Author: Eric Deabill

(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.”

SCRANTON – A total of 135 couples who are celebrating milestone anniversaries this year will be recognized at the Cathedral of Saint Peter on Sunday, June 23, 2024.

The Most Rev. Joseph C. Bambera, Bishop of Scranton, will serve as principal celebrant and homilist for the Diocese of Scranton’s annual Wedding Anniversary Mass that recognizes married couples who are celebrating their 25th and 50th anniversaries.

The Mass will begin at 2:30 p.m.

In all, the couples registered to attend the Mass will signify 5,914 years of married life.

Two couples who have registered to attend the Mass are each celebrating 67 years of marriage in 2024. The couples are from Nanticoke and Dickson City.

Marriage is a vocation to holiness. All marriages can grow in knowledge, faith, joy, and love. Whether a married couple is just starting or has fifty years (or more) under their belt, the church can always help strengthen and bless your marriage.

CTV: Catholic Television of the Diocese of Scranton will broadcast the Mass live and provide a livestream on the Diocese of Scranton website and all Diocesan social media platforms.

 

(OSV News) – The number of permanent deacons in America is holding relatively steady, but more than a third of them are also at or approaching the required retirement age for many dioceses. According to experts, the situation may suggest a need for local churches to revisit the Second Vatican Council’s vision for the permanent diaconate and rethink how to invite men to discern the vocation.

On June 17, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops’ Committee on Clergy, Consecrated Life, and Vocations released its annual survey, “A Portrait of the Permanent Diaconate in 2023: A Study for the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops.”

Since 2005, the Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate — a national, nonprofit research center at Georgetown University that conducts social scientific studies for and about the Catholic Church — has released the survey, which provides both statistics and forecasts trends for the permanent diaconate in the U.S. Catholic Church.

The estimated number of permanent deacons in active ministry was 13,718 in 2023, roughly 69% of all permanent deacons in the Latin Church.

There were 587 men ordained to the permanent diaconate in 2023, and since 2014, the estimated number of ordinations averaged 613.

However, most active deacons are between 60-69 years old (42%), followed by deacons 70 and older (36%).

“There’s no big change or shift,” said Jesuit Father Tom Gaunt, executive director of CARA. “I think what we see is that we have an increasing number of retired deacons — they’re well into their late 70s, 80s.”

While those deacons often still serve, “we have a few more who are dying each year than are being ordained,” Father Gaunt observed. “The total number of active deacons has gone down just a little bit; very small. Whereas the total number of retired deacons has increased.”

As Catholic News Service reported in 2021, “retirement age differs from diocese to diocese. Forty-two percent of dioceses have no retirement age for deacons. Of the others, no diocese requires deacons to retire until they reach at least age 70, while 88% require retirement at ages 75-79, and 10% mandate retirement at ages 70-74. One percent does not require retirement until at least age 80.”

The CARA survey — which utilized contact information from the National Association of Diaconate Directors, or NADD — was sent to the Office of the Permanent Diaconate in Latin and Eastern (arch)dioceses and eparchies. CARA received responses from 128 of the 185 (arch)dioceses/eparchies whose bishops are members of the USCCB — and have an active Office of Deacons — for a 69% total response rate.

The Archdiocese of Chicago had the most permanent deacons (827), followed by the Archdiocese of New York (357), Archdiocese of San Antonio (346), Archdiocese of Galveston-Houston (308), and Diocese of Joliet in Illinois (307).

“Essentially, it seems about the same as the previous one,” said Deacon Bill Ditewig, former executive director of the USCCB’s Secretariat for the Diaconate. “But there’s still some areas of concern — the major one, in my opinion, being the age situation.”

“One of the things that I think people forget — when you just look at the naked statistics — is that Vatican II’s vision was of a younger diaconate,” noted Deacon Ditewig, who has held multiple academic and diocesan posts.

“In fact, some of the original proposals were that married guys could be ordained deacons at the age of 40 — and then during the debates during the (Second Vatican) Council, that was determined to be too old, and they lowered it to 35,” he said. “Now when you do that — and then look at the statistics — less than 1% of deacons are under the age of 40. You kind of have to say, ‘Has the vision met the reality here?'”

If the diaconate becomes a retired, “second career” vocation, Deacon Ditewig emphasized, “it’s not what the original vision was supposed to be” — which included bringing a diaconal witness to the secular workplace.

Deacon Ditewig also noted the American diaconate’s ethnic makeup.

Most permanent deacons are Caucasian/white (73%); followed by Hispanic/Latino (20%); Asian/Pacific Islander (3%); African American/Black (3%); and Native American/other (1%).

“That’s been a concern of the bishops since 1971,” shared Deacon Ditewig, “because again, a key part of the diaconate was to be with people where they are, where they live and where they work.”

Deacon Ditewig said some dioceses discourage younger vocations to the diaconate, reasoning, “You’re at the beginning of your career; your career is about to go on a different path; you’ve still got young children at home — why don’t you wait awhile.”

Deacon Ditewig, 74, was ordained at 40, with four children at home.

“The fact is, it worked out to be the perfect time for our family. And so what we have found over the years, sometimes, is that dioceses will set standards that if you still have minor age children at home, then don’t apply. It’s almost building in an age situation,” said Deacon Ditewig, who added that some men discerning a diaconal vocation — seeing so many older deacons serving — assume that candidates have to be retired.

“The attitude that many of us have is, let discernment do its thing — if this is the right time for this family, it will be demonstrated,” he stressed. “If it’s the wrong time for this family, that will come up, too. But the bottom line of all this is, that we’re talking about a vocation from God.”

Deacon Dominic Cerrato, director of the Office of the Diaconate for the Diocese of Joliet, and editor of OSV’s The Deacon magazine, agreed. (OSV is the parent company of OSV News.)

“The unfortunate thing is that many priests and many deacons — and I don’t want to be sweeping here, but I think it’s true — discourage young men from becoming deacons,” said Deacon Cerrato, who was ordained a deacon at 35, the youngest canonical age allowed. “We had five children at the time; we eventually had seven children. It is possible — and I think that those years served me and the church well. But many, many were discouraged from coming, and told ‘raise your family.'”

That mindset, Deacon Cerrato said, can largely be traced to a faulty understanding of the nature of vocation that proposes “God calls you in one ear for marriage, and then calls you in the other ear for the diaconate — and you’re split,” he explained. “No — because God doesn’t speak out of both sides of his mouth. It’s one single call — of which the two are integrated in.”

Still, given the persistence of that outlook, “It’s very possible that there are many more people who are younger,” observed Deacon Cerrato. “We just haven’t called them.”

That is not, however, the case in the Diocese of Joliet, where there are 307 permanent deacons, and many younger candidates are being called. “We’re seeing a rise in our numbers,” Deacon Cerrato reported.

“The single most vital development regarding the state of the diaconate in the U.S.,” said Deacon James Keating, a professor of spiritual theology at Kenrick-Glennon Seminary in St. Louis and a member of the Academy of Catholic Theology, “will be if diocesan seminaries begin to form seminarians in a mature theology of their own impending diaconate, and that this formation extends to a thorough appreciation for the vocation of the permanent diaconate.”

“Further,” Deacon Keating continued, “priest-deacon fraternity will only reach a place of abiding respect if the quality of diaconal formation in dioceses deepens in the areas of scriptural knowledge, liturgical competency, homiletical giftedness, ministerial wisdom to and for married couples, prudent leadership in the works of charity, and the unleashing of desire for contemplative prayer.”

The divergence between a secular and spiritual outlook also must be addressed, said Deacon Keating.

“Deacon formation programs should be encouraged to instill within the deacon an ecclesial imagination to replace a very stubborn cultural one,” he suggested. “Possessing an ecclesial imagination will go a long way in securing a true brotherhood of clerics within the ranks of priests and deacons.”

Reflecting on the survey results, Deacon Cerrato offered both an inquiry and a suggestion.

“There’s a larger question here. Why is God calling men to the diaconate? Why is it arguably the largest growing segment in the church today, certainly in the West? What is God saying?” he asked. “And I suspect he’s saying that the reason for this is that Christ the Servant needs to be made present in a world that is so turned in on itself that it fails to see that service is the way you discover yourself.”

VATICAN CITY (CNS) – There is a prayer for every state of mind and spiritual need in the Book of Psalms, Pope Francis said.

“There are many psalms that help us forge ahead. Get into the habit of praying the psalms. I assure you that you will be happy in the end,” the pope said during his June 19 general audience.

The pope also reminded people that June 20 marks World Refugee Day, established by the United Nations to focus on solidarity with refugees. “We are all called to welcome, promote, accompany and integrate those who knock on our doors,” he said.

“I pray that nations will work to ensure humane conditions for refugees and facilitate processes for integration,” he said.

During his main catechesis, the pope continued his series on the Holy Spirit and highlighted the importance of prayer, especially in preparation for Holy Year 2025.

All the books of the Bible are inspired by the Holy Spirit, he said, “but the Book of Psalms is also so in the sense that it is full of poetic inspiration.”

The psalms were the prayer of Jesus, Mary, the Apostles and all previous Christian generations, he said. Jesus enters into the world with a verse from a psalm in his heart, “I delight to do your will, my God (Ps 40:9), and he leaves the world with another verse, “Into your hands I commend my spirit” (Ps 31:6).

“Do you pray with the psalms sometimes?” the pope asked, reminding people that there are special editions that contain the New Testament and the psalms together.

“I have on my desk a Ukrainian edition” of the New Testament and the psalms that belonged to a soldier who died in the war, he said. “He used to pray at the front with this book,” referring to the 23-year-old soldier named Oleksandr.

“If there are psalms, or just verses, that speak to our heart, it is good to repeat them and pray them during the day. The psalms are prayers ‘for all seasons’: There is no state of mind or need that does not find in them the best words to be transformed into prayer,” the pope said.

The psalms also allow the faithful to expand on the nature of their prayers, he said, so prayers are not just a series of requests and a continuous “give me, give us.”

“The psalms help us to open ourselves to a prayer that is less focused on ourselves: a prayer of praise, of blessing, of thanksgiving; and they also help us give voice to all creation, involving it in our praise,” he said.

At the end of his main talk, the pope greeted an Italian association supporting the late Cardinal Celso Costantini, a former apostolic delegate in China who led the Council of the Chinese Catholic Church 100 years ago with the aim of revitalizing the mission of the church in China.

The pope greeted “the dear Chinese people” and asked Catholics to always pray “for this noble people, so brave, who have such a beautiful culture.”

In greeting Polish-speaking visitors, the pope gave God thanks for a new blessed: Father Michal Rapacz, a martyr of communism, who was beatified in Kraków June 15.

Blessed Rapacz was an early victim of Poland’s communist regime as he refused to abandon his parishioners and his pastoral work. The pope prayed “his example (may) teach us to be faithful to God, to respond to evil with good, to contribute in the building of a fraternal and peaceful world.”

“We pray that his witness may become a sign of consolation from God in these times marked by wars,” he said, praying that the new blessed “intercede for Poland and to obtain peace in the world!”