan Father Paolo Benanti, an ethics professor at Rome’s Pontifical Gregorian University and an adviser to Pope Francis on AI issues.

In his speech, Father Benanti noted that due to the omnipresence of technology, “we have transformed reality into a software-defined reality.”

That means that although people still engage with physical goods, such as a car, the “power” of modern cars, such as Teslas, is their software — the code that exists within the car’s computer and enables it to run — which is only licensed and not owned by the purchaser.

“So I bought the piece of hardware, but what makes this piece able to work and function is not my property. It’s a license that is someone else’s property,” he said at the conference in the Vatican June 21.

“It’s the software that defines the nature of the reality that is in front of you, (then) who owns the software, owns the power, owns the reality and has the ability to define what is allowed and what is not allowed.”

While this has been the case for technology in the past decade, such as with smartphones, AI is significant in that “all the processes that we digitize are centralized in the cloud, and who will own the cloud will own the processes.”

That concentration of power is a concern for institutions beyond the Vatican as well. Father Benanti, who is a member of the United Nations’ AI Advisory Body, shared that a concern for the U.N. is how to build technology capacity for the Global South while avoiding a situation of people being “colonized” by software developers.

He stressed that establishing an ethical framework for any technology, and in particular AI, entails “opening the black box” in order to make known the mechanisms that underpin their behavior for users.

OpenAI’s ChatGPT, for example, is a so-called “black box” that does not provide explanation or rationale for its output.

How society will come to grasp the software-defined reality and centralization of computing power “will describe what kind of society, which kind of democracy, we will leave to the next generation” Father Benanti said.

To that end, he proposed using the church’s social doctrine as a model to shift the building of AI tools away from the pursuit of progress — “the ability to do something faster, speedier, in a much more efficient way” — and rather toward development, which prioritizes serving the common good.

That process, Father Benanti said, begins by calling on society to establish the ethical limits of artificially intelligent technology.

“That means allowing human beings to be enriched by AI tools, (while) maintaining the control of the process and being able to have this kind of process compatible with democracy,” he said.

Meeting with the conference participants June 22, Pope Francis echoed Father Benanti’s sentiments, calling for a “regulatory, economic and financial environment that limits the monopoly of a few and allows development to benefit all of humanity.”

He also asked the experts to deepen their study on what humankind’s relationship with AI will be like in the future, stressing the need to educate children on AI from a young age so that they may develop a critical approach to it, to consider how AI technologies will impact labor markets and prepare workers for the transition and to plan for the consequences of AI in security and human relationships.

Pope Francis ended his audience with a “provocation,” he said: “Are we sure we want to continue calling ‘intelligence’ that which is not intelligent?”

“Let us think about it,” he said, “and ask ourselves whether the misuse of this word that is so important, so human, is not already a surrender to technocratic power.”

VATICAN CITY (CNS) – Pope Francis blessed an ambulance filled with medicine and first-aid equipment that will travel some 1,800 miles from the Vatican to support those wounded in Ukraine.

Cardinal Konrad Krajewski, papal almoner, will make his eighth trip into Ukraine to donate the ambulance and medical supplies to a hospital in the country’s Ternopil region, the Dicastery for the Charity Services announced June 24. The dicastery’s statement was accompanied by a picture of Pope Francis blessing the ambulance.

In Ternopil, “many convoys arrive every day which transport civilians and soldiers forced to flee the border area with Russia, where the fighting is most fierce,” the dicastery said. It will be the third ambulance the pope has sent to Ukraine, it said, and this one will also be “a valuable tool to support those rescuing injured people.”

During his trip, the cardinal will also inaugurate the St. John Paul II rehabilitation center on Pope Francis’ behalf “for the integral physical and psychological rehabilitation of those who have suffered war trauma,” it added.

The center and others like it, “desired by Pope Francis,” were built with the contribution of some pontifical foundations, such as Aid to the Church in Need and the Papal Foundation, the statement said.

The dicastery noted that the centers “are open to everyone without any distinction of faith, of nationality and without any exclusion.”

Additionally, it said that medicine will be made available not only to those who were injured in battle but also to their families and loved ones.

By donating the ambulance and medical supplies and establishing the rehabilitation center, Pope Francis “reminds us that faith is not disincarnate, but it takes upon itself the difficult situations of the most poor and fragile brothers and sisters,” the dicastery said in its statement. “These concrete gestures of compassion seek to clear the way for mercy to reach the grace of forgiveness.”

(OSV News) – A new study suggests that Catholic belief in the Real Presence may be higher than previous data indicated — but measuring that belief accurately remains a tricky task for researchers.

Regular Mass attendance, however, has emerged as a key factor in determining an individual’s belief in the Real Presence.

On June 3, Vinea Research, a Maryland-based market research firm that focuses on the Catholic Church in the U.S., released “Do Catholics Truly Believe in the Real Presence?” — which concluded that 69% of Mass-going Catholics believe in the real presence of Jesus in the Eucharist. Higher levels of belief correlated with more frequent Mass attendance, Vinea found.

Vinea’s seven-page report revisited a landmark 2019 survey by Pew Research that found only 31% of Catholics in the U.S. believed that “during Catholic Mass, the bread and wine actually become the body and blood of Jesus.” Pew reported at the time that among Catholics attending Mass at least once a week, 63% believed in transubstantiation — the theological term used to describe the change of the Eucharistic bread and wine into the body and blood of Christ — but another 37% believed “the bread and wine are symbols.”

Yet the wording of Pew’s question was problematic, as were the response options, said Vinea founder and president Hans Plate, who has extensive experience in conducting market research for pharmaceutical and health care industries.

The Pew study “actually gave (survey participants) two responses that were both partially correct,” Plate told OSV News.

Pew had posed two questions — one knowledge-based, the other belief-oriented — about the Eucharist. In the first, Pew had asked respondents, “Which of the following best describes Catholic teaching about the bread and wine used for Communion?” and asked them to select if the bread and wine “actually become the body and blood of Jesus Christ” or “are symbols of the body and blood of Jesus Christ.” A percentage of the survey takers indicated they were not sure (10%) or had no answer (1%).

In the second question, Pew asked, “Regardless of the official teaching of the Catholic Church, what do you personally believe about the bread and wine used for Communion?” with participants replying that during the Mass, the bread and wine “actually become the body and blood of Jesus Christ” or “are symbols of the body and blood of Jesus Christ.”

Plate told OSV News that “not only did (Pew) phrase the question wrong … but they actually gave (survey participants) two responses that were both partially correct. They weren’t even mutually exclusive. … I don’t think they had any bad intentions, but they just didn’t know any better.”

Instead, said Plate, the questions needed to be phrased to better align with Catholic teaching, which — as Jesuit Father Thomas Gaunt, executive director of the Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate, told OSV News — holds that the bread and wine are “true Presence and symbol at the same time.”

“All sacraments are symbols,” said Father Gaunt, whose organization teamed up with the McGrath Institute for Church Life at the University of Notre Dame for a 2023 national survey on Eucharistic belief among adult Catholics in the U.S.

That report – which found 64% of respondents expressed belief in the Real Presence, based on collective assessments of both open- and closed-ended questions for each participant, with Mass attendance proving significant in positive responses – used questions that “better expressed the church’s teachings around Real Presence and transubstantiation,” wrote McGrath’s associate director for research Timothy O’Malley in an October 2023 commentary.

Vinea’s rewrite of the Pew questions rendered the options for both the knowledge-based and belief questions as as “Jesus Christ is truly present in the bread and wine of the Eucharist,” “Bread and wine are symbols of Jesus, but Jesus is not truly present,” or “Not sure.”

The Vinea study split its sample of over 2,000 Catholics — defined as age 18 or older, who attended Mass “at least once,” Plate told OSV News, on a basis ranging from “seldom” to “a few times a year” to “more than once a week” — and administered Pew’s language to half, with the remaining half answering Vinea’s revised questions.

Father Gaunt told OSV News the Vinea study “is confirming pretty much what we found” in the McGrath-CARA study.

“They highlighted again that the issue is the way Pew phrased the question was not clear enough,” said Father Gaunt. “And so when you correct for that, you get a very different response rate.”

But Gregory A. Smith, associate director of research at Pew, told OSV News his firm’s question phrasing “has a number of strengths,” as it “gives people two plausible alternatives to choose from.

“That’s really important because of something survey researchers call ‘acquiescence bias,'” whereby respondents, given a choice to either agree or disagree with a statement, “tend to prefer to express agreement rather than disagreement,” explained Smith, who has not studied the Vinea findings.

Smith also said the Pew questioning is “quite neutral,” which is “very important.”

“I am aware that there have been some other surveys that have added a clause to the second statement … modifying the second statement so that it would be (to the effect), ‘The bread and wine symbols of the body and blood of Jesus Christ, but Jesus is not really present.’ We would not ask that kind of question, because you’re asking Christians to deny the real presence of Jesus. … I would be concerned that (phrasing) would cue respondents into a particular kind of answer that they might think the researcher is looking for.”

Smith said that even with Pew’s wording aside, “more crucially, the patterns that we see in our data are meaningful … and they’re what you might expect to see, if you assume that practicing Catholics are going to be the most likely to believe in the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist. That is exactly what we see in our data.”

Both he and Plate cautioned their studies were not directly comparable, given the differences in sampling (selecting a subset of a given population for research) and weighting, which ensures the sample accurately reflects the makeup of the larger population.

Vinea noted in its report that Pew’s sampling approach of “probability sampling” is “the gold standard method for obtaining a representative set of survey respondents.” In contrast, Vinea worked with ThinkNow, a consumer panel company.

“However, the magnitude of difference in results does allow us to make inferences between the two approaches,” the Vinea report said.

More broadly, researchers may find themselves increasingly having to account for how Catholics in the U.S. identify themselves as such, given polarization within the church and in society.

More than a decade ago, Brian Starks — a sociologist of religion at Kennesaw State University who specializes in the study of Catholic identity — noted that greater in-depth research was needed on self-identification terms such as “traditional,” “moderate” and “liberal” Catholic, since such identities represent “self-understood divisions within the Catholic Church, and serve to institutionalize intrafaith conflicts.”

ROME (CNS) – The diversity of the Catholic Church in the United States requires that it develop a culturally sensitive approach to preventing abuse, a safeguarding expert said.

Although the U.S. church, like the church in Europe, has structures in place to promote safeguarding to a higher degree than churches with less resources, “there are cultural aspects that need to be taken into account,” Jesuit Father Hans Zollner, president of the Pontifical Gregorian University’s Institute of Anthropology: Interdisciplinary Studies on Human Dignity and Care, said.

“The more diverse a society is and a local church is, the more it needs to respect the different cultures, languages, habits, mentalities that are represented,” he told Catholic News Service June 18 on the sidelines of an international safeguarding conference hosted by the institute.

Given the diversity within the U.S. church, it must “be aware that there are different types of (ways) how you establish relationships, how you interact and express yourself, in different parts of the world,” Father Zollner said.

According to a 2023 report by the Pew Research Center, 57% of U.S. Catholics are white, non-Hispanic, while 33% are Hispanic, 4% are Asian, 2% are Black and 3% are of another race.

Racial, ethnic and cultural diversity in U.S. churches presents the challenge of communicating the sensitivity around safeguarding in ways that cut through cultural differences, he said.

“When we talk with people from a different background do we really talk the same language in regard to sexuality, to harassment? How do we approach people, how you relate to people, talk about difficult issues?” Father Zollner asked.

He said the church in the United States must make significant effort “so that these ethnicities are more likely to come on board, and so that people don’t get the impression of a sort of ‘neo-colonialism’ by just applying the same type of structure, language, or educational programs to people who have a different outlook.”

“Law and guidelines are important,” he said, “but law does not change the heart. It does not automatically change mentality.”

Father Zollner stressed the need for the church “to learn to tell the intention of guidelines in a narrative way. And the narration needs to come in symbols, in language, that can be understood on the ground. “

In many cultures, for example, sexuality is “a complete taboo in the public debate,” and, as a result, “people don’t have the courage to talk about this and are not educated in family, schools, or religions to do so.”

Still, he maintained that the Catholic Church is still a leader in safeguarding, since “no religion and no denomination have made the same strides in safeguarding activity, which means setting up guidelines for all types of institutions, (and) the training of personnel, full-time or volunteers.”

But still, the church’s implementation of safeguarding practices are “far from perfect and far from consistent,” Father Zollner said.

“In many places, we don’t implement our own law,” for example in addressing cover up of abuse,, he said, which is “an institutional failure of great importance because it undermines the credibility of the Gospel message.”

Additionally, he noted that the church often fails to collaborate on safeguarding with other religions, denominations, the state and non-government organizations.

While Father Zollner praised the extensive work already done by the Catholic Church to prevent abuse, “we are the biggest player in this field, so we have a special obligation.”