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Tag: Roman Catholicism

  • Pope calls female genital mutilation a crime that must stop

    Pope calls female genital mutilation a crime that must stop

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    ABOARD THE PAPAL PLANE — Pope Francis called female genital mutilation a “crime” on Sunday and said the fight for women’s rights, equality and opportunity must continue for the good of society.

    “How is it that today in the world we cannot stop the tragedy of infibulation of young girls?” he asked, referring to the ritual cutting of a girls’ external genitalia. “This is terrible that today there is a practice that humanity isn’t able to stop. It’s a crime. It’s a criminal act!”

    Francis was responding to a question about women’s right en route home from Bahrain. He was asked whether he supported the protests in Iran sparked by the death in custody of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini, who was detained by morality police after allegedly violating the country’s strict dress code for women.

    Francis didn’t directly respond, but gave a lengthy denunciation of how women in many cultures around the world are treated as second-class citizens or worse and said: “We have to continue to fight this because women are a gift.”

    “God … created two equals: man and woman,” the pope said.

    Francis has done more than any pope to give more decision-making roles to women in the church. He has appointed several women to key governing positions, including the No. 2 in the Vatican City State administration as well as several other high-ranking management roles. He has also named women — laywomen and religious sisters — as consultors to Vatican offices dominated by male clergy, including the one that chooses bishops.

    “I have seen in the Vatican, that whenever a woman enters to work, things improve,” he said.

    He said society would do well to follow suit, noting that his native Argentina remains a “macho” culture, but that such attitudes “kill” humanity.

    “A society that cancels women from public life is a society that grows poor,” he said.

    Francis was also asked about new cases of clergy sex abuse and cover-up that have emerged in the French church, with evidence that a bishop was allowed to quietly retire in 2021 despite having been found guilty by a church investigation of having spiritually abused two young men by making them strip during confession. More victims have reportedly come forward since the scandal was first reported.

    Francis didn’t reply when asked if such church sanctions should be made public going forward. But he insisted that the church was on the right path, even reviewing bad past canonical investigations and redoing them. He said the church was committed to not hiding abuse even if there are still some in the church “who still don’t see clearly, who don’t share” the need for justice.

    “It’s a process we’re doing with courage, and not all of us have courage,” he said. “Sometimes there’s the temptation of making compromises — we are enslaved by our sins.”

    But he said the goal was toward further clarity, noting that he had recently received two reports from victims lamenting their abuse and how their cases had been “covered up and then not adjudicated well by the church,”

    “I immediately said ‘Study this again, do a new judgment.’ So we’re now revising old judgments that weren’t well done,” he said. “We do what we can. We’re all sinners.”

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    Associated Press religion coverage receives support through the AP’s collaboration with The Conversation US, with funding from Lilly Endowment Inc. The AP is solely responsible for this content.

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  • Pope appeals for Lebanon leaders to put interests aside

    Pope appeals for Lebanon leaders to put interests aside

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    ABOARD THE PAPAL PLANE — Pope Francis appealed Sunday for Lebanon’s politicians to put their personal interests aside and agree on a path to help the country emerge from years of economic meltdown and a new political vacuum.

    “Lebanon now is suffering,” Francis said when asked en route home from Bahrain if he might visit the country, which he had been considering earlier this year but had to postpone.

    Francis didn’t respond directly but said he was greatly “pained” by the country’s descent into chaos and begged for prayers and for the international community to help Lebanon.

    “I take this opportunity to appeal to Lebanese politicians to put your personal interests aside and speak about the country and come to an agreement,” he said. “First God, then country, then personal interests.”

    Lebanese President Michel Aoun’s term ended at the end of October without a replacement, leaving Lebanon in a political vacuum that is likely to worsen its historic economic crisis.

    Many fear that an extended delay in choosing a successor could further delay attempts to finalize a deal with the International Monetary Fund that would provide Lebanon with $3 billion in assistance, widely seen as a key step to help the country climb out of a three-year financial crisis that has left three quarters of the population in poverty.

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    Associated Press religion coverage receives support through the AP’s collaboration with The Conversation US, with funding from Lilly Endowment Inc. The AP is solely responsible for this content.

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  • Thousands pack Bahrain national stadium for pope’s main Mass

    Thousands pack Bahrain national stadium for pope’s main Mass

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    MANAMA, Bahrain — Thousands of Christians from around the Gulf packed Bahrain’s sports stadium on Saturday for Pope Francis’ big Mass, as he shifted the attention of his four-day visit to ministering to the Catholic community in the overwhelmingly Muslim region.

    Pilgrims wearing identical white caps to shade them from the morning sun waved the yellow and white flags of the Holy See as Francis looped around the Bahrain National Stadium in his popemobile before Mass. A big cheer erupted when he kissed a young girl in a bubble-gum pink dress who was brought to the vehicle.

    According to the Vatican, local organizers estimated some 30,000 people attended the service. Organizers had said that passes to the event were snapped up within two days of them becoming available, with pilgrims coming from Saudi Arabia and other Gulf countries.

    “This is actually a very huge honor,” said Bijoy Joseph, an Indian living in Saudi Arabia who attended. “This is like a blessing for us to be part of our Holy Father’s papal Mass in Bahrain.”

    Francis is on the first-ever papal visit to the island kingdom the size of New York City that lies off the coast of Saudi Arabia. The primary aim was to participate in a government-sponsored interfaith conference to promote Catholic-Muslim dialogue. But for the final two days, he is focusing on ministering to the Catholic community, a minority in the country of around 1.5 million.

    Most are workers from South Asia, many of whom have left behind their families to work in Bahrain’s construction, oil extraction and domestic service industries.

    Sebastian Fernandez, an Indian living in Bahrain, said he was blessed to be able to attend. “It will be a fruitful Mass and we are happy to see our pope,” he said.

    After the Mass, Francis was meeting with young people at the Sacred Heart school, which dates from the 1940s and is affiliated with the church of the same name that was the first Catholic Church built in the Gulf. Francis wraps up his visit Sunday meeting with priests and nuns at the church.

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    Associated Press religion coverage receives support through the AP’s collaboration with The Conversation US, with funding from Lilly Endowment Inc. The AP is solely responsible for this content.

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  • Pope blasts ‘childlike’ wars at Bahrain interfaith summit

    Pope blasts ‘childlike’ wars at Bahrain interfaith summit

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    MANAMA, Bahrain — With Russia’s war in Ukraine raging, Pope Francis joined Muslim, Christian and Jewish leaders Friday in calling for the world’s great religions work together for peace, telling an interfaith summit that religion must never be used to justify violence and that faith leaders must counter the “childlike” whims of the powerful to make war.

    On his second day in the Gulf kingdom of Bahrain, Francis closed out a conference on East-West dialogue sponsored by King Hamad bin Isa Al Khalifa. It was his second such conference in as many months, following one in Kazakhstan, evidence of Francis’ core belief that moments of encounter among people of different faiths can help heal today’s conflicts and promote a more just and sustainable world.

    Sitting around him in the Sakhir royal palace grounds were leading Muslim imams, the spiritual leader of the world’s Orthodox Christians, and U.S. rabbis who have long engaged in interfaith dialogue, as well as the king. Speaker after speaker called for an end to Russia’s war in Ukraine and the start of peace negotiations. The Russian Orthodox Church, which sent an envoy to the conference, has strongly supported the Kremlin in its war and justified it on religious grounds.

    Francis told the gathering that, while the world seems to be heading apart like two opposing seas, the mere presence of religious leaders together was evidence that they “intend to set sail on the same waters, choosing the route of encounter rather than that of confrontation.”

    “It is a striking paradox that, while the majority of the world’s population is united in facing the same difficulties, suffering from grave food, ecological and pandemic crises, as well as an increasingly scandalous global injustice, a few potentates are caught up in a resolute struggle for partisan interests,” he said.

    “We appear to be witnessing a dramatic and childlike scenario: in the garden of humanity, instead of cultivating our surroundings, we are playing instead with fire, missiles and bombs, weapons that bring sorrow and death, covering our common home with ashes and hatred,” he said.

    King Hamad, for his part, urged a coherent effort to stop Russia’s war in Ukraine and promote peace negotiations, “for the good of all of humanity.”

    The visit is Francis’ second to a Gulf Arab country, following his 2019 landmark trip to Abu Dhabi, where he signed a document promoting Catholic-Muslim fraternity with a leading Sunni cleric, Sheikh Ahmed al-Tayeb. Al-Tayeb is the grand imam of Al-Azhar, the seat of Sunni learning in Cairo, and has become Francis’ key partner in promoting greater Christian-Muslim understanding.

    Al-Tayeb joined Francis in Bahrain and was on hand last month in Kazakhstan too. In his prepared remarks, called Friday for an end to Russia’s war “to spare the lives of innocents who have no hand in this violent tragedy.”

    Al-Tayeb also called for Sunni and Shiite Muslims to engage in a similar process of dialogue and try to heal their centuries of divisions, saying Al-Azhar was prepared to host such an encounter.

    “Let us together chase away any talk of hate, provocation and excommunication and set aside ancient and modern conflict in all its forms and with all its negative offshoots,” he said. Bahrain is ruled by a Sunni monarchy that has been accused by human rights groups of systematic discrimination against its Shiite majority, charges the government rejects.

    Later Friday, al-Tayeb was to meet privately with Francis and participate in a larger encounter at the mosque in the royal palace with the Muslim Council of Elders, which he heads.

    Francis was also bringing his message of dialogue to Bahrain’s Christian leaders by presiding over an ecumenical meeting and peace prayer at the Our Lady of Arabia Cathedral, the largest Catholic Church in the Gulf, which was inaugurated last year on land gifted to the church by Al Khalifa.

    Francis opened his visit to Bahrain on Thursday by urging Bahrain authorities renounce the death penalty and ensure basic human rights are guaranteed for all citizens — a nod to Bahraini Shiite dissidents who say they have been harassed and detained, subject to torture and “sham trials,” with some sentenced to death for their political activities. The government denies discriminating against Shiites.

    Francis also aimed to highlight Bahrain’ tradition of religious tolerance: Unlike neighboring Saudi Arabia, where Christians cannot openly practice their faith, Bahrain is home to several Christian communities as well as a small Jewish community.

    In his prepared remarks to the forum, U.S. Rabbi Marc Schneier, who has long worked to promote Jewish-Muslim understanding and serves as Al Khalifa’s special advisor on interfaith matters, praised Bahrain as a “role model in the Arab world for coexistence and tolerance of different faith communities.”

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    Associated Press religion coverage receives support through the AP’s collaboration with The Conversation US, with funding from Lilly Endowment Inc. The AP is solely responsible for this content.

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  • Pope presses Muslim dialogue in first papal visit to Bahrain

    Pope presses Muslim dialogue in first papal visit to Bahrain

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    VATICAN CITY — Pope Francis is bringing his message of dialogue with the Muslim world to the kingdom of Bahrain, where the Sunni-led government is hosting an interfaith conference on East-West coexistence even as it stands accused of discriminating against the country’s Shiite majority.

    Human rights groups and relatives of Shiite activists on death row have urged Francis to use his visit, which begins Thursday, to call for an end to the death penalty and political repression in Bahrain. But it’s not clear if Francis will publicly embarrass his hosts during his four-day visit, the first of any pontiff to the island nation in the Persian Gulf.

    The 85-year-old pope, who has been using a wheelchair for several months because of strained knee ligaments, said Thursday he was in “a lot of pain” as he headed to Bahrain, and for the first time greeted journalists travelling with him while seated rather than walking through the aisle.

    Francis has long touted dialogue as an instrument of peace and believes a show of interfaith harmony is needed, especially now given Russia’s war in Ukraine and regional conflicts, such as in Yemen. On the eve of the trip, Francis asked for prayers so that the trip will promote “the cause of brotherhood and of peace, of which our times are in extreme and urgent need.”

    The visit is Francis’ second to a Gulf Arab country, following his 2019 landmark trip to Abu Dhabi, where he signed a document promoting Catholic-Muslim fraternity with a leading Sunni cleric, Sheikh Ahmed al-Tayeb. Al-Tayeb is the grand imam of Al-Azhar, the seat of Sunni learning in Cairo. Francis followed that with a 2021 visit to Iraq, where he was received by Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, one of the world’s pre-eminent Shiite clerics.

    Francis will meet again this week in Bahrain with al-Tayeb, as well as other prominent figures in the interfaith field who are expected to attend the conference, which is similar to one hosted last month by Kazakhstan that Francis and el-Tayeb also attended. Members of the regional Muslim Council of Elders, the spiritual leader of the world’s Orthodox Christians, Patriarch Bartholomew, a representative from the Russian Orthodox Church and rabbis from the United States are all expected, according to the Bahrain program.

    The trip will also allow Francis to minister to Bahrain’s Catholic community, which numbers around 80,000 in a country of around 1.5 million. Most are workers hailing from the Philippines and India, though trip organizers expect pilgrims from Saudi Arabia and other neighboring countries will attend Francis’ big Mass at the national stadium on Saturday.

    Bahrain is home to the Gulf’s first Catholic Church, the Sacred Heart parish, which opened in 1939, as well as its biggest one, Our Lady of Arabia Cathedral. The church, with a capacity of 2,300, opened last year in the desert town of Awali on land gifted to the church by King Hamad bin Isa Al Khalifa. In fact, the king presented Francis with a model of the church when he visited the Vatican in 2014 and extended the first invitation to visit.

    Francis will visit both churches during his visit and is likely to thank the king for the tolerance the government has long shown Christians living in the country, particularly when compared to neighboring Saudi Arabia, where Christians cannot openly practice their faith.

    “Religious liberty inside Bahrain is perhaps the best in the Arab world,” said Bishop Paul Hinder, the apostolic administrator for Bahrain and other Gulf Arab countries. “Even if everything isn’t ideal, there can be conversions (to Christianity), which aren’t at least officially punished like in other countries.”

    But in the runup to his visit to Bahrain, Shiite opposition groups and human rights organizations have urged Francis to raise human rights violations against the majority Shiites by the Sunni monarchy. They urged him to call for an end to the death penalty and request to visit the country’s Jau prison, where hundreds of Shiite activists have been jailed.

    Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International have repeatedly denounced the use of torture in prisons, as well as forced confessions and “sham trials” against dissidents.

    “We are writing to appeal to you as the families of twelve death row inmates who are facing imminent execution in Bahrain,” read a letter from the families to Francis released this week by the Bahrain Institute for Rights and Democracy. “Our family members remain behind bars and at risk of execution despite the clear injustice of their convictions.”

    Francis has changed church teaching to declare the death penalty inadmissible in all cases. He has regularly visited prisoners during his foreign trips, though no such prison visit is planned in Bahrain.

    The Vatican spokesman declined to say whether Francis would raise Bahrain’s human rights record publicly or privately during his visit.

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    Associated Press religion coverage receives support through the AP’s collaboration with The Conversation US, with funding from Lilly Endowment Inc. The AP is solely responsible for this content.

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  • Prominent Chicago priest accused of sexual abuse of minor

    Prominent Chicago priest accused of sexual abuse of minor

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    CHICAGO — A Catholic priest who gained national fame as an activist has been asked to step away from his ministry while allegations that he sexually abused a minor decades ago are investigated.

    The development came a little more than a year after another probe cleared the priest, the Rev. Michael Pfleger, of allegations that he sexually abused children.

    In a letter sent Saturday, Cardinal Blase Cupich said Pfleger was asked to relinquish his duties at the church, Faith Community of Saint Sabina, after allegations were made that he sexually abused a minor decades ago.

    Pfleger “has agreed to cooperate fully with this request,” Cupich said, adding that the archdiocese has notified the Illinois Department of Children and Family Services and law enforcement officials as required by archdiocese policies.

    The accuser is a man in his late 40s who said Pfleger on two occasions abused him in the late 1980s during choir rehearsals in the Saint Sabina rectory, according to a statement released by a spokesperson for the man’s attorney, Eugene Hollander. The attorney did not elaborate on the allegations.

    In his own statement to the parish on the city’s South Side that he has led for decades, Pfleger said he had done nothing wrong.

    “Let me be clear – I am completely innocent of this accusation,” he wrote, telling his parish he was confident that the allegation would be “determined to be unfounded” and that he would be reinstated.

    Pfleger, who is white, leads a Black church in Chicago’s largely Black and low-income Auburn Gresham neighborhood. His activism captured the attention of film director Spike Lee, who based a character played by actor John Cusack in the 2015 film “Chi-Raq” on Pfleger.

    Pfleger has made national headlines for his activism on an array of issues, opposing cigarette and alcohol advertising, taking on drug dealers and stores that sell drug paraphernalia, and leading countless protests. He has even been sued for his activism and once said it “has resulted in jealousy, attacks and hate.”

    In May of last year, four months after Pfleger was asked to step aside from his duties while similar allegations involving a minor more than 40 years earlier were investigated, he was reinstated by the archdiocese after the probe found “insufficient reason to suspect” he sexually abused children.

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  • Pope slams treatment of migrants as 2 Italians become saints

    Pope slams treatment of migrants as 2 Italians become saints

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    VATICAN CITY — Pope Francis on Sunday denounced Europe’s indifference toward migrants risking their lives to cross the Mediterranean Sea as he elevated to sainthood an Italian bishop and Italian-born missionary whose work and life paths illustrated the difficulties faced by 19th Century Italian emigrants.

    Francis departed from prepared remarks to slam Europe’s treatment of migrants as “disgusting, sinful and criminal.” He noted that people from outside the continent are often left to die during perilous sea crossings or pushed back to Libya, where they wind up in camps he referred to as “lager,” the German word referring to Nazi concentration camps.

    He also recalled the plight of Ukrainians fleeing war, which he said “causes us great suffering.”

    “ The exclusion of migrants is scandalous,’’ Francis said, generating applause from the faithful gathered in St. Peter’s Square for the canonizations of Don Giovanni Battista Scalabrini, an Italian bishop who founded an order to help Italian emigrants in 1887, and Artedime Zatti, an Italian who emigrated in 1897 to Argentina and dedicated his life as a lay-worker there to helping the sick.

    “Indeed, the situation of migrants is criminal. They are left to die in front of us, making the Mediterranean the largest cemetery in the world. The situation of migrants is disgusting, sinful, criminal. Not to open the doors to those who are in need. No, we exclude them, we send them away to lager, where they are exploited and sold as slaves.”

    He urged the faithful to consider the treatment of migrants, asking: ‘’Do we welcome them as brothers, or do we exploit them?”

    The pontiff said the two new saints “remind us of the importance or walking together.”

    Francis said Scalabrani showed “great vision,’’ by looking forward “to a world and a Church without barriers, where no one was a foreigner.” And the pontiff called Zatti “a living example of gratitude” who devoted his life to serving others after being cured of tuberculosis.

    Scalabrini founded the Missionaries of Saint Charles Borromeo, known as the Scalabrian Fathers, and the Missionary Sisters of Saint Charles Borromeo Scalabrians, to minister to the many Italians who left their homeland due to what he wrote were the combined effects of an agricultural crisis, social change, a poorly managed economy, exorbitant taxation and “the natural desire to improve one’s condition.”

    Disturbed by statistics on Italian emigration that swelled to 84,000 in 1884 alone, Scalabrini wrote that the mass emigration and separation of families would “help strew white the lands of America with their bones.”

    He died in 1905 in Piacenza, where he was bishop, and was beatified in 1997 by St. John Paul II. Pope Francis dispensed with the canonization requirement of Scalabrini having a miracle attributed to him after his beatification.

    The order he founded currently operates 176 missions around the world, including 27 migrant shelters and 20 schools and centers for children.

    Francis, himself the son of Italian immigrants to Argentina, has recalled being inspired by Zatti’s life while he was Jesuit provincial superior in Argentina, saying the number of men entering the Catholic order increased after he prayed for the late bishop’s intercession.

    Zatti was one of eight children born to a farming couple in northern Italy that emigrated to Argentina in 1897 when he was a teenager.

    After entering the Salesian order at age 20, Zatti fell ill with tuberculosis and was sent to a Salesian-run hospital in northern Patagonia to be treated. He made a vow to serve the sick and poor for the rest of his life, if he recovered. Zatti went on to work in the same hospital for 40 years, working as a nurse, in the pharmacy, and later as an administrator.

    His fame for treating the ill attracted the sick from all over Patagonia. Zatti was known to travel the city of Viedma with his bicycle with a medical case to help the sick. The pontiff on Sunday also recalled an occasion when Zatti was seen removing a dead patient on his own shoulders from the hospital, to prevent the sick from seeing the body.

    Zatti died in 1951, and was beatified in 2002. Paving the way for canonization, Francis signed the decree recognizing Zatti’s intercession in the healing of a man in the Philippines who had suffered a brain bleed.

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    Barry reported from Milan. Francesco Sportelli in Rome and Gianfranco Stara in Vatican City contributed.

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    Follow AP’s coverage of global migration at https://apnews.com/hub/migration

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  • Hurricane Ian shakes SW Florida’s faith but can’t destroy it

    Hurricane Ian shakes SW Florida’s faith but can’t destroy it

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    FORT MYERS, Fla. — In darkness and despair, there were flickers of light and hope, even for Jane Compton who lost her home and possessions to Hurricane Ian’s wrath. As the storm approached last week, she and her husband found sanctuary at their Baptist church, huddling with fellow parishioners through wind, rain and worry.

    They prayed for the gusts to subside and for God to keep them from harm as the hurricane made landfall last Wednesday. Floodwaters swept under the pews, driving the congregation to the pulpit and further testing their faith. The intensifying storm ripped the church’s steeple away, leaving a large gap in the roof. The parishioners shuddered.

    “Good Lord, please protect us,” Compton prayed, with her husband, Del, at her side.

    She compared the deluge to the biblical story Noah’s Ark, saying they had no idea when the water would stop rising. When it did, there were hallelujahs.

    With the storm now passed and its devastation abounding, churches across hard-hit Southwest Florida are providing a steadying force in the lives of those plunged into chaos and grief. Heartache, frustration and uncertainty now swirl in sanctuaries amid sermons about perseverance and holding on to one’s faith.

    “We believe this was a blessing in disguise,” said the Rev. Robert Kasten, the Comptons’ pastor at Southwest Baptist Church, a congregation of several hundred in one of the most devastated neighborhoods of Fort Myers.

    Also being tested are many of the nearly quarter million Catholics in the Diocese of Venice, which encompasses 10 counties from just south of Tampa Bay to the Everglades that bore the brunt of the hurricane. Bishop Frank Dewane has been visiting as many of the diocese’s five dozen parishes and 15 schools as possible.

    “A lot of people just wanted to talk about, ‘Why is there this much suffering?’” Dewane said of parishioners he met as he celebrated weekend Mass in a church in an inundated North Port neighborhood and in the parish hall of a storm-damaged Sarasota church. “We have to go on; we’re a people of hope.”

    Priests walked a fine line between holding Mass to provide comfort and not endangering older parishioners in areas with widespread lack of running water and electricity and flooded roadways. Dewane said one rescued man had kept asking about his wife, not realizing she had drowned in the storm.

    Around Kasten’s church, nearby mobile home parks where many of his parishioners lived became submerged. About a fourth of his congregation suffered major damage to their dwellings, with many like the Comptons losing nearly everything. The church’s sanctuary has become temporary quarters for nearly a dozen of the newly homeless.

    Most were handling things well, until the realities of tragedy hit.

    “When they saw pictures, they just burst into tears,” Kasten said.

    “Just the shock of knowing and seeing what you knew happened, it overwhelmed them. But they are just praising the Lord how he protected us, kept us safe,” he said.

    Barbara Wasko, a retiree who is now sleeping on a lounge chair in the sanctuary, said she has faith the community will rebuild.

    “We will get by,” she said. “We will make it.”

    Hurricane Ian’s fury — 150 mph (241 kph) winds and deluges of water — killed dozens of people and stranded countless in what for many communities has been their worst calamity in generations.

    Rhonda Mitchell, who lives near the Baptist church, said all she had left was her faith in God.

    “We don’t know what He is going to do,” she said, her belongings splayed to dry outside her mobile home as an empty U-Haul truck waited to be loaded.

    “I just lost my whole life,” she said, beginning to sob. “I’m still here but I just lost everything I own. … I’m just trying to figure things out.”

    At badly damaged Catholic churches and schools, reconstruction work is already underway. But Dewane said his priority is to “meet people where they are” and ensure the Catholic community can help overall relief efforts.

    That ranges from finding shelter for teachers whose homes were leveled even as many schools are re-opening this week to helping counsel elderly neighbors. The diocese is working with Catholic Charities to set up distribution centers for donations as well as supplies provided by FEMA.

    But many successful efforts are grassroots. When a group of nuns in small Wauchula, an inland town, lost power, they decided to just empty out their freezers of meat and other perishables, and invite the entire neighborhood for a barbeque. The fire blazing, hundreds of people lined up and started adding what they had in their own rapidly warming fridges.

    “We’re doing as well as we can,” Dewane said. “I think we can only be the Lord’s instruments.”

    The Rev. Charles Cannon, pastor at St. Hilary’s Episcopal Church, sermonized about the temporariness of the community’s losses. While much was lost, he said, not all is gone.

    “People think they have lost everything, but you haven’t lost everything if you haven’t lost yourself and the people you love,” Cannon said after Sunday services that were held outside amid the fallen boughs of once-majestic oaks.

    Cannon pointed out that the debris that left church grounds looking like an ugly, unearthly place can be cleaned.

    “Most of the work has been to get the people feeling safe again,” he said, “Almost everybody has been without power. All of them without water. Trying hard to get them feeling comfortable again.”

    Down the street, about 50 parishioners at the Assembly of God Bethlehem Ministry gathered to share in their hardships. They recounted how they had no electricity, no drinkable running water and, in many cases, were left with damaged homes.

    “But God has kept them safe,” said Victoria Araujo, a parishioner and occasional Sunday school teacher.

    “Some people lost a lot of things … We need to pray for the people who lost more than us,” said the Rev. Ailton da Silva, whose congregants are mostly immigrant families from Brazil.

    The storm has truly tested his community’s resiliency, he said, adding that “I think people will think about faith, family and God.”

    Five years ago, Hurricane Irma swept through the region, causing extensive damage to his church. Repairs were still ongoing when Ian hit. The church fared much better this time.

    In the end, “it’s just a building,” da Silva said. “The church is us.”

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    Dell’Orto reported from Minneapolis.

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    Associated Press religion coverage receives support through the AP’s collaboration with The Conversation US, with funding from Lilly Endowment Inc. The AP is solely responsible for this content.

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    For more AP coverage of Hurricane Ian: apnews.com/hub/hurricanes

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  • UN, abuse survivor groups seek Vatican investigation of Belo

    UN, abuse survivor groups seek Vatican investigation of Belo

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    VATICAN CITY — The United Nations and advocacy groups for survivors of clergy sexual abuse are urging Pope Francis to authorize a full investigation of Catholic Church archives on three continents to ascertain who knew what and when about sexual abuse by Nobel Peace Prize-winning Bishop Carlos Ximenes Belo, the revered independence hero of East Timor.

    The Vatican’s sex abuse office said last week that it had secretly sanctioned Belo in 2020, forbidding him from having contact with minors or with East Timor, based on misconduct allegations that arrived in Rome in 2019. That was the year Francis approved a new church law that required all cases of predator prelates to be reported in-house and established a mechanism to investigate bishops, who had long escaped accountability for abuse or cover-up during the church’s decades-long scandal.

    But a brief statement by the Vatican, issued after Dutch magazine De Groen Amsterdammer exposed the Belo scandal by quoting two of his alleged victims, didn’t reveal what church officials might have known before 2019.

    Belo won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1996 with fellow East Timorese independence icon Jose Ramos-Horta for campaigning for a fair and peaceful solution to conflict in their home country as it struggled to gain independence from Indonesia. He is revered in East Timor and was celebrated abroad for his bravery in calling out human rights abuses by Indonesian rulers despite threats against his life.

    But six years after winning the prize, in 2002, Belo suddenly retired as the head of the church in East Timor, a former Portuguese colony. At 54, he was two decades shy of the normal retirement age for bishops, and he never held an episcopal appointment after that.

    He has said he retired for health reasons and because of stress and to give the newly independent East Timor different church leadership. But within a year of his retirement, Belo had been sent by the Vatican and his Salesian missionary order to another former Portuguese colony, Mozambique, to work as a missionary priest. There, he has said, he spent his time “teaching catechism to children, giving retreats to young people.”

    He is currently in Portugal, where the Salesians have said they took him in at the request of their superiors. His whereabouts are unclear, and he didn’t respond when contacted by Portuguese media.

    Advocates for survivors cite the in-house investigation that Francis authorized and published in 2020 into defrocked American Cardinal Theodore McCarrick in calling for a similar forensic study of church archives for Belo.

    The McCarrick investigation, which began after new allegations surfaced in 2018 that McCarrick sexually abused a teenage altar boy, exposed how a series of bishops, cardinals and even popes over two decades dismissed or downplayed reports that he slept with his seminarians and allowed him to rise through the church hierarchy.

    There is no indication yet that Francis is prepared to authorize a similar investigation into Belo. There doesn’t appear to be any groundswell of indignation within East Timor’s Catholic community, as there was among U.S. Catholics over McCarrick. On the contrary, in the impoverished, overwhelmingly Catholic country, where the church holds enormous influence, many rallied behind Belo despite the allegations.

    Francis did meet Saturday with his ambassador to Portugal as well as the head of the Portuguese Bishops Conference, who himself is reportedly accused of covering up for other abuser priests.

    Anne Barrett-Doyle, of the online resource Bishop Accountability, called for Francis to order a “full and sweeping investigation of the Belo case including past and present church officials from all ranks and dicasteries and from every relevant region, from East Timor to Portugal to Rome to Mozambique.”

    She noted that Belo’s Salesian superiors as well as Vatican officials, up to and including even Pope John Paul II, would have been involved in his 2002 retirement and subsequent transfers. East Timor is and was then under the jurisdiction of the powerful Vatican Congregation for the Evangelization of Peoples, which handles all church matters in mission territories in Africa, Asia and some other regions. But ultimately a pope decides when bishops retire and whether they are subject to any sanction.

    “The Vatican’s suggestion that it first learned of the allegations in the last few years doesn’t pass the smell test. It is wholly implausible,” Barrett-Doyle said in an email. “Signs point to the real possibility that Belo is another McCarrick – an acclaimed churchman whose predations were known to many church officials.”

    The United Nations’ spokesman, Stephane Dujarric, also backed a full investigation.

    “These allegations are truly shocking and need to be fully investigated,” he told The Associated Press. The United Nations organized a referendum on East Timor’s independence in 1999 and then provided a U.N. peacekeeping force to quell widespread violence that broke out until independence was finally declared in 2002.

    The main U.S.-based advocacy group for survivors of priestly sex abuse, SNAP, joined the call for a more thorough inquest, especially given that Belo was allowed to continue ministering to children while in Mozambique.

    “We learn from many allegations of sexual abuse against children that there are often more victims. In this tragedy, the Vatican set Belo free to have access to potentially more victims,” said SNAP communications manager, Mike McDonnell.

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