News - June 2019 RSS Feed

During their recent annual Spring General Assembly in Baltimore, the U.S. Catholic Bishops approved three additional measures to address abuse and accountability by bishops. The measures expand upon Pope Francis’s Motu proprio (“Vos estis lux mundi” [“You are the light of the world”]) and the U.S. Charter for the Protection of Children and Young People. The term Motu proprio in Canon Law refers to a document issued by the Pope on his own initiative and personally signed by him.

Today we celebrate Father’s Day in the United States. Other countries, especially in Europe and Latin America, celebrate Father’s Day on St. Joseph’s Day (March 19). The first event sponsored in honor of Fathers occurred in 1908 in memory of 362 coal miners who died in explosions at the Fairmont Coal Company in Monagh, West Virginia in December, 1907. The next year, Sonora Smart Dodd, a resident of Spokane, Washington, who was one of six children raised by a widower who was also a veteran of the Civil War, tried to establish an official equivalent to Mother’s Day for male parents. She was successful in her efforts. Washington State celebrated the first state-wide Father’s Day on June 19, 1910, which was the third Sunday in June that year. Slowly the holiday spread. President Calvin Coolidge urged state governments to observe Father’s Day in 1924. Father’s Day finally became a national holiday, celebrated on the third Sunday in June in 1972. This was fifty-eight years after Mother’s Day became an official national holiday.

Last weekend Pope Francis visited Romania. On Sunday, June 2, 2019, on the last day of his visit, the Holy Father presided over a Divine Liturgy in the small town on Blaj, the heartland of the country’s Greek-Catholic Church. Although the largest religious denomination in Romania is Orthodox, a small percentage is Catholic. Some of the Romanian Orthodox entered into union with Rome in 1700. They kept their Byzantine liturgy and Eastern-rite traditions. During the Divine Liturgy in Blaj, Pope Francis declared “blessed” seven of the Greek-Catholic bishops who had died a martyr’s death in the decades following the suppression of the Eastern-rite Romanian Church in 1948.

I have been thinking about Mental Health Conditions, particularly among our young people. This has been a particular worry or concern for me. Let me be more specific in what I mean when I talk about mental illness. The National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI) states that a mental illness is a condition that affects a person’s thinking, feeling, or mood. Such conditions may affect someone’s ability to relate to others and function each day. Each person will have different experiences—even people with the same diagnosis. Recovery, including meaningful roles in social life, school, and work, is possible when you start treatment early and play a strong role in your own recovery process.