GREENSBORO, N.C. (CNS) — Keith and Donielle Wilde know what it means to live this every day: “Jesus, I trust in you.”

Married for 17 years, the Catholic parents of nine children under the age of 12 and the owners of a concrete business in Summerfield rely heavily on their faith in Christ and the Church.

But shortly after Donielle became pregnant with her 10th child in April, doctors found that her breast cancer, which had been in remission for the past nine years, had returned — and their faith was put to the test again.

“The beginning of this year was extremely difficult for Keith and me,” Donielle recalled. “The business, financial stressors, and 11 of us living under the same roof had us both feeling maxed out. In our minds, we were sure that God had given us all that we could handle.

“However, God would soon reveal that He had other plans. Since we were using NFP (natural family planning), we were more than a little surprised to find out we were pregnant with our 10th child,” she told the Catholic News Herald, newspaper of the Charlotte Diocese.

After sharing the feelings of joy and excitement, the couple “began to wonder how God could think we were able to handle more. But He never let us down before,” Donielle said.

So they prepared to welcome their 10th child, a fifth daughter.

But when Donielle went to her OB-GYN for a routine ultrasound nine weeks into her pregnancy, life took another unexpected turn. The ultrasound revealed a large mass on one of her ovaries.

The tumor was cancerous. At 16 weeks safely into her pregnancy, Donielle underwent surgery to remove it.

“With God’s grace, we never lost our peace in spite of all that was happening,” she said. “In fact, our faith grew stronger and our hope for a healthy pregnancy and delivery was in the forefront of our prayers, as well as all those praying for us.”

Tests revealed that the tumor was not ovarian cancer, but Stage IV breast cancer that had metastasized. The breast cancer she had successfully fought in 2005 had returned, and doctors told her the hormones produced by her pregnancy were speeding its growth.

Both the ovarian specialist and the oncologist strongly advised Donielle to begin treatment immediately. She had two options:

• abort their unborn daughter, then undergo surgery and chemotherapy
• undergo aggressive chemotherapy throughout her pregnancy and risk a possible miscarriage

“It felt as if the moment was frozen in time,” Donielle said. “Looking back, it was as if we were in the midst of a spiritual battlefield, and the forces of good and evil were intently watching to see what our choice would be … but in reality there was no hesitation in making our decision. We would not abort our child or place her in harm’s way for any reason.”

Keith recalled the day they met with the oncologist and received the diagnosis.

“As a father, it is very strange to sit across from someone, at arm’s length, and listen to that person tell you to kill your child,” he said. “I know that is a very blunt description of what took place — but it is also accurate. I realized that he did not see it that way. The doctor is a good man, kind, a father. He is a competent professional and very dedicated to doing all he can to save Donielle’s life.

“But he simply did not see the child in her womb as a person. The pregnancy was a condition to be dealt with so that Donielle’s treatment could begin.”

But he said he and his wife never wavered on their decision.

“We calmly accepted the news, and calmly refused the abortion,” Keith added. The couple decided to postpone treatment for Donielle’s cancer until after their daughter is born.

She was to have a C-section in early November, four weeks before her due date, which will be “followed by the start of any suggested cancer treatments,” Donielle said. “Further treatment will be determined upon results of testing after she is born.”

Dr. Lewis Lipscomb Jr. is a pro-life OB-GYN who is caring for Donielle and the couple’s unborn baby, and he has dealt with life-threatening situations like this before.

“I have cared for courageous moms who have fought through cancer during their pregnancies — including women with breast cancer, melanoma, lymphoma, cervical cancer and uterine cancer,” Lipscomb said.

Despite some medical complications, Donielle “is doing very well,” he said, — and the baby is developing normally.

“Donielle is a courageous and prayerful woman,” Lipscomb said. “She has faced multiple life-threatening and life-changing situations with genuine grace. She is an authentic witness for life to everyone she encounters.”

Said Donielle, “We feel very hopeful that our little girl will be healthy and strong. We’ve accepted in our hearts whatever it is God has willed for my life. Whether it be healing from cancer, strength in suffering or a peaceful death, my heart remains at peace knowing Christ and our Blessed Mother will give my family and me all the grace we need to live it out.”

As Catholics, “our decision not to abort and to postpone treatment was rooted in our faith,” Keith said. “We are pro-life by virtue of our Christianity. We have placed God at the center of our marriage, and He has blessed us profoundly. Now He has given us a cross to bear — who are we to say no?”

Donielle said the couple’s nine children and the 10th on the way are “a constant reminder to me of God’s love.”

For her, being Catholic is more than speaking words or reading books but “is how we are called to live our lives,” she added.

Catholics must “go forth and live the Gospel, do works in faith striving to imitate Christ,” Donielle said, and to consider “what is God is asking of me, personally, to better live out the Gospels? Whatever the answer may be, I ask you to fearlessly give God your ‘fiat,’ your ‘yes.'”

— By SueAnn Howell, Catholic News Service.

JERUSALEM (CNS) — For Salim Badawi, a Greek Orthodox Palestinian from the West Bank village of Beit Jalla, the opportunity to help a group of Franciscan priests harvest olives in the Garden of Gethsemane on the Mount of Olives offers a sense of hope amid the adversaries his family has faced in their own olive groves.

He said much of the olive grove of his extended family has long been unreachable as it was taken years ago to build an Israeli settlement, now considered a neighborhood of Jerusalem.

An uncle tries every year — unsuccessfully — to reach the land, Badawi said.

“Here I feel hope that maybe one day it will be different, maybe we will one day be allowed to go there and pick our olives,” Badawi told Catholic News Service while reaching into the branches of one of the trees that can be traced to the time of Christ. “The olive trees are still there, but we can’t reach them. I feel something special in this holy place where we are picking the oldest olives in the area, maybe in the whole world.”

At the bottom of the tree, Karina Henriquez, a volunteer from Chile, places olives that drop from the branches into a sack. For her, the trees that continue to bear fruit after thousands of years are a symbol of Jesus, who is still giving fruit to all who seek him.

Henriquez does not want to discuss politics, but she knows that Israelis and Palestinians are good people.

“Too bad they can’t solve their problems. We were hopeful with the pope’s visit, but then there was the war,” she said.

Still, Henriquez feels the need to share the pope’s message of speaking to the soul of people about love and peace. “We have to pray so God will place peace and love in the hearts of all people,” she said.

Since the Franciscans retook possession of the small olive grove adjacent to the Church of All Nations in 1681, the Franciscan fathers have tended to eight of what are believed to be the oldest olive trees in the Holy Land. Tradition, backed by modern genetic testing, holds that the gnarled trees were grafted at some point during the Crusader era from a single tree that was a witness to Jesus’ agony more than 2,000 years ago.

Today, the trees are part of the Garden of Gethsemane, fenced off and protected from the crowds of faithful who come on pilgrimage to the site. To accommodate pilgrims, the Franciscans keep a box of small branches pruned from the trees from which people can freely take a memento.

As the olive harvest begins in the Holy Land, Father Benito Choque, an Argentine who is superior of the Franciscan community at the church, ponders the significance of the olive in the Bible as he greets pilgrims outside the fence and walks among the trees inside the garden. A few pilgrims ask for an olive from the trees, but the friar gently denies their request. If he gives an olive to one, then all the other pilgrims will want one, too, he explained.

“These oldest of trees are a testament to Jesus’ suffering,” Father Choque said. The ancient trees continue to speak to those who will hear, he said.

The Franciscans have been in the Holy land for eight centuries under mandate of the Holy See, and their mission, he explained, is to live with the Jews and Muslims, transmitting their charism.

“What the Crusaders in the past did with their weapons, we do with prayers,” Father Choque told CNS. “I believe God has given something beautiful to humanity and I think the people of this land are blessed also with the planting of the olive trees.”

Though now there is confrontation not far from the trees, the priest sees the harvest as a time that unites people as families gather to pick olives and neighbors and friends meet at the olive press to make the fruit into oil used in cooking throughout the year.

Franciscan Father Diego Dalla Gassa, who guides volunteers at the garden, said he urges them to consider the vocation of the olive and the olive tree, likening them to the life of Jesus. They are cared for with the rain which God provides and in the end, they are meant to be pressed for the oil so precious and important in the region, he noted.

“It is very beautiful for us to pick the olives here from the trees we have cared for. When we collect the olives, we understand we are doing what God does with us. When we see an olive on a faraway branch, we must reach out to it to take it and so it happens with us that God is reaching out for us, searching for us,” Father Dalla Gassa said.

“This place interprets all of the life of Jesus,” he added. “Jesus was pressed here (as the olive is pressed) and we received the beautiful oil, in this case the blood (of Jesus).”

The Franciscans utilize every part of the olive, the oil is blessed and used for the Chrism Mass on Holy Thursday at the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, including the sacraments of baptism, confirmation, ordination of priests, and anointing the sick. Last year, the Franciscans sent a bottle of the blessed oil to Pope Francis for Holy Thursday in anticipation of his pilgrimage to the Holy Land.

The olive pits are sent to a few Christian Palestinian families who traditionally make them into rosaries which are then gifted to the Franciscan priests.

In addition to the eight old trees, the garden includes a younger tree planted by Pope Paul VI during his visit in 1964 and the newest sapling planted by Pope Francis during his pilgrimage earlier this year.

— By Judith Sudilovsky, Catholic News Service.

VATICAN CITY (CNS) — Pope Francis called for abolition of the death penalty as well as life imprisonment, and denounced what he called a “penal populism” that promises to solve society’s problems by punishing crime instead of pursuing social justice.

“It is impossible to imagine that states today cannot make use of another means than capital punishment to defend peoples’ lives from an unjust aggressor,” the pope said Oct. 23 in a meeting with representatives of the International Association of Penal Law.

“All Christians and people of good will are thus called today to struggle not only for abolition of the death penalty, whether it be legal or illegal and in all its forms, but also to improve prison conditions, out of respect for the human dignity of persons deprived of their liberty. And this, I connect with life imprisonment,” he said. “Life imprisonment is a hidden death penalty.”

The pope noted that the Vatican recently eliminated life imprisonment from its own penal code.

According to the Catechism of the Catholic Church, cited by Pope Francis in his talk, “the traditional teaching of the church does not exclude recourse to the death penalty, if this is the only possible way of effectively defending human lives against the unjust aggressor,” but modern advances in protecting society from dangerous criminals mean that “cases in which the execution of the offender is an absolute necessity are very rare, if not practically nonexistent.”

The pope said that, although a number of countries have formally abolished capital punishment, “the death penalty, illegally and to a varying extent, is applied all over the planet,” because “extrajudicial executions” are often disguised as “clashes with offenders or presented as the undesired consequences of the reasonable, necessary and proportionate use of force to apply the law.”

The pope denounced the detention of prisoners without trial, who he said account for more than 50 percent of all incarcerated people in some countries. He said maximum security prisons can be a form of torture, since their “principal characteristic is none other than external isolation,” which can lead to “psychic and physical sufferings such as paranoia, anxiety, depression and weight loss and significantly increase the chance of suicide.”

He also rebuked unspecified governments involved in kidnapping people for “illegal transportation to detention centers in which torture is practiced.”

The pope said criminal penalties should not apply to children, and should be waived or limited for the elderly, who “on the basis of their very errors can offer lessons to the rest of society. We don’t learn only from the virtues of saints but also from the failings and errors of sinners.”

Pope Francis said contemporary societies overuse criminal punishment, partially out of a primitive tendency to offer up “sacrificial victims, accused of the disgraces that strike the community.”

The pope said some politicians and members of the media promote “violence and revenge, public and private, not only against those responsible for crimes, but also against those under suspicion, justified or not.”

He denounced a growing tendency to think that the “most varied social problems can be resolved through public punishment … that by means of that punishment we can obtain benefits that would require the implementation of another type of social policy, economic policy and policy of social inclusion.”

Using techniques similar to those of racist regimes of the past, the pope said, unspecified forces today create “stereotypical figures that sum up the characteristics that society perceives as threatening.”

Pope Francis concluded his talk by denouncing human trafficking and corruption, both crimes he said “could never be committed without the complicity, active or passive, of public authorities.”

The pope spoke scathingly about the mentality of the typical corrupt person, whom he described as conceited, unable to accept criticism, and prompt to insult and even persecute those who disagree with him.

“The corrupt one does not perceive his own corruption. It is a little like what happens with bad breath: someone who has it hardly ever realizes it; other people notice and have to tell him,” the pope said. “Corruption is an evil greater than sin. More than forgiveness, this evil needs to be cured.”

— By Francis X. Rocca, Catholic News Service.