News - March 2022 RSS Feed

April is Child Abuse Protection Month. The Secretariat of Child and Youth Protection for the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops has prepared a very nice resource booklet of which I am going to make use for my column today.

On March 11, 2022 Cardinal Gregory, Archbishop Lori of Baltimore and Bishop Koenig of Wilmington, the three (arch)bishops who lead dioceses in Maryland, wrote a guest commentary for the Baltimore Sun in which they urged support for women and their children and not an “unnecessary, symbolic” bill that would enshrine abortion in Maryland’s Constitution. Here is an excerpt from their op-ed commentary:

Archbishop Boris Gudziak, the archbishop of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Archeparchy of Philadelphia was in Washington on March 10, 2022 for a memorial prayer service at the Ukrainian Catholic National Shrine of the Holy Family. The prayer service was offered to honor those killed in the war undertaken in recent days by invading Russian forces. In a press conference held before the memorial prayer service Archbishop Gudziak made the following remarks:

Jesuit Father Jean-Pierre de Caussade died on March 6, 1751 at the age of 76. We don’t much about his life except that he spent his priestly life in a series of somewhat obscure assignments. One of his assignments was to serve as the spiritual director to a convent of Visitation nuns in France. In that capacity he prepared a series of conferences and wrote a series of letters for the benefit of the Visitation Nuns at that convent. Political events in France over the next seventy-five years or so kept things in a state of upheaval. It wasn’t until a century after Father de Caussade’s death that the nuns living at the convent thought to publish de Caussade’s writings under the title Abandonment to Divine Providence.

After the 5:00 p.m. Mass on Sunday, February 27, 2022, a woman originally from the Ukraine stopped me to ask that we pray for the people of the Ukraine. This individual still has family members living there and implored with me to pray and get other people to pray for this intention as well. This was a most timely request. Both Pope Francis and Cardinal Gregory have urged us to pray for peace in the Ukraine and other hot spots in the world in recent statements.