Angelus News | August 2-9, 2019 | Vol. 4 No. 27

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VATICAN MEDIA WORLD NEW VOICES — Pope Francis has named Vatican communications staffer Matteo Bruni (left) and Brazilian Vatican Radio journalist Christiane Murray (right) as his new spokesman and deputy spokeswoman. The pair take over for interim Holy See Press Office Director Alessandro Gisotti, who has been filling in since American Greg Burke and Spaniard Paloma Garcia Ovejero both resigned from their roles at the end of 2018. Benedict’s surprise daytrip Summer breaks aren’t just for students. On July 25, Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI left Vatican City for the first time in four years to pay a surprise visit to the papal summer residence of Castel Gandolfo, where he walked the garden paths where he used to pray. According to Italian media, his next stop was to pray at a 15th-century Marian sanctuary in the town of Rocca di Papa. He finished the day with dinner at the house of Bishop Raffaello Martinelli of Frascati, a small diocese outside of Rome. Benedict’s last venture outside of Vatican City was in July 2015, when he spent two weeks in Castel Gandolfo at Pope Francis’ invitation. The capital of the crisis of faith? Germany’s Christian churches — both Protestant and Catholic — lost more than 400,000 members last year, according to data published by the German Bishops Conference and the Evangelical Church in Germany. Church membership in Germany is officially recorded by the government, which collects donations for religious groups through a “church tax.” The tax requires members of a church to pay up to 9 percent of taxable income, which the state gives to the church they are registered with. Church membership can be renounced at any time, and the state doesn’t require a reason to leave. The Catholic Church in Germany, which counts 23 million members, lost 216,078 in 2018. “Every departure hurts,” president of Germany’s Evangelical Church Heinrich Bedford-Strohm told Vatican News. “Since people today, unlike in the past, decide out of freedom whether they want to belong to the church, it is important for us today to make even clearer why the Christian message is such a strong basis for life.” If membership trends continue, Germany’s Christian population could drop by half by 2060, according to a study by the University of Freiburg. Cardinal Louis Sako at a conference in Rome last month. Join the army, but don’t start one If you want to fight ISIS, join the army or get active in politics. But just don’t get involved with so-called “Christian militias,” Iraq’s senior prelate told the country’s Catholics. “We respect individual decisions to join Al-Hashd Al-Shaabi or to get involved in politics,” read a statement by Cardinal Louis Raphaël I Sako, head of the Chaldean Catholic Church, “but not to form a Christian ‘brigade,’ since forming a Christian armed militia contradicts the Christian spirituality that calls for love, tolerance, forgiveness, and peace.” Plans to create Christian militias to help fight against the Islamic State in Mosul and the Nineveh Plain, two areas with historically large populations of Christians in Iraq, have emerged in the past years as violence has threatened the area. One such militia, known as the Babylon Brigades, has been relatively successful, giving rise to a political movement, the Babylon movement, which won two out of five seats reserved for Christians in Iraq’s 2018 elections. CATHOLIC NEWS SERVICE/PAUL HARING 4 • ANGELUS • August 2-9, 2019
NATION Abortion by cable and on demand Whether on TV, streaming, or in movies, on-screen depictions of abortion have increased this year, a California scholar has found. “You’re definitely seeing more of the matter-of-fact ‘I am pregnant, I don’t want to be, I’m going to have an abortion,’ ” said Gretchen Sisson, a University of California San Francisco sociologist, to The New York Times July 18. According to a study by Sisson, almost two dozen characters have had an abortion on-screen halfway through this year. The increase in abortion as plot points comes as pro-choice activists call for its greater portrayal onscreen. Meanwhile, as abortion on-screen becomes more normalized, pro-life filmmakers have turned away from the Hollywood establishment. “Nobody’s speaking for us, Hollywood doesn’t speak for us,” filmmaker Nick Loeb, director of the forthcoming film “Roe v. Wade,” told The New York Times. “But when people make movies for us, they’re loved and they’re adored.” CATHOLIC NEWS SERVICE/YURI GRIPAS, REUTERS A Catholic callout on death penalty U.S. Attorney General William Barr is a practicing Catholic. Catholics are criticizing the Justice Department following the decision to reinstate the federal death penalty after 16 years of no federal executions. Attorney General William Barr, himself a Catholic, announced July 25 that the Justice Department will once again begin implementing the death penalty starting this December. “The United States’ death penalty system is tragically flawed. Resuming federal executions — especially by an administration that identifies itself as ‘pro-life’ — is wrongheaded and unconscionable,” Catholic Mobilizing Network Executive Director Krisanne Vaillancourt Murphy told Catholic News Service. Bishop Frank Dewane of Venice, Florida, chairman of the U.S. bishops’ Committee on Domestic Justice and Human Development, said he was “deeply concerned” about the change of policy and urged the Trump administration to reconsider. A change in the language in the Catechism of the Catholic Church last year by Pope Francis declared that the death penalty is “inadmissible because it is an attack on the inviolability and dignity of the person.” CATHOLIC NEWS SERVICE/COURTESY BOYS TOWN NEBRASKA’S HOLY FATHER — Father Edward Flanagan talks with a group of boys in an undated photo. The Irish-born priest founded Boys Town, a well-known Catholic orphanage in Nebraska that today serves as a center for troubled youth. The effort to have Father Flanagan canonized took a step forward on July 22 with the presentation of the “Positio super Virtutibus” (“Position on the Virtues”) to the Vatican Congregation for Saints’ Causes, along with a letter of support from Archbishop George J. Lucas of Omaha. Sun-powered Catholic charity Washington, D.C., is about to get a pope-inspired shock to its energy grid. Catholic Energies, a nonprofit dedicated to switching churches to solar energy, is teaming up with Catholic Charities to install almost 5,000 solar panels in a fiveacre plot in northeast Washington, D.C. The array will be the capital’s largest, and is inspired in part by Pope Francis’ encyclical on the environment, “Laudato Si” (“Praise Be to You”). “We love being supportive of the pope’s position and believe that it really has helped advance the conversation within the Catholic community about our responsibility to be good stewards of this earth,” Catholic Charities CFO Mary Jane Morrow told The Washington Post July 21. The project is scheduled to be completed by early 2020 and should bring Catholic Charities enough energy credits to power 12 of its properties throughout the capital. August 2-9, 2019 • ANGELUS • 5
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Page 3 and 4: ON THE COVER A nationwide trend pus
Page 5: NEW WORLD OF FAITH BY ARCHBISHOP JO
Page 9 and 10: LA Catholic Events Items for LA Cat
Page 11 and 12: IN EXILE BY FATHER RONALD ROLHEISER
Page 13 and 14: Statues of Confederate generals bro
Page 15 and 16: NANCY WIECHEC/CATHOLIC NEWS SERVICE
Page 17 and 18: ing evidence of a second miracle fo
Page 19 and 20: and firemen broke through the smoke
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Page 23 and 24: San Francisco to study English led
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Page 29 and 30: tainment. As some psychiatrist once
Page 31 and 32: no objective reality or truth, and
Page 34 and 35: THE CRUX BY HEATHER KING Crystal cl

Angelus News | August 2-9, 2019 | Vol. 4 No. 27

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