Just hours after landing in Ireland for the World Meeting of Families, the “pope of the poor” will pay a visit to Dublin’s neediest population where he’ll be welcomed into a very special family, one that holds special weight in his vision of the Church’s role in the world.
Cardinal Blase Cupich offered a powerful admission that Church leaders “cannot pretend to teach” on matters such as the family and love without acknowledging the scandal of clerical sex abuse, which looms ever larger over the global Catholic Church at the moment.
When Colm O’Gorman left home just after he turned 18 years old, he spent six months on the streets of Dublin homeless and wondering what he did wrong in life to be sexually abused by a Catholic priest for years. Now he’s only left with words to describe the agony of long ago, but the horror never left him.
Leading up to the World Meeting of Families, some critics charged the focus was too narrowly on Ireland. Those detractors received a response on Wednesday morning, when an opening session dealt with how refugees might help restore stronger familial bonds all across the globe.
Pilgrims attending the World Meeting of Families from Brooklyn and Queens visited St. Patrick’s Cathedral this week – but not the one they’re familiar with in Manhattan.
In an opening address for the World Meeting of Families, Archbishop Eamon Martin confronted many of the most neuralgic issues facing the Church today, ranging from abortion to gay marriage and clerical sex abuse, and pledged that “no one is excluded from the circle of God’s love.”
Venezuela’s spiraling economic and political crisis has left shelves bare in stores, including supermarkets and pharmacies. Sister Teresinha has heard stories about fistfights over food scraps in garbage piles in Venezuelan cities.
The Catholic Church has joined relief efforts as unprecedented floods and landslides continue to wreak havoc in India’s Kerala state, killing about 370 people within a week.
In a forceful letter released just ahead of his Aug. 25-26 trip to Ireland, and just after the blistering Pennsylvania Grand Jury report on sex abuse crimes and cover-ups in six dioceses, Pope Francis wrote Monday “no effort must be spared to create a culture able to prevent such situations from happening, but also to prevent the possibility of their being covered up and perpetuated.”
A 16-year-old peasant girl will be beatified as a martyr in Slovakia, seven decades after she was shot in front of her family for resisting rape by a drunken Soviet soldier.
