Amid the ongoing racial reckoning taking place in the country in the wake of the death of George Floyd, parishioners of St. Martin de Porres Parish gathered on Nov. 8 for a Feast Day Mass for their patron saint in an atmosphere of faith, love, and hope.
“I didn’t know so many people could die from so many things,” eight-year-old Meena Deo said innocently as she sat cross-legged in front of dozens of lit candles. She and her mother Shalini visited the Corona Altar at Green-Wood Cemetery on Oct. 31 for the cemetery’s annual Día de los Muertos celebration.
Ongoing violence in Nigeria pits Muslim cattle herders and Christian farmers in a bloody struggle for agricultural land at Nigeria’s center, said Father Cosmas Nzeabalu and Sister Elizabeth Ogbu, both assigned to the Diocese of Brooklyn.
Incarnation Catholic Academy invited the 105th Precinct to attend a socially safe, in-person celebration on Oct. 28 to mark National First Responders Day. Congress designated Oct. 28 as National First Responders Day three years ago to honor firefighters, police officers, emergency medical technicians, and others who are first on the scene in dangerous situations.
“I come from everywhere and I go everywhere. I am art among the arts and with the mountains, I am one.” These verses, from Cuban patriot and poet José Martí, were on the mind of retired Auxiliary Bishop Octavio Cisneros as he prepared to present Our Lady of Sorrows Church with a statue of Our Lady of Charity.
Loretta Watz is an example of the kind of devout Catholic who is the backbone of the Diocese of Brooklyn — the parishioners who faithfully attend Mass every week. In Watz’s case, that would be St. Pancras Church.
Auxiliary Bishop Octavio Cisneros, a native Cuban who came to the U.S. as a teenage refugee in the early 1960s without his parents, became a priest and served the Diocese of Brooklyn for 49 years, officially retired from his post on Oct. 30, after Pope Francis accepted his resignation.
As a chaplain, Father Capodanno traded the cassock and collar for olive green jungle fatigues and a steel helmet. He became known as the “Grunt Padre” and was famous for going with Marines into the fiercest firefights. Often, they saw him darting among the wounded, either pulling them to safety or giving last rites.
It has been five months since George Floyd died at the hands of police in Minneapolis — a tragedy that unleashed massive protest demonstrations in cities across the country and ushered in a new era of racial reckoning in America.
Bishop Nicholas DiMarzio joined African American priests in Diocese of Brooklyn to celebrate the naming of Cardinal-designate Wilton Gregory, who currently serves as archbishop of Washington. He will be the first African American cardinal in the United States.
