Archbishop Diarmuid Martin

Dublin Archbishop Diarmuid Martin reportedly stated that he does not want to see the sacrament of communion being used “for publicity reasons” by anybody in the debate surrounding abortion. And he urged politicians to “examine their coherence” between their faith and what they proposed in the forthcoming abortion legislation.

Martin’s comments came after Coadjutor Archbishop of Armagh, Eamon Martin, warned that politicians who knowingly introduced legislation “aiding and abetting abortion” should not approach a priest looking for communion. Legislators who supported abortion were excommunicating themselves, said Archbishop Eamon Martin, who succeeds Cardinal Sean Brady next year.

“You cannot regard yourself as a person of faith and support abortion,” he told the ‘Sunday Times’.

“If a legislator comes to me and says, ‘Can I be a faithful Catholic and support abortion?’ I would say no. Your communion is ruptured if you support abortion.”

“You are excommunicating yourself. Any legislator who clearly and publicly states this should not approach looking for communion.”

Meanwhile, Archbishop Diarmuid Martin pointedly failed to back his hardline stance when asked about his colleague’s remarks. He said he believed communion “should not become a place of debate and contrast and be used for publicity reasons by anybody”.

While he said he had only had a “quick look” at how the story concerning his fellow archbishop had been presented, he felt that the term excommunication “may have been used in a rather large way there.” He told the Irish Independent that excommunication was a “very specific measure” under Canon Law.

“There is a danger that it would be looked at as a life sentence by some people and that is not what it does,” he said.

The line taken by Archbishop Diarmuid Martin appears to be in keeping with the Pope’s own decision not to give communion in public, except on rare occasions, apparently for fear that it could be politicized.

Although Pope Francis has given no explicit reason for his decision, he spoke of his reluctance to give communion and be photographed with people who engage in indecent behavior.

At the inaugural Mass of his pontificate, US Vice-President Joe Biden and Democrats’ leader, Nancy Pelosi – both publicly pro-abortion and Catholic – were present and received communion but not from the hands of the Pope. He was seated behind the altar.

Archbishop Diarmuid Martin has urged politicians to examine their own faith as they make up their minds on the issue. But he also said the question of a time limit on late abortions should be “seriously looked at”.

“We believe that current (medical) practice will be to try always to defend the mother and the child. We have to make sure that continues.”

He also praised the strong ethos and tradition in the Irish health service.

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The 1 p.m. Mass was reportedly the last one ever to be held at the Congress Street church, which was scheduled to close its doors for good Sunday night, with its sale to the owner of the adjacent Westgate Shopping Center expected to close by the end of summer.

Mary Doyle, who grew up on Lassell Street, one street away, came to the final Mass to bid farewell to the Roman Catholic Church that served as the “moral compass” for her entire family.

“It’s the end of an era. It’s really sad for me,” Doyle said outside before the Mass began.

“It’s really about saying goodbye and paying homage to the gifts it gave us, growing up,” Doyle said as she went inside for the last time.

The Rev. James Lafontaine, pastor of St. Patrick, led the final Mass, joined by many fellow priests and Jesuits.

“Here we are gathered in this holy place, this church with all its history. This will be the final Eucharist,” Lafontaine said.

“That sorrow, that grief, that deep emotion we feel, that is a sign of love, and we have loved well. If we had not loved well, we would not feel the sorrow we now do.”

The church pews were about three-quarters full, with rows of folding metal chairs left empty. Some of those who attended said they heard from relatives that the 10:30 a.m. Mass drew a much larger gathering.

The decision to sell St. Patrick Church came after it was combined with two other churches to form a new parish three years ago. With rising costs and decreasing membership, the parish was operating at a deficit and began considering closing one of the three churches.

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Cardinal Keith O'Brien

Cardinal Keith O’Brien, once Britain’s highest-ranking Catholic leader, has been ordered to leave Scotland for several months to pray and atone for sexual misconduct.

O’Brien reportedly stepped down as Archbishop of St. Andrews and Edinburgh and recused himself from the March conclave that elected Francis pope after a newspaper reported unnamed priests’ allegations that he acted inappropriately toward them.

O’Brien subsequently acknowledged he had engaged in unspecified sexual misbehavior. He apologized and promised to stay out of the church’s public life.

The Vatican said O’Brien would leave Scotland for several months of “spiritual renewal, prayer and penance” for the same reasons he decided not to participate in the conclave.

The statement didn’t specify that the decision was imposed on O’Brien by the Vatican as punishment, and in fact went out of its way to suggest that the decision was O’Brien’s.

However, wayward priests have been previously sanctioned by the Vatican with punishments of “prayer and penance,” and the statement made clear Francis supported the move and that the Holy See would decide his future fate.

Austen Ivereigh, director of the Catholic Voices, a British-based Catholic advocacy group, said such a sanction is very much in keeping with the church’s legal tradition of making a public reparation for a scandal done to the church.

The issue is important since victims of clerical abuse have long denounced the lack of accountability among the church hierarchy for having covered up the crimes of pedophile priests. In the church, bishops and cardinals have long been virtually untouchable.

Even though O’Brien has not been accused of abusing minors, his case had been watched to see if Francis would dare take any action against a senior cardinal who had strayed. given O’Brien’s rank, the issue is delicate but the message the Vatican sent Wednesday was clear.

“For a senior church member to be asked to leave the place of his residence for a period of penance and prayer, it’s about as a strong a sanction as you can get before the standard canonical penalties about laicization” kick in, said Ivereigh.

He said laicization, or removing someone from the priesthood, might have been foreseen if he had sexually abused minors, but that doesn’t apply in this case.

The Vatican has refused to even confirm whether it was investigating the allegations against O’Brien, even though the Scottish Catholic Church’s media office said the complaints had been forwarded to Rome and that it expected an investigation.

For the meantime, the Vatican spokesman declined to provide further explanation Wednesday and the spokesman for the Scottish church declined to comment beyond the Vatican statement. O’Brien was unavailable, the Scottish church said.

It wasn’t clear what would happen to O’Brien after his months of prayer and penance. The Vatican statement said a decision would be “agreed with the Holy See.”

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The Holy See reportedly unveiled Tuesday details of its Venice pavilion, which opens June 1 and runs through Nov. 24. It also features the famous summertime Venice film festival.

The festival marks the Vatican’s most significant step yet in a renewed effort to engage contemporary artists and intellectuals in ways that once created masterpieces such as the Sistine Chapel and Bernini Colonnade.

The exhibit, “Creation, Un-Creation, Re-Creation,” is not religious art: There are no crucifixes or images of the Madonna or sacred objects that might find themselves on a church altar.

The works rather explore themes that are important to the church and were executed by internationally recognized contemporary artists, including Czech photographer Josef Koudelka, who were given broad leeway to create.

The idea was initiated by Cardinal Gianfranco Ravasi, the Vatican’s culture minister who was considered a papal contender in the conclave that elected Pope Francis. Ravasi has long lamented that the Vatican has all but severed its ties with a contemporary art world that often finds in the Catholic Church inspiration for blasphemous art.

The Venice Biennale, one of the most prestigious contemporary arts festivals in the world, features pavilions for individual nations as well as a curated show of international artists. The show has remarkably provided a very visible venue for some of that blasphemy ever since its inception.

Art experts suggested the Vatican’s initiative to have its own pavilion was perhaps a response to such perceived attacks.

“There is not a great deal of first-rate religious art from the 20th and 21st centuries.”Ravasi, though, is intent on changing that.

“This for us is a germ, a seed to return to the hope that there can be even more commissions between churchmen, ecclesial figures and artists – quality contemporary artists,” Ravasi told reporters.

For its inaugural Venice commission, the Vatican picked three well-known artists and art groups and gave them a relatively simple source of inspiration: the first 11 chapters of the book of Genesis, which describes Creation, the introduction of evil, destruction and sin into the world, followed by hope for mankind in a renewed creation.

Being Catholic wasn’t a criterion: Vatican officials said they weren’t even sure of the artists’ faiths. The artists were rather selected based on the body of their pre-existing work. The Vatican is one of eight countries being represented at the 55th Venice Biennale for the first time, joining Angola, Bahamas, Bahrain, Ivory Coast, Kosovo, Kuwait, Maldives, Paraguay and Tuvalu.

Whether Ravasi’s initiative continues remains to be seen, but his office immediately pointed out that the (EURO)750,000 ($975,000) pricetag – which includes the payment to the artists and Biennale organizers – was entirely covered by corporate sponsorship and private donations.

Meanwhile, the Vatican’s presence at Venice isn’t entirely uncommon. The Holy See has a long history of participation in international exhibitions dating to the first World’s Fair, the 1851 “Great Exhibition” in London.

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San Francisco Archbishop Salvatore Cordileone

San Francisco Archbishop Salvatore Cordileone reportedly called for urgent comprehensive immigration reform to help thousands of undocumented families from Marin County in the north to San Mateo County south of the city.

The archbishop stood Monday with Father Arturo Albano, Father Paul Gawlowski and other Roman Catholic leaders on the steps of the city’s historic Mission Dolores.

“We have a historic opportunity to fix the immigration system,” Cordileone said. “Our country has a right and a responsibility to protect its borders, and effective immigration laws are part of that enforcement.”

The following are among the specific demands for national immigration reform:
• a path to full legal status
• provisions for minors to gain legal status
• enhanced education and employment
• reduction of immigration application backlogs to curb family separations
• improved due process protections for immigrants
• “a way of addressing the root causes of immigration”

“This is important to us as Catholics,” said Lorena Melgarejo of the Office of Public Policy and Social Concern within the Archdiocese.

Besides calling for a national bill, Cordileone also urged California Governor Jerry Brown and state legislators to pass a Trust Act in 2013 that would put the responsibility of immigration detention and enforcement exclusively in the jurisdiction of federal agencies, rather than local law enforcement.

Such a bill would work against the existing Secure Communities program that policy analysts say has led to the deportation of 93,500 individuals across the country.

The bill, now pending in Washington, would create a 13-year path to citizenship for persons who are currently undocumented while also strengthening border security.

Vermont Senator Patrick Leahy recently proposed an amendment to the pending bill that would allow Americans to sponsor same-sex partners who were born outside the country and in need of green cards.

The inclusion of issues related to same-sex partnership has drawn fire from conservative politicians as well as the San Francisco archbishop, who publicly denounces same-sex marriage.

“It’s an unrelated issue,” he said of same-sex partnerships. “Let’s just focus on immigration reform in this bill.” If the bill failed because of a controversial same-sex partnership amendment, he added, “it would be a tragedy.”

Alongside the archbishop, two undocumented San Franciscans spoke about personal hardships they said were results of a broken immigration system.

Carolina Parrales of the Archdiocese Office of Public Policy and Social Concern, and members of La Colectiva, a worker-run collective that aims to empower immigrant women, joined clerics to lend their support to the reform campaign.

Meanwhile, San Francisco archdiocese’s public policy official Lorena Melgarejo declined to provide last names to protect the undocumented persons in attendance from further repercussions.

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Investigators believed that the Rev. Nicolas Aguilar Rivera, who fled in 1988, molested as many as 26 children, many of them altar boys, during the nine months he spent in Los Angeles.

Los Angeles County Deputy District Attorney William Hodgman said an arrest warrant on 19 felony counts remains in effect if he ever returns to the U.S. His whereabouts are unknown. The report states eleven of the priest’s alleged victims, all now grown men, have filed six civil lawsuits against the archdiocese. The first of those could go to trial later this month.

Plaintiff attorneys plan to call the recently retired Cardinal Roger Mahony as a witness. Mahony was at the helm of the nation’s largest archdiocese when the alleged abuse occurred.

The archdiocese, however, is fighting to torpedo the trial and has asked the judge to either throw out the lawsuit completely or move or delay the trial indefinitely due to a “media frenzy” that could taint a jury pool.

In court filings, church attorneys detailed the hundreds of articles, national TV programs and blogs that reported on the release of thousands of pages of confidential personnel files the archdiocese kept on priests accused of abuse, including Aguilar Rivera.

The archdiocese released the papers following a five-year legal battle with victims over the privacy rights of accused priests. Some of the files show Mahony and other top leaders maneuvering behind the scenes to protect molester priests and provide damage control for the church.

In 2007, the archdiocese paid $660 million to settle more than 500 sex abuse claims, but the current cases were not included in that. Attorney for the archdiocese, J. Michael Hennigan, said attempts to settle the current lawsuit have so far been futile.

“We want to settle. We have no doubt these children were his victims,” he said. “We’ve had serious discussions. We’re just far apart.”

In addition to the request to toss the case on Tuesday, Superior Court Judge Emilie Elias will also consider motions to move the trial to Kern or Sacramento counties — 120 miles to nearly 400 miles away — or postpone it six months or more.

The church also wants to try all the Aguilar Rivera cases at once, which would cause further delays. Anthony De Marco, the attorney for the plaintiff, declined to comment.

In 1988, the Los Angeles County district attorney’s office filed 19 felony counts against Aguilar Rivera and forwarded the investigation to Mexican authorities for them to prosecute there in lieu of an extradition order.

Hodgman said proceedings began, but at some point the case was dropped although U.S. authorities were never sure why. He said U.S. prosecutors pulled the file in 2002 and attempted to revive the case without success.

Meanwhile, prosecutors in Puebla State, as well as the federal attorney general’s office in Mexico City, declined to comment.

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On Sunday, tens of thousands of faithful reportedly gathered in St Peter’s Square to attend the mass in which Francis formally bestowed the sainthoods, which had been approved by his predecessor Benedict XVI.

The new saints include Italian cobbler Antonio Primaldo, who was killed along with an estimated 800 other Italians, who remain anonymous, in 1480 by Ottoman forces in the southern part of the country for refusing to convert to Islam.

“While we venerate the martyrs of Otrante, ask God to support the many Christians who still suffer from violence and give them the courage and fate and respond to evil with goodness,” he said, referring to the persecution of Christians.

The new pope also canonized Colombia’s Laura di Santa Caterina da Siena Montoya y Upeguila, and Mexico’s Maria Guadalupe Garcia Zavala, who both died in the 20th century.

The two women founded religious orders and devoted their lives to helping the poor, the sick and native peoples.

Francis paid tribute to di Santa Caterina da Siena Montoya y Upeguila, or “Madre Laura” — Colombia’s first saint — for respecting the local culture and traditions while teaching natives during her mission.

He also praised Guadalupe Garcia Zavala, whom he referred to as “Madre Lupita,” for “kneeling in front of the sick on the hospital pavement to treat them with tenderness.” She is Mexico’s second saint.

Meanwhile, Francis used the occasion to take a firm stance against abortion for the first time since his election in March, calling for legislation to “protect all human beings from the first moment of their existence.”

The pope also spoke before Colombia’s President Juan Manuel Santos, stressing his support for reconciliation efforts between the Colombian government and leftist guerrillas. He also called for an end to “violence and insecurity” in Mexico, where thousands of people fall victim to drug violence every year.

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In a public letter issued to members of their dioceses on May 6, the bishops expressed their concern with the reforms that they said would affect many members of their parishes.

“You can’t look at someone who is unemployed as a problem,” said St. John’s Archbishop Martin Currie.

“Someone who has family responsibilities, has a life to lead, has commitments to make.”

“So the bishops thought we should speak about it.”

Reports said the reforms make it more difficult for people on Employment Insurance to turn down jobs, and force them to travel up to 100 kilometres for available work.

Additionally, EI claimants have to take jobs that pay as little as 70 per cent of their previous hourly wage, as long as it’s not below the province’s minimum wage.

Currie said that during his last meeting in Halifax with the other Atlantic bishops, many noticed that rural parishioners in areas heavily dependent on fishing, farming and tourism told priests they’re worried about how EI reform would affect their lives.

“It’s just not easy for them to get another job, to move somewhere, and expect to get back to their other employment,” said Currie.

“We wanted to express our concern and our solidarity and let them know we are with them.”

In part, the bishops’ letter states: “The present policy’s priorities, it seems to us, should be more focused on the needs of persons than on the need to cut government costs on the backs of the most vulnerable in our area.”

The bishops are calling on politicians, many of whom are members of their parishes, to think harder about EI reform, Currie said. The bishops are also urging parishioners to lobby the federal government to reflect deeply on the proposed reforms.

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News reports state five Tanzanians have also been arrested after the Sunday attack on a packed church in the northern city of Arusha that killed three people.

“There are three nationals of the United Arab Emirates and a Saudi… they were arrested while trying to cross the border” into Kenya, Arusha’s governor Magesa Mulongo told AFP.

He added that none of those arrested have been charged yet.

“Investigations are continuing. They are only suspects at this time. They can be released or brought to trial; it will depend on the results of the investigations.”

Tanzanian President Jakaya Kikwete described the bomb attack as “an act of terrorism.” The bombing, which no group is known to have claimed yet, was one of the worst such incidents to hit the east African country in years.

Attackers allegedly hurled a bomb into the compound of the newly built Saint Joseph’s Roman Catholic Church, wounding over 60 people.

Located in the Olasti district on the outskirts of Arusha, the church was celebrating its inaugural mass at the time and was filled with worshippers, many of whom were sitting on benches outside.

Arusha is a town popular with tourists visiting the Serengeti national park and snowcapped Mount Kilimanjaro.

Archbishop Francisco Montecillo Padilla, the Vatican’s ambassador to Tanzania, was among those attending mass at the church but was not harmed.

Officials have given no indication as to who might have carried out the attack, but tensions have been high between Tanzania’s Christian and Muslim communities in recent months.

Kikwete said he was “shocked and deeply saddened” by the incident. He has called on people to remain calm while police investigate the attack.

According to reports, around half of Tanzanians are believed to be Christian, and around a third Muslim, although there are no official figures.

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Father Denis Nulty

The promotion of Father Denis Nulty, from Slane in Co Meath, as the new Bishop of Kildare and Leighlin, was announced by Pope Francis.

The 49-year-old bishop will take up the high-ranking role left empty for more than three years as a result of the child abuse scandals that rocked the church.

During his first public address as Bishop-elect, Fr Nulty praised a demonstration at Knock Shrine in Co. Mayo on Saturday against the planned laws to allow abortion in certain medical circumstances.

Citing Monsignor Brendan Byrne, who has run the Diocese of Kildare and Leighlin over recent years, Fr Nulty said the need to respect life should “never be reduced to a choice or an arbitrary timeline”.

“Mothers deserve nothing less than the best medical and psychiatric care available, especially during pregnancy when the lives of two persons – the life of the unborn and the life of the mother – are at stake,” he added.

The newly-elected bishop also reiterated a statement from the Catholic bishops last week that “the deliberate decision to deprive an innocent human being of life is always morally wrong”. He was speaking after his appointment Tuesday at the Cathedral of the Assumption in Carlow.

Fr Nulty has 25 years pastoral experience, including as parish priest at St Mary’s in Drogheda over the last 15 years. At the time of his appointment to Drogheda, he was the youngest parish priest in the country.

Fr Nulty will bring many gifts to his task as “chief shepherd” of Kildare and Leighlin, said Bishop of Meath Michael Smith, who oversees the parish of St Mary’s.

He will take over from retired Bishop Jim Moriarty who was named over inadequate church investigations into a paedophile priest in Dublin in the 1990s. Moriarty announced in 2009 he was stepping down after being criticized in the Murphy Report on clerical sex abuse.

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