ROME (CNS) — With the aim of ensuring that the public display of the Shroud of Turin promotes conversion and healing, the archbishop of Turin has given priests throughout the archdiocese special faculties to offer absolution to women who confess to having had an abortion.

The display of the shroud April 19-June 24 should be “a time of grace that translates into attitudes of conversion, the fruit of repentance and newness of life,” Archbishop Cesare Nosiglia wrote in a decree signed Feb. 18, Ash Wednesday.

According to the Code of Canon Law, “A person who procures a completed abortion” automatically incurs excommunication. Only the bishop or a priest he designates can lift the excommunication. In some dioceses the local bishop formally has granted the faculty to all priests, while in Turin and other places, the bishop grants the faculty on special occasions.

[quote_box_right]

Shroud of Turin in Diocese of Phoenix

Two local parishes are hosting exhibitions featuring replicas of the Shroud of Turin in the days leading up to Easter.

Shroud Encounter

What: Life-sized, museum quality replica on display as part of a presentation by Russ Brealt, an international expert on the shroud who takes audiences through a big-screen like adventure. Video preview.
When: 2 p.m. March 29 (Palm Sunday) at St. Steven Parish in Sun Lakes
Info: $10 admission fee supports church’s new sanctuary

Exhibit

What: high-resolution photo replica of the shroud that has been scientifically proven to be from the time of Jesus. Parishioner Greg Biltz will offer three talks about the shroud.
When: 4-7 p.m. March 29 (Palm Sunday) and 9 a.m.-6 p.m. March 30-April 3 at St. Maria Goretti Parish in Scottsdale
Info: in John XXIII Parish Hall. (480) 948-8380 Related article from our archives.

[/quote_box_right]

Archbishop Nosiglia wrote that the church’s ministers, meeting the hundreds of thousands of pilgrims expected to visit the Turin cathedral to see the shroud, want to “concretely demonstrate the Father’s mercy toward those who repent of an evil committed.”

However, he said, the permission granted to priests is limited to the time of the shroud’s public display so as not to “diminish the rigor of the law,” which aims to teach people how seriously wrong it is to kill an innocent life.

The archbishop asked Turin priests to re-read St. John Paul II’s encyclical letter, “The Gospel of Life,” especially the sections numbered 58-63, which discuss the seriousness of taking the life of the most innocent human being imaginable, the way deciding to have an abortion is usually “tragic and painful” for the woman and explaining that the automatic excommunication applies also to anyone who helped a woman procure an abortion.

The penalty, St. John Paul wrote, “makes clear that abortion is a most serious and dangerous crime, thereby encouraging those who commit it to seek without delay the path of conversion. In the church the purpose of the penalty of excommunication is to make an individual fully aware of the gravity of a certain sin and then to foster genuine conversion and repentance.”

Turin priests hearing the confessions of someone who has had or helped someone to have an abortion must remember that in the confessional they are “simultaneously ministers of divine justice and divine mercy,” the archbishop wrote. “Above all, they must know how to console the anguished remembering that ‘whatever our hearts condemn, God is greater than our hearts and knows everything,'” as 1 John 3:20 says.

Archbishop Nosiglia also asked priests to impose a penance that would help lead to a lasting conversion, first of all by making a commitment to “implore God’s indispensable help” by regular prayer, particularly attendance at daily Mass for a specific period of time, if at all possible. Penitents also can be asked to support, financially or through the gift of their time, programs that assist women with crisis pregnancies and other pro-life causes.

— By Cindy Wooden, Catholic News Service.
[quote_box_center]

Shroud shows what pain Jesus endured, says speaker

[/quote_box_center]

VATICAN CITY (CNS) — The Catholic Church supports the efforts of scientists to study the causes and effects of climate change and insists governments and businesses must get serious about specific commitments for protecting the environment.

But Pope Francis, like his predecessors, does not pretend to have a technical solution to the problem. However, he does feel a responsibility to remind Christians of their religious obligation to safeguard creation, beginning with human beings who are created in the image and likeness of God.

Clearing his calendar for a week in late March, Pope Francis rolled up his sleeves to put the final touches on an encyclical letter about the environment; building on what he and his predecessors have said, the document —planned for publication early in the summer — is expected to present ecology as the ultimate pro-life, pro-poor, pro-family issue.

For Pope Francis, like Pope Benedict XVI, safeguarding creation is not simply about protecting plants and animals, or just about ensuring the air, water and land will support human life for generations to come. Those things are part of the task.

“We need to see — with the eyes of faith — the beauty of God’s saving plan, the link between the natural environment and the dignity of the human person,” Pope Francis wrote in a speech prepared for young people in the Philippines in January.

Christianity teaches that God created the world and everything in it with a certain order and proclaimed it good. As stewards of God’s creation, Pope Francis has said, people have an absolute obligation to respect the natural order.

Defending marriage as the lifelong union of a man and a woman, Pope Francis told a conference in November, “the crisis of the family has produced a human ecological crisis, for social environments, like natural environments, need protection.”

“Human ecology” was a phrase often used by retired Pope Benedict XVI, who was known for “green” initiatives, including installing solar panels at the Vatican. He taught that “the book of nature is one and indivisible; it includes not only the environment but also individual, family and social ethics. Our duties toward the environment flow from our duties toward the person, considered both individually and in relation to others.”

In his 2009 encyclical, “Caritas in Veritate,” Pope Benedict wrote that the church “must defend not only earth, water and air as gifts of creation that belong to everyone. She must above all protect mankind from self-destruction. There is need for what might be called a human ecology, correctly understood.”

The “decisive issue,” he wrote, “is the overall moral tenor of society. If there is a lack of respect for the right to life and to a natural death, if human conception, gestation and birth are made artificial, if human embryos are sacrificed to research, the conscience of society ends up losing the concept of human ecology and, along with it, that of environmental ecology.”

Echoes of Pope Benedict’s thought can be found in Pope Francis’ frequent denunciations of the “throwaway culture.” He sees people increasingly at ease throwing away not just plastic and paper, but wasting food at a time when so many people are starving. Even more seriously, he has said, people have a similar “throwaway” attitude when it comes to people they don’t find useful — including the unborn, the sick and the elderly.

Meeting with U.N. officials in May 2014, Pope Francis insisted the defense of the family, the defense of the poor and protecting the environment are part of the same agenda of ensuring the survival and thriving of humanity.

The international community, he said, must address “the structural causes of poverty and hunger, attain more substantial results in protecting the environment, ensure dignified and productive labor for all and provide appropriate protection for the family, which is an essential element in sustainable human and social development.”

As often happens when things go wrong, Pope Francis has said, the poor pay the highest price for the destruction of the environment: the seas and rivers no longer provide fish; landslides send their makeshift homes tumbling down hillsides; the deserts expand, robbing sustenance farmers of even a meager diet.

Flying from Sri Lanka to the Philippines in January, Pope Francis told reporters accompanying him that Cardinal Peter Turkson, president of the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, and a team from his office had prepared drafts of the ecology document.

During an early March visit to Ireland, Cardinal Turkson spoke about the principles underlying the pope’s upcoming letter, insisting “this is not some narrow agenda for the greening of the church or the world. It is a vision of care and protection that embraces the human person and the human environment in all possible dimensions.”

All people are called to be “protectors” of the environment and of one another, especially the poor, the cardinal said. The responsibility and obligation of care is both a matter of justice and a matter of faith; it is the natural result of being in a right relationship with God, with others and with the earth.

“When Pope Francis says that destroying the environment is a grave sin; when he says that it is not large families that cause poverty but an economic culture that puts money and profit ahead of people; when he says that we cannot save the environment without also addressing the profound injustices in the distribution of the goods of the earth; when he says that this is ‘an economy that kills’ — he is not making some political comment about the relative merits of capitalism and communism,” Cardinal Turkson said. “He is rather restating ancient biblical teaching.”

At the heart of the “integral ecology” Pope Francis is calling for, he said, “is the call to dialogue and a new solidarity, a changing of human hearts in which the good of the human person, and not the pursuit of profit, is the key value that directs our search for the global, the universal common good.”

— By Cindy Wooden, Catholic News Service.

MONTGOMERY, Ala. (CNS) — On the property of St. Jude’s Church, just outside Montgomery, marchers nearing the end of the civil rights march from Selma in 1965 heard a concert and slept on the athletic fields.

Fifty years later, the parish commemorated its role in the march’s end with an evening Mass March 24, the night before ceremonies culminated at the state Capitol.

Archbishop Joseph E. Kurtz of Louisville, Kentucky, in a statement at the end of Mass, urged those in the congregation to “use the energy of this anniversary to finish the work of healing divisions that remain and ending the cycles of violence that grip too many of our communities.”

“With firm faith and trust in a gracious and loving God, we must march on,” said the archbishop, who is president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops.

He noted that just being on the property of this parish near where the historic march ended, participants cannot help but be “flooded with vivid memories.”

“We must never forget the images associated with this historic march. They are pictures of men and women standing as still as stone against a coming rush of violent resistance during the first attempt to march,” he said. “They are images of solidarity, of complete strangers coming together all along the way for a noble purpose, at times literally binding up one another’s wounds.”

He also pointed out that on the grounds of St. Jude’s parish are images of “compassionate souls creating space for rest and hospitality for the weary when many others would not take the risk.”

The archbishop, who concelebrated the Mass that evening with Mobile Archbishop Thomas J. Rodi, said that the march 50 years ago “shed needed light on the toll of racism, and, for many, put a human face on those impacted by its evils.”

He also pointed out that the “perseverance, sacrifice and peaceful witness against violence” of the marchers “marked a turning point in the national conscience and conversation.”

“Today, we honor the sacrifice of many brave and often unnamed heroes — most of deep faith, including a number of Catholics — who worked for years to ensure equal access to the benefits of democracy, benefits that include the right to vote and fully participate in the processes that safeguard the common good. Those who marched did so as part of a poignant chapter in a long struggle.”

He praised the 1965 marchers saying their sacrifices brought about real and lasting change even though more work remains in “transforming hearts and minds.”

In 1965, there were three marches, which ultimately led to the Aug. 6, 1965, passage of the federal Voting Rights Act, signed into law by President Lyndon Johnson.

On March 7, 1965, local civil rights activists led about 600 marchers in a peaceful procession from Selma across the Edmund Pettus Bridge toward Montgomery.

They risked imprisonment and injury to protest infringement of voting rights against African-Americans in Selma and the brutal murder of a demonstrator by a state trooper a month earlier. March 7 came to be known as “Bloody Sunday,” as police — some on horseback — released tear gas and beat some of the marchers over the heads with truncheons.

The Rev. Martin Luther King led the second march, which took place March 9, 1965. He galvanized more than 2,000 people to participate. They included ministers, priests, nuns and rabbis around the country who answered a call to join him.

Rev. King turned the march back at the bridge, after time spent in prayer. He did so at the urging of members of Congress who wanted federal protection for the demonstrators but had not yet secured it.

A third march started from Selma March 21, 1965, with federal protection for participants. Walking between seven and 17 miles a day, and camping along the way, the marchers reached the steps of the Capitol in Montgomery March 25, 1965. The crowd grew to 25,000 on the last day.

This year, on March 25, thousands of people marched to the Alabama Capitol in Montgomery commemorating that last leg of the 1965 march.

The daughters of Rev. King, the slain civil rights leader, and the late George Wallace, four-time governor of Alabama who came to embody resistance to the civil rights movement, were scheduled to address marchers during the afternoon.

Bernice King planned to read the “How Long, Not Long” speech her father gave 50 years ago and Peggy Wallace Kennedy was scheduled to talk about her father who initially opposed civil rights but later apologized.

According to The Associated Press, marchers at the Capitol waved signs reading “The March Continues” and “Don’t Let the Dream Die.”

VATICAN CITY (CNS) — Having so much world-famous art housed in Rome’s churches and chapels has risked turning the city’s sacred spaces into sightseer circuses.

A hushed prayerful atmosphere for the faithful is often broken by clicking cameras and tourists exchanging guidebook details.

But one Rome attraction has managed to hold on to its spiritual side, according to the rector of the Pontifical Sanctuary of the Holy Stairs.

Located across a busy street from the Basilica of St. John Lateran, the sanctuary remains “a place of prayer” even as thousands of people stream through its doors every day, Passionist Father Francesco Guerra told Catholic News Service.

“It is felt to be a sacred place” not just by Catholics and Orthodox Christians, but even people of other faiths like Hindus and Buddhists as they are drawn to the sanctuary’s spiritual atmosphere, he said in early March.

“Our job is to keep the Holy Stairs a holy place,” he whispered as he pointed to what he saw as a sign of success: two tourists quietly and respectfully walking through a chapel while a dozen faithful were seated or standing in prayer.

The Gospel story of Jesus driving the money-changers out of the temple is a kind of mandate about the importance of keeping these spaces focused on the sacred, he said. “Even if it’s a place of great art, a church is always a place of prayer,” Fr. Guerra said.

The Holy Stairs, according to tradition, are the ones Jesus climbed when Pontius Pilate brought him before the crowd and handed him over to be crucified. The 28 marble steps, some spattered with droplets of blood, are covered with thick wood panels, now worn smooth from centuries of human traffic. It’s said that Constantine’s mother, St. Helen, brought the stairs to Rome from Jerusalem in 326 A.D.

From the moment people walk into the sanctuary, they are surrounded by images and symbols associated with the Passion.

Overhead in the atrium, frescoed angels carry the cross, ladder, nails, spear, sponge and chalice, and, standing at each stairwell are life-sized marble statues:

• Jesus weeping in the Garden of Gethsemane
• Judas confidently pulling a pensive Jesus close for a kiss
• Pontius Pilate presenting Jesus bound and crowned with thorns to the people
• Jesus tied to a column for flagellation

With the statues’ pedestals at shoulder-level, people kiss or touch Jesus’ feet.

“People need this concreteness” as part of entering into a deeper form of self-examination and meditation, Fr. Guerra said.

The Sanctuary of the Holy Stairs is like a catechetical storybook, whose wall-to-ceiling frescoes take pilgrims on a visual journey of Christ’s passage from the Last Supper to his passion, death, resurrection and ascension into heaven.

A unique feature of the sanctuary is that pilgrims climb the Holy Stairs on their knees in silent prayer.

Advancing up the relic on one’s knees and seeing the images around them “help the pilgrims enter into the spirituality of those events” and focus on Jesus’ passion, he said.

“They physically take on a condition that is outside the norm, they’re not walking, but laboring, sacrificing to get up the stairs, which helps the spirit” engage in the penitential and sacrificial aspects of the Passion, he said.

“We don’t just have minds, we also have bodies, which here become part of the act of prayer,” he said.

“Today we read the Gospel and reflect on the Gospel, but in the Middle Ages, people didn’t read, they went to church, they saw the images and prayed,” Fr. Guerra said.

“Now there is much emphasis on study and reason, but before it was all about participation,” he said.

Lent and Holy Week often offered very powerful experiences for the laity as the processions, especially the Way of the Cross, and other devotional practices gave people the opportunity to “re-live events” in the Bible and church tradition, he said. It was more than acting in or watching a scene, “but was identifying oneself with” Christ, following in his footsteps and “incarnating” his journey, he said.

With the help of private donors and the Patrons of the Arts in the Vatican Museums, the Vatican Museums have been overseeing a decade-long piecemeal restoration of the sanctuary, starting with the chapel dedicated to St. Sylvester and a chapel dedicated to St. Lawrence.

John Gildea from Connecticut underwrote the restoration of 14 framed paintings from the 18th-century of the Stations of the Cross in the Chapel of the Crucifix.

“The beauty and the state of the stations were so moving that I was so honored to be able to assist in a small way,” he told CNS in an email. He said he only discovered the sanctuary after being brought there by a U.S. art gallery curator who is coordinating the Holy Stairs project.

“Unfortunately, many Americans, including myself, aren’t aware of the church or are too busy visiting other sites — a real shame,” he wrote.

Fr. Guerra, who studied art history in Florence, said Western culture has lost touch with the theological and religious inspiration of Europe’s Medieval, Renaissance and Baroque art and literature. Today’s guidebooks and even education “removes art from its roots, which is faith, spirituality and humanity,” he said.

“My dream is that the faithful can come here and they can absorb, breathe in the spirituality that this art expresses.”

— By Carol Glatz, Catholic News Service.

[quote_box_center]

Related

Vatican backs Holy Stairs shrine restoration (National Catholic Reporter)

Sanctuary of Holy Stairs (The Catholic Travel Guide)

[/quote_box_center]