Fellay Speaks

On a Canadian visit last week, the recently re-communicated head of the Society of St Pius X Bishop Bernard Fellay sat down for an exclusive "Witness" interview with Toronto's Salt + Light TV.

Among other things, the Swiss prelate discusses the January "remit" of the excommunications following the SSPX bishops' illicit 1988 ordination to the episcopacy, the upcoming placement of the Society's reconciliation talks with Rome under the aegis of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith and, indeed, the "grenade in [his] hand" that is Richard Williamson.

With thanks to Basilian Fr Tom Rosica and his crew for making the video embeddable, have at the whole thing:


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Pray for Mumbai

In India, over 100 dead and 250 injured:

Coordinated terrorist attacks struck the heart of Mumbai, India’s commercial capital, on Wednesday night, killing dozens in machine-gun and grenade assaults on at least two five-star hotels, the city’s largest train station, a Jewish center, a movie theater and a hospital.

Even by the standards of terrorism in India, which has suffered a rising number of attacks this year, the assaults were particularly brazen in scale and execution. The attackers used boats to reach the urban peninsula where they hit, and their targets were sites popular with tourists.

The Mumbai police said Thursday that the attacks killed at least 101 people and wounded at least 250. Guests who had escaped the hotels told television stations that the attackers were taking hostages, singling out Americans and Britons.

A previously unknown group claimed responsibility, though that claim could not be confirmed. It remained unclear whether there was any link to outside terrorist groups.

Gunfire and explosions rang out into the morning....

lex Chamberlain, a British citizen who was dining at the Oberoi, told Sky News television that a gunman had ushered 30 or 40 people from the restaurant into a stairway and, speaking in Hindi or Urdu, ordered them to put up their hands.

“They were talking about British and Americans specifically,” he said. “There was an Italian guy, who, you know, they said, ‘Where are you from?’ and he said he’s from Italy, and they said, ‘Fine,’ and they left him alone.”

Sajjad Karim, 38, a British member of the European Parliament, told Sky News: “A gunman just stood there spraying bullets around, right next to me.”

Before his phone went dead, Mr. Karim added: “I managed to turn away and I ran into the hotel kitchen and then we were shunted into a restaurant in the basement. We are now in the dark in this room, and we have barricaded all the doors. It’s really bad.”

Don't just pray for peace, church -- live it.

PHOTO: Reuters

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"Please Help Us! We Are Christians!"

The survivors of yesterday's carnage in Baghdad's Syriac-Catholic cathedral have begun to recount the "savage" attack -- the largest strike against Iraqi Christians of any kind since the 2003 US-led invasion.

Here, from the LA Times:

Around 5:20 p.m., as the Christian worshipers stood and recited "Upon this rock I will build my church," the gunfire started on the street outside.

Father Thar advised everyone to stay seated and to keep praying, but Madeline Mikhal and others rushed from their pews.

Suddenly a large explosion rocked Our Lady of Salvation Church in Baghdad. Bullets whistled by. Some worshipers ran to the church basement. Mikhal darted into the priests' changing room. A barrage of bullets thundered in the main hall.

Many parishioners dived beneath the pews seeking cover. But the dozen or so gunmen, some wearing vests covered with explosives and carrying grenades and other weapons, took aim at the scrambling congregation.

"Those who couldn't find a place to hide were killed," Mikhal said.

She was among more than 70 people who pressed together in the priests' dressing room. The group blocked the door with a dresser, and knocked out the fluorescent lights and waited in the dark. One of the priests, Father Rafael, had taken shelter with them. Mikhal spotted Baan Selim, a relative through marriage.

"Oh Mary, Christ, God, please protect us," they whispered and sobbed....

For survivors like Mikhal and Selim, who swore Monday that they would never again step foot in an Iraqi church, the immediate goal was finding a way to leave the country. The place they loved, a place of faith and rebirth, their sanctuary, had been infected by Iraq's death and bloodshed.

An hour into the attack, militants inside the church roared, "God is great! God is great!" A fresh explosion jolted the building. Screams rang out.

Selim thought a suicide bomber had blown himself up. Mikhal was near Selim and tried to calm her with prayers. People started crying in their hiding place and the gunmen discovered them. Someone lobbed a grenade into the middle of the room.

The explosion left blood everywhere. Some people slumped to the floor. Father Rafael, who shielded Mikhal from the shrapnel, was badly wounded.

"He protected me," she said.

The priest, despite injuries that later required major surgery, remained standing.

"He was encouraging us," Selim said. "He told us to please pray. He never sat down."

Selim, Mikhal and the others started shining their cellphone lights at one another to look at the wounded among them. Some used their phones to reach family.

"Please call the government," Mikhal told her son by phone. "Please call Bolani [Interior Minister Jawad Bolani]. Please call [the Shiite parties] to help us, to save us."

Relatives told them by phone that they'd heard at least two priests were dead. But it was almost impossible to hear anything amid the screams and bursts of weapon fire.

Around 9 p.m., relatives warned by phone that they must lie down, the security forces were coming, they would storm the church.

Selim, Mikhal and the others tumbled over one another as giant blasts rattled the building. Elite security units swung by ropes from helicopters onto the church's roof and broke through the windows, the women said.

People cried, "Please help us! We are Christians!"

In the room, they tore white cloths and waved them as surrender flags, afraid the security forces would think they were the bombers.

By about 10 p.m., the Iraqi forces had opened the door to the dressing room and ordered the hostages up one by one. They stood with their hands in the air. The soldiers checked them for wounds, and led them out. The Iraqi officers guided them with small lights. Selim could make out the bodies by her feet.

"The soldiers tried to raise my head not to look at the ground and see the corpses. I felt I was stepping on bodies," she said. "I noticed the black robe of one of the priests."

On Monday, the women sat in Mikhal's apartment, decorated with paintings of the Virgin Mary and Jesus Christ.

Selim vowed to leave for Syria or Lebanon or anywhere that would take her.

* * *

The death toll standing at at least 58, in the wake of the attacks a group calling itself the "Islamic State of Iraq" claimed responsibility for the siege; eight arrests were made earlier today.

On two hierarchical notes of interest, based in Lebanon, the sui iuris Syriac church in communion with Rome counts roughly 130,000 members worldwide, and is led by a cleric with strong US ties: prior to his election to its top post last year, Patriarch Ignace III Younan was Bishop Joseph Younan, named in 1995 as founding head of the Eparchy (Diocese) of Our Lady of Deliverance, based in North Jersey, but charged with oversight of the church's small diaspora across the whole of North America.

While many news reports have translated it as "Our Lady of Salvation," "Our Lady of Deliverance" is likewise the proper name of the Baghdad cathedral (the image at right was damaged in the attack).

As some have asked after its eparch, according to a Bob Moynihan brief earlier today, the head of the Iraqi capital's Syriac community of 22,000, 80 year-old Archbishop Athanase Matti Shaba Matoka, remains in Rome following last month's Synod of Bishops for the Middle East. Still formally known to most of the rites as "Babylon," the Syriacs share Baghdad with communities of Latins, Armenians and, of course, the Chaldean Catholics native to the land.

In his intervention to the Vatican gathering -- of which Younan was one of the three co-presidents named by B16 -- Shaba Matoka eerily spoke to the bleeding his own cathedral would come to see:

Since the year 2003, Christians are the victims of a killing situation, which has provoked a great emigration from Iraq.. Even if there are no definite statistics, however the indicators underline that half the Christians have abandoned Iraq and that without a doubt there are only about 400,000 Christians left of the 800,000 that lived there. The invasion of Iraq by America and its allies brought to Iraq in general, and especially to its Christians, destruction and ruin on all levels. Churches were blown up, bishops and priests and lay persons were massacred, many were the victims of aggression. Doctors and businessmen were kidnapped, others were threatened, storage places and homes were pillaged...

Perhaps the acuity with which Christianity was targeted has been lightened during the last two years, but there still is the fear of the unknown, insecurity and instability, as well as the continuation of emigration, which always makes this question arise: what is the future of Christian existence in this country should this situation continue, more so because the civil authorities are so weak. The tears are continuous between the different religious and political composing elements, as well as external influence by external powers, especially neighboring countries.

Seven years have passed and Christianity is still bleeding. Where is the world conscience? All the world remains a spectator before what is happening in Iraq, especially with regards to Christians.

We want to sound the alarm. We ask the question of the great powers: is it true what is said that there is a plan to empty the Middle East of Christians and that Iraq is one of the victims?

PHOTOS: Getty

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"The Gospel Cannot Thrive in Pride": At the Synod, The Floor Calls for "Penance"

On its second working day, the Synod for the New Evangelization turned its ear to the floor, as yesterday's tone-setting presentations from the dais gave way to the five-minute interventions by the delegates beyond.

Notably for this crowd, several of the English-speaking church's heavy hitters weighed in with their takes during the morning session, led by Archbishop José Gomez of Los Angeles, who pointed to the impact of globalization as a "challenge" for the church, one which "requires the church to protect immigrant populations from being marginalized and exploited."

The head of the US bishops' migration efforts – as well as the largest diocese American Catholicism has ever known – it's notable that Gomez was appointed to the Synod by Pope Benedict last month only after the LA prelate reportedly declined a place on the ballot for one of the USCCB's allotted four seats.

In that light, the pontiff's apparent determination to have Gomez in the room can be seen signaling two things: first, further evidence that – as Hispanics draw ever closer to comprising a majority of the nation's 70 million Catholics – Benedict places a considerably higher premium on the community's presence and voice than many natives remain to imitate (the Angeleno's successor in San Antonio, Archbishop Gustavo García-Siller, is likewise present as an elected US rep.); and, second, given Gomez's standing as "Archbishop of Hollywood," perhaps a nod to what the world of entertainment could teach the church's proclamation of the Gospel.

Back to the former point, however, it's telling that of this Synod's delegation of six American bishops – four elected, two appointed – only two (the Relator-General, Cardinal Donald Wuerl of Washington, and Archbishop Joseph Kurtz of Louisville, the USCCB vice-president) come from dioceses whose Catholic populations don't have either a Hispanic majority or one just shy of it.

As Latinos currently comprise no less than 60 percent of Stateside Catholics younger than 30 – while, from another angle, national data released this morning reports that one in five American adults (and fully one in three under 30) now holds no religious affiliation whatsoever – this has been your "Demography is Destiny" Moment of the Day.

* * *

In the other domestic turns on the floor, making his first Synod speech, the USCCB president, Cardinal Timothy Dolan of New York, quoted Fulton Sheen and GK Chesterton in calling for a greater emphasis on sacramental confession, which he termed "the primary sacrament of the New Evangelization."

"The sacrament of reconciliation evangelizes the evangelizers," Dolan said, noting that while "the second Vatican Council called for a renewal of the sacrament of penance... what we got instead, sadly, in many places, was [its] disappearance."

For his intervention, Kurtz (who's blogging daily from Rome) focused on the recent introduction of a liturgical Blessing of the Child in the Womb – a project he championed – as "a pastoral moment of first evangelization of the child and new evangelization of the family," while Kicanas honed in on how the church's "acts of love and justice" serve as "a prophetic evangelical call," noting that "sharing and acting on our Catholic social teaching often bring people to Christ." As a Missionary of the Holy Spirit,  meanwhile, the energetic, emphatic, Mexican-born García-Siller – soon to be 56, the nation's youngest metropolitan, and the lone US prelate who bears his episcopal motto in Spanglish – hewed to his community's charism by imploring a "new Pentecost," asking the Synod to call for the Pope "to consecrate the world to the Holy Spirit."

Given the backdrop of the church's decline across much of the West in the face of scandals, atrophy, and perceptions of institutional coldness or arrogance, however, perhaps this Tuesday's most potent messages came instead from the East, courtesy of two even younger archbishops from the Philippines: Luis Antonio Tagle, the 55 year-old "golden child" named to Manila – with 3 million members, Asia's largest diocese – last year by Benedict, and Socrates Villegas, a protege of the iconic Cardinal Jaime Sin who was given the mitre at 40, then a pallium eight years later.

His own archdiocese of Lingayen-Dagupan (100 miles north of the capital) numbering more than a million Catholics, Villegas turned 52 late last month.

With some 75 million faithful, the Filipino church is even larger than its US counterpart, and considerably more influential on the national stage. Yet while the prior generation of its leadership literally led the revolution that overthrew a government, its heirs have apparently come to a rather different sense of their mission.

Along those lines, here below is the Vatican-released summary of Villegas' grenade in the Aula....

“Why is there a strong wave of secularization, a storm of antipathy or plain cold indifference towards the church in some parts of the world necessitating a new wave of evangelization programs?”

The new evangelization calls for new humility. The Gospel cannot thrive in pride. When pride seeps into the heart of the Church, the Gospel proclamation is harmed. The task of new evangelization must begin with a deep sense of awe and reverence for humanity and her culture. Evangelization has been hurt and continues to be impeded by the arrogance of its messengers. The hierarchy must shun arrogance, hypocrisy and bigotry. We must punish the errant among us instead of covering up our own mistakes. We are humans among our human flock. All our beauty and holiness we owe to God. This humility will make us more credible new evangelizers. Our mission is to propose humbly not to impose proudly.

Secondly, the new evangelization must be done by new saints and we must be those saints. The great poverty of the world now is the poverty of saints. Whether we come from the first world or third world countries, everybody is looking for models to inspire and emulate. Our youth need models to inspire them. They need living heroes to ignite their hearts and excite them to know Jesus and love Him more. Our experience in the Third World tells me that the Gospel can be preached to empty stomachs but only if the stomach of the preacher is as empty as his parishioners.

Lastly, the new evangelization must be a call for new charity. We will be credible bringers of Gospel joy if the proclamation is accompanied by its twin messenger of charity. The charity of Jesus is the gift of Himself. The charity of the new evangelization must be the gift of Jesus.

The new evangelization needs a new humility; a renewal in holiness and a new face of charity for it to be credible and fruitful.

...and Tagle's bookend of it:

A young girl asked: “Are we the youth lost or has the Church lost us?” Her question expresses a longing for a Church where she can be found by Jesus and where she can find Him. But for the Church to be the “space” of a faith-encounter with the Lord, she [i.e. the church] must learn anew from Jesus in whom we meet God.

The Church must learn humility from Jesus. God's power and might appears in the self-emptying of the Son, in the love that is crucified but truly saves because it is emptied of self for the sake of others.

The Church is called to follow Jesus' respect for every human person. He defended the dignity of all people, in particular those neglected and despised by the world. Loving His enemies, He affirmed their dignity.

The Church must discover the power of silence. Confronted with the sorrows, doubts and uncertainties of people she cannot pretend to give easy solutions. In Jesus, silence becomes the way of attentive listening, compassion and prayer. It is the way to truth.

The seemingly indifferent and aimless societies of our time are earnestly looking for God. The Church's humility, respectfulness and silence might reveal more clearly the face of God in Jesus. The world takes delight in a simple witness to Jesus, meek and humble of heart.

To be sure, a similar thread was taken up by an American prelate at the Synod – just the one that took place 15 years ago.

While the interventions continue through this afternoon and tomorrow, the Synod's business will halt on Thursday morning for this week's second outdoor liturgy in St Peter's Square: the Mass at which the Pope and Synod Fathers will mark the 50th anniversary of the opening of Vatican II, launching the church's 13-month Year of Faith. In a poignant nod to the milestone, no less than a dozen of the 69 surviving Council Fathers will be on hand to concelebrate.

Set to begin at 10am Rome time (4am Eastern), the Thursday rite's worship aid is posted.

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