ALEXANDRIA, Va. (CNS) — Dominican Sister Donna Markham has been chosen to succeed Father Larry Snyder as the new president of Catholic Charities USA.

The announcement was made Jan. 12 at Catholic Charities headquarters in Alexandria, a suburb of Washington.

Sister Donna becomes the first woman to lead Catholic Charities, which was founded in 1910. She will officially take over from Father Snyder June 1.

In a Jan. 12 telephone interview with Catholic News Service, Sister Donna said it is “a wonderful story” that three of the United States’ leading Catholic service organizations are headed by women, listing Carolyn Woo, president of Catholic Relief Services, and Sister Carol Keehan, a Daughter of Charity who is president and CEO of the Catholic Health Association.

“I see myself as number three — at least,” Sister Donna said. “It’ the first time for Catholic Charities, but certainly not the first time in this country.”

Currently president of the Behavioral Health Institute for Mercy Health based in Cincinnati, Sister Donna, a board-certified clinical psychologist, has a doctorate in clinical psychology from the University of Detroit and was named a fellow in the American Association of Clinical Psychologists. Last year, she was awarded the prestigious Harold S. Bernard Training Award from the American Group Psychotherapy Association in February 2014.

“There can be no greater call than to serve and advocate on behalf of persons who struggle to get by in a world where they are all too frequently relegated to the margins of society and where they long for dignity, hope and compassion,” said Sister Donna in a statement, adding she was “honored and humbled” by her selection. “I feel blessed to walk among the many dedicated Catholic Charities workers across the country who daily make the Gospel come alive through their care for their sisters and brothers in need.”

With Mercy Health, Sister Donna is working on changing how behavioral health care services are delivered across seven geographic regions. Beforehand, she served for 10 years as the president of the Southdown Institute in Ontario, and was the founding director of the Dominican Consultation Center in Detroit, serving there for 13 years. Both agencies focused on the psychological care of people in ministry.

From 2004 to 2010, Sister Donna was prioress of the Adrian Dominican congregation in Michigan, and served a one-year term in 1991-92 as president of the Leadership Conference of Women Religious. She also served eight years as a member of Catholic Charities’ board of trustees, two of those as board chair.

Sister Donna noted the difference between the oversight and policy responsibilities of a board member and the day-to-day nitty-gritty of a leader, but “I’m a bit new. This happened on Friday,” Jan. 9, she said of her hiring. “I haven’t done a lot of ruminating about a lot yet. Governance and organizational administration are two different roles. I’m quite aware of that because I’ve served in both capacities in my life. They serve distinct roles.”

Catholic Charities USA is the national office for Catholic Charities agencies nationwide, which help a combined 9 million-plus people a year regardless of religious, social or economic backgrounds.

Father Snyder will return to his home Archdiocese of St. Paul and Minneapolis to do ministry there.

Born in Illinois north of Chicago, Sister Donna grew up mostly in Michigan and Ontario, earning her first college degree from the University of Toronto.

“My first priority is to get to know the people.” Sister Donna said. “I don’t know all the people who work in the office, and I don’t know all the diocesan directors. I think those priorities get put in place in a dialogic way when you have those kind of in-depth conversations.”

Contributing to this story was Mark Pattison in Washington.

NEW YORK (CNS) — Father Jonathan Morris, program director and talk-show host for the Catholic Channel on the Sirius XM satellite radio platform, has left the station.

In a Jan. 8 tweet, Father Morris told his followers, “Today I hand off direction of @catholicchannel SiriusXM 129 to more competent hands @liz_aiello. Great 3 yrs!! New assignment news soon!!”

Liz Aiello, a longtime broadcast executive, will succeed the priest.

Today I hand off direction of @catholicchannel SiriusXM 129 to more competent hands @liz_aiello. Great 3 yrs!! New assignment news soon!!

— Fr. Jonathan Morris (@fatherjonathan) January 8, 2015

Father Morris, 42, was ordained in 2002 in the Legionaries of Christ order, although in 2009 he sought incardination in the Archdiocese of New York.

In addition to his radio duties, Father Morris was assigned to Corpus Christi Parish in the New York City borough of Manhattan, and also worked in campus ministry at Columbia University in New York.

From 2002 to 2004, Father Morris served as a theological adviser to Mel Gibson during the making of the movie, “The Passion of the Christ.” In 2005, he joined the Fox News Channel as a commentator. That year, he also appeared on CNN during coverage of the death and funeral of St. John Paul II.

Father Morris has written three books: “The Promise: God’s Purpose and Plan for When Life Hurts,” “God Wants You Happy: From Self-Help to God’s Help,” and “The Way of Serenity: Finding Peace and Happiness in the Serenity Prayer.”

Sirius XM’s Catholic Channel features talk shows boasting a Catholic perspective on events. Father Dave Dwyer’s three-hour “Busted Halo Show” and Lino Rulli’s two-hour “Catholic Guy” program are both repeated twice daily. Cardinal Timothy M. Dolan of New York’s Tuesday “Conversation With Cardinal Dolan” is also repeated frequently on the channel.

Father Morris had an hourlong weekday “News & Views” show on the Catholic Channel, which also features daily Mass form St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York and Gus Lloyd on their air for five-and-a-half hours each weekday with the program “Seize the Day.”

Aiello has previous experience with other Sirius XM channels. She had been news director for Howard 100, the three Sirius XM channels run by longtime shock jock Howard Stern, leaving in 2006 for a position as senior vice president for Sirius XMs Martha Stewart Living Channels.

She left Sirius XM for a slot as a managing editor and executive producer at WABC-TV in New York. She had later served as vice president of all-news WEMP radio in New York, but was sacked in early 2012 after the station slumped in the ratings.

Aiello is married to Tony Aiello, a reporter for WCBS-TV in New York. They have twin sons.

VATICAN CITY (CNS) — Exactly 31 years after St. John Paul II personally forgave him for shooting and trying to assassinate him, Mehmet Ali Agca returned to the Vatican with a bunch of white roses and laid them at the late pope’s tomb.

Ali Agca, who was released from an Italian prison in 2000 and extradited to Turkey where he was jailed for killing a journalist in 1979, phoned the Italian newspaper La Repubblica to announce his presence in St. Peter’s Square Dec. 27.

It was on Dec. 27, 1983, after celebrating Mass in the chapel of Rome’s Rebibbia prison, that Pope John Paul personally forgave him during a 15-minute meeting in a cell. Ali Agca had been sentenced to life in prison for shooting the pope May 13, 1981, during his weekly general audience in St. Peter’s Square.

Jesuit Father Federico Lombardi, Vatican spokesman, did not issue a statement about Ali Agca’s visit to the late pope’s tomb nor about the Turk’s repeated requests to meet Pope Francis. “He put his flowers on John Paul’s tomb; I think that’s enough,” Father Lombardi told La Repubblica.

The newspaper reported that Ali Agca traveled by “plane, car and foot” from Turkey to Greece, then to Austria, through northern Italy and to Rome. He apparently was not stopped at any of the borders.

Standing in line at the metal detectors to get into St. Peter’s Basilica Dec. 27, a member of the Italian state police recognized him and called the Vatican police. Vatican agents accompanied Ali Agca to St. John Paul’s tomb, but then handed him over to Italian police. The police said he did not have a visa to visit Italy and, La Repubblica reported, he was taken to an immigration center near Rome’s Fiumicino airport and scheduled for deportation back to Turkey Dec. 29.

Ali Agca was released from prison in Turkey in 2010. Over the years, he has claimed to be the second coming of Christ and to have the “real” third secret of Fatima. When nothing came of his request to meet Pope Francis during the pope’s November trip to Turkey, Ali Agca held a news conference and told reporters the current pope’s life was not worth the price of a bullet.

— By Cindy Wooden, Catholic News Service.

CROIX-DES-BOUQUETS, Haiti (CNS) — Young Patrick and Mika have seen more than their share of suffering.

Found unclothed, nonverbal, and malnourished roaming in a cemetery in 2010, Patrick was taken to the General Hospital of Port-au-Prince, where he was nursed to good health. But, despite the care and because of the pervasive influence of the practice of voodoo, Patrick was chained to a radiator every night out of fear he would jump out of a window.

Mika was abandoned at birth. Only days old when dropped off in an empty shoe box, she was blind, dehydrated and malnourished and would not have lived much longer had she not received the proper care.

Today, Patrick is a happy young man about 16 years old. He cannot speak because he is deaf and has cerebral palsy, but his personality is evident in his smile. After a few weeks of nourishment, Mika’s vision returned, and today she is a healthy, outgoing 5-year-old schoolgirl.

Patrick and Mika are two of the children who are part of the Zanmi Beni family, a program based in this town near the Haitian capital of Port-au-Prince. In Creole, Zanmi Beni means “blessed friend.”

On Dec. 21, Patrick and Mika became members of another family — the family of faith — as the 64 residents of Zanmi Beni were baptized in an outdoor ceremony on the program’s grounds.

Helping the children prepare for baptism was not easy, explained Jennie Block, a Zanmi Beni co-founder. Before they could be baptized each child needed a birth certificate. Co-director Loune Viaud officially adopted each child, applying for a birth certificate by approximating their age and assigning a birth date. For their surname, they were all named “Beni.”

“There was no record of these children at all,” said Dominican Father Mark Wedig, a Zanmi Beni supporter and professor of theology at Barry University in Miami Shores, Florida. “Without birth certificates, these children didn’t exist. So the church named them and claimed them.”

The children, wearing white baptismal dresses or suits and dress shoes donated by Joe and Irene Souto of Miami, were excited as they sat with nearly 150 Haitian and American guests gathered to witness the ceremony.

“These children will have another place to call home for they are about to be incorporated into the body of Christ as members of the Christian community,” Block told the assembly.

“The fact that over 75 people would put their busy lives on hold, four days before Christmas, to travel to Haiti from all over the United States to witness the baptisms of these beautiful children couldn’t be a better example of God’s household in action,” she said.

Each child was called by name, and one of the eight priests and a deacon officiating made the sign of the cross on them. Their godparents were invited to do the same.

“These children will officially enter the story, the story of a loving relationship between God and his people,” Father Jorge Presmanes said in his reflection. “It is a story, the story of Abraham and Sarah, of Moses. And it’s been passed down by the prophets, the apostles and disciples and mothers and grandmothers and fathers and godfathers.”

The story of each child at Zanmi Beni is different; yet all are alike. Some have been orphaned; some were abandoned; some are severely disabled; some have required major medical procedures. But all have experienced loss, and all have found a home in Zanmi Beni.

The residence was founded in the aftermath of the Jan. 12, 2010, earthquake that ravaged much of Haiti. It is a partnership between Partners in Health, a Boston-based health care organization and Operation Blessing International, a Christian organization addressing human suffering in the United States and around the world.

Zanmi Beni strives to help each child live a full life in a safe, secure environment surrounded by love and acceptance.

“Every child has a plan,” Viaud explained, saying that each child receives what he or she needs: those who are able attend area schools; those who require physical therapy or medical care receive it. “But more importantly, all are given love,” she said.

In his reflection, Father Presmanes said the Zanmi Beni children “have found the loving embrace of Jesus in this place. They have been loved and cared for and embraced with extraordinary love and compassion by people who, in the ‘here and now,’ do what Jesus did in the ‘there and then.'”

After the ceremony, Paul Farmer, co-founder of Partners in Health, reminded the group that “none of us will forget today, nor will we forget the friendships and relationships that we have deepened today.”

He called on those in attendance to “form a web” of friendship in order to be “bound up together in protection.”

“The purpose of these webs is yes, to instruct, but also to protect each other, to care for each other, to look out for each other in difficult times especially,” he said.

“We have a lot of work to do.”

—By Donis Tracy, Catholic News Service.

VATICAN CITY (CNS) — Pope Francis’ Christmas greeting to the Vatican bureaucracy this year was an extended warning against a host of spiritual ills to which he said Vatican officials are prone, including “spiritual Alzheimer’s,” “existential schizophrenia,” publicity-seeking, the “terrorism of gossip” and even a poor sense of humor.

The pope made his remarks Dec. 22, in a biting half-hour speech to heads of the Roman Curia, the Church’s central administration, and to cardinals resident in Rome.

Popes have often used their annual Christmas speech to review events of the previous year and lay out priorities for the next. Pope Francis’ nine-member Council of Cardinals is currently working on an overhaul of the Curia, but the pope’s speech did not address specific reforms. Instead, he spoke in general terms of virtues and values, saying he hoped his words might serve officials as a “support and stimulus to a true examination of conscience” in preparation for the sacrament of reconciliation.

The pope, who has made criticism of the Church’s leaders a common theme of his preaching, called the Curia a “dynamic body” naturally vulnerable to “maladies, to dysfunction, to infirmities.”

He offered what he called a “catalog” of 15 such diseases. Most corresponded to vices for which he has frequently rebuked the hierarchy, including self-promotion, greed and a focus on bureaucratic efficiency over pastoral solicitude. But the pope’s rhetoric this time was especially impassioned and forceful.

Following a year in which Vatican officials and other bishops aired differences to a remarkable degree in the press, especially during the October Synod of Bishops on the family, Pope Francis warned against “exhibitionism,” the “malady of persons who seek insatiably to increase their power and to that end are capable of calumniating, defaming and discrediting others, even in newspapers and magazines.”

The pope denounced the “hypocrisy typical of the mediocre” and said an apostle who puts excessive faith in planning becomes a mere “bookkeeper or accountant” who would “confine and control the liberty of the Holy Spirit.” He said an official who forgets his personal relationship with Jesus becomes completely dependent on his “passions, whims and manias,” “incapable of carrying out any autonomous activity, living in a state of absolute dependence on his often imaginary views.”

[quote_center]The pope, who has made criticism of the Church’s leaders a common theme of his preaching, called the Curia a “dynamic body” naturally vulnerable to “maladies, to dysfunction, to infirmities.”[/quote_center]

Officials who idolize their bosses are “victims of careerism and opportunism,” “mean persons, unhappy and inspired only by their own fatal egoism,” the pope said, acknowledging that bosses often encourage such attitudes to obtain “submission, loyalty and psychological dependence” from their staff.

Deriding a “gruff and grim” manner he described as characteristic of the insecure, Pope Francis called for a “joyous spirit, full of humor and even self-mockery, that makes us amiable persons, even in difficult situations.” The pope said that every day he recites a prayer, which he attributed to St. Thomas More, asking God for a sense of humor.

The pope wound up his remarks on a note of encouragement, saying that the failings of a few have discredited the virtuous majority of the Church’s ministers. He quoted an adage that “priests are like airplanes, they make news only when they fall, but there are so many that fly.”

After the speech in the Vatican’s Clementine Hall, the pope spent about half an hour exchanging Christmas greetings with individual cardinals and curial members.

— By Francis X. Rocca, Catholic News Service