Mois : décembre 2022

During his annual Christmas Day message, Pope Francis lamented the « famine of peace » sparked by the invasion of Ukraine, saying the 10 month-long war had wreaked havoc on Ukrainians and fueled a crisis of hunger around the globe. 

« Think of all those, especially children, who go hungry, while huge amounts of food daily go to waste and resources are being spent on weapons, » said Francis, as he delivered his Dec. 25 urbi et orbi (« to the city and the world ») message and blessing. « The war in Ukraine has further aggravated this situation, putting entire peoples at risk of famine. »

« We know that every war causes hunger and exploits food as a weapon, hindering its distribution to people already suffering, » the pope continued. « On this day, let us learn from the Prince of Peace and, starting with those who hold political responsibilities, commit ourselves to making food solely an instrument of peace. »

Francis used the occasion to again call for an immediate end to « this senseless war » and deplored the fact that many Ukrainians are spending Christmas in the dark and cold and away from their homes. As the pope delivered his remarks, all of Ukraine was under alert, following Russia’s launch of new rockets aimed at the country. 

The pope delivered his traditional Christmas Day address from the central balcony of St. Peter’s Basilica overlooking the square below, where thousands of pilgrims gathered on an unusually warm and sun-filled Christmas morning at the Vatican.

As he did during his Christmas Eve Mass on Dec. 24, the pope urged « concrete gestures » to aid all who are suffering during the holiday season.

He also used his noontime remarks to highlight a number of conflict zones around the world, including Yemen, Syria, Myanmar, Iran, the Sahel region of Africa, as well as the ongoing disputes between Israelis and Palestinians.

Francis also prayed for the deteriorating situation in Lebanon, which is currently without a government, and called for the support of the international community to help the country rebound. 

« I think in particular of the people of Haiti who have been suffering for a long time, » Francis said, paying tribute to a country long plagued by natural disasters and humanitarian crises, which in recent months has experienced a new wave of political chaos. 

As is his custom, the pope also spotlighted the needs of migrants and refugees, as well as offered prayers for prisoners « whom we regard solely for the mistakes they have made and not as our fellow men and women. » 

Francis said that the same forces that prevented King Herod from welcoming the birth of Jesus — « attachment to power and money, pride, hypocrisy, falsehood » — continue to plague society today and risk overshadowing the « grace of Christmas. » 

« Indeed, we must acknowledge with sorrow that, even as the Prince of Peace is given to us, the icy winds of war continue to buffet humanity, » said the pope. 

« Let us allow ourselves to be deeply moved by the love of God, » Francis concluded. « And let us follow Jesus, who stripped himself of his glory in order to give us a share in his fullness. » 

Which Christmas Mass are you going to? When I was a child, we went to an early morning Mass — before we could see what Santa brought. Whichever celebration you choose, unless perhaps the Mass at Dawn, you know it is going to be crowded. Everything about Christmas is sacramental, awakening the Catholicism in folks who may exhibit little interest in religiosity during most of the year. (Note the crowds at Christmas Masses, and give thanks that so many people want to celebrate God’s love — even if not on a regular basis.)

Christmas invites everybody to feel at home. As we set up the nativity scenes and contemplate the characters, I suspect we often feel at most at home with the shepherds. It’s delightful to think of those folks who were just going about their business, expecting nothing more than another long night, when suddenly they became the audience for an angelic chorus. Many of us know the script because in « A Charlie Brown Christmas » Linus has taught us to repeat:

I bring unto you good tidings of great joy, which shall be to all people. For unto you is born this day in the City of David a Savior, which is Christ the Lord. And this shall be a sign unto you; Ye shall find the babe wrapped in swaddling clothes, lying in a manger. 

While we gladly sing that, it’s actually a very odd image to make the centerpiece of such extraordinary celebration. Perhaps we’re charmed by specialized language like swaddling clothes and the manger. The declaration is far more dramatic than saying, « Go to a little town nearby and you’ll find a baby wearing diapers, sleeping in a feedbox. »

What a sign! A baby wearing diapers! Yet that’s the message of this feast. The Gospel of John (the reading for our Mass during the Day) gives us all the solemnity we can handle with the solemn proclamation: « In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. … And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us. » But that glorious declaration simply tells us that the Word of God became mortal, limited and needy. Jesus the Christ, the Word of God incarnate, needed someone to change his diapers.

We have five sets of readings for the feast of the Nativity of the Lord, including the Vigil Mass. The Gospel for the Vigil comes from Matthew, recounting the genealogy describing Jesus as a descendant of Abraham and David, then telling last Sunday’s story of Joseph’s dilemma.

The Mass during the Night begins with Isaiah’s promise that the boots that tramped battle and the cloaks rolled blood will be forgotten and the people who walked in darkness will see a great light. (Imagine how Ukrainians hear that!) Luke’s Gospel accompanies this with the story of Jesus’ birth to the homeless pilgrims, Mary and Joseph and the announcement to the shepherds. During the Mass at Dawn, we sing Psalm 97, « A light will shine on us this day, » and we hear of the shepherds’ visit to the newborn child and his parents.

Finally, in the Mass during the Day, Isaiah proclaims, « How beautiful upon the mountains are the feet of him who brings glad tidings, » and we sing, « All the ends of the earth have seen the saving power of God! » Then we hear John’s solemn proclamation that includes the terrible truth: « He came to his own, but his own people did not accept him. »

The baby creates the charm of Christmas. Babies promise a future and inspire our tenderness and protectiveness. We are awed at their fragility. The scandal of Christmas is that it reveals that this is how God comes: vulnerable and fragile, unwelcomed at home while reverenced by the poor and strangers.

All our Nativity stories include hints of the end — both the cross and resurrection, Jesus’ rejection and love’s triumph through him. Christmas reminds us that God remains among us weak and mild. The baby Jesus can represent a sweet message and also the earth-shattering revelation that God’s power is the antithesis of domination. The shepherds and Magi, Caesar and Herod, remind us that not everyone desires Emmanuel, God-with-us, and that those who reject Emmanuel will stop at nothing to carry out their plan. The coming of Christ, then and now, is what the poet William Butler Yeats called « a terrible beauty. »

Today, it is we who must incarnate the promise of peace to people of goodwill. In a world in which at least 30 nations are at war, we who flock to the manger are called and empowered to become sacraments of Emmanuel. Let us wonder at the babe and remember that we must be the body of Christ today. That’s why he came in the first place.

Twenty years after city prosecutors convened a grand jury to investigate the handling of priest-abuse complaints within the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Philadelphia, the tortuous legal case came to an end with a cleric’s misdemeanor no contest plea in a near-empty City Hall courtroom.

Msgr. William Lynn, 71, had served nearly three years in state prison as appeals courts reviewed the fiery three-month trial that led to his felony child endangerment conviction in 2012. The verdict was twice overturned, leaving prosecutors pursuing the thinning case in recent years with a single alleged victim whose appearance in court was in doubt.

In the end, they said Lynn could end the two-decade ordeal by pleading no contest to a charge of failing to turn over records to the 2002 grand jury. A judge took the plea during a short break from her civil caseload last month, and imposed no further punishment.

“He lost 10 years of his life, 10 years of his priestly life,” said defense lawyer Thomas Bergstrom, speaking of the decade since Lynn’s conviction. “It’s a travesty. It’s an absolute travesty.”

“You’re fighting an uphill battle because the public at large misunderstood what he was convicted of. They thought he was an abuser,” Bergstrom said.

Lynn was the first U.S. church official ever charged, convicted or imprisoned over their handling of priest-abuse complaints.

His trial attracted a packed courtroom full of press, priest-abuse victims and outraged Catholics, along with a few church loyalists. Lynn, the longtime secretary for clergy, was accused of sending a known predator — named on a list of problem priests he had prepared for Cardinal Anthony Bevilacqua — to an accuser’s northeast Philadelphia parish.

The trial judge allowed nearly two dozen other priest-abuse victims to testify about abuse they had suffered in the archdiocese over a half century. An appeals court later said their weeks of testimony over uncharged acts were unfair to Lynn — who some saw as a scapegoat for the church, given that the bishops and cardinals above him were never charged.

“This is one defendant, one count of endangering the welfare of children, with one group of children,” Judge Gwendolyn Bright said before his retrial was set to start in March 2020. “We’re not bringing in the so-called or alleged ‘sins of the Catholic Church.’”

The pandemic closed the courthouse, and the case against Lynn stalled yet again until the recent plea offer.

A spokesperson for District Attorney Larry Krasner, who inherited the case from his predecessors, called Lynn’s unannounced Nov. 2 plea “the appropriate path for bringing finality and closure to the victims, who have endured retraumatization throughout the legal process for years » and said they did not want to face another trial.

The archdiocese did not immediately return a message seeking comment.

Lynn, who remains a priest, has been saying Mass for retired nuns and hopes to assume more duties, according to Bergstrom, who declined to make his client available to the press on Nov. 21.

At his trial, Lynn said he had made a list of 35 suspected predator priests so Bevilacqua would address the matter, only to have the list be destroyed.

“I did not intend any harm to come to (the victim). The fact is, my best was not good enough to stop that harm,” Lynn testified.

In recent years, prosecutors were not sure they could get the trial accuser — a policeman’s son who testified to his long struggle with addiction — back in court for the retrial, complicating their trial strategy. Assistant District Attorney Patrick Blessington, the lead trial prosecutor in 2012, had said he could try the case without a victim by arguing that Lynn had placed “a bomb” in the parish, whether or not it went off.

Blessington is now retired. And, ultimately, District Attorney Krasner decided not to try that strategy.

“The victims in this matter expressed to the commonwealth that proceeding (with another trial) … would cause irreparable harm and further victimize them, » his office said in its statement.

The trial accuser said that he had been abused by two priests and his Catholic school teacher. One of them, defrocked priest Edward Avery, took a plea offer days before trial. Fr. Charles Engelhardt, who said he had never met the accuser, was convicted at a 2013 trial and died in prison. Teacher Bernard Shero was released in 2017 after his conviction was overturned and, like Lynn, pleaded no contest to lesser charges.

The priest-abuse scandal has cost the Roman Catholic church an estimated $3 billion or more, and plunged dioceses around the world into bankruptcy.

Over 1,000 U.S. faith leaders are calling for a Christmas cease-fire in Ukraine 10 months after Russia invaded its neighbor. The leaders, who represent a broad range of faiths, said they hoped a temporary truce could lead to the negotiation of permanent peace.

“As people of faith and conscience, believing in the sanctity of all life on this planet, we call for a Christmas Truce in Ukraine,” the statement says. “In the spirit of the truce that occurred in 1914 during the First World War, we urge our government to take a leadership role in bringing the war in Ukraine to an end through supporting calls for a ceasefire and negotiated settlement, before the conflict results in a nuclear war that could devastate the world’s ecosystems and annihilate all of God’s creation.”

The signers are advocating for a cease-fire from Dec. 24 through Jan. 19, the 12th day of Christmas in the Orthodox calendar.

The statement was sent to the White House Office of Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships on the morning of Dec. 20. The signers aim to meet with a representative of that office to urge the Biden administration to spearhead both the temporary cease-fire and long-term peace talks.

More than 6,000 civilians have died in Ukraine since the war began, and Ukrainians are bracing for a harsh winter as damaged infrastructure and displacement make heat a rarity.

Among the initial signers of the statement are pastor and activist the Rev. William J. Barber II, Shalom Center founder Rabbi Arthur Waskow, scholar and progressive activist Cornel West and Tarunjit Singh Butalia, executive director of Religions for Peace USA.

The statement was written by representatives of several peace groups, including Fellowship of Reconciliation, CodePink and the National Council of Elders. They began recruiting signers to the statement in mid-November. 

“As the war in Ukraine drags into .. its 10th month, the only certainty is that the estimated hundreds of thousands killed and wounded will continue to grow, as will the 14 million war refugees not to mention the humanitarian impacts felt across Europe and the globe,” Ariel Gold, executive director of the Fellowship of Reconciliation USA, said in a separate press release.

The demand is inspired by the Christmas truce that occurred during World War I. Though national leaders at the time ignored Pope Benedict XV’s plea for an official cease-fire, on Dec. 24, 1914, German and British troops along the Western Front took part in an informal, erratic truce, emerging from their trenches to sing carols and share cigars, food and beverages for a few short hours.

“Negotiation is not a euphemism for capitulation, nor is it a rationalization of Putin’s aggression,” Medea Benjamin, another of the authors of the statement and co-founder of the peace group CodePink, said in a press release. “It is simply a recognition that the end of this war cannot be achieved by more war.”

President Joe Biden on Dec. 19 expressed alarm about growing antisemitism in the United States and around the globe and vowed to fight back against the scourge.

Speaking to guests gathered for a Hanukkah reception at the White House, Biden said “silence is complicity,” and added that it’s imperative that hate, violence and antisemitism are condemned by the nation.

“This year’s Hanukkah arrives in the midst of rising and emboldened antisemitism at home — and quite frankly, around the world,” Biden said. “I recognize your fear, your hurt, your worry that this vile and venom is becoming too normal.”

The president added: “I will not be silent. America will not be silent.”

The holiday celebration comes during a spate of antisemitic episodes. Former President Donald Trump hosted a Holocaust-denying white supremacist at his Mar-a-Lago club in Palm Beach, Florida. The rapper Ye expressed love for Adolf Hitler in an interview. Basketball star Kyrie Irving appeared to promote an antisemitic film on social media. Neo-Nazi trolls are clamoring to return to Twitter as new CEO Elon Musk grants “amnesty” to suspended accounts.

“Today, we must all say clearly and forcefully: Antisemitism and all forms of hate and violence in this country have no safe harbor in America,” Biden said.

The Anti-Defamation League, a Jewish civil rights group, tracked 2,717 antisemitic instances of assault, harassment and vandalism last year, a 34% increase over the previous year and the highest number since the New York City-based group began tracking them in 1979.

Doug Emhoff, the husband of Vice President Kamala Harris, recently hosted a White House discussion on antisemitism and combating hate with Jewish leaders representing the Reform, Conservative and Orthodox denominations of the faith. At the event, Emhoff, who is Jewish, said he was “in pain right now” over rising antisemitism.

Among those invited to Nov. 19’s White House event were Holocaust survivor Bronia Brandman; Michele Taylor, who is U.S. ambassador to the U.N. Human Rights Council and the daughter of Holocaust survivors; and Avigael Heschel-Aronson, the granddaughter of Jewish theologian Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel.

Also present was a rabbi, Charlie Cytron-Walker, who managed to usher his congregants to safety during a synagogue hostage crisis earlier this year. He credited security training that his suburban Fort Worth, Texas, congregation had received over the years for getting him and the other three hostages through the traumatic, 11-hour ordeal.

At the White House celebration, he noted that antisemitism was a growing problem in America but expressed thanks that many Americans — including Biden — are speaking out.

“Antisemitism may be on the rise, but thank God that people are standing by our side,” said Cytron-Walker, who is now a rabbi at Temple Emanuel in Winston-Salem, North Carolina.

A menorah has been added to the White House holiday collection this year, lit nightly during the eight-day Jewish festival of Hanukkah. White House carpenters built the menorah out of sterling silver candle cups and wood that was saved from a Truman-era renovation.

While the White House has borrowed menorahs of special significance in the past, Biden said the addition was needed.

“This year we thought it was important to celebrate Hanukkah with another message of significance, permanence,” Biden said. “The very promise of America is that we all are created equal and deserve to be treated equally throughout our entire lives.”

Pope Francis’ Jesuit order on Nov. 18 asked any more victims to come forward with complaints against a famous Jesuit artist who was essentially let off the hook by the Vatican twice despite devastating testimony by women who said he sexually and spiritually abused them.

The Jesuits asked for new evidence against the Rev. Marko Ivan Rupnik, and offered a timeline about his case in an effort to tamp down the scandal.

The Slovenian priest is relatively unknown among rank-and-file Catholics but is well known in the hierarchy because he is one of the church’s most sought-after artists. His mosaics decorate chapels, churches and basilicas around the globe.

The scandal exploded this past week after the Jesuits admitted he had been excommunicated for having committed one of the gravest crimes in the Catholic Church — using the confessional to absolve a woman with whom he had engaged in sexual activity.

He was declared excommunicated in May 2020, but the Vatican’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith lifted the excommunication later that month after he repented, an unusually quick turnaround for such a serious violation.

A year later, the same Congregation decided not to prosecute him for another allegation of spiritual and sexual abuse of a former nun, declaring the statute of limitations had expired. The Congregation, which routinely waives the statute of limitations, is headed by a Jesuit prefect, has a Jesuit sex crimes prosecutor and a former No. 2 who lived in Rupnik’s Jesuit community.

The Congregation has not responded to requests for information about the case, which has exposed the Vatican’s general refusal to consider spiritual and sexual abuse of adult women as a crime that must be punished. Rather, the Vatican has long considered such abuse a mere lapse of priestly chastity that can be forgiven, without considering the trauma it causes victims.

The Jesuit appeal came on the same day the Italian newspaper Domani published the most explosive testimony yet by the former nun who made the complaint in 2021. She detailed years of sexual abuse and spiritual manipulation by Rupnik and said she made repeated efforts to turn him in only to face Jesuit and other superiors who routinely protected Rupnik at her expense.

“It was truly an abuse of conscience,” said the nun, who was not identified but whose account was confirmed to The Associated Press by someone familiar with the case.

“His sexual obsession was not impromptu but was profoundly connected to his concept of art and his theological thinking. Father Marko started slowly and sweetly infiltrating my psychological and spiritual world, leveraging my uncertainties and fragility and using my relationship with God to push me into sexual experiences with him.”

She said that her first complaint about his behavior dated from 1994 in Slovenia but that it was ignored as Rupnik’s community — first in Slovenia, then in Rome — grew and gained an international following.

In the meantime, other sisters were similarly harmed, she said, describing the use of pornography, humiliation and multiple partners “in the image of the Trinity” in Rupnik’s spiritual and sexual abuse.

The scandal has been accentuated by conflicting accounts given by the Jesuits.

After the first allegations of the 2021 complaint were aired in Italian blogs and websites this month, the Jesuits issued a statement only referring to the 2021 case. But under questioning by AP at a Christmas reception, the Jesuit superior, the Rev. Arturo Sosa, admitted Rupnik had previously been excommunicated for the confession-related crime.

Sosa said that Rupnik’s ministry had been restricted and that he was forbidden from hearing confessions, giving spiritual direction or leading spiritual exercises. However, Rupnik is listed as scheduled to deliver spiritual exercises Feb. 13-17 at the Loreto Marian shrine on Italy’s Adriatic coast, according to the Loreto website.

On Nov. 18, Rupnik’s immediate superior, the Rev. Johan Verschueren, said he wanted to try to clarify some of the questions that have erupted about the case. In a statement, he appealed for anyone with old or new allegations to come forward. He provided an email address: teamreferente.dir@gmail.com.

“My main concern in all of this is for those who have suffered, and I invite anyone who wishes to make a new complaint or who wants to discuss complaints already made to contact me,” he said.

He said complaints would be accepted in English, French, Italian, Spanish, Dutch and German.