Category: Diocese of Scranton News

(OSV News) – The numbers alone are impressive: 16 million people and 28 million meals served; services supporting strong families for 500,000 clients; basic needs and emergency financial services for 2.8 million people; behavioral health and wellness services for 526,000 individuals; 2.8 million nights of emergency shelter; emergency housing services for 295,000 without lodging; 52 disasters responded to in the U.S. and its territories.

These figures represent the work of Catholic Charities USA and its 168 diocesan affiliate agencies, work that has come under scrutiny by Vice President JD Vance, himself a Catholic, and some in the media.

In a Jan. 26 interview on CBS’s “Face the Nation,” Vance questioned the motives of the U.S. bishops’ criticism of the new Trump administration’s hardline immigration policies — including allowing raids on churches and schools — asking whether it had more to do with losing federal resettlement funding and “their bottom line.”

Fox News Channel’s Laura Ingraham, also a Catholic, said in a Jan. 29 broadcast, “I mean, no one wants to criticize Catholic Charities, but you can’t be facilitating illegal immigration.”

Such claims have ignited a vigorous rebuttal from U.S. Catholic bishops in defense of the church’s charitable agencies.

“Certain news outlets continue to make claims that Catholic Charities participates in illegal immigration and human trafficking, earning large profits while doing so,” Bishop Kevin C. Rhoades of Fort Wayne-South Bend, Indiana, said in a Feb. 3 message to the faithful. “As your Bishop and Chairman of the Board of Catholic Charities of the Diocese of Fort Wayne-South Bend, I can assure you these are false claims levied against our Catholic Charities agency.”

“The complete opposite is true,” he said. “Our diocesan Catholic Charities participates in pathways for legal immigration and supports survivors of human trafficking, while operating those programs at a fiscal deficit.”

According to Catholic Charities USA, only 5% of the services provided by its agencies last year were immigration and refugee services.

“Catholic Charities agencies serve migrants not because they are newcomers to the U.S., but because they are vulnerable and in need, like all those we serve. This work is a response to the Gospel mandate to feed the hungry, clothe the naked and welcome the stranger,” the CCUSA website states.

Catholic Charities agencies provide essential services, such as food, clothing and a place to sleep, as part of how the church puts the Gospel mandate from Jesus Christ into action.

Federal, state, and local governments have asked some Catholic Charities agencies — especially those near the U.S.-Mexico border — to assist migrants the federal government has processed and released with pending immigration court proceedings. Others also offer legal assistance to migrants navigating the complicated immigration legal system.

Such assistance, Bishop Rhoades emphasized, should not be mistaken for abetting illegal immigration — especially since federal authorities have regularly brought migrants to local Catholic Charities agencies after processing them through U.S.-Mexico ports of entry.

“This does not mean that we support open borders and disregard the rule of law,” he said.

“While the Catholic Church recognizes and respects the right of every nation to regulate its borders for the common good, we must balance this with the rights of vulnerable migrants to access protection, and with the fundamental right of all to life and dignity as human persons; as well as,” Bishop Rhoades added, “the rights of parents and the family, the cradle of life and love, the first and most vital cell of society.”

Bishop Rhoades also explained how Catholic Charities worked as a “contracted resettlement agency” working under the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops.

“Funds received are used to provide financial support for the first 90 to 240 days after arrival, until the refugee families become economically self-sufficient; provide immigration legal services as they study to become U.S. citizens; as well as to partially pay for the staff that provide those services,” he said.

In his own diocese, he said, Catholic Charities in the latest fiscal year “received $3.0 million in contract revenue and spent $3.2 million to administer the program.”

Bishop Joseph J. Tyson of the Diocese of Yakima, Washington, also spoke out concerning immigration and refugees in his Feb. 2 pastoral letter, “A Light for the Gentiles,” citing his six years leading the U.S. bishops’ efforts for the pastoral care for migrants and refugees. He had sharp words specifically for Vance’s “Face the Nation” claims.

“We follow the command to ‘love our neighbor’ and to ‘welcome the stranger,’ which are commands from the words of Jesus himself,” Bishop Tyson said, rejecting charges that the church’s assistance encourages illegal activity or profits from its immigration efforts.

“We receive no money to resettle ‘illegal’ migrants,” he said. But when it resettles refugees, he said the church loses money “on every resettlement.”

“The government contracts do not cover the cost of resettlement,” he explained.

He noted Washington state no longer has a Catholic Charities office that offers these services, because the church “could not sustain the loss.”

“In Central Washington, neither the Diocese of Yakima nor Catholic Charities receive any money from the government for resettling refugees or migrants. Not a single penny!” he said.

The bishop’s diocese is located in one of the world’s leading sources of apples and other produce, largely harvested through migrant labor. Any welcome extended to migrants, refugees and asylum-seekers, he said, is due to the diocese’s generous parishioners.

Bishop Tyson emphasized that people without legal immigration status are “our fellow parishioners and neighbors.” Regarding them, he shared how hundreds of Catholic youth in his diocese now fear their parents may be deported. He condemned Vance’s eager affirmation of deliberately instilling fear — such as by making schools generally open to immigration raids — as an immigration enforcement tactic.

“That the vice president — who refers to himself in the CBS interview as a devout Catholic — would want to engender fear as a tactic is deeply disturbing,” he wrote. “It’s also contrary to the teaching of Christ and the teachings of the Church.”

Bishop Rhoades also denounced attacks on the U.S. Refugee Admission Program, or USRAP, which his diocesan Catholic Charities agency has participated in since that federal program was launched in 1980.

“USRAP is the formal process by which people are legally resettled in the United States as refugees. Resettlement through USRAP is distinct from the U.S. asylum process,” he said.

Individuals resettled through USRAP are “screened, vetted, and approved by the U.S. government while outside of the United States,” he explained.

Bishop Tyson likewise in his letter emphasized that refugees resettled by the Catholic Church underwent 12-24 months of screening.

“That screening is conducted by the federal government itself. So, if there’s a problem with screening, it’s not because we have failed the federal government as a partner,” he said. “It’s because the federal government has failed us.”

More bishops have come to the fore to defend the church’s ministries to migrants and refugees.

In a Jan. 24 interview with Vatican News, Archbishop Timothy P. Broglio of the U.S. Archdiocese for the Military Services, president of the USCCB, likewise talked about the U.S. church’s “tremendous network — of Catholic Charities, of migration services that respond to people in these difficult situations — and we want to make those possibilities available to those most in need.”

Cardinal Timothy M. Dolan of New York, who offered prayers at both of President Donald Trump’s inaugurations — also expressed frustration with Vance’s comments on “Face the Nation” calling them “not only harmful” but demonstrably “not true,” pointing to the church’s audited financials.

“You think we make money caring for the immigrants? We’re losing it hand over fist,” Cardinal Dolan said Jan. 29 on his SiriusXM Catholic Channel. He said Vance’s remarks were a “let down” from “a guy that struck me as a gentleman and a thoughtful man and from whom I’m still expecting great things.”

At the same time, Bishop Mark J. Seitz of El Paso, Texas, who heads the U.S. bishops’ migration committee, told attendees at a Georgetown University event Feb. 12 that he wanted to offer the vice president an opportunity to dialogue over the church’s work with migrants and refugees.

“I would love to sit down sometime with Vice President Vance and talk to him about these issues in regard to our resettlement work and things like that because he clearly has been misinformed,” he said.

“That is so unfortunate when it comes from a person who has a loud megaphone,” Bishop Seitz said. “It can be very harmful to this work of the church to very vulnerable people.”

(OSV News) – Sunday Mass attendance in person at Catholic churches in the U.S. is back to pre-pandemic levels – although just under one quarter of the nation’s Catholics are in the pews on a regular weekly basis.

The Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate at Georgetown University noted in a Feb. 5 post on its Nineteen Sixty-four research blog that Sunday Mass attendance in person has risen to 24% since the declared end of the COVID-19 pandemic in May 2023. That rate has held through the first week of 2025.

From the start of the pandemic lockdowns in March 2020 to May 2023, attendance had averaged 15%. Prior to the pandemic, the average attendance was 24.4%.

Mark Gray, CARA’s director of polls and editor of the blog, told OSV News that attendance figures recently released by the Diocese of Arlington, Virginia, had underscored a trend he and his colleagues had identified.

“It’s something I noticed, and then when the Diocese of Arlington posted their October headcount numbers … I thought, all right, I’ll go ahead and put this (data) out there,” said Gray, referencing an annual tally of Mass attendance undertaken by many U.S. dioceses.

Gray – who is also a research associate professor at Georgetown University – and his colleagues relied on data from their various national surveys, along with Google Trends queries that he said “allow you to see variations in how frequently people are searching for” certain terms that “would correlate with Mass attendance.”

“It’s not a direct measurement, but it’s a proxy,” Gray explained.

He also noted that the dip in data does not account for those who relied on livestreamed and televised liturgies during the pandemic lockdowns.

“We’ve looked at those numbers too,” he said. “We can alter the search terms and Google Trends to different queries. And we did that in the past, and we saw that about the same percentage of Catholics were participating in Mass during lockdowns, if you included watching on television or watching on the internet. And then we’ve got surveys on engaging in-person Mass attendance, and watching on television or the internet.”

Gray said the Mass attendance data “almost looks like a straighter distribution once you include the television and internet numbers” during the pandemic lockdowns.

He also noted that pandemic lockdowns were “a local situation” in which some areas “opened up … quickly” and “others stayed closed for much longer.”

But since “this last Christmas in 2024, things are back to normal,” he said.

Some Masses during the year generally reflect “spikes” in attendance, Gray said, with Christmas, Easter and then Ash Wednesday the most well-attended liturgies.

“We’re always interested in Ash Wednesday,” since “it’s probably one of the most unusual days,” said Gray.

“It’s not a holy day of obligation, but it’s the third highest attendance of Mass historically, according to the data,” he said. “And it also has probably the highest participation of young adult Catholics.”

And, Gray added, “If there’s any moment that the church has to reach out to young adult Catholics, Lent and specifically Ash Wednesday is the time. So it’s always a good barometer to see what activity looks like during that period, because it gives you a little view into the future of the next generation of Catholics.”

VATICAN CITY (CNS) – The morning after the Vatican confirmed Pope Francis has double pneumonia, the director of the Vatican press office said the pope had a restful night at Rome’s Gemelli hospital.

Matteo Bruni, director of the Vatican press office, told reporters early Feb. 19 that the pope slept peacefully, woke up and had breakfast.

A CT scan Feb. 18 “demonstrated the onset of bilateral pneumonia, which required additional drug therapy,” according to the previous evening’s medical bulletin.

The 88-year-old pope’s history of lung problems and repeated bouts of bronchitis have resulted in “bronchiectasis,” a widening of the airways that makes a person more suspectable to infection, and “asthmatic bronchitis” which makes “therapeutic treatment more complex,” the bulletin had said.

Still, Pope Francis was reportedly getting out of bed each day, reading and doing some work. Although the doctors’ orders for “complete rest” meant he was not receiving visitors, his secretaries were at the hospital with him.

Most evenings at 7 p.m. he was making his regular phone call to Holy Family Parish in Gaza, where the priests and sisters on staff are giving shelter to hundreds of people.

A source, who was not authorized to give details of the pope’s medical condition, said the pope’s heart is “holding up well” and that he has not needed a ventilator, oxygen mask or CPAP (continuous positive airway pressure) machine.

The source also confirmed that a couple of days before Pope Francis agreed to be hospitalized, he had gone to Rome’s Gemelli Isola Hospital for tests. He has been an inpatient at the main Gemelli hospital since Feb. 14.

NAPLES, Fla. (OSV News) – Prayers and fasting, Eucharistic adoration and getting back to the basics of the Catholic faith are some of the ways the laity can encourage priestly and religious vocations in 2025.

Those were among the recommendations that a panel of lay and religious offered during the 2025 Legatus annual summit for Catholic business men and women Feb. 6-9 at the Ritz-Carlton in Naples. Some 700 people attended the three-day national gathering.

New Jersey native Sister Pia Jude, who entered the Sisters of Life community in 2013 after law school and a short law career in New York City’s Wall Street district, recalled the importance of a strong parish engagement within her family.

“Parish life for me was everything – I was a little altar server and that meant being so close to the Lord standing up there, being involved in the parish and the parish and having Eucharistic adoration Holy Hours available to the young does make a difference,” said Sister Pia Jude, who has an identical twin sister, Sister Luca Benedict, also a Sister of Life.

Sister Pia Jude currently lives at Annunciation Motherhouse in Suffern, New York, and serves as an assistant to Mother Mary Concepta, superior general of her order.

“We had a priest in our parish and his thought was to have a Holy Hour for the parish pro-life society that my mom was part of — she brought her two little daughters to this Holy Hour,” Sister Pia Jude said.

“And so sitting before Our Lord in the Eucharist praying; I didn’t really know how to pray but I knew Jesus was there,” she added.

“I do think that we’re planting seeds we don’t even know and that I couldn’t have articulated back then, but the Lord showed me later on as I was in religious life that ‘I’ve seen you and I’ve known you from this moment. I saw you there, I was calling you, I was drawing you.'”

“Those confirmed my vocational graces, those were bedrock for me,” Sister Pia Jude told the Legatus audience.

Also on hand was Father John Burns, a priest of the Archdiocese of Milwaukee ordained in 2010 and author of “Lift Up Your Heart: A 10-Day Personal Retreat with St. Francis de Sales.” He is the founder of Friends of the Bridegroom, an apostolate dedicated to the renewal of the church through the renewal of women’s religious life.

Father Burns noted that canon law defines religious life as the most perfect way to imitate Christ, “not meaning that it is better than other states in life, but it is the fullest way you can cling to Christ, and it is given to us so that the world may see something of what it looks like to being completely to Christ,” he said.

Recent decades of secularism, clericalism and scandals among the clergy brought the church to a place where many priests are themselves embarrassed by their priestly vocation and identity, he added. They may, as a result, have backed away from the supernatural and attempted to make religious life look more normal and approachable.

“But it isn’t normal; it is supernatural,” Father Burns said of religious vocations.

“I would never trade this life — given a thousand times to redo things I would never choose another pathway,” he said.

“And as a church we are getting comfortable saying, ‘We need holy priests and we need holy sisters and it would be a gift if my son or my daughter were called to that.’ It would be an honor if God might be interested in your son, your daughter, your granddaughter, your grandson and to encourage them in that,” Father Burns said.

He also recommended parishes and the laity adopt prayer, fasting and alms to ask God for an increase in vocations even if the fruits of those efforts are not realized in the short run.

“We have to believe that God wants his church renewed, that God wants holy priests, holy marriages and holy religious and that he is the one doing the work and we have to align with his will,” the priest added. “Be willing to say, God, what do you want to do; how do you want to mobilize us to renew your church?”

Jason Shanks, CEO of the National Eucharistic Congress Inc. which recently announced its next national congress will be held in 2029, told the gathering of his work as a layman organizing a Catholic youth summer camp in Ohio in 2000, replete with jet skis, a ropes course and other adventure sports.

“The kids would leave and would say, ‘We came for the adventure but what we got out of it was the Mass, the adoration, the worship,” Shanks said. “I think the parents would send the kids for the jet skis and the high ropes course but were tickled and touched that they came back talking about Jesus.”

What families need to do is carve out more quiet and reflective time for youth to escape the pressures and distractions of daily life in order to discern their calling, according to Shanks. He agreed with Sister Pia Jude that adoration time is a great time and place for such discernment.

“We live in a world of so much distraction and so much pressure on these kids that we need to create that space of silence so they can discern what the voice of the Lord is doing in their life,” he said, adding that last year’s Eucharistic congress seemed to renew the participating clergy and hierarchy as well.

“All of us in Legatus can be part of that healing solution as this revival moves forward and to love and encourage our priests and our religious and our families every day,” Shanks said.

EWTN’s Colm Flynn, who moderated the vocations conversation, added his recollection of reporting from 2023’s World Youth Day Lisbon in Portugal, and how the event featured a broad range of activities both traditional and secular.

The morning of the final day before the closing World Youth Day Mass with Pope Francis featured a DJ priest “who for 40 minutes did this really loud techno set” of music, Flynn said. “Not one person we interviewed said that was the highlight that touched me, that made me think differently. It was the Eucharist, or the priest who led late night discussions they remembered.”

“There is this idea that if we don’t be more like the world, they won’t come for us, rather than, ‘Let’s invite the world to be more like the Gospel,'” Flynn added.

“A priest I know back in Scotland who had been in Angola for 30 years said to me: ‘You have to tell more young people that besides the supernatural aspect, it is a great exciting life. You travel, you meet people. He said the church needs to be not arrogant but more bold and say, ‘This is the best thing you could ever do with your life.'”

VATICAN CITY (CNS) – Pope Francis has urged U.S. Catholics and people of goodwill to not give in to “narratives” that discriminate against and cause unnecessary suffering to migrants and refugees.

“I recognize your valuable efforts, dear brother bishops of the United States, as you work closely with migrants and refugees, proclaiming Jesus Christ and promoting fundamental human rights,” he said in a letter to the U.S. bishops published by the Vatican Feb. 11.

Pope Francis said he was writing because of “the major crisis that is taking place in the United States” with the start of President Donald J. Trump’s “program of mass deportations.”

In his presidential executive order, “Protecting the American people against invasion,” released Jan. 20, Trump said, “Many of these aliens unlawfully within the United States present significant threats to national security and public safety, committing vile and heinous acts against innocent Americans.”

Pope Francis said, “The rightly formed conscience cannot fail to make a critical judgment and express its disagreement with any measure that tacitly or explicitly identifies the illegal status of some migrants with criminality.”

He also applauded the efforts of the U.S. bishops to assist migrants and refugees and to counter the arguments of the Trump administration, saying that “God will richly reward all that you do for the protection and defense of those who are considered less valuable, less important or less human!”

“I exhort all the faithful of the Catholic Church, and all men and women of goodwill, not to give in to narratives that discriminate against and cause unnecessary suffering to our migrant and refugee brothers and sisters,” he wrote.

“With charity and clarity we are all called to live in solidarity and fraternity, to build bridges that bring us ever closer together, to avoid walls of ignominy and to learn to give our lives as Jesus Christ gave his for the salvation of all,” the pope wrote.

In his letter to the bishops, the pope said every nation has the right to defend itself and keep its communities safe “from those who have committed violent or serious crimes while in the country or prior to arrival.”

However, he continued, “the act of deporting people who in many cases have left their own land for reasons of extreme poverty, insecurity, exploitation, persecution or serious deterioration of the environment, damages the dignity of many men and women, and of entire families, and places them in a state of particular vulnerability and defenselessness.”

“This is not a minor issue,” he wrote. “An authentic rule of law is verified precisely in the dignified treatment that all people deserve, especially the poorest and most marginalized.”

Pope Francis also used the letter to respond to an assertion U.S. Vice President JD Vance, who is Catholic, made in a late January television interview about the Catholic concept of “ordo amoris” (the order of love or charity).

The concept, Vance said, teaches that “you love your family, and then you love your neighbor, and then you love your community, and then you love your fellow citizens in your own country. And then after that, you can focus and prioritize the rest of the world.”

However, the pope said, “Christian love is not a concentric expansion of interests that little by little extend to other persons and groups. In other words: the human person is not a mere individual, relatively expansive, with some philanthropic feelings!”

“The true ordo amoris that must be promoted is that which we discover by meditating constantly on the parable of the ‘Good Samaritan,’ that is, by meditating on the love that builds a fraternity open to all, without exception,” the pope wrote.

The pope wrote that “worrying about personal, community or national identity, apart from these considerations (of human fraternity), easily introduces an ideological criterion that distorts social life and imposes the will of the strongest as the criterion of truth.”

“The true common good is promoted when society and government, with creativity and strict respect for the rights of all — as I have affirmed on numerous occasions — welcomes, protects, promotes and integrates the most fragile, unprotected and vulnerable,” he wrote.

That does not prevent or hamper the development of policies that regulate “orderly and legal migration,” he wrote. “However, this development cannot come about through the privilege of some and the sacrifice of others.”

“What is built on the basis of force, and not on the truth about the equal dignity of every human being, begins badly and will end badly,” the pope warned.

While the pope did not name specific U.S. policies, his letter emphasized the Catholic Church’s longstanding closeness to and support of migrants and refugees.

The U.S. bishops’ conference had recently faced unfounded claims that it profited from its partnership with the U.S. government in assisting refugees who qualified for federal assistance. Vance questioned the bishops’ motives for criticizing new immigration policies in a Jan. 26 interview, asking whether the bishops were just concerned about receiving federal resettlement funding.

At a time that is “so clearly marked by the phenomenon of migration,” the pope reaffirmed “not only our faith in a God who is always close, incarnate, migrant and refugee, but also the infinite and transcendent dignity of every human person.”

These words, he said, “are not an artificial construct.” Even a quick look at the church’s social doctrine over the centuries clearly shows Jesus Christ “did not live apart from the difficult experience of being expelled from his own land because of an imminent risk to his life and from the experience of having to take refuge in a society and a culture foreign to his own.”

“The Son of God, in becoming man, also chose to live the drama of immigration,” he wrote.

Therefore, he wrote, “all the Christian faithful and people of goodwill are called upon to consider the legitimacy of norms and public policies in the light of the dignity of the person and his or her fundamental rights, not vice versa.”

“Let us ask Our Lady of Guadalupe to protect individuals and families who live in fear or pain due to migration and/or deportation,” he wrote.