Faith leaders say criticism of immigration campaign won't deter them
WASHINGTON (CNS) -- Attacks against an interfaith campaign to shape immigration reform to address family reunification and other social concerns just affirm the importance of churches working together, said national religious leaders March 1. At a press conference, Washington Cardinal Theodore E. McCarrick said such attacks, including those made by U.S. Rep. Tom Tancredo, R-Colo., in a recent press release and television commentary, underscore that "we are going to have to make sure we keep our people with us." Tancredo, who has become a prominent critic of illegal immigration, said church efforts on the issue misrepresent the religious beliefs of a majority of churchgoers. Faith groups will need to be vigilant to keep up with how others try to shape the debate about immigration policy, Cardinal McCarrick said.
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Roe v. Wade: The decision we all think we know
WASHINGTON (CNS) -- Since it's been the law of the land for 33 years, everybody knows what the Supreme Court's Roe v. Wade decision on abortion says, right? And we all know what we think about it, right? Wrong and wrong, according to witnesses at an oversight hearing held March 2 by the House Judiciary Committee's subcommittee on the Constitution. Most Americans don't understand the full scope of Roe v. Wade, and don't support it when they find out what it really says, the witnesses said. And most underestimate the deep and lasting wounds that the decision has caused for women, for families and for U.S. society at large. "There remains a great misunderstanding by the public as to the real scope of Roe v. Wade, a misunderstanding that is exhibited in polling questions stating that Roe protects a right to an abortion in only the first three months of pregnancy," said Rep. Steve Chabot, R-Ohio, who convened the hearing as chairman of the Constitution subcommittee. "In fact, Roe is much more sweeping."
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Elderly woman's New Orleans home is gutted for rebuilding
NEW ORLEANS (CNS) -- Eighty-five-year-old Clothilde Mack hardly batted an eye as a crew of Catholic college students walked in and out of the home where she had lived for nearly 50 years and dumped its water-damaged belongings into a heap in her front yard. They weren't just clearing out broken furniture, appliances, rusted lamps, blankets and clothes, but boxes overflowing with chunks of drywall and carpeting. A student from Wheeling Jesuit University in Wheeling, W.Va., asked her if she wanted an empty chest they found, but Mack shook her head no and smiled, saying she had all she needed. What she needed, it turned out, was a table, some pictures and a certificate from her first job. She was also interested in keeping the box of plates and dishes that had been placed by the curb, a coffee maker and a cat scratching post. While the college students on their spring break cleared her home, Mack sat in the shade of her garage right alongside the water mark left by the flooding after the levees broke.
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Friends, family say farewell to Archbishop Marcinkus at funeral Mass
CHICAGO (CNS) -- Friends and family members bade farewell to Archbishop Paul C. Marcinkus, once one of the most powerful Americans in the Vatican, at a funeral Mass March 2 at Holy Name Cathedral in Chicago. They remembered the Cicero native and former Chicago archdiocesan priest for his kindness as a pastor rather than for the questions surrounding an Italian banking scandal during the archbishop's years as head of the Vatican bank. Archbishop Marcinkus, 84, died Feb. 20 at his home in Sun City, Ariz., where he retired in 1990. He had worked for the Vatican for 38 years, including 18 as president of the Vatican bank, from 1971 to 1989. During that time, the bank was involved -- unwittingly, he and the Vatican always maintained -- in the 1982 fraudulent bankruptcy of Banco Ambrosiano, Italy's largest private bank. While the Vatican and Archbishop Marcinkus always maintained they had done nothing wrong, the Vatican bank made what it called a $240 million "goodwill payment" to Banco Ambrosiano's former creditors in 1984.
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As faith-based travel rises, new Web site aims to make it easier
WASHINGTON (CNS) -- With spending on faith-based travel estimated to exceed $1 billion annually, a new online service called Groople (for "groups of people") is making it easier to organize pilgrimages, retreats and parish gatherings for groups as small as five people. The Web site,
www.groople.com, also caters to those organizing other group travel, including trips for weddings or showers, bachelor or bachelorette parties, sports tournaments and family, military or class reunions. Mike Stacy, CEO of the Colorado-based Groople, said group travel had been left out of the recent boom in online travel services because sites such as Travelocity.com and expedia.com weren't set up to permit bookings for more than four people at a time. But that doesn't mean Americans are staying home. More people than ever are traveling in groups, especially for religious-related travel, Stacy said. According to American Church Lists, 70,000 churches in the United States had groups participating in faith-based travel last year, a 40 percent jump since 2002, he said.
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WORLD
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Vatican Radio employees present pope with specially loaded iPod nano
VATICAN CITY (CNS) -- A group of Vatican Radio employees gave Pope Benedict XVI a brand new iPod nano loaded with special Vatican Radio programming and classical music. To honor the pope's first visit to the radio's broadcasting headquarters, the radio's technical staff decided the pencil-thin, state-of-the-art audio player would make the perfect gift. Now that Vatican Radio offers podcasts in eight different languages, the pope has the technological capability to plug in and import the radio's audio files. Pope Benedict visited the programming and broadcasting hub of "the pope's radio" March 3 to mark the station's 75th anniversary.
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Monsignor says Lithuanians' Katrina donation shows gratitude to U.S.
VILNIUS, Lithuania (CNS) -- Although the amount of money Lithuanian Catholics collected for Hurricane Katrina victims pales in comparison to the generosity of the U.S. Catholic Church toward their country, Lithuanians wanted to give something back, said a church official. Just before Christmas, about $29,000 was transferred to Archbishop Alfred C. Hughes of New Orleans. The money was collected for two weeks in the churches of Lithuania right after Hurricane Katrina hit the U.S. coast six months ago, said Msgr. Gintaras Grusas, secretary-general of the Lithuanian bishops' conference. "In respect to how much assistance the church in Lithuania has received from the faithful of the USA through the American bishops' conference -- and (retired) Archbishop Francis Schulte of New Orleans ... being a visitor here in Lithuania several times -- an idea came up to take up a collection for whatever meager sum that we could raise," Msgr. Grusas told Catholic News Service in late February.
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Pope: It's right to discuss women's role in church decision-making
VATICAN CITY (CNS) -- While insisting women cannot be ordained priests, Pope Benedict XVI said it is right to discuss how women can be more involved in church decision-making. Meeting March 2 with the priests of the Diocese of Rome, Pope Benedict spent two hours listening to their concerns and responding to the questions posed by 15 of them. The following day, the Vatican released a summary of the priests' questions and a transcript of the pope's remarks covering women in the church, youth, family life and a variety of other topics. Father Marco Valentini asked the pope why the church does not recognize that women's experience, wisdom and points of view would complement those of the men in decision-making positions. Pope Benedict said, "Everyone certainly has had this experience" that Father Valentini described of being assisted by women in growing in the faith. "The church owes a great debt of thanks to women," the pope said.
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Peruvian young people learn new type of mission spirituality
LIMA, Peru (CNS) -- When Emilio Benito Samayani was growing up in Arequipa, a balmy city in the southern highlands of Peru, he was involved in parish youth groups, but found that they often fell into a rut. When he joined Youth Without Borders, a missionary group affiliated with Vatican missionary agencies, he discovered what had been missing. Instead of just going to meetings, he said, "When you do mission, the question is what are you going to do between now and the next meeting?" That meant making his faith a deeper part of his everyday life. "It was hard for me to learn the (missionary) spirituality -- it's nice, but it's hard to live out," said Benito, 27. Before joining Youth Without Borders, Benito thought that being a missionary meant carrying the Gospel message to far-off lands. "But now I know that it means proclaiming it where I live, within my family, so that they are also drawn" to Jesus, he said.
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Mexican town's economy hinges on serving northbound border traffic
ALTAR, Mexico (CNS) -- An odd thing that stands out about Altar in the Mexican state of Sonora, 60 miles south of the Arizona border, is the merchandise sold by strolling vendors and the shops ringing the plaza. Unlike the typical Mexican town square's colorful assortment of household items, snack foods and local crafts, Altar's offers little more than dark-colored backpacks; hats, jackets, shirts and socks in black or camouflage; sturdy shoes and warm gloves -- all in men's sizes -- and gallon jugs of water. They're the tools needed to cross the Sonoran Desert in winter, theoretically without attracting the attention of U.S. Border Patrol agents. On a Wednesday afternoon in February, the plaza was populated almost entirely by small clusters of working-age men, each with a stuffed backpack close at hand. The arrival of two dozen visitors from the Diocese of Tucson, Ariz., prompted the men to huddle closer together, watching cautiously as the Americans were briefed by Altar's parish priest, Father Prisciliano Peraza, and the town's former mayor, Francisco Garcia Aten.
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Parish's weekly meals evolve into full-scale migrant ministry
ALTAR, Mexico (CNS) -- In the beginning, a concerned group of parishioners at Our Lady of Guadalupe Church decided that the men in Altar's town square, which is anchored on one corner by the church, looked like they needed a hot meal, explained Josefina Campuzano. After the U.S. Border Patrol began enforcement campaigns in the 1990s at the most common points on the border for crossing into the U.S. illegally, in Arizona, California and Texas, Altar became a point from which people launched efforts to sneak in. Its location near major Mexican highways and about 60 miles down a dirt road from a less densely patrolled section of the border west of the Nogales, Ariz., port of entry helped turn Altar's fading agricultural economy into one based on services to migrants. In May 2000 when Campuzano and other volunteers from the church began cooking a simple meal once a week and taking it to the plaza, between 2,000 and 2,500 people a day were passing through Altar, explained former mayor Francisco Garcia Aten. The population in Altar, in the state of Sonora, is about 14,000.
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PEOPLE
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U.S. first lady meets children at Missionaries of Charity home
NEW DELHI (CNS) -- Amid tight security, U.S. first lady Laura Bush visited a Missionaries of Charity home for handicapped children in the Indian capital. "The first lady was extremely pleased with her visit," Peter Watkins, spokesman for Laura Bush, told Catholic News Service March 2. Watkins said that after visiting the sick children at Jeevan Jyothi (Flame of Life), the first lady told the nuns she was impressed by "how you have changed the lives of these children." He quoted her as saying, "I thank you for loving these children." The first lady accompanied President George W. Bush on his first visit to India, where he signed a nuclear energy agreement with India. If Congress supports the agreement, the United States would share its nuclear intelligence and fuel with the country.
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Pope Pius XI saw (radio) wave of the future
VATICAN CITY (CNS) -- The idea of capturing and carrying someone's voice across oceans and continents was a radical idea at the turn of the 20th century, and one pope saw the groundbreaking possibilities in such a project. Pope Pius XI was fascinated by this "awesome invention," and in the late 1920s he invited the inventor of the radio, Guglielmo Marconi, to build a radio broadcasting station on the grounds of the newly established Vatican City State. Before radio, the pope's public addresses could only cover the venue at which he was speaking, maybe going a little farther if there was a good echo bouncing off Bernini's colonnade in St. Peter's Square. But on Feb. 12, 1931, with a flick of a switch, the pope's words spoken from a tiny, bare-bones studio in Vatican City were heard simultaneously in New York, Quebec, London, Paris, and Melbourne and Sydney, Australia. With Christ, the word was made flesh; with radio, the pope's words were made trans-Atlantic and truly universal.
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Church officials say Cardinal George will not resign as group demands
CHICAGO (CNS) -- Cardinal Francis E. George did not respond publicly to calls for his resignation by the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests, but officials of the Archdiocese of Chicago said the cardinal has no intention of leaving his post in the wake of a much-publicized case of sexual abuse charges made against one of his priests. The archdiocese and the state Department of Children and Family Services agreed on several new protocols to strengthen the archdiocese's already revamped policies in a recent series of meetings. "I believe the cardinal has acted very responsibly," said Jimmy Lago, archdiocesan chancellor. "We've got a whole approach to make sure that what happened with the McCormack case does not happen again. I think calls for his resignation are irresponsible. We've had good policies and practices going back 15 years."
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