Bishop Brungardt brings Kansas greetings to the Philippines
Bishop John B. Brungardt recently returned from a trip to the Philippines where he met with local bishops and clergy, and spent time with local Catholics, including the families of the Filipino priests currently serving in the Diocese of Dodge City.
The trip came on the heels of the bishop’s Ad Limina visit with the Holy Father at the Vatican.
It was a two-part visit; the bishop spent time in the Diocese of Sorsogon and the Diocese of Boac, each of which have long provided priests to the Diocese of Dodge City, which, in turn, supports their vocations programs.
Child migrant surge originates in traffickers' lies, bishop says
San Pedro Sula, Honduras, Aug 5, 2014 / 12:04 am (CNA/EWTN News) - A Central American bishop has said the recent wave of migrants to the U.S., which has included many unaccompanied minors, has been shaped in large part by “false illusions” created by organized criminals and traffickers.
“It is unfortunate that the illusion and mirage that the U.S. is the best place for all of the children from Honduras, when it is a false and empty promise to say that arriving there they will have free education, health care, food, and clothing,” Bishop Romulo Emiliani Sanchez told the Honduran newspaper “La Tribuna.”
Bishop Emiliani is an auxiliary of the Diocese of San Pedro Sula, located in the north of Honduras near the Guatemalan border.
Some media reports have estimated the number of underage immigrants who have arrived in the U.S. in recent months at 50,000, the majority of them without the company of their parents. Many come from Honduras, El Salvador, and Guatmela in hope of obtaining a better future and earning their U.S. residency.
‘Battlefield Angels’: Book highlights nuns’
work on both sides of Civil War
“Battlefield Angels: The Daughters of Charity Work as Civil War Nurses” by James Rada Jr. Legacy Publishing (Gettysburg, Pa., 2011).
230 pp., $19.95.
Reviewed by
Sarah Mulhall Adelman
Catholic News Service
In “Battlefield Angels: The Daughters of Charity Work as Civil War Nurses,” James Rada Jr., known for his many historical novels, tells the story of one order of Catholic women religious who served as nurses during the Civil War.
Catholic sisters fulfilled an essential role in the medical, psychological, and spiritual care of both Union and Confederate soldiers. Rada describes women religious who selflessly performed life-saving work in often miserable conditions and thereby gained the admiration and respect of countless contemporaries.
'Powerful, historical’ drama recounts
1920s religious persecution in Mexico
By John Mulderig
Catholic News Service
NEW YORK (CNS) -- “Viva Cristo Rey!” “Long live Christ the King!”
Such was the rallying cry of the Cristeros -- devout Mexican Catholics driven into open, sometimes violent, opposition to their government during the 1920s by its policy of persecution against the church. This pious exclamation also serves as the stirring refrain of the powerful historical drama recounting those events, “For Greater Glory” (ARC Entertainment).
Campaign seeks to help educate escaped Nigerian schoolgirls
By KATY SENOUR
Washington D.C., Aug 5, 2014 / 04:18 am (CNA) - As more than 200 Nigerian schoolgirls remain missing after being kidnapped this spring, one human rights group has started a campaign to help educate those who were able to escape.
“Right now as these courageous girls remain in Nigeria, they are confronted daily with the paralyzing fear of recapture and potential village attacks,” Jubilee Campaign legal intern Sarah Jane Norris told CNA.
“These are our sisters-in-Christ and they need our help.”
In April, the radical Islamic group Boko Haram kidnapped more than 200 girls from a boarding school in Chibok, Nigeria. About 60 girls have escaped, according to report, but the majority remain missing despite government efforts to locate them.
Jubilee Campaign USA – a non-profit group that supports human rights and religious freedom – is now raising money to help further the education of several of the girls who have escaped.
Protestors slam global failure to save missing Nigerian girls
By ADELAIDE MENA
Washington D.C., Jul 30, 2014 / 05:18 pm (CNA/EWTN News) - Gathering outside the Nigerian Embassy in Washington, D.C. to mark the 100th day since the kidnapping of nearly 300 girls in Nigeria, protestors urged more effective action to return them home.
“We're here to talk about over 200 girls who are still in captivity, who have been violated, who some are pregnant, who have been put into sex trafficking,” said Faith McDonnell, Religious Liberty Program Director of the Institute on Religion and Democracy.
“But that's not the end with Boko Haram,” warned McDonnell, who helped organize the July 24 rally. “That's just the beginning.”
The event commemorated the 100 day anniversary since 276 schoolgirls, most between the ages of 16 and 18, were kidnapped from a boarding school in Chibok, Nigeria, in the northeastern part of the country.
The girls were taken and held captive by Boko Haram, a militant terrorist organization launched in 2009 with the aim of enacting a narrow view of Sharia law in the country. Previously, the organization has targeted government officials, security forces, Christian minorities, and moderate Muslims in the predominantly Muslim Northern region of Nigeria.
Advice from immigrant family:
‘Be active -- in your family, your community, your Church’
By David Myers
Southwest Kansas Register
There were two times in Alberto Mora’s life when he fell in love.
The first time was when he peered through the store window of a shop in his native city of Nuevo Casas Grande in the state of Chihuahua, Mexico.
“I saw her through the big glass,” he said with a wide smile, referring to his future wife, Bertha. “I told her, ‘You have nice eyes,’ and I asked her name.”
The second time he fell in love was about nine years later, when he, Bertha and their two daughters, Daniela and Victoria, visited Bertha’s sister in Great Bend. Life was good in Mexico. Alberto was a paramedic at a local hospital. His daughters were fine students.
But when he experienced life in Great Bend, he knew that’s where he wanted to live. It would not be easy, uprooting his family and moving to a different country.
Natural Family Planning praised for respecting women, nature
By ADELAIDE MENA
Washington D.C., Jul 31, 2014 / 04:18 am (CNA/EWTN News) - Catholic teaching on sexuality and fertility is being hailed as a moral alternative to hormonal birth control that embraces nature and respects the fullness of women’s lives and dignity.
Author Mary Rice Hasson, a fellow at the Washington, D.C.-based Ethics and Public Policy Center, noted that many women, both religious and secular, are seeing the “terrible side effects” of artificial contraception and searching for “a better way” to monitor fertility.
“There’s increasingly an openness to what’s good for women,” she told CNA July 24, explaining that there has been a disconnect in society when “we buy organic milk to avoid hormones, but yet we’re putting these same hormones into our bodies” through hormonal contraception.
As hormonal birth control is called into question, Hasson said, the Church’s teaching on the dignity of women, fertility and sexuality offers an alternative.
A Pearl of great price
Sister celebrates her Native past, while
serving those who ‘hunger for the Lord’
By Charlene Scott Myers
Special to the Register
An old song says that when Irish eyes are smiling, they chase all your cares away. The eyes of Sister Virginia Pearl, CSJ, are a combustible combination: Irish and American Indian, and they brighten a room like a candle in a dark space.
A sister of St. Joseph of Concordia, Kansas, she recently was one of two sisters in the Diocese of Dodge City nominated for the Catholic Church Extension Society’s 2012 Lumen Christi awards.
The other nominee is Sister Matilde Reyna Donis Monterroso, MCMI, of Guatemala, who has been Parish Life Coordinator at St. Alphonsus Church in Satanta for 10 years and soon will serve in Kenya.
“I didn’t want to become a sister, but the Lord kept calling me!” said a laughing Sister Virginia, a chaplain for the past 20 years at the Larned Correctional Mental Health Facility and the Larned State Hospital, and a teacher for many years previously.
“I thought being a sister would be dull,” she admitted.
Houston native makes final vows in Great Bend as Dominican Sister
GREAT BEND – Sister Mary Vuong, OP, made her Perpetual Profession of Vows May 26 as a Dominican Sister of Peace at the Great Bend Motherhouse. Sister Mary’s friend Father Anthony Nguyen, a diocesan priest from Jackson, Mississippi, presided at the Mass.
Attending her profession were her parents, Thu Vuong and Moi Vu, her sister Jamie, brother-in-law Darren, and their children Jerie, Devin, and Hailey, all having traveled from her hometown of Houston. Also there to celebrate were friends, family, and Dominican Sisters from throughout the United States.