Invitation to pray

Msgr. Raul Trevizo, Father Jorge Farias Saucedo, Sister Gladys Echenique, OP, and Sister Jeanne Bartholomeaux,SC, and I recently recorded a recitation of the Luminous Mysteries of the Rosary. The recordings in both English and Spanish now are available at your parish for no cost while supplies last.  If you prefer, the recordings also are available as downloadable MP3 files, also at no charge, at our diocesan webpage at https://diocesetucson.org/communications/Rosary-Audio-Download.html.

As I wrote in a letter to our priests,  “As we journey through the season of Easter, I would like to focus attention on sharing the power of prayer with our brothers and sisters, specifically prayer for vocations to the priesthood and religious life. In the sh0rt time that I've been in our Diocese I have come to understand that the need for more priestly vocations is at the top of our most critical issues for the future. Addressing this need first and foremost with prayer is critical, and for that I need your help.”

Cardinal 'Fix It': Almoner's job is to model direct charity

VATICAN CITY (CNS) - (May 14, 2019) - During his visit to a center offering respite and food to refugees on the Greek island of Lesbos, Cardinal Konrad Krajewski followed a sign that said, "Broken? Fix it here."

The sign led to a shack where several refugees were working together to fix a bicycle, and one was trying to construct what looked like a coal stove out of large cans.

The 55-year-old Polish cardinal holds the title of papal almoner, an ancient office devoted to mostly small, direct acts of almsgiving.

"Fix it" could be the motto on Cardinal Krajewski's coat of arms. (Instead, it is "Misericordia," mercy.)

Twenty-four hours after returning to Rome from Greece, the cardinal went to a government building occupied by some 450 people, including close to 100 children. The power company had cut electricity to the building because no one was paying the bill.

Cardinal Krajewski fixed it.

While he did not explicitly admit to climbing down a manhole to reconnect the power, he has taken full responsibility for overriding the electric company's decision to cut service to the building. And he knows it can have legal consequences.

The office of papal almoner has existed since early in the 13th century. While the Dicastery for Promoting Integral Human Development and Caritas Internationalis, along with its national partners, are responsible for large-scale development, relief and advocacy projects, the almoner's office is focused on person-to-person charity.

The direct contact with the poor is so important to the Catholic Church that the papal almoner is one of a handful of top Vatican positions that is not suspended when a pope dies. As a sign of the church's constant love for the poor, the almoner is to continue his work distributing charity "in accordance with the criteria employed during the pope's lifetime," say the rules governing the interregnum, or period between popes.

Pairing both small- and large-scale approaches to charity has been part of Catholic tradition for centuries.

As then-Pope Benedict XVI wrote in his 2005 encyclical letter, "Deus Caritas Est" ("God is Love"), "Following the example given in the parable of the Good Samaritan, Christian charity is first of all the simple response to immediate needs and specific situations: feeding the hungry, clothing the naked, caring for and healing the sick, visiting those in prison, etc."

While the church's charitable organizations must be professionally competent, he said, professionalism is not enough. "We are dealing with human beings, and human beings always need something more than technically proper care. They need humanity. They need heartfelt concern."

Cardinal Krajewski is not naive. He spent hours with government officials in Greece May 8-9 trying to promote humanitarian visas for some of the 70,000 asylum-seekers in the country.

But he spent more time in three camps on Lesbos and at three small, privately run centers that offer migrants and refugees a place to relax, to get new clothes, to drink tea or coffee with their friends, to watch a movie or borrow a book and to watch their children on a playground.

He gave little bags of candy to the children and rosaries to the adults, although the majority of them were Muslims. He also handed out small containers of dates and nuts, which the adults would eat when they broke their day's Ramadan fast that evening.

Pope Francis sent him to Lesbos with more than $100,000, mostly for Caritas Hellas, the Greek Catholic charity. But he had cash in his pockets, too, and he quietly made donations to the small charities assisting the refugees. One gift was met with stunned, open-mouthed gaping. Another elicited a spontaneous burst of tears.

Cardinal Krajewski did not ask for grant proposals or budget reports or a future accounting of how the cash was spent. He saw people helping people in need and, in Pope Francis' name, gave them resources to do more.

Justice for the asylum-seekers is a big, long-term project. Personally showing them someone outside the camps knows they are there and sees them as human beings, not case numbers, requires presence, which is Cardinal Krajewski's mission and is meant to be an example.

As Pope Francis said on the first World Day of the Poor in 2017: "Drawing near to the poor in our midst will touch our lives. It will remind us of what really counts: to love God and our neighbor. Only this lasts forever, everything else passes away. What we invest in love remains, the rest vanishes."

By Cindy Wooden Catholic News Service

Statement on Abortion-Related Legislation nationwide

The landmark Supreme Court decision of Roe vs. Wade unleashed a tidal wave of abortion in the United States.  In the intervening years the lives of millions of unborn children have been terminated.  When one considers the ramifications of so many lost lives, it is almost impossible to believe that a nation as great as ours has permitted this moral evil for so long.  As many who follow the politics of our day are aware, several states have recently passed very strict pro-life laws which will greatly reduce abortions.  These state laws are soon to be challenged in appellate courts and quite probably the U.S. Supreme Court.  I cannot help but believe that we are drawing nearer to reversing this moral catastrophe.  How we proceed from here is crucial and I would offer the following three points for guidance.

The first is that we must keep the light focused on what abortion does to the unborn child and the life it terminates.  This truth, which is based upon science, medicine, and reason, is all too often kept in the dark by the pro-abortion world.  However, even as we keep the light focused on the child in the womb we likewise cannot fail to acknowledge and respond to the crises in which so many pregnant women find themselves.  While stopping abortion is a moral imperative, the followers of Jesus Christ will recognize His face in the faces of every pregnant woman suffering from poverty, fear, abuse, or abandonment.  Saving the lives of infants is critical, but we likewise must do all we can to make it possible for women to keep and care for their children.  Legislation, political decisions, and government policies that compound and further aggravate the lives of poor and suffering women can be a powerful incentive to push them through the abortion clinic doors. Again, even as we keep the light focused on the devastation of an unborn child’s life, we cannot afford to narrow our vision and refuse to see the suffering of their mothers and many times their older siblings.  For this reason I am especially grateful, and strongly supportive of, those charitable organizations that serve poor and needy pregnant women as well as women struggling to care for their children.

The second is that Catholics are called to be full members of our communities and that includes the political realm.  We have a right and an obligation to bring our values into our local communities as well as our individual states, our nation, and the global community.  Catholics have a crucial role to be a salt for the earth and a light for the world. We are never authentic to the Gospel when we ignore or run from the world.  Informing our legislators, as well as how we vote, matters deeply.  The Gospel is quite clear:  our goal is heaven but our task for today is to dig deeply into daily life and to be a part of building a land of justice and peace today. We can never abandon our citizenship or our stewardship for God’s created world.

The final point is prayer, and it is perhaps the most significant of our efforts.  Regrettably the word prayer is sometimes tossed around casually without reference to its very real power.  The forces of evil are clearly at work in the world.  In the face of so great an evil we need to unleash renewed waves of prayer—invoking the Holy Spirit upon the people of our Nation and most especially upon our judges and legislators.  Prayer is powerful and it will make the difference.  Too, we don’t pray instead of taking action.  Rather, the two are profoundly connected.  Indeed, it is oftentimes prayer that unleashes the Spirit within us so that God—working through us—can bring about His will in our world.  From this vantage point prayer is not incidental, it is critical.  We must pray and pray aggressively for an end to abortion, for true justice in our nation, and for women and children in crisis.  

Again, there are current efforts around our nation which have the potential to end a profound moral evil.  Now is a time for renewed energies on our part.  I believe that we must blend together three critical tools:  an intensity of prayer, renewed efforts in the political world, and generous service of suffering women and their children.  The stakes are critical, the potential immense, and our call to be a part of righting this profound evil is clear.