Category: Diocese of Scranton News

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WASHINGTON (OSV News) – The U.S. bishops on April 10 told congressional lawmakers they support bipartisan legislation that would ease some immigration restrictions on religious workers from other countries, allowing them to stay in the U.S. while they wait for permanent residency.

The legislation, titled the Religious Workforce Protection Act, was introduced in the Senate by Sens. Susan Collins, R-Maine, Tim Kaine, D-Va., and Jim Risch, R-Idaho, and in the House by Reps. Mike Carey, R-Ohio, and Richard Neal, D-Mass.

If signed into law, it would permit religious workers already in the U.S. on temporary R-1 status with pending EB-4 applications to stay in the U.S. while waiting for permanent residency, Collins’ office said. All five of those members are Catholic.

“When Maine parishes where I attend mass started losing their priests, I saw this issue creating a real crisis in our state,” Collins said in an April 8 statement. “Recently, three Catholic parishes in rural Maine — Saint Agatha, Bucksport, and Greenville — were left without priests for months because their R-1 visas expired while their EB-4 applications were still pending.”

The National Study of Catholic Priests — released in 2022 by The Catholic University of America’s Catholic Project — indicated 24% of priests serving in the U.S. are foreign-born. A majority of these were ordained outside the U.S., while others are foreign-born priests who came to the U.S. as seminarians, were ordained in the U.S. and are also subject to visa renewals.

“Our bill would help religious workers of all faith traditions continue to live and serve here in the United States while their applications for permanent residency are being fully processed,” Collins said. “Many Mainers and Americans cannot imagine their lives without the sense of community and services their local religious organizations provide — with this legislation, I hope they never have to.”

Kaine likewise said in a statement, “I first started hearing about churches losing trusted priests through my Parish, St. Elizabeth’s in Richmond, where we have had priests who were immigrants, and often have visiting priests, some of whom are immigrants as well.”

“But as it turns out, this problem is not unique to Virginia — it’s impacting religious congregations of many faiths, all across the country,” he said.

Bishops Mark J. Seitz of El Paso, Texas, Barry C. Knestout of Richmond, Virginia, James T. Ruggieri of Portland, Maine, and Earl K. Fernandes of Columbus, Ohio, were among the religious leaders who offered statements of support for the bill in press releases from Collins and Kaine’s offices, alongside representatives of evangelical Christian, Muslim, Jewish, and Hindu organizations.

In an April 10 letter to members of Congress, Archbishop Timothy P. Broglio, president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops and head of the U.S. Archdiocese for the Military Services, as well as Bishop Seitz, who is chairman of the USCCB’s Committee on Migration, urged lawmakers to pass the legislation to “to ensure communities across our nation can continue to enjoy the essential contributions of foreign-born religious workers who lawfully entered the United States on a nonimmigrant religious worker (R-1) visa.”

They said that there are many Catholic priests, women religious, and laypersons working in Catholic ministries in that category.

“Some parishes, especially those in rural or isolated areas, would go without regular access to the sacraments, if not for these religious workers,” the bishops said. “Additionally, dioceses with large immigrant populations rely on foreign-born religious workers for their linguistic and cultural expertise. We would not be able to serve our diverse flocks, which reflect the rich tapestry of our society overall, without the faithful men and women who come to serve through the Religious Worker Visa Program.”

They said, “Simply put, an increasing number of American families will be unable to practice the basic tenets of their faith if this situation is not addressed soon. Likewise, hospitals will go without chaplains, schools will go without teachers, and seminaries will go without instructors.”

The bishops urged lawmakers to cosponsor “this vital measure and to work toward its immediate passage, thereby furthering the free exercise of religion in our country for the benefit of all Americans.”

VATICAN CITY (CNS) – All the speeches and messages Pope Leo XIV has given since becoming pope May 8 are available on the Vatican website, which should be checked before sharing supposed quotes and videos, Vatican News said.

The Vatican News site published the warning in several languages May 21 after a 36-minute “deep fake” – AI-generated – video was posted on YouTube.

The post, which used manipulated video of Pope Leo and an AI-generated voice with an accent that is not Pope Leo’s, praises Ibrahim Traoré, the military ruler of Burkina Faso.

Vatican News said the post was “produced using footage from Pope Leo XIV’s audience with journalists on Monday, May 12. A ‘morphing’ technique was used – that is, transforming the image so that the movement of the lips matches the AI-generated words.”

The video is only the latest example of social media fakes attributed to the new pope.

A popular meme circulating on Facebook, Instagram and other social media features a photo of Pope Leo from May 8 and the fake quote: “You cannot follow both Christ and the cruelty of kings. A leader who mocks the weak, exalts himself, and preys on the innocent is not sent by God. He is sent to test you. And many are failing.”

According to snopes.com, the fact-checking website, the earliest posting of the supposed quote was May 14, but there is no evidence anywhere that the pope said it.

The Vatican website – www.vatican.va – offers papal texts, including the texts of video messages, in multiple languages, often including Italian, English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, German, Polish, Arabic, Chinese and Latin.

ROME (CNS) – Before he was Pope Leo XIV, then-Bishop Robert F. Prevost of Chiclayo, Peru, created a commission to help women escape forced prostitution, said a trafficking survivor who worked with him.

Silvia Teodolinda Vázquez, 52, told the Argentine newspaper, La Nacion, she met Pope Leo when he created a diocesan commission on human migration and trafficking in persons in 2017.

Saying she affectionately called him “padrecito,” or “Padre Rober,” Vázquez told La Nacion in an interview May 17, “The day I met him he said something very beautiful to me.”

They had wrapped up a meeting about the commission’s work, she said, and “he approached me and, with that warm tone of voice he has, said, ‘Silvia, I know this job is very hard for you because of everything you’ve been through when you were young. I am so grateful for what you are doing for these girls, and I bless you.’ It was very moving.”

The pope set up the commission, which is still active, in 2017 to bring lay people, religious men and women, and parishes together to help defend and provide assistance to vulnerable migrants, refugees and victims of trafficking. He was the driving force behind all of their work, she said.

Then-Bishop Prevost was concerned about the connection between the huge flow of Venezuelan migrants into Peru and the increasing numbers of sex workers, so he met with members of the Sisters of the Adoration of the Blessed Sacrament, who were active in assisting women forced into prostitution, and he asked them to join the commission he was forming, Vázquez told La Nacion.

The sisters had long been active in the fight against human trafficking and offered women ways to support themselves free from exploitation; the congregation was honored in 2005 by the U.S. State Department’s TIP Award for its work.

Vázquez, a survivor of sexual abuse, human trafficking and forced prostitution, said one of the sisters repeatedly reached out to her, helping her find shelter and a new job. “I am eternally grateful to (the sisters) because thanks to them, I was able to get ahead and become who I am today. They were my second mothers,” she said.

She then spent 15 years working with the sisters, providing health education to sex workers and promoting workshops offering alternative trades. That was how she met Bishop Prevost, she said.

The sisters spent years working with the commission until they had to close their convent in Chiclayo and return to Lima. Bishop Prevost’s commission then took over the sisters’ work in assisting victims of trafficking, which is how Vázquez started working directly with the commission, La Nacion reported.

Vázquez and others walk the streets and go to bars, where they get permission from the bar owners to talk to the women, she said.

“The first thing we ask them is how they are and what they need,” she said. She also gives out her phone number, “and many of them call me when they want to talk or need something.”

The commission also built, with the help of the Vincentians and Caritas, a St. Vincent de Paul shelter outside Chiclayo for the women, she said. More than 5,000 people have come through the shelter, most of them migrants from Venezuela.

The future Pope Leo supported all of the commission’s efforts and would organize spiritual retreats for trafficking victims and sex workers, “which were very well attended at the time,” Vázquez said. He would celebrate Mass and hear confessions at the retreats, too.

“We coordinated everything with him,” she said. The commission gave him monthly reports on its work, “which included everything from talking to the girls at brothels and bars to offer them help and job opportunities, to helping them regularize their immigration status and assisting them with treatment for illnesses and clothing for their children.”

The new pope is “gentle, very caring and has a very nice way of treating people,” she said.

When she saw who had been elected pope May 8, she “cried with joy,” she said. She had gone to a neighbor’s to watch the announcement on TV, and “my neighbor didn’t understand. I told her I knew the pope very well. I had to show her the photos for her to believe me!”

WASHINGTON (OSV News) – In a letter to mark the 10th anniversary of the late Pope Francis’ encyclical “Laudato Si’,” U.S. bishops have urged young people to “lead the way” on the climate crisis.

Published on May 24, 2015, the late Pope Francis’ landmark environmental encyclical “Laudato Si’, on Care for Our Common Home” urged steps to counteract “the throwaway culture which affects the entire planet.”

In a joint, public letter to young people May 21, Archbishop Borys Gudziak of Ukrainian Catholic Archeparchy of Philadelphia, chair of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops’ Committee on Domestic Justice and Human Development, and Bishop A. Elias Zaidan of Maronite Eparchy of Our Lady of Lebanon, chair of the USCCB’s Committee on International Justice and Peace, thanked young people for their witness and called for “a renewed commitment to care for our common home, which sustains all life.”

“(T)he sacred gift of creation is under threat,” the bishops wrote. “Climate change and environmental degradation entrap many people in poverty, often in communities already excluded by society. Climate change, biodiversity loss, and industrial pollution threaten the livelihoods and food security of farming, fishing, and forest-dependent communities in the United States and around the world. Illegal and often unregulated mining, as well as other exploitative extractive activities, threaten Indigenous Peoples’ survival and sacred places. Toxic waste results in high asthma and cancer rates in low-income communities living near sources of contamination. Extreme weather threatens the health, education, safety, and future of children born today more than in previous generations.”

They said, “When we fail to steward the gifts of our Creator carefully, we also manifest our blindness to the ways we are all interconnected and interdependent.”

The bishops asked, “So, what can we do?”

“We must be steadfast in our hope in God and in one another,” they said. “God’s plan for our salvation and our world involves the participation of all. We need to build a culture of encounter.”

The bishops also pointed to comments made by the new Pope Leo XIV when he introduced himself to the world: “We are all in the hands of God. Therefore, without fear, united hand in hand with God and among ourselves, we move forward. We are disciples of Christ.”

“Young people can lead the way as catalysts of hope,” on protecting creation, they said. “You have the capacity to organize and create change that will endure for generations to come.”

By their witness, the bishops said, “youth and young adults serve as a vital bridge.”

“Do not doubt that you have the power to inspire and lead efforts to effect change locally and globally,” the bishops said. “We are with you, standing in the tension between God’s vision for his beloved creation and our current reality.”

VATICAN CITY (CNS) – The Gospel parable of the “wasteful sower” who casts seeds on fertile soil as well as on a rocky path “is an image of the way God loves us,” Pope Leo XIV told visitors and pilgrims at his first weekly general audience.

The parable can strike people as odd because “we are used to calculating things — and at times it is necessary — but this does not apply in love,” the pope told an estimated 40,000 people gathered in St. Peter’s Square May 21.

Pope Leo read his full prepared text in Italian and also read the summaries of the talk in English and in Spanish.

At the end of the audience, Pope Leo drew attention to ongoing Israeli military operations in Gaza and its limitations on the delivery of humanitarian aid to the area.

“The situation in Gaza is increasingly worrying and agonizing,” he said. “I renew my heartfelt appeal to allow the entry of sufficient humanitarian aid and to end the hostilities, the heartbreaking price of which is being paid by children, the elderly and the sick.”

The pope also told the crowd that he could not conclude the gathering without remembering “our beloved Pope Francis, who exactly one month ago returned to the house of our Father.”

It had been more than three months since the Vatican hosted a weekly general audience; Pope Francis met pilgrims and visitors Feb. 12 and was hospitalized two days later. He died April 21.

Mercy Sister Maria Juan Anderson, coordinator of the Bishops’ Office for U.S. Visitors to the Vatican, which is housed in the Casa Santa Maria of the Pontifical North American College in Rome, told Catholic News Service that the office distributed 1,800 free tickets to the pope’s first audience — “a record!”

“We had eight priests hearing confessions for two and a half hours” as visitors came to collect their tickets May 20 and get information about the audience, the Vatican and the new pope, she said.

Pope Leo arrived in the popemobile for the audience, riding through the crowd in St. Peter’s Square and stopping often to bless infants, tracing the sign of the cross on their foreheads.

The pope began his audience explaining he would continue the series of talks his predecessor had begun on the Jubilee-related theme, “Jesus Christ Our Hope.”

Focusing specifically on the parable of the sower from the Gospel of Matthew 13:1-17, Pope Leo said Jesus’ parables were stories “taken from everyday life” but meant to lead listeners “to a deeper meaning.”

The parable of the sower, he said, is about “the dynamic of the word of God and the effects it produces. Indeed, every word of the Gospel is like a seed that is thrown on the ground of our life.”

The soil where the seed in the parable lands “is our heart, but it is also the world, the community, the church,” he said. “The word of God, in fact, makes fruitful and provokes every reality.”

What happens to the seed depends on the quality of the earth it lands on, he said.

“But first and foremost, in this parable Jesus tells us that God throws the seed of his word on all kinds of soil, that is, in any situation of ours,” the pope said. “At times we are more superficial and distracted; at times we let ourselves get carried away by enthusiasm; sometimes we are burdened by life’s worries, but there are also times when we are willing and welcoming.”

“God is confident and hopes that sooner or later the seed will blossom,” Pope Leo said. “This is how he loves us: he does not wait for us to become the best soil, but he always generously gives us his word.”

When people see how God loves and trusts them, the pope said, it should encourage them to be “better soil.”

Pope Leo urged people to ask God for the grace to welcome his word in their lives, “and if we realize we are not a fruitful soil, let us not be discouraged, but let us ask him to work on us more to make us become a better terrain.”

ROME (CNS) – God’s love, mercy and goodness lie at the foundation of every vocation, including that of the pope, Pope Leo XIV said.

“Let us ask the Lord for the grace to cultivate and spread his charity and to become true neighbors to one another,” he said, paraphrasing his predecessor, Pope Francis, in a homily at Rome’s Basilica of St. Paul Outside the Walls May 20.

“Let us compete in showing the love that, following (St. Paul’s) encounter with Christ, drove the former persecutor to become ‘all things to all people,’ even to the point of martyrdom,” he said.

The pope visited the basilica and tomb of St. Paul two days after the Mass for the inauguration of his Petrine ministry in St. Peter’s Square. It was part of a series of visits to the city’s major papal basilicas after his election.

People cheered and applauded as he entered the basilica, and he blessed the crowds. He walked to the steps descending to the apostle’s tomb where he knelt briefly in silent prayer.

The prayer service was dedicated to St. Paul, the so-called “Apostle to the Gentiles” who brought the Gospel to peoples across the central and eastern Mediterranean, exemplifying evangelical zeal and the missionary spirit. The visit was part of entrusting “the beginning of this new pontificate to the intercession of the apostle,” the pope said.

Pope Leo’s homily reflected on a reading chosen from the opening of Paul’s Letter to the Romans, where the apostle expresses his complete allegiance to the Lord and his faith in God’s justifying action in Jesus.

St. Paul received the grace of his vocation from God, acknowledging “that his encounter with Christ and his own ministry were the fruit of God’s prior love, which called him to a new life while he was still far from the Gospel and persecuting the church,” the pope said.

St. Augustine also was a convert who experienced choosing God after having realized God had chosen him first, he said. “We cannot love unless someone has loved us first.”

In fact, “at the root of every vocation, God is present, in his mercy and his goodness, as generous as that of a mother who nourishes her child with her own body for as long as the child is unable to feed itself,” he said, quoting from the saint who founded the religious order he joined in his 20s.

When St. Paul speaks of “the obedience of faith,” he said, he is referring to what happened to him on the road to Damascus, when the Lord appeared and “did not take away his freedom, but gave him the opportunity to make a decision, to choose an obedience that would prove costly and entail interior and exterior struggles, which Paul proved willing to face.”

“Salvation does not come about by magic, but by a mysterious interplay of grace and faith, of God’s prevenient love and of our trusting and free acceptance,” he said.

Quoting from Pope Benedict XVI’s 2011 address to young people, Pope Leo said, “‘God loves us. This is the great truth of our life; it is what makes everything else meaningful.’ Indeed, ‘our life originates as part of a loving plan of God.'”

“Faith leads us to ‘open our hearts to this mystery of love and to live as men and women conscious of being loved by God,'” he continued.

“Here we see, in all its simplicity and uniqueness, the basis of every mission, including my own mission as the successor of Peter and the heir to Paul’s apostolic zeal. May the Lord grant me the grace to respond faithfully to his call,” he said.

After praying before the altar above the apostle’s tomb, Pope Leo concluded the service and processed out the basilica, again to applause, blessing those present and making the sign of the cross on the foreheads of several babies.

VATICAN CITY (CNS) – Pope Leo XIV has named Cardinal Baldassare Reina grand chancellor of the John Paul II Pontifical Theological Institute for Marriage and Family Sciences.

The cardinal succeeds Archbishop Vincenzo Paglia, who turned 80, the Vatican’s mandatory retirement age, April 20. The archbishop had served as grand chancellor since 2016.

Cardinal Reina, as papal vicar for Rome, is automatically the grand chancellor of the Pontifical Lateran University, where the institute is based.

The institute for studies on marriage and the family was established by St. John Paul II in 1982 after the 1980 Synod of Bishops on the family called for the creation of centers devoted to the study of the church’s teaching on marriage and the family.

After the more recent meetings of the Synod of Bishops on the family in 2014 and 2015 called for a more pastoral and missionary approach to modern family life, Pope Francis updated the statutes in 2017. He said there was a need for greater reflection and academic formation in a “pastoral perspective and attention to the wounds of humanity” while keeping the original inspiration for the old institute alive.

By amplifying the institute’s scope in making it a “theological” institute that is also dedicated to human “sciences,” Pope Francis had written, the institute’s work will study — in a “deeper and more rigorous way — the truth of revelation and the wisdom of the tradition of faith.”

The anthropological and cultural changes underway affect every aspect of human life, he wrote, and that calls for a new approach that is not limited to pastoral practices and mission “that reflect forms and models of the past.”

Archbishop Paglia also is president of the Pontifical Academy for Life, a position he also is expected to retire from now that he has turned 80.

Pope Francis also updated the statutes of that body in 2016. The main goal of the academy, as founded in 1994 by St. John Paul II, is still “the defense and promotion of the value of human life and the dignity of the person,” according to the new statutes.

The new statutes added, however, that achieving the goal includes studying ways to promote “the care of the dignity of the human person at the different ages of existence, mutual respect between genders and generations, defense of the dignity of each human being, promotion of a quality of human life that integrates its material and spiritual value with a view to an authentic ‘human ecology’ that helps recover the original balance of creation between the human person and the entire universe.”

VATICAN CITY (CNS) – The day after his inauguration Mass, Pope Leo XIV had a closed-door meeting with U.S. Vice President JD Vance at the Vatican.

The vice president also met May 19 with Archbishop Paul R. Gallagher, Vatican foreign minister, after meeting with the pope, a Vatican statement said.

The Vatican press office released a communique outlining only what general themes were discussed during the “cordial talks held at the Secretariat of State.” The two parties expressed their satisfaction with the “good bilateral relations” between them, and “the collaboration between church and state was discussed, as well as some matters of special relevance to ecclesial life and religious freedom.”

“Finally, there was an exchange of views on some current international issues, calling for respect for humanitarian law and international law in areas of conflict and for a negotiated solution between the parties involved,” the Vatican said.

According to the office of Vice President Vance, U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio was present for a portion of the closed-door meeting with the pope after Vance’s one-on-one.

The two U.S. leaders were then joined by their spouses and the larger U.S. delegation for photos and an exchange of gifts. One of the gifts from the U.S. delegation was a navy blue and orange jersey from the Chicago Bears football team with “Pope Leo XIV” written on the back. The new pope was born in Chicago.

The papal audience lasted 45 minutes, according to the vice president’s office.

Vance and Rubio were in Rome to represent the United States at Pope Leo’s inaugural Mass in St. Peter’s Square May 18. They were accompanied by their spouses and senior White House aides at the Mass, which drew more than 200,000 people.

Later May 18 Vance and Rubio also met with Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, who also was in Rome for the pope’s inaugural Mass.

In a post on X, Vance said, “Our countries share the goal of ending unnecessary bloodshed in Ukraine, and we discussed updates on the ongoing negotiations for a ceasefire and lasting peace.”