A silent vigil was held outside the papal nunciature in Dublin yesterday to protest against the censuring of priests by the Vatican.

Well-known priest and journalist Fr Brian D’Arcy last week said he had been censured by the Vatican over four articles he wrote for the Sunday World newspaper in 2010.

Fr D’Arcy is the fifth Irish Catholic priest known to have been censured by the Vatican recently. The others are Redemptorist priests Fr Tony Flannery and Fr Gerard Moloney, Marist priest Fr Seán Fagan and Capuchin priest Fr Owen O’Sullivan.

More than 200 lay Catholics and religious, several of whom wore gags in the Vatican colours of white and yellow, yesterday handed in a letter at the gates of the residence of papal nuncio Archbishop Charles Brown, calling for the censures to be revoked. It is not known if the archbishop was at home.

Sr Siobhán Ní Mhaoilmhichil, a member of the Dominican order for almost 50 years, said she was angered by the way the priests had been treated.

“These are all good theologians who have worked for the church for many years and we are here to show our solidarity with them.”

Brendan Butler, a spokesman for We Are Church Ireland, which organised the vigil, said the Vatican had been heavy-handed in silencing the priests.

“The treatment of these priests goes against the teachings of Jesus Christ and the church founded by Jesus. These are outstanding priests and people are outraged by the disrespect that has been shown to them.”

Mr Butler said he was aware of four other priests who had been silenced but were choosing to remain anonymous.

Cath News

The Roman Catholic church has written to every state-funded Catholic secondary school in England and Wales asking them to encourage pupils to sign a petition against gay marriage.

Students at one south London school were shown a presentation on religious opposition to government plans to let gay couples marry in civil ceremonies. Church leaders believe the proposal would reduce the significance of marriage.

The Catholic Education Service, which acts for Catholic bishops in England and Wales, contacted 385 secondary schools to highlight a letter read in parish churches last month, in which two archbishops told worshippers that Catholics have a “duty to do all we can to ensure that the true meaning of marriage is not lost for future generations”.

The CES also asked schools to draw pupils’ attention to the petition being organised by the Coalition for Marriage, a Christian campaign which has attracted more than 466,000 signatures to date.

Terry Sanderson, president of the National Secular Society, said: “This is a clear breach of the authority and privilege that the Catholic Education Service has been given in schools.

“Surely it is no part of its remit to promote a specific political campaign from this purely sectarian viewpoint. It is disgraceful that children are being encouraged into bigotry when they are attending a state school paid for by taxpayers.”

A pupil at St Philomena’s Catholic high school for girls in Carshalton, in the south London borough of Sutton, told the website PinkNews.co.uk that children aged 11 to 18 had been encouraged to sign the anti-equality pledge by their headteacher.

She said: “In our assembly for the whole sixth form you could feel people bristling as she explained parts of the letter and encouraged us to sign the petition. It was just a really outdated, misjudged and heavily biased presentation.”

Cath News

Pope Benedict has set up a commission of cardinals to investigate the leaks of sensitive documents to the media alleging corruption and mismanagement in the Vatican.

The documents included private letters to the pope from an archbishop who was transferred to Washington after he blew the whistle on what he said was nepotism and cronyism in the awarding of contracts, and documents alleging internal conflicts about the Vatican bank.

The Vatican said the commission would be made up of three retired cardinals: Spaniard Julian Herranz, Jozef Tomko of Slovakia and Salvatore De Giorgi of Italy.

A statement said they would “undertake an authoritative investigation and throw light” on how the leaks happened.

The scandal, which has come to be known as “Vatileaks”, involved the leaking of a series of documents to Italian media in January and February.

A television investigation in January broadcast private letters to Secretary of State Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone and the pope from Archbishop Carlo Maria Vigano, the former deputy governor of Vatican City and now the Holy See’s ambassador in Washington.

Vigano was deputy governor of Vatican City from 2009 to 2011, and was head of a department responsible for maintaining the tiny city-state’s gardens, buildings, streets, museums and other infrastructure, managed separately from the Italian capital Rome which surrounds it.

The letters showed that Vigano was transferred to the United States after he exposed what he said was a web of corruption linked to the awarding of Vatican contracts to Italian contractors at inflated prices.

He complained in one letter of a smear campaign against him by Vatican officials who were upset that he had taken drastic steps to clean up the purchasing procedures. He begged to stay in the job to finish what he had started.

Cath News

A Muslim mob set ablaze a Catholic church frequented by Southern Sudanese in the capital Khartoum, witnesses and media reports said on Sunday.

The church in Khartoum’s Al-Jiraif district was built on a disputed plot of land, but the Saturday night incident appeared to be part of the fallout from ongoing hostilities between Sudan and South Sudan over control of an oil town on their ill-defined border.

Sudan and South Sudan have been drawing closer to a full-scale war in recent months over the unresolved issues of sharing oil revenues and the disputed border.

Last week, South Sudanese troops seized Heglig, which the southerners call Panthou, sending Sudanese troops fleeing. The Khartoum government later claimed to have regained control of the town.

The witnesses and several newspapers said a mob of several hundred shouting insults at southerners torched the church. Fire engines could not put out the fire, they said.

One newspaper, Al-Sahafah, said the church was part of a complex that included a school and dormitories. Ethiopian refugees living in the Sudanese capital also used the church.

Cath News

Pope Benedict XVI called on the international community to tackle sex tourism and organ trafficking on Monday, slamming the abuse, torture and exploitation of minors in particular.

Tourism can facilitate people trafficking “for sexual exploitation or organ harvesting, as well as the exploitation of minors,” the pope said in a speech to mark the 2012 World Congress on the Pastoral Care of Tourism.

These are “evils that must be dealt with urgently since they trample upon the rights of millions of men and women, especially among the poor, minors and handicapped,” the pope said.

The United Nations estimates there are around 2.5 million victims of human trafficking in the world at any one time.

The pope — who has faced thousands of clerical sex abuse scandals in Europe and the US since becoming pontiff — condemned “the exploitation of minors, abandoned into the hands of individuals without scruples.”

“Sexual tourism is one of the most abject of these deviations that devastate morally, psychologically and physically the life of so many persons and families, and sometimes whole communities,” he said.

Cath News

Following Pope Benedict XVI’s recent trip to Cuba, U.S. Catholic bishops are pushing the State Department to lift the 50-year Cuban embargo in order to improve religious liberty and human rights for the Cuban people.

In a Tuesday (April 17) letter to Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, Bishop Richard E. Pates of Des Moines, Iowa, the chairman of the bishops’ Committee on International Justice and Peace, pressed the Obama administration to pursue “purposeful engagement rather than ineffective isolation” with Havana.

After joining Benedict during his March 26-28 visit, Pates saw firsthand what added support could do for the Cuban people, he wrote in the letter.

Richard Coll, a policy adviser to the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, said lifting the embargo has been the bishops’ ”long-held policy” for at least the last 20 years, but actually traveling to the country made the issue real for Pates and other prelates.

The embargo should be lifted, Pates wrote, so that “greater support and assistance may be provided to the ordinary citizens” of the country.

Cath News

“Peace to you” are the first words on the lips of Jesus whenever he appears to his disciple after the resurrection. I say “Peace to you” rather than “Peace be with you,” because the phrase (as the original implies) is not so much a wish or a greeting as a declaration. Jesus announces something to the disciples as his principal commentary on recent events. In other words, after the struggle with darkness and evil, the temptation to yield to abandonment, and from the embrace of the ordeal and surrender in death, comes a declaration: peace to you, or peace for you.

What we have in other words is a gift, something we are to receive and appropriate, not something we have to create or bring about in ourselves.

This peace, as Jesus later amplifies, is his own.” “My own peace I give you.” It comes from him as its source, and the source – to be repetitive – is the resurrection victory. The peace we are offered is thus an assurance. Given its source, it is not simply the peace of calmness or tranquillity. That’s the sort of peace the world gives.

Peace and tranquillity are not negligible experiences. They are times to be treasured, when noise is unobtrusive or distant and far away. But this is not the peace of Christ, and it is not what Jesus offers after the resurrection.

The peace Jesus offers is the fruit of his overcoming, an antidote to the experience of evil and all those things that try the human spirit — melancholy, despondency, despair, discouragement, and the experience of futility. The peace offered to us is the quality that helps us to do battle and make us capable of overcoming. The world cannot give it because it is the world itself that creates the obstacles that peace overcomes.

We have to open ourselves to receive the gift. I have said that the experience of stillness or the calmness we can induce in ourselves are not yet the peace of Christ, but they may be one of its preconditions. You can’t know the peace of Christ if you never pause, if you cannot keep still, if you must always be on the go and on the move. Centuries of experience in this matter tell us that we must learn not to avoid silence but to cultivate it, a few moments a day, not much at the start, and then for longer periods as the need is felt. That’s the preparation ground for receiving the peace of Christ.

Peace is a gift, as I say. During the course of the Mass, on the other hand, it constitutes a wish. The exchange of peace at that time is more than just a transient ritual, a lukewarm way of saying hello. It is the exchange of a deep desire that you and I may have in our lives the capacity Jesus displayed in his for overcoming all that is dark, threatening and destructive in life, and coming out victoriously on the other side. This is the peace I wish for you, and the wish you also extend to me. It is the wish that circulates to and from everyone in the assembly.

By: Father Henry Charles PhD