c. 2004 Religion News Service
Pope Declares `Year of the Eucharist’ to Promote Peace
VATICAN CITY (RNS) Pope John Paul II on Friday (Oct. 8) declared October 2004 to October 2005 the “Year of the Eucharist” and urged Catholics to learn from the sacrament to become “promoters of communion, peace and solidarity.”
To open the observance, the Roman Catholic pontiff issued the 40th apostolic letter of his 26-year reign, entitled “Stay With Us Lord.” He addressed the 32-page document to Catholic bishops, clergy and faithful worldwide.
“Every Mass, even when celebrated in hiding and in a lost region of the earth, always carries the mark sign of universality,” he said. “The Christian who participates in the Eucharist learns from it to become a promoter of communion, peace and solidarity in all the circumstances of life.”
The Eucharist is the sacrament of the body, blood, soul and divinity of Christ, whom the church believes is present in the bread, known as the host, as well as the wine, of which worshippers partake. The church teaches it was instituted by Christ at the Last Supper and perpetuates his sacrifice on the cross.
The pope described the Year of the Eucharist as a “synthesis” of the two “Holy Years,” the years devoted to the Virgin Mary, the family and the rosary that he has called during his pontificate. It is, he said, “a sort of summit of all the roads traveled.”
“The lacerated image of our world, which began the new millennium with the specter of terrorism and the tragedy of war, calls Christians more than ever to live the Eucharist as a great school of peace,” he said.
The Eucharist, John Paul said, forms “men and women who, at various levels of responsibility in social, cultural and political life, make themselves weavers of dialogue and communion.”
While leaving it up to local churches to decide how to celebrate the year, the pope invited Catholics to make Sunday “a special day of faith,” cultivate the Liturgy of the Hours and devote time in the evening to “eucharistic adoration,” praying before the tabernacle containing “the real presence of Christ” in the consecrated host.
John Paul said Catholics also should practice “service to others,” especially the sick, the elderly, the unemployed and immigrants.
“Why not make of this Year of the Eucharist a period in which diocesan and parish communities devote themselves in a special way to encounter the so many poor of this world with fraternal activism?” he asked.
The year will open formally at an International Eucharistic Congress Oct. 10-17 at Guadalajara, Mexico, and close with a Synod of Bishops Oct. 2-29 at the Vatican. World Day of Youth celebrations at Cologne, Germany, Aug. 16-21, on the theme of “We Have Come to Worship Him,” will also center on the Eucharist.
To open observances in Rome, John Paul will celebrate a Mass in St. Peter’s Basilica on the evening of Oct. 17, one day after the 26th anniversary of his election as pope.
“I feel as a great grace of the 27th year of my Petrine ministry, which I am about to begin, the power to call now all the church to contemplate, praise and adore this ineffable sacrament in a most special way,” the pope said.
_ Peggy Polk
Ed McAteer, Prominent Christian Conservative, Dead at 78
(RNS) Ed McAteer, a prominent Christian conservative and the founder of the Religious Roundtable, died Tuesday (Oct. 5).
McAteer, whose conservative political organization began in 1979, was 78, news services reported. He had been treated for cancer.
The Memphis, Tenn., resident was recognized for holding the National Affairs Briefing in Dallas in 1980 that connected then-presidential candidate Ronald Reagan with evangelicals during the campaign.
“I know you can’t endorse me, but I can endorse you,” Reagan famously said at the time.
McAteer, a former sales executive with the Colgate-Palmolive Co., left secular business behind to engage in Christian activism.
“Ed McAteer probably did as much as anyone to awaken the conscience of evangelical Christians and other people of faith to their obligation and responsibility to be the `salt’ and `light’ in society that Jesus commanded us to be,” said Richard Land, president of the Southern Baptist Convention’s Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission, in a statement to the denomination’s news service.
“Ed had a tremendous vision for an informed and engaged Christian community in the life of our nation as well as Christians’ responsibility to the state of Israel.”
The Rev. Jerry Falwell of Lynchburg, Va., said McAteer greatly influenced his career.
“Ed, more than anyone else, is responsible for the emergence of the religious right in America,” Falwell said, the Associated Press reported.
“He encouraged me to use my pulpit to speak out on moral and social issues, and I loved and revered him.”
_ Adelle M. Banks
Accused New Orleans Priests Will Have Church Trial
(RNS) The Vatican has ordered church trials in the cases of three New Orleans priests accused of sexually abusing minors and said that Archbishop Alfred Hughes will handle a fourth case administratively.
The Rev. William Maestri, a spokesman for the Archdiocese of New Orleans, refused to name the priests who will be tried, claiming that disclosure could compromise the rights of the accused and the complainants.
However, he said an administrative hearing will be held in the case of the Rev. Pat Sanders, a popular Belle Chasse pastor who is accused of abusing two 16-year-olds during a 1993 outing to Biloxi, Miss.
Maestri announced the trials on Tuesday (Oct. 5).
The trials will be the first such legal proceedings to be held in New Orleans since priest sex-abuse scandals rocked the Catholic Church in 2002. But the public may never know the final disposition of the landmark proceedings.
Church trials are conducted in private, Maestri said. Archdiocesan officials have the final say on disclosing tribunal rulings to the public.
“I think that would be handled on a case-by-case basis depending upon the judgment of the archdiocese on the need to know,” Maestri said.
Unlike civil trials, church trials are held in secret before a panel of three to five canon lawyers, whose job it is to render a judgment. Parties can appeal the court’s rulings to a second court of review, and then to Rome, Maestri said.
The rulings in the three sex-abuse trials would not be disclosed until the appeals process is exhausted, Maestri said. But church officials may keep them under wraps.
That upsets Lyn Hayward Taylor, who has vigorously fought for transparency in abuse cases as founder of the New Orleans chapter of the Survivors Network of Those Abused by Priests.
“It’s the same culture of secrecy that has kept this scandal and this horror alive,” she said. “They are going to decide whether one of their own is guilty . . . of what is considered a crime and in some cases is punishable by the death penalty. They just don’t get it. They don’t believe they have to be subjected to the same kind of public scrutiny that the rest of the world has.”
In the three cases set for trial, it is likely the charges _ at least in some instances _ are too old for criminal prosecution. When abuse allegations surface years after the fact, which happens often in church cases, prosecutors are unable to bring charges because of statutes of limitations.
The New Orleans archdiocese has said two deacons and eight diocesan priests have been credibly accused since 1950. They have never identified some; others were named after the archdiocese adopted new procedures relating to sex abuse charges.
_ Martha Carr
Congress Honors Victims of 1963 Church Bombing
WASHINGTON (RNS) Congress has formally commemorated the four young black girls who died in the 1963 bombing of Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Ala.
The U.S. House of Representatives approved a resolution on Wednesday (Oct. 6) honoring Addie Mae Collins, Denise McNair, Carole Robertson and Cynthia Wesley, and the Senate was expected to do the same.
“Although this tragic incident obviously stirred the conscience of both our country and Congress, it has never been formally noted by the House of Representatives, and I am grateful that 41 years later we can commemorate this critical event in such a unifying and bipartisan way,” said U.S. Rep. Artur Davis, D-Ala.
_ Mary Orndorff
Quote of the Day: Ambassador Robert Jordan
(RNS) “Allowing Baptist churches on every street corner was, of course, never a goal.”
_ Former U.S. Ambassador to Saudi Arabia Robert Jordan, speaking to The Washington Times about a push to allow greater religious freedom in Saudi Arabia. Jordan said the Saudis are privately angered but publicly nonchalant about a State Department report that chided the kingdom on its lack of religious freedom.
MO/JL END
