Andrew's Blog

January Blog 2023

1/7/2023

I acknowledge and thank the Lkwungen People
for allowing me to live, pray, work, and play on their lands. I am deeply sorry for the injustices inflicted upon the First Nations, Inuit and Métis peoples in Turtle Island by the complicity of Governments & settlers, including the Catholic Church, in the colonialism inherent in the Indian Act and Residential Schools including racism, neglect, many forms of abuse & cultural genocide. I commit to work for truth, healing and reconciliation.

1. The Incarnation

Source: Britannica. The first to adore the Christ child were the humble shepherds not the Magi.

As Franciscans the Incarnation is of special importance to us and the first nativity crèche was staged by St Francis of Assisi in 1223.

Pope Francis Christmas Homily :
“In order to rediscover the meaning of Christmas, we need to look to the manger. Yet why is the manger so important? Because it is the sign, and not by chance, of Christ’s coming into this world. It is how he announces his coming... Read More at Andrew's January Blog

2. Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI, RIP

Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI, aged 95. Vatican Media (V

Opinions vary on all Popes. None are perfect.
For me his good points were that he was the first green pope and wrote two great encyclicals. His bad point for me was he allowed his partial criticism of liberation theology to become seen as total opposition to it.

I will consider Benedict XVI in three ways (1) as the first green pope; (2) on theologians and liberation theology and (3) his encyclicals Deus Caritas est /God is love (2005) and Caritas in Veritate /Charity in truth (2009) which inspired me.... Read More at Andrew's January Blog

3. Talking about truth (& reconciliation), did you know how Canada swindled the Métis out of land?

"No reconciliation is possible if the history of Métis lands and scrip is not known." Nathalie Kermoal
As a high school teacher in the 1970’s I taught about the Red River Rebellion 1869-70, the North West Rebellion 1885 and Riel’s execution and the effect on English-French relations in Canada. Some criticised me for my pro Métis approach as I did not consider Riel a traitor. I did not then know about the scrip issue. I recently learned about it from the CBC... Read More at Andrew's January Blog

Read Andrew's full January Blog

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December 2022 Blog

11/6/2022

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Icons on Ammo Boxes

Oleksandr Klymenko and Sofia Atlantova, a husband-and-wife team of iconographers based in Kyiv, have been painting icons on the lids of used ammunition boxes since 2014, when the war in Ukraine’s Donbas region against Russian-backed separatists began. Their sacred art pieces have come to be known as “Icons on Ammo Boxes” and have toured 13 countries, 45 cities, and 90 locations to date raising money for hospitals. ...Read more

1. CHANGES AT CARITAS INTERNATIONALIS

Following allegations of bullying and mistreatment of employees, Pope Francis on Tuesday (22 Nov 2022) in a decree, removed the entire leadership of the Roman Catholic Church's international charity & social justice wing and appointed a temporary Extraordinary Commissioner, Italian engineer and management consultant Dr Pier Francesco Pinelli, to run it. During his six-month mandate the Extraordinary Commissioner is entrusted with re-launching the organization. ...Read more

2. SYNODALITY FOOD FOR THOUGHT & QUESTIONS

US Bishops elect anti-Francis archbishop as new president
& elect Coakley, a Viganò supporter, as No. 3 official

https://www.ncronline.org/feature-series/usccb-fall-assembly-2022/stories

How will this affect the North American Continental Synod Report to Rome? Will Canadian Bishops be able to stand up to US Bishops or will they be out-numbered & bull dozed? [196 U.S. vs 72 Canadian (arch)dioceses] What will the Mexican input reflect and where will they stand? ...Read more

Also read about: 4. CATHOLIC SOCIAL TEACHING IN UKRAINE

To see all of Andrew's December blog click HERE

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October 2022 Blog

10/8/2022

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I acknowledge and thank the Lkwungen People for allowing me to live, pray, work, and play on their lands. I am deeply sorry for the injustices inflicted upon the First Nations, Inuit and Métis peoples in Turtle Island by the complicity of settlers and the Catholic Church in the colonialism inherent in the Indian Act and Residential Schools including racism, neglect, many forms of abuse & cultural genocide. I commit to work for truth, healing and reconciliation.

1. Why do I write about the history of Ukraine?

Because we pray:
“O Master, grant that I may ever seek
not so much to be understood, as to understand.”
The religious cultural underpinnings can be seen to be active on both sides.
Below is Prof Fr John McGuckin’s understanding. (Emphasis is Andrew’s.)

I virtually attended in a lecture at the Centre for Studies in Religion and Society at the University of Victoria, 22 Sept 2022 by John McGuckin, a Romanian Orthodox priest and Nielsen Emeritus Professor of Byzantine Christianity at Columbia University and Union Theological Seminary, and currently on the Faculty of Theology in the University of Oxford.

The recent Russian aggression in Ukraine is a resurgence of a pattern of often fatal dominance that has been played out in relations between Ukraine and Russia over past centuries.

In recent times, Kirill, the Orthodox Patriarch of Moscow, has even called the aggression a “fight for religious values”: a statement which, along with his overall wholehearted support of Vladimir Putin’s irredentist views of Ukraine’s role within a resurgent Russian empire, has earned him much criticism outside Russia. The talk asked how this situation came about before moving on to focus on the role of religious ideas particular to Russian Orthodoxy, which might have fomented unhealthy views about the value and meaning of unity, and obedience in politics and religion.

He said: “My topic today is to reflect on the role of Eastern Orthodox ideas and culture in the affairs beginning with the recent incursions into Ukrainian sovereignty after 2014 and culminating in the Russian invasion of Ukraine beginning in February 2022, and still continuing as we meet today in September; for it is clear enough that aspects of religious philosophy and culture are involved here, but in a complicated way.

He did not address the desire of Russia for a deep water all-year harbour such as offered by Crimea, or the unfulfilled (and perhaps unfulfillable) promises of NATO states to consider Ukrainian membership which raised the potential of having oppositional nuclear capacity on the borders of mainland Russia. Nor even the centuries of imperial presumption that have characterized Russian attitudes to the Ukraine from the time of Catherine the Great to the Orange Revolution [2004] that ousted Viktor Yanukovych.

Prof McGuckin focused on the extent that Russian Orthodox cultural and religious ideas play in this relation between Kiev and Moscow. The religious cultural underpinnings can be seen active both from the Ukrainian and Russian sides. Was it not the case, for example, that Petro Poroshenko, the 5th Ukrainian [pro-Ukrainian but since accused of treason] president ran a campaign around three slogans: Armiya, Mova, Vera : that is the centrality of the army, the language, and the faith? This religious-cultural underpinning from the Russian side is extensive, deep-rooted (certainly in Vladimir Putin and the current Orthodox Patriarch of Moscow) and has been elaborated many times publicly, from the Slavophile movement of the 19th century through to current ideologues such as Alexander Dugin [whose daughter Darya was assassinated 20 Aug 2022].

One shorthand for it is the theory of Russkiy Mir - the greater “Russian world” that is bonded together by ties of history, culture and familial languages: which those Orthodox Christians who support it claim to be rooted in the Byzantine traditions of the Church’s governance: traditions which are alleged to be of equal validity to, but misunderstood by, the West.

One of the elements involved in this crisis is the determination of many Orthodox Christians in Ukraine to distance themselves from the spiritual governance of the Russian Orthodox Patriarch in Moscow. This began a long time ago if we take into consideration the complex situation of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church – the seventeenth century in fact; but it is also true in relation purely to the Orthodox churches in Ukraine subject to Moscow: for it began in the early twentieth century and gained new momentum after Ukrainian independence from the Soviets. The contemporary flight from what is known as the ‘ecclesial jurisdiction’ of Moscow, was encouraged by President Poroshenko and has been eventually formalized recently by the senior Orthodox Patriarch Bartholomeos of Constantinople, whose awarding of the status of Autocephaly, or independent status, to the three forms of dissentient Ukrainian Orthodox Church1, was clearly a rebuke to the Moscow Patriarchate for being so subservient to Russian state ideology: a rebuke that has resulted in the Moscow synod breaking communion with Constantinople: one of the most serious ruptures in Orthodoxy for many decades.

The claim by many Russian Orthodox, and most of Patriarch Kirill’s synod of bishops, that they have a continuing right to dominance over all the Ukrainian Orthodox church - which is one indication of the pervasiveness of the theory of the Russkiy Mir - can also be seen to be widely contested among most other Orthodox churches; not least from the rapid condemnation of the Russian invasion by so many other Orthodox hierarchs. This was led by the Patriarch of Constantinople followed by a widespread call among world Orthodox leaders for the violence between fellow Orthodox nations to be brought to a speedy end. There were some notable silences: as for example the large Serbian orthodox Church.

Patriarch Kirill and his spokesmen have frequently blamed the conflict on so-called ‘malicious elements’ – a code word for Greek Catholics on the one hand whom they blame for fomenting the desire to hold the Moscow Patriarchate to account, and offensively designating them as Uniate – a charge that in current usage means politically chauvinistic and ecclesiastically schismatic. This hostile vocabulary has also now been passed on to the breakaway Orthodox churches: resulting in the specious charge that the Russian army is a force meant to liberate Ukraine from fascism. But the so-called ‘malicious elements’ are also meant to encompass the Western powers and it is Moscow’s view that their agent has been the Patriarch of Constantinople, affording independent liberty to the Ukrainian Orthodox as an attempt to politically de-stabilize Russian politics. The Constantinopolitan Patriarchate, however, has a long history of protective supervision of the diaspora Slavic churches which sought to escape the control of the Soviet governments, and indeed historically it took direct charge of the church of Kiev in the fifteenth and early seventeenth centuries before shortly afterwards transferring that responsibility by proxy to Moscow. Is it the case, then, that there are values at play here that the secular West never understood and cannot appreciate? Or is it a question of some deep-seated attitudes at play that need to be brought out into the light to see if their religious garb is genuine, or masquerade?

One of the new terms we have accepted into common parlance these days, in the aftermath of the Russian invasion of Ukraine – for that’s what it was and no amount of fake news or what George Orwell called “double speak’ (in his famous study of Soviet propaganda in the novel 1984) can mask that fact – is the word “irredentism” {which] comes out of 19th century Italian politics and signifies the policy of advocating, and struggling for, the return to Italy of all Italian-speaking districts that were presently subject to other countries’ governments. Irredentism might explain the decision to send in the ‘Little Green Men’ to eastern Ukraine’s Russian-speaking provinces (Russian troops pretending that they weren’t there) or even the decisions to hold show-plebiscites [sham, fake, fraudulent, rigged, foregone concluded, illegal] to indicate how the local populations of the Crimea and the Donbas allegedly wanted to be liberated and more deeply united with Mother Russia.

It is this notion of the Russkiy Mir (the concept of the greater Russian world of cultural and political confederation) that I would like to reflect on today; for it is here, I believe, that the confluence of church and state thinking in Russia overlap to some extent. Patriarch Kirill of Moscow actually called the February ‘invasion’ (and I pause for a moment here to unpack that little word ‘invasion’ which the Patriarch and President are too delicate to pronounce – to remind ourselves that in this case it means the bombing of hospitals [& schools] and civilian targets; the mutilation of men, women and children; the destruction of villages, churches and farms; the scattering of thousands into the wretchedness of exile; as well as widespread rape, torture and illegal assassination)…. why the Orthodox Patriarch of Moscow called that action: “a fight for religious values.”

If one was to put these sentiments into an acid wash so as to reveal them a little more clearly beyond the surface fudge: I suspect it would be the resonant chime of President Putin who often has complained that the loss of the Soviet empire is the worst thing that has happened to Russia since the era of the Tsars, and something he wishes to reverse.

Did Kirill, perhaps, dream wistfully of the time under the Soviets when so many other ancient and independent Orthodox churches were forcibly subjected to the Moscow Patriarchate’s domination as an arm of state control? The Moscow Patriarchate under the Soviets scandalously assented to, and co-operated in, the obliteration of ancient Church structures such as the Patriarchates of Bulgaria and Georgia, as well as the widespread suppression of religious freedoms - even those of itself.

This is why, for most of the other world Orthodox, this latter vision is a nightmare of the subjugation of the church that was even worse than the five centuries it was imprisoned under Ottoman regulation. The Soviet care of the Eastern Orthodox churches under the nominal supervision of the Moscow Patriarchate was in actuality one of the most extensive and destructive persecutions Christianity has ever known, and world Orthodoxy today is still trying to recover from it. No one outside the Kremlin could ever imagine that world Orthodoxy would accept this situation once more.

For the late Empire, Russkiy Mir was based on three principles: Orthodoxy, Russian language and shared culture. Patriarch Kirill cited it’s re-establishment as a great hope in one of his first speeches as the new Patriarch in May 2009, two years after Vladimir Putin had established the state-funded neo-nationalist Russkiy Mir foundation. Three months after the February invasion of Ukraine in 2022 the Patriarch again echoed Vladimir Putin (whom in 2008 he had called a ‘miracle of God’) by saying that Lenin’s ‘tragic dismemberment’ of Russia into different countries was a serious mistake that has repercussions even today.2 He seems to regard Russkiy Mir as a golden dream, comparable I think to the romantic fantasy of the world of Holy Rus that seized the nineteenth century idealists.
Several Orthodox theologians, led in the main from the Greek side, but garnering 500 signatories of intellectuals, have recently issued a denunciation3 of Russkiy Mir as a heretical idea, fundamentalist and totalitarian in character.

The name of Rus came from the Varangians [Vikings] who founded a state based on Kiev [Kyiv] which is immensely important as the symbolic birth of the people. It is, actually, the mother church of the Russians.

This Varangian foundation of the state became a source of enduring speculation about the so-called ‘Russian soul’ and in the 19th century it was a key issue between the Slavophiles and the Pro-Westerners. In some ways that old trope still endures and represents a split in contemporary Russian society between the old and the young. [i.e. Russophile vs Europhile]

Another cardinal moment in the history of the nation was the invitation by prince Vladimir of Kiev to Byzantine missionaries from Constantinople after his own baptism in 988, before he entered into political alliance by marrying Princess Anna, sister of the Byzantine emperors Basil II and Constantine VIII. He forced his people to throw their gods into the Dnieper and accept baptism. The Byzantine influence was profound in the court and the church, especially sustained by the monastics, but did not extend greatly to the village level except through the literate élite; The Mongol invasions of the 13th century inaugurated the destruction of Kiev and the dismantling of its political importance. It would enter a long period of decline and political domination by catholic Poland, and not regain free Orthodox ecclesial status again until after 1620, and the time Peter Mohyla was elected Metropolitan of Kiev in 1632.

Meanwhile the Muscovite rulers grew in significance and eventually adopted the Byzantine title of the Tsars, or Caesars. By the end of the Tartar era, in 1480, the political and ecclesial centre of Russia had moved to Moscow. The general adoption of Orthodoxy, became a factor that strengthened a certain distrust of the West, especially after the third foundational ‘memory’ of national identity occurred which was consequent on the collapse of Byzantium before Ottoman Islamic power in 1453.

Four years before this major political shake-up the Byzantine Emperor had agreed to a union of the Catholic and Orthodox churches at the council of Florence. The Moscow Metropolitan Isidore, who assented to this on behalf of Russia, was castigated on his return and the Russian Orthodox church declared that Constantinople had lapsed into heresy by accepting Papal supremacy and conforming to the decadent standards of the West. The doctrine of Moskva Tretiy Rim, Moscow the Third Rome, developed after this time. In short it meant that as Rome was once the undisputed head of Christendom, but lost that role because of its departures from strict tradition; Constantinople, also known as the New Rome, took its place as head, but now because of its infidelity that role as leader of Christendom had passed to Moscow. Moscow is the third Rome, so the legend begun by Philotheos of Pskov in 1510 went: there will be no fourth. This became an important plank in Moscow’s argument that it had assumed a certain supremacy in the Orthodox church. It was, of course, the undoubted leader in terms of [numbers of] adherents.

After the 15th century Russia was the one great protector of the Orthodox faithful in the East, while the Patriarch of Constantinople was forced by the Ottoman Sultans to adopt the role of Ethnarch of all Christians in the Sultanate and to collect the taxes imposed on them through his Phanariot agents: a role that led to much resentment against him among the Orthodox.

Even so, the Tsar of Moscow sought to consolidate the importance of his church by petitioning (some say buying) Patriarchal status for his national church; and this was granted by Patriarch Jeremias of Constantinople in 1589 who was in Russia seeking alms. But when the latter returned home with the funds he made it clear that such a new patriarchate would only rank fifth after all the others; particularly stressing that it was subordinate to his own jurisdiction. This, today, is still a tension that inflects world Orthodoxy, as Moscow sees itself, under Putin, as once more able to offer the whole world Orthodox leadership and protections (remember part of the justification for Russia entering the Syrian civil war).
This tension led to the Moscow Synod’s decision on 15th October 2018, to cut ties of communion (basically excommunicate) the Patriarchate of Constantinople and all its faithful, because of the latter’s grant of autocephaly, or independence, to the Orthodox Church of Ukraine, in defiance of Moscow’s wishes.

A last element of historical symbols we need to consider alongside our earlier three of [1] Kiev as the Mother church of the Rus, [2] the Muscovite Tsars as the centre of political dominion after Kiev’s occlusion by the Tartars and Poles, and the subsequent theory of [3] Moscow as the Third Rome. This is [4] the concept of Byzantine Symphonia which underlies the modern Russian Orthodox claim that its understanding of power and organisation, whether that of state or church, is fundamentally different to that of the West. That it alone has solid order and discipline at its core, whereas the West is decadent and individualistically disorganized.

The idea was applied to the idealized relation of church and state and elaborated from the time of Justinian the Great in the 6th century Byzantine empire. Since the laws of Russia owed a lot to the re-ordering imposed on them according to Byzantine formularies4 the Justinianic Novellae (or ‘new laws’ which reflected Christian values) were very formative there in a way they have not been on western countries where Saxon folk laws retained greater precedence.

Just as the Jews had one righteous King over all, and responsible for good political as well as religious order, for example David, so too the Christians had to have one kingdom of God on earth, one king and one church. The Pope’s complete disregard of this theory by his coronation of Charlemagne as alternative Holy Roman Emperor, on Christmas Day 800, struck the Byzantines as the first sign of a major heretical difference in terms of what God’s kingdom on earth was meant to be. The Western church, of course, after Augustine, had settled on a view of Two Cities – the earthly city driven by self-interest and greed, and the City of God which was the pure and eschatological heaven, not to be identified with anything on the earth (not even the church). The Byzantines saw this emphatic duality as a rejection of the close harmony (the symphonia) operative between earthly life and divine grace that was indivisibly present here and now. Simply put the Byzantine theory of Symphonia shies away from the stricter separation that western political theory likes to invoke between the sacred and the secular. Politically, the Western view of social order led to numerous independent princely states – the origin of the Western diversity of governance we now see. Byzantine ideas of the world order saw the single ruler who upheld the Orthodox faith, God’s chosen Emperor or Tsar, as the defender of the borders of Christendom against all faithless attackers – either from the East or the West.

What the original text in Justinian stressed, however – and what the Byzantine carefully sustained in practical politics – is that the Ruler, the King or Basileus, was not so much elevated by birthright, but by divine choice. He also drew his right to rule as Autocrat, not from the will of the people but from his appointment by God, witnessed and supported by the church. The title Autokrat sounds chilling to us now but originally just meant ‘Monarch’. Two things that were not so often quoted by the later adherents of this doctrine of Symphonia, were that (a) the Autokrat lost his right to rule if he did not sustain evangelical standards of morality, and (b) that although the Byzantines afforded him the status and right as absolute ruler, a quick glance at the regnant years of various Emperors would quickly show that in real-world politics they had massive limitations to their dominion and frequently had very short reigns indeed. Where there was no suffrage, revolution has always served instead. But Symphonia is a religio-political doctrine that certainly underpinned the Russian attitude to the Emperor as having a divine right to rule; and it certainly ran on in a corrupted and fearful form, even into the claims of the Soviet leaders in totalitarian times for absolute obedience. Remove the caveats that such a dominion falls if the values it represents are not according to the spirit of the Gospel, and we can see here how such a view can decay into the worst forms of absolutist governance.

There was a tendency towards understanding authority in such a radical and totalist sense in the Slavic Orthodox church traditions, however, because monasticism there (unlike its many iterations in the Byzantine world) tended to be very heavily regulated. In short it was militarized in its sense of fundamental obedience required from the monk. Such a radical expectation of complete obedience ran on through all the levels of Slavic church life, even up to the bishop. Since all bishops had to be monks before they were eligible for election we witnessed a profound trend among Slavic church leaders to be conformist and anxious to avoid independent judgement or action. This was put to good use by the Russian emperors who policed their ecclesiastical leaders closely and exercised profound scrutiny over the selection of all of them. It was a tendency only reinforced when the NKVD and its successors up to the KGB co-opted each and every Russian Orthodox hierarch, giving them rank, code names and a long list of expectations of how they should do their duty by the state.
_________________________
1 The Kievan Patriarchate, the Autonomous Ukrainian Orthodox church, and the Ukrainian Orthodox Church Moscow Patriarchate elements who wished to secede.
2 http://www.patriarchia.ru/db/text/5931598.html
3 https://publicorthodoxy.org/2022/03/13/a-declaration-on-the-russian-world-russkii-mir-teaching/
4 In 1551 Ivan IV (The Terrible) presided in Moscow over a great council of Russian bishops, the Stoglav (Council of 100 Chapters), in which various issues of liturgy and discipline were settled and numerous Russian saints were canonized.

2. LAUDATO SI’ - THE 2022 FILM:
“THE LETTER - A MESSAGE FOR OUR EARTH”

Pope Francis' ground breaking teaching document on ecology, creation and climate change that he addressed to the entire world is coming to a computer, phone or smart TV screen near you.

"The Letter: A Message for Our Earth" is a new documentary about the pope's 2015 encyclical, or papal letter, "Laudato Si', on Care for Our Common Home." The film, a joint project of Off the Fence Productions (behind the Oscar-winning documentary "My Octopus Teacher") and the Laudato Si' Movement.

The film launched 4 Oct the feast of St. Francis of Assisi, the same day the Holy See acceded to the Paris Accord. Its premiere was at the Vatican. That day, the feast of St. Francis of Assisi, it was released via YouTube Originals for people anywhere and everywhere to watch for free. You can watch it here https://theletterfilm.org/watch/. Please help us share this movie with your friends and family! As of Monday 10 Oct afternoon, this 80-minute feature film has been viewed about 2 million times since its release. Including me!

On Tuesday morning, October 4, feast of St. Francis of Assisi, a press conference on the premiere of The Letter was held in the Vatican’s Sala Stampa. The film tells the story of various frontline leaders’ journeys to Rome to discuss the encyclical Laudato Si’ with Pope Francis.

The press conference was addressed by Cardinal Michael Czerny, SJ, Prefect of the Dicastery for Promoting Integral Human Development; Dr. Hoesung Lee, Chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change; Cacique Odair “Dadá” Borari, a protagonist of the film and Chief-General of the Maró Indigenous Territory, Pará, Brazil; Dr. Lorna Gold, President of the Board, Laudato Si’ Movement; and Nicolas Brown, Writer and Director of The Letter, all presented by Matteo Bruni, Director of the Holy See Press Office.

Cardinal Michael Czerny, head of the integral human development department, said at a Vatican press conference that in the seven years since both Laudato Si' was issued and the Paris accord was adopted, "the environmental crisis of our common home has worsened drastically."

"Clearly, the great treasure of Laudato Si's wisdom needs to become far more deeply known and effectively put into practice," he said, calling the film "a clarion cry to people everywhere. Wake up. Get serious. Meet. Act together. Act now."

The Chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Dr. Hoesung Lee said: “Humanity is at a crossroads,” he said. “Both the science community and the faith community are clear: the planet is in crisis and its life-support systems are in peril. The stakes have never been higher. May the world receive this “Letter” with an open heart and open mind.”

The film that tells the story of the encyclical Laudato Si' and the power of humanity to stop the ecological crisis, was released at the Vatican on a very special day: the feast of St. Francis of Assisi and the closing of the 2022 Season of Creation.

Writer and director Nicolas Brown commented on the long journey to bring Laudato Si' "The Letter," to the digital screen: "It's been four years in the making."

Part of the challenge, Brown said, was taking a papal document that lacked a traditional plot, and finding a way to tell a story through it and it puts a human face on climate change. “These voices are on the front lines, and they are the most experienced to tell us the reality of what is happening in relation to the climate crisis,” from a different perspective than the scientific community.

If you're expecting a textual analysis or chapter-by-chapter breakdown of the encyclical, you won’t find it in this documentary. Instead, it introduces the themes and messages of Laudato Si' through a cast of real-life characters, speaking about the real ways climate change and biodiversity loss are present in and impacting their lives, and ultimately taking that discussion all the way to Rome in a face-to-face meeting with Francis.

The film's protagonists were at the premiere: Ridhima, a teenage activist from India [more about her below]; Chief Dada, an Indigenous leader from the Amazon; Arouna, a climate refugee from Senegal [shown below]; and Robin and Greg, a married couple of scientists from Hawaii; as well as other important figures.

Pope Francis meets with Arouna Kandé, a climate refugee from Senegal, in a scene from "The Letter: A Message for Our Earth," a new documentary based upon the pope's 2015 ecology encyclical "Laudato Si', on Care for Our Common Home." (Courtesy of Laudato Si' Movement)

Representing Laudato Si’ Movement and as a participant of the film, Lorna Gold explained that “the essence of this film is to bring this wonderful book to new audiences,” responding to Pope Francis’ intention in writing Laudato Si’. “But we know that not all people have read it, so how do we reach them? That’s how the idea of making a documentary film came to us.”

In the press conference Austen Ivereigh, a UK-based RC journalist, author, commentator and biographer of Pope Francis and former deputy editor of The Tablet, (at about the 26 min mark) prefaced his question by saying: “The reception of Laudato Si’ has been patchy at best; sometimes indifferent and sometimes resistant” and asked: “where does this resistance come from? How to overcome it? And how to use the film in our parishes etc?” In her reply Lorna Gold said that The Laudato Si’ Movement has more than 900 organizations as affiliates [including Franciscan Voice Canada] and tens of thousands of LS Animators [including me] to help us carry the message e.g. publicise, promote, and advocate the film & host showings. Also that Catholic organisations are called to action (on the website) to prepare a Laudato Si Action Plan. Cardinal Czerny added, “The key is conversion of heart, and I am very hopeful about that.”

Hopefully this will reach those unwilling to read it! Let us pray it will be effective. I found it impressive and inspiring but I am already convinced and hope it will reach those yet to be persuaded.
I have two observations. First, I was disappointed that LS n 179 calling for political action was not mentioned and second, in answer to the question asked by Austen Ivereigh the real answer is that most priests, with few exceptions, have not strongly, actively and frequently promoted Catholic Social Teaching because they are not led to do so by their bishops, period! That’s why it was/is called the church’s best kept secret! Pope Francis leads but the clergy are hesitant to follow. It seems they are not reading the signs of the times or responding to the sensus fidelium.

To give an American example of the sensus: “CRS survey shows vast majority of Americans concerned about climate, support taking action.” Catholics score slightly higher, and this is probably similar in Canada.

Let us hope and pray that the climate catastrophes currently emerging will help change clergy hesitancy. They also talk a lot about youth leading the charge. True, but not so much as a result of what they hear in church or church teaching but thanks to the likes of outsiders e.g. Greta Thunberg, whom Pope Francis encouraged. Let us hope this will also change. Several British & Irish Bishops did march in Glasgow COP26 in 2021 but have Canadian bishops marched? Not yet, as far as I know. Let them lead by example! Filipino bishops have marched!

In addition to Greta Thunberg, children from 12 countries are a party to the complaint. (Twitter/UNICEF) At the United Nations Climate Action Summit 2019, 16 children, including teenage activist Greta Thunberg and India’s Ridhima Pandey, filed a complaint to protest lack of government action on the climate crisis. The child petitioners – aged between 8 - 17 – allege that Member States’ failure to tackle the climate crisis constitutes a violation of child rights. Greta first on left, Ridhima 5th from left.

As a Canadian I would cite and show pictures of a number of things e.g. The Mount Polley Dam disaster (2014), the destruction of Lytton, BC (2021) by fire, the Fraser Valley flood (2021) and forest clear cutting (ongoing), just to mention a few.

Also I would recommend Kevin Moynihan’s: Laudato Si' +7 (2022) (43 mins)
and for children D&P (4 mins)

Campaign: People and Planet First
3. Membership Drive 24 Sept-3 Dec 2022
We call on the House of Commons to adopt human rights and due diligence legislation

Over the last year, we have paved the way for our demand for due diligence legislation to reach Canadians across the nation. From sharing our petition and gathering 24,355 signatures to hosting 38 meetings with members of Parliament, our members have done much to show their solidarity and commitment to holding Canadian companies accountable for their environmental and human rights violations abroad.

However, we are at a crossroads as Canadian parliamentarians are considering another kind of corporate accountability legislation that undermines the goal of compelling companies to adopt due diligence measures and prevent abuses.

To understand why we are pushing for stronger mandatory human rights and environmental due diligence (mHREDD) legislation than the one being considered, refer to the Canadian Network on Corporate Accountability’s handy comparative chart.

This fall, to continue pushing for the right kind of mHREDD law, we will be amplifying the voices of our 11,000 members by growing our movement. We invite you to become a member and to join us in advocating, and sharing and signing the petition by 10 Dec 2022 The International Day for Human Rights!

PEOPLE AND PLANET FIRST MEANS… ‘ a different kind of economy: one that brings life not death, one that is inclusive and not exclusive, humane and not dehumanizing, one that cares for the environment and does not despoil it.’ – Pope Francis Learn more at D&P

4. SEASON OF CREATION
& LAUDATO SI’ ACTION PLAN

Caritas Internationalis "Together We" multiyear global campaign asking Catholics to take actions to combat poverty and conserve nature in the spirit of integral ecology and solidarity that are key themes in Pope Francis' encyclicals Laudato Si' and Fratelli Tutti.

The campaign provides prayers alongside tools and resources to lobby elected officials for more aggressive climate responses — such as increased payments for the international Green Climate Fund — as well as fundraise for communities facing floods, heat waves and droughts right now.
It is also asking dioceses to encourage people to take part, and developing resources for priests to engage conversations on climate change, as well.

Following is one example of a new parish:
Social Eco Justice Ministry trying to bring this to the congregation’s attention. A cardboard tri-fold foam display board was set up with the following panels. Please feel free to copy, enlarge on landscape page orientation & modify and use them!

I have just added the info about the film The Letter given above.

"The Letter: A Message for Our Earth" is a new documentary film about the Pope's 2015 encyclical, or papal letter, "Laudato Si', on Care for Our Common Home" from the Laudato Si' Movement.

"Clearly, the great treasure of Laudato Si's wisdom needs to become far more deeply known and effectively put into practice," Cardinal Czerny, SJ, calling the film "a clarion cry to people everywhere” said: “Wake up. Get serious. Meet. Act together. Act now."

“Human beings are the thinking heart, called to be
co-creators with God in shaping the world.”
St. Hildegard von Bingen, OSB
Let us pray the 2022 Season of Creation Prayer
to our Creator God:
Give us hearts to listen for the good news of your promise
to renew the face of the Earth.
Enlighten us with the grace to follow the Way of Christ
as we learn to walk lightly upon this holy ground.
Fill us with the hope to quench the fires of injustice
with the light of your healing love that sustains our common home.
In the name of the One who came to
proclaim good news to all creation, Jesus Christ,
Amen.

THE SEASON OF CREATION 2022
MAKES ME ASK
WHERE IS OUR LOCAL LAUDATO SI’ ACTION PLAN?

WOULD YOU AND YOUR THINKING HEART
BE WILLING
TO HELP DEVELOPE A PLAN
For our parish?

HAVE YOU READ THE POPE’S
ENCYCLICAL LETTER
LAUDATO SI’ ?
THAT WOULD BE A GOOD START!
BUY HARD COPIES OR READ IT ONLINE AT
LAUDATO SI’

OR SEE THE 2022 FILM "The Letter"
You can watch it here free!
Please help us share this movie with your friends and family!

LAUDATO SI’
˅
ENCYCLICAL LETTER
LAUDATO SI’ ACTION PLATFORM
˅
Our Parish
LAUDATO SI’ ACTION
PLAN
^
PARISH CONSULTATION

NEXT YEAR WE WILL BE CONTACTING
ALL PARISH GROUPS TO ASK FOR THEIR IDEAS TO DEVELOPE A PLAN.
WE WILL HAVE SUGGESTIONS.

OUR POPE, OUR BISHOP & OUR PASTOR ARE SUPPORTIVE
PARISH SOCIAL ECO JUSTICE MINISTRY

Burrard Bridge, Vancouver, BC on a very rainy day in October 2019. The Georgia Straight (CHARLIE SMITH)

Vatican News, 17 April 2019 - Pope Francis encouraging Greta Thunberg, introduced by Tomás Insua founder of the Laudato Si’ Movement

will you join us in future strikes?
Put our money where our mouth is!

Most Rev'd William Nolan, Archbishop of Glasgow
"speaking out is not enough, action is required."

Toward fossil fuel free churches
We believe that churches need to divest from fossil fuel companies and invest in climate solutions if they are to retain their integrity in the face of the climate crisis.

by Andrew Conradi, ofs
JPIC & Laudato si' Animator

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September 2022 Blog

9/10/2022

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I acknowledge and thank the Lkwungen People for allowing me to live, pray, work, and play on their lands. I am deeply sorry for the injustices inflicted upon the First Nations, Inuit and Métis peoples in Turtle Island by the complicity of settlers and the Catholic Church in the colonialism inherent in the Indian Act and Residential Schools including racism, neglect, many forms of abuse & cultural genocide. I commit to work for truth, healing and reconciliation.

“May our struggles and our concern for this planet never take away the joy of our hope.”
Laudato Si’, 244

1. DO YOU HAVE A LAUDATO SI’ ACTION PLAN?

Let us pray the 2022 Season of Creation Prayer to our Creator God:
Give us hearts to listen for the good news of your promise
to renew the face of the Earth.
Enlighten us with the grace to follow the Way of Christ
as we learn to walk lightly upon this holy ground.
Fill us with the hope to quench the fires of injustice
with the light of your healing love
that sustains our common home.
In the name of the One who came
to proclaim good news to all creation, Jesus Christ,
Amen.

2. THE SEASON OF CREATION 2022 MAKES ME ASK
WHERE IS MY LOCAL LAUDATO SI’ ACTION PLAN?

[I have abbreviated Laudato si’ to LS in the following]
Does your diocese or parish have a LS Action Plan? Mine do not. I, a LS Animator, am hoping that I can help to bring one about.

In supporting the LS Animators Program 1.5 hours once each week 24 Aug- 12 Oct 2022, Victoria, BC Bishop Gary Gordon said: “It would be a wonderful gift to our Diocese if every parish and school could have one or more people participating. He describes the program as “a marvelous way for leaders and interested individuals to grow in our faith, which fundamentally includes integral human development and care for God’s earth.” ” In fact I, Andrew, would say that the environment, especially when viewed as creation, is a basic core life issue. We need to see the moral implications of LS and how they are vital to a fully pro-life vision in the church.

Bishops and pastors need to lead by example i.e. with their own plan! Needed is active, public, frequent encouragement and leadership without which laity won’t get very far. They might be tempted to give up and have to work only outside the church. A great shame because Pope Francis and Catholic Social Teaching (CST, which includes LS) support such work both within the church and in public society.

The Laudato Si' Action Platform is in nine languages for Catholic institutions, communities and families as well as “all people of goodwill” to put into action the integral ecological vision of LS. It is sponsored by the Vatican and developed in partnership with many Catholic people and institutions. The platform includes a self-assessment, planning guides to help build an action plan, as well as space to share reflections and actions.

But such Canadian action plans are not easy to find. I looked on google under Canadian LS Action Plans and found none. Plans exist under different names but not named LS Action Plans! Here is a short one from Ottawa-Cornwall: https://en.archoc.ca/care-for-gods-creation. Three longer & more comprehensive US plans can be found here.

What are some topics that have been included and could serve as examples to those of us who advocate for our own diocese and parish to draft a LS Action Plan?
Here is a suggested Goal: "Our goal is not to amass information or to satisfy curiosity, but rather... to discover what each of us can do about it." (LS, 19) The members of the Catholic community of the Diocese of XXX want to plan and act in Eco Social Justice Creation Care Ministry in our parishes to implement the teachings and goals of Pope Francis in his encyclical LS. We also wish to join the forces of our parishes and schools to assist the Laudato Si’ Movement and Mouvement Laudato Si’ Movement, the Government of Canada, Province of XXX and City of XXX with a target of 100% renewable energy and 50% reduction of greenhouse gases by 2035. And to assist them in reaching their greenhouse gas or carbon reduction targets. These are among the most important local implementations of LS and the Seven Goals of the LS Action Platform.

A LS Action Plan could:

1. Include a summary of CST and LS.
2. Celebrate liturgies with homilies and Prayers of the faithful that frequently reflect LS themes especially for Earth Day, D&P Share Lent & Fall Campaign, LS Week and Season of Creation.
3. Include and formally incorporate CST especially LS in all catechist training.
4. Establish Eco Social Justice/Creation Care Committees to conduct workshops on LS and CST.
5. Bulletins and mass announcements to publicise (Canadian) Mouvement LS Movement and (international) LS Movement’s courses and website. Same for Green Churches Network.
6. All churches should install solar panels and consider small wind turbines as well as plug-in stations for recharging electric vehicles.
7. Grass lawns should be wilded for bees and other animals.
8. Lawns could be replaced to grow crops and fruit trees for food banks.
9. Lower fossil fuel emissions and divest from fossil fuels. (Pope Francis, 19 June 2020)
10. Promote a diet with less meat and more organic fair trade food.
11. Do not use plastic plates/bowls & cutlery. Use only compostable/recyclable items.
12. Advocate, advocate, advocate!
Space precludes more.

3. A NEW CANADIAN BRANCH OF A VATICAN ORGANISATION
whose virtual launch is on 17 Sept (to participate click on cappcanada link below):

https://www.cappcanada.ca
It is part of this:

From https://capp-usa.org
What is the Practical Purpose of Catholic Social Teaching?
TO ACHIEVE THE COMMON GOOD
The common good is the sum total of social conditions which allow people to reach their fulfillment.
It is the result of applying the three principles [of CST] to governments and economic systems.

[Woops! Methinks they left out the church itself. Surprise, surprise!]

4. SPEAKING BOLDLY

Pope Francis encourages us in a Synodal church to speak boldly without fearing what others may think.
Following is one way that needs to be taken seriously by the church:
Put our money where our mouth is!

Towards fossil free Churches
We believe that churches need to divest from fossil fuel companies and invest in climate solutions if they are to retain their integrity in the face of the climate crisis.

According to the https://divestmentdatabase.org not one Canadian Catholic Diocese has divested. Have Canadian First Order Franciscans? Has OFS Canada? If not why not? I am more than disappointed and frustrated; I am embarrassed and even, dare I say it, disgusted! Some Canadian religious entities have divested so what are the Canadian Catholic bishops waiting for? They need a kick in the arse. Let’s do it! Actually, better still, ask them nicely to get with the programme!

See what is being done in other parts of the world: Check here.

Fr Joshtrom Isaac Kureethadam, Coordinator of the Ecology Sector in the Vatican Dicastery for Integral Human Development, which assists Pope Francis’ work on the environment, said: ‘In 2020, the Vatican called on Catholic institutions to divest from fossil fuel companies given their harm to the environment. I applaud these prophetic institutions divesting today and encourage every institution in the world to reduce our dependence on such harmful energy sources by divesting from fossil fuels. This is how prophetic institutions can live out our values and help the most vulnerable among us. If we want to achieve peace, and ensure a liveable planet for all, including the future generations, we need to end our dependence on fossil fuels that fuel the current climate crisis.’

Most Revd William Nolan, Archbishop of Glasgow and Lead Bishop on the Environment for the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of Scotland, which divested from fossil fuel companies in October 2021, said: ‘I think it’s going to get to the stage, it will be an embarrassment for any Catholic institution that hasn’t divested. This has gone from a purely symbolic gesture to something much, much more than that. Because we’re now advocating, and Pope Francis is advocating as well, (for) a complete change of lifestyle. We have to change our lifestyle.’

[As reported here : Nolan said the Scottish bishops decided to join the multitrillion-dollar worldwide divestment movement because "speaking out is not enough, action is required." Although some people argue that fossil fuel companies are necessary in the transition to renewable energy, he said, the act of divesting sends a signal "that the status quo is not acceptable." and here: “Given the harm that the production and consumption of fossil fuels is causing to the environment and to populations in low income countries, it was not right to profit from investment in these companies.”]

Included were two Catholic dioceses (the Irish Archdiocese of Armagh and the English Diocese of Leeds); & 11 Catholic religious orders;

The Archbishop of Glasgow, Monsignor William Nolan, said that in the near future "it will be a disgrace to any Catholic institution that has not divested." If "where your treasure is, there will your heart be" (Mt 6:21), ask yourself: where is your heart today? 🤍

“Humanity is called to recognize the need for changes of lifestyle, production and consumption, in order to combat this warming or at least the human causes which produce or aggravate it” (LS 23).

The Financial Times : Corinne Le Quéré: ‘Could we just adapt to climate change? The answer is no.’ The Canadian-born climate scientist stays cool as politicians fail to act, saying we have the solutions we need — we just have to use them.

The Guardian : “António Guterres [UN Secretary General] told ministers from 40 countries meeting to discuss the climate crisis on Monday [18 July 2022]: “Half of humanity is in the danger zone, from floods, droughts, extreme storms and wildfires. No nation is immune. Yet we continue to feed our fossil fuel addiction. We have a choice. Collective action or collective suicide. It is in our hands.”

Extinction Rebellion Vancouver's first major action involved blocking the Burrard Bridge on a very rainy day in October 2019.The Georgia Straight (CHARLIE SMITH)

That’s putting it plainly. Image credit unknown

5. WHAT YOU SHOULD KNOW AND CAN DO

“Oil and gas companies have been ravaging the pocketbooks of working-class people at the pump,” Avi Lewis, an associate professor of geography at the University of British Columbia and longtime climate activist, told The Tyee. “It is grotesque beyond the capacity of words to convey.”

Big banks like RBC are getting away with investing billions into the climate-killing fossil fuel industry, bankrolling massive projects like Coastal GasLink and TMX. [1-3] So far, they’ve faced no consequences from banking regulators — but we have a rare opportunity to change that.

WHAT YOU CAN DO
Right now the banks regulator — the Office of the Superintendent of Financial Institutions (OFSI) — is considering tightening up the rules on whether banks should be allowed to invest in the dirty oil and gas industry. And they want to hear from the public (that’s us!) about what they should do. [4]
Bank regulators like OSFI might not be well known to the average person, but they play a big role in shaping the banking industry. If thousands of us flood their consultation, it would help push them to create real and stringent regulations to force banks to divest from fossil fuels. Will you submit a message to OSFI's public consultation now?

6. MORE ON SEASON OF CREATION

The most damaging farm products?
Organic, pasture-fed beef and lamb! 28% of the world’s land is used for grazing.

Analysis: You may be amazed by that answer, but the area of land used for grazing is vast compared with the meat and milk produced.

Perhaps the most important of all environmental issues is land use. Every hectare of land we use for extractive industries is a hectare that can’t support crucial ecosystems. Farming swallows far more land than any other human activity. Arable crops, some of which are fed to farm animals, occupy 12% of the planet’s land surface. But far more land (28%) is used for grazing: in other words, for pasture-fed meat and milk. Yet, across this vast area, farm animals that are entirely pasture-fed produce just 1% of the world’s protein.

Agricultural sprawl inflicts a very high ecological opportunity cost: the missing ecosystems that would otherwise exist. This is matched by the carbon opportunity cost of pasture-fed beef and lamb.

Meat production has two kinds of global heating impact: its climate current account, which means the gases released by farming animals; and its climate capital account, which means the carbon dioxide the land could absorb if it were rewilded.

The livestock industry has fought back with a massive public relations campaign, seeking to persuade people that pasture-fed meat helps reduce global heating by storing carbon in the soil. Yet, despite the many claims, there is no empirical evidence that carbon storage in pastures can even compensate for grazing’s current account emissions, let alone address the capital debt. Just as the oil industry tried to convince us that CO2 was good for the planet on the grounds that it’s “plant food”, the ranching industry has sought to sow doubt and confusion about its vast environmental impacts.
We live in a bubble of delusion about where our food comes from and how it is produced. We’ve been dealing in stories when we should be dealing in numbers. Our gastroporn aesthetics, embedded in bucolic fantasy, are among the greatest threats to life on Earth.

George Monbiot’s book Regenesis: Feeding the World Without Devouring the Planet, is published by Penguin. (See our September edition of the Common Good newsletter)

7. GREENHOUSE EFFECT
Who discovered the greenhouse effect?

The world has known about the warming risk posed by excessive levels of carbon dioxide for decades, even before the invention of cars or coal-fired power stations. A rare American female scientist in her time, Eunice Foote , explicitly warned about the basic science 165 years ago. Why haven’t we listened more closely? In 1856 she documented the underlying cause of today’s climate change crisis. Foote’s brief scientific paper was the first to describe the extraordinary power of carbon dioxide gas to absorb heat – the driving force of global warming.

A few years later, in 1861, the well-known Irish scientist John Tyndall also measured the heat absorption of carbon dioxide and also recognized the possible effects on the climate, saying “every variation” of water vapour or carbon dioxide “must produce a change of climate.” He also noted the contribution other hydrocarbon gases, such as methane, could make to climate change, writing that “an almost inappreciable addition” of gases like methane would have “great effects on climate.”

The first person to use the term “greenhouse gases” was a Swedish scientist named Svante Arrhenius in 1896. In a paper published that year, he made an early calculation of how much warmer the Earth was thanks to the energy-trapping nature of some of the gases in the atmosphere. Even at this early stage, he understood that humans had the potential to play a significant role in changing the concentration of at least one of those gases, carbon dioxide (carbonic acid back then):

The world’s present production of coal reaches in round numbers 500 millions of tons per annum, or 1 ton per km of earth’s surface. Transformed into carbonic acid, this quantity would correspond to about a thousandth part of the carbonic acid in the atmosphere.

Though he didn’t explicitly say in that paper that human activity could warm the planet, Arrhenius would go on to make that argument in later works. A 2008 tribute to Arrhenius published by the Royal Swedish Academy of Engineering Sciences stated that his ideas about coal and climate were popular and well known in his day but fell out of favour for a while after his death in 1927.

While Arrhenius’ prediction [of warming] received great public interest, this typically waned in time but was revived as an important global mechanism by the great atmospheric physicist Carl Gustaf Rossby who initiated atmospheric CO2 measurements in Sweden in the 1950s.

And 110 years ago, climate change was in the news. Are we finally ready to listen?

14 August 1912, Rodney and Otamatea Times, Waitemata and Kaipara Gazette , New Zealand, identical to an earlier story in the Australian newspaper 17 July 1912, The Braidwood Dispatch and Mining Journal.

The Keeling Curve is a graph of the accumulation of carbon dioxide in the Earth's atmosphere based on continuous measurements taken at the Mauna Loa Observatory on the island of Hawaii from 1958 to the present day. The curve is named for the scientist Charles David Keeling, who started the monitoring program and supervised it until his death in 2005. It has gone from about 315 ppm in 1958 to 420 ppm at present (2022). Countless scientists, climate experts, and governments officials agree that 350 ppm is the “safe” level of carbon dioxide.

8. POILIEVRE

How Poilievre Is Reinventing Right-Wing Politicking
....READ MORE

No less than the United Nations secretary-general agrees with that analysis. “We are seeing excessive scandalous profits of the oil and gas industry in a moment in which all of us are losing money,” António Guterres said during an August press conference. “I urge people everywhere to send a clear message to the fossil fuel industry and their financiers that this grotesque greed is punishing the poorest and most vulnerable people, while destroying our only common home, the planet.”

JK Galbraith:
a great Canadian American

9. HOPE

Historic climate law, signed by Biden, has Catholic fingerprints all over it. The Inflation Reduction Act was signed by USA President Biden 16 August 2022. It includes health care, climate and tax provisions. The US passed the largest Climate Bill in history. This is a huge relief but the awareness campaign for other countries to follow must continue!

10. HEROES

Source: Ignatiansolidarity.net [Andrew’s not quite literal translation: God, give us courage to not label as prudence that which is cowardice, conformism and comfort.]

Father Lluis Espinal i Camps, SJ (to give him his Catalan name) and "Lucho" (his nickname) (1932-1980) murdered in Bolivia for defending human rights and criticising corruption & injustice (just two days before St Oscar Romero, the Salvadoran archbishop, was shot dead).

One line from Fr Luis’ (his Castilian name) book Religión effectively sums up his life’s mission: “Whosoever does not have the courage to speak on behalf of other people does not have the right to speak with God.” For me, Andrew, that includes the cry of the earth and cry of the poor, for they are one.

The danger of charity “Marx said that religion was the opium of the people. But I also know that charity can be the opium of the rich.” St. Alberto Hurtado, S.J. (1901-1952) Chilean Jesuit who was an apostle of the poor. He wrote a beautiful prayer which follows:

11. POPE’S VISIT

So much has been written about the visit. I’ll say that it was not just the Catholic Church but other churches and the People and Governments of Canada that were responsible. The Supreme Governor of the Anglican Church, Her Majesty the Queen of Canada did not apologise.

The Holy Father’s sincerity and authenticity are beyond question. The reaction varied from great happiness and acceptance through wishing for a bit more to indifference and hostility. All to be expected given the circumstances. I have to say that I believe the Holy Father was not as well briefed as he could have been. I am sure the Canadian bishops mentioned topics to be briefed which do not seem to have been passed on at a higher level. Examples: (1) he could/should have mentioned sexual abuse right away (not just physical abuse) rather than wait til later in Quebec (2) to say during his return flight that he had not thought of using the word genocide beggars belief & (3) he was not sure what the Doctrine Discovery/ Terra Nullius fuss was about! Incidentally, the CCCB refuted both in a statement dated 19 March 2016 here: Statement. Here is an excerpt: “We reject the assertion that the principle of the first taker or discoverer, often described today by the terms Doctrine of Discovery and terra nullius, could be applied to lands already inhabited by Indigenous Peoples”.

Having said that, the Holy Father listened, he came, he apologised and for that we are most grateful! Now the real work of reconciliation by Canadians must continue.

Sarain Fox, who is an artist and activist from the Batchewana First Nation, was one of the people who took part in a brief silent protest before mass. She felt it was important to urge Pope Francis to rescind the Doctrine of Discovery. (Jennifer Yoon/CBC)

12. UKRAINE
LET THERE BE NO DOUBT!
An excerpt

Holy See Communiqué, 30.08.2022

In the context of the war in Ukraine , … it is reiterated that the Holy Father's words on this dramatic issue should be interpreted as a voice raised in defence of human life and the values associated with it, and not as a political stance. As for the large-scale war in Ukraine, initiated by the Russian Federation, the Holy Father Francis' interventions are clear and unequivocal in condemning it as morally unjust, unacceptable, barbaric, senseless, repugnant and sacrilegious. (emphases added)

SOUNDS POLITICAL TO ME!
IN SPITE OF SOME MIXED MESSAGES, I THANK GOD FOR THAT
AND MAY GOD BLESS THE HOLY FATHER
AND BRING JUSTICE TO UKRAINE!

QUEEN OF CANADA, RIP

Elisabeth II embodied Duty, Service, Faith, Family, Persistence & Courage
THE QUEEN IS DEAD. LONG LIVE THE KING!
For me this is personal. I was born a British Subject and as a 12 year old was in the cheering crowd as Her Majesty passed by Hyde Park in her Coronation procession.
I pledged my allegiance to Her Majesty and her heirs & successors three times;
twice as a soldier, British and Canadian, then as a Canadian citizen.
I was rewarded with four medals including both the Golden and Diamond Jubilee Medals (Golden for military and Diamond for civilian service) and
I thank God for the opportunity to serve my Queen and Country.

I will continue to try to serve God, King and Country, and the World
as long as I am able, as Elizabeth did and Pope Francis is.

Peace & joy, Andrew, ofs

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July 2022 Blog

7/3/2022

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I acknowledge and thank the Lkwungen People
for allowing me to live, pray, work, and play on their lands. I am deeply sorry for the injustices inflicted upon the First Nations, Inuit and Métis peoples in Turtle Island by the complicity of settlers and the Catholic Church in the colonialism inherent in the Indian Act and Residential Schools including racism, neglect, many forms of abuse & cultural genocide. I commit to work for truth, healing and reconciliation.

Extra! Extra! Urgent for immediate action
Is the world facing a hunger crisis?

More than 10% of the world's population goes to bed hungry every night. 50 million people in 44 countries are teetering on the edge of famine, up from 27 million in 2019. 25,000 PEOPLE DIE OF HUNGER EVERY DAY. THAT'S ONE EVERY 4 SECONDS. AND IT'S GETTING WORSE. This is a catastrophe and we must act quickly to save lives. Development and Peace/Caritas Canada is calling for our help (https://www.devp.org/en/).

As a member of the Canadian Foodgrains Bank, Development and Peace — Caritas Canada is participating in the $5 million matching fund launched until July 17 by the Government of Canada and the Humanitarian Coalition in response to this hunger crisis in sub-Saharan Africa due to climate crisis and war in Ukraine.

"We produce enough food for all people, but many go without … it is everyone’s duty to eliminate this injustice… "— Pope Francis, 2021
Are we pro-life? Please help!

CREATE AND NOURISH HOPE

1. NATIONAL INDIGENOUS PEOPLE'S DAY
21 June 2022

Google Canada honours the life and legacy of Northwestern Ontario Indigenous artist Norval Morrisseau. Conceived and illustrated by a Winnipeg couple, Blake Angeconeb and Danielle Morrison, who are originally from Lac Seul First Nation (300 km NW of Thunder Bay, Ontario) and Anishinaabeg of Naongashiing (near Morson, Ontario) respectively.

Canadian artist Timothy Schmalz has unveiled his latest work, Mary, Untier of Knots, in time for Pope Francis’ visit to Canada later this month. Schmalz is perhaps best known for his sculptures Homeless Jesus and Angels Unawares. (Courtesy of Timothy Schmalz). LEARN MORE AT B.C. CATHOLIC

2. POPE’S VISIT TO CANADA

"We pray this pilgrimage will serve as
another meaningful step in the long journey of
healing, reconciliation and hope"

The logo is the work of Indigenous artist, Shaun Vincent

See Pope's itinerary via Vatican and CBC

The Pope, who will be in Canada from July 24 to 29 with stops in Edmonton, Quebec City and Iqaluit, is coming here to apologize in person for the abuse suffered by Indigenous people at the hands of the Catholic Church.
"We know that the Holy Father was deeply moved by his encounter with Indigenous Peoples in Rome earlier this year, and that he hopes to build on the important dialogue that took place," Archbishop Richard Smith, an organizer of the Pope's visit to Canada, said in a statement. "We pray this pilgrimage will serve as another meaningful step in the long journey of healing, reconciliation and hope," Smith said.

3. SEASON OF CREATION 2022

From my Understanding JPIC (2013) 3.2.53. “What exactly do we mean by ‘creation’? Creation is not the same as ‘nature’; neither is it properly a scientific or philosophical term. Creation is a thoroughly religious concept. Creation means that to understand everything that exists at its deepest level, it must be seen in its relationship to God. [cf. contuition] Creation is concerned not only with beginnings but with every single moment of existence.” (Michael Guinan, OFM, 2006, 32, emphasis added)

Season of Creation 2022 Kick Off video (46 mins)

The Season of Creation (1 September -4 October) is a time to renew our relationship with our Creator and all creation through celebration, conversion, commitment, advocacy and action.

The Kick Off video linked above is a summary of the Celebration Guide 2022 found here.

“I have heard their cry…I know their sufferings…
Come, now! I will send you…I will be with you” (Ex 3: 1-12)

Inspired by Moses we must go to today’s Pharaohs and demand justice and care of creation and serve God. We must amplify the voices of those marginalised who are silenced, muted or ignored. We are called to respond to the cry of the poor and cry of the earth for they are one; everything is connected. God was with Moses and we believe God will be with us.

The Season “Celebration” begins on 1 September, the World Day of Prayer for the Care of Creation, and ends on 4 October, the Feast of St. Francis of Assisi, the patron saint of ecology beloved by many Christian denominations. This year we will unite around the theme, “Listen to the Voice of Creation.”
The Psalmist declares, “The heavens are telling the glory of God; and the firmament proclaims God’s handiwork. Day to day pours forth speech, and night to night declares knowledge...their voice is not heard; yet their voice goes out through all the Earth, and their words to the end of the world.” (19: 1-4)
During the Season of Creation, our common prayer and action can help us listen for the voices of those who are silenced. In prayer we lament the individuals, communities, species, and ecosystems who are lost, and those whose livelihoods are threatened by habitat loss and climate change. In prayer we centre the cry of the Earth and the cry of the poor. Communities of worship can amplify the voices of young people, Indigenous people, women and affected communities who are not heard in society. Through liturgies, public prayers, symbolic acts and advocacy, we can remember those who are displaced or have disappeared from public spaces and political processes.

Please, oh please, ask that your bishops and pastors listen to our cry that they strongly support the 2022 Season of Creation. Check out the Kick off video and The Celebration Guide linked previously above.

The Guide includes articles among others on the Theme; the Burning Bush Logo; Ideas on how to Celebrate SOC 2022 (including prayer services); a Season of Creation Prayer; Advocacy, e.g. participation in climate campaigns, etc.

SOC website also links to Catholic resources: https://laudatosimovement.org/seasonofcreation/
This includes 52 Ways to Care for Creation.

Here is no 33:
33. Talk to your parish priest about mentioning the climate crisis during Mass
The most important thing all people can do is talk about the climate crisis. Do you hear your parish leader or priest talking about the climate crisis? If not, set up a meeting with your priest to talk about your worries and how the climate crisis is affecting sisters and brothers in your community.

The Vatican has launched the “Laudato Si Action Platform” , to support Catholic Institutions and families to move toward total sustainability in the spirit of integral ecology and Laudato Si’.

Jesus would invite his disciples to recognise the paternal relationship God has with all his creatures. With moving tenderness the Son would remind them that each one of them is important in God’s eyes.
The programme of Jesus is a heart which sees.
- (Sr John Mary Sullivan, FSE)

Give us hearts to listen for the good news of your promise to renew the face of the Earth.
(Season of Creation 2022 Prayer)

A useful Canadian link:
https://creationcare.teachable.com/p/10-steps-to-greening-your-church

4. D&P/CARITAS CANADA

At the D&P/Caritas Canada Orientation Assembly 16-19 June 2022, Halifax, NS, the keynote address was given by Cardinal Czerny, SJ, (pictured above) Prefect of the Dicastery for Promoting Integral Human Development. It was entitled “From Vatican II’s Signs of the Times to the Synodality of the 2020’s.” You can watch it here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2GZuZCpjAjc&t=2495s.

The Cardinal’s presentation begins at about the 30 minute mark of the video. Czerny traced the five decade evolution of the church’s new focus on synodality to the principles of VII and explained how heeding Pope Francis’ call to integral ecology can help create hope. Czerny characterized synodality in terms of “the verb of the Church―how it lives and moves” and a universal call. “If the world does not learn to walk synodally, it’s not going to do a good job solving the huge problems that we have.” Walking together is not, the cardinal said, “just a way of ‘being Church,’ it will also finally be a way of ‘being world,’ the world that God created for us all.”

Here are some excerpts from my notes:
“Signs of the times was probably the most memorable expression from Vatican II …
In Octogesima adveniens, [1971] an Apostolic letter Pope Paul VI wrote to Cardinal Maurice Roy, (of Québec) President of the Council of the Laity and of the Pontifical Commission Justice and Peace (which belong together) on the 80th Anniversary of the Encyclical Rerum Novarum:
“It is up to these Christian communities, with the help of the Holy Spirit, in communion with the bishops who hold responsibility and in dialogue with other Christian brethren and all men of goodwill, to discern the options and commitments which are called for in order to bring about the social, political and economic changes seen in many cases to be urgently needed.” (no 4)

“That is what D&P is about. To bring Christ incarnate into the world where He is needed. The Cardinal cited Gaudium et Spes #22: “For by His incarnation the Son of God has united Himself in some fashion with every man. He worked with human hands, He thought with a human mind, acted by human choice (23) and loved with a human heart. Born of the Virgin Mary, He has truly been made one of us, like us in all things except sin.(24)”. Although the Cardinal did not say this, Robert Swan, OBE did, and it is appropriate to include it at this point:

Continuing with the Cardinal: “These things take time to gel … with freshness, zeal and hope … Francis began with Evangeli Gaudium, a renewal of the church’s mission of evangelisation followed by Laudato Si’, a challenge of the planet to care for our common home. Then came the Amazon Synod, trying it out in a particular place then Fratelli Tutti explaining how to be siblings to care for one another.

Five criteria for discerning the signs of the times and to new way of life of the church (new words to some of us: verb - synoding, noun – synodality, adjective synodally).

1. Faith discerning our way of life responding to challenges and people of God’s faith in seeing the signs of the times vs consumerism, individualism & exclusion which we need to resist.
2. Common good. Pope critiques the economy. Alternatively the Church teaches universal destination of goods and social mortgage on private property. Francis has re-expressed it from the point of view of the excluded.
3. Preferential option of the poor; which re-presents The disconcerting logic of the incarnation; Jesus took on our frailty and humility, so we make oneself poor so others may live [or live simply so others may simply live as Mahatma Gandhi said, and St Teresa of Calcutta, and others have repeated]
4. Realism of effective charity. Solidarity, service in accompaniment & encounter with the suffering (we cannot unravel the mystery of suffering).
5. Care for creation and our common home. Listen to the cry of the poor & cry of the earth; they are one.

As Pope Francis has said: ‘Synodality is the way the church is and functions to evangelise … Vatican II taught synodality but never used the word! And as Pope Francis says: It is precisely on this way of synodality where we find the pathway that God expects from the Church of the third millennium.’

And not just for the church but for the world. ‘But in this church, as in an inverted pyramid, the summit is located below the base. For those who exercise this authority are called “ministers” because, according to the original meaning of the word, they are the least of all. It is in serving the people of God that each Bishop becomes for that portion of the flock entrusted to him, vicarius Christi, (vicar of that Jesus who at the Last Supper stooped to wash the feet of the Apostles (cfr. Jn 13: 1-15 ). And in a similar manner, the Successor of Peter is none other than the servus servorum Dei (Servant of the servants of God)’. …

The inverted pyramid
Imagine the one below upside down:

In answering a question the Cardinal said: ‘Synodality does pose a risk. Francis is willing to take a risk. If only 27% of parishioners participate in a synod that’s OK. It only takes a 2 or 3 of us to make a noise!’

Sr Jean Bellini, works with the Pastoral Land Commission of Brasil and quoted Gaudium et Spes, (which I have quoted from my Understanding JPIC, 2013 as ammended):
“3.2.11. Among the many contributions of Vatican II to the Church, one of the most important is its attitude towards the world, history and social issues. This orientation is described in the famous opening statement of Gaudium et Spes: “The joys and the hopes, the griefs and the anxieties of the men of this age, especially those who are poor or in any way afflicted, these are the joys and hopes, the griefs and anxieties of the followers of Christ.” (1965, n.1)”

THE ORIENTATIONS FOR THE NEXT FIVE YEARS:

Under the theme, Create Hope, delegates reflected on D&P/Caritas Canada’s general direction and themes for the next five years. Delegates discussed and proposed orientation statements in the light of the workshops and panels and in furtherance of the pre-assembly consultations. On the last day, delegates vigorously debated and voted on the orientation statements and their associated priorities, to finally select the following:

Renew the movement
- Be a prophetic witness of Catholic Social Teaching in our communities and in the world
- Prioritize the youth movement
- Strengthen our democratic structures
Living synodality
- Walk together as the Church in Canada
- Walk together in our local and global networks
- Walk together with social movements for structural change
Integral communities for integral ecology
- Climate and ecological justice
- Women’s rights and leadership
- Strong civil society
- A triple nexus approach
- Our role in reconciliation

Our role in reconciliation

A final Orientation Assembly document synthesizing the consultations and discussions and elaborating on the orientations and priorities will be disseminated in the coming weeks.

Although the following prayer did not come from D&P but from Deacon Craig, ofs from the [US] Franciscan Action Network, it fits perfectly with synodality [and from Gospel to Life].

Litany of the Way, Prayer for the Journey
As Jesus sought the quiet of the desert,
teach us to pray.
As Jesus washed the feet of his disciples,
teach us to love.
As Jesus promised paradise to the thief on the cross,
teach us to hope.
As Jesus called Peter to walk to him across the water,
teach us to believe.
As the child Jesus sat among the elders in the temple,
teach us to seek answers.
As Jesus in the garden opened his mind and heart to God's will,
teach us to listen.
As Jesus reflected on the Law and the Prophets,
teach us to learn.
As Jesus used parables to reveal the mysteries of the Kingdom,
teach us to teach.
Amen

5. WHY IS CATHOLIC SOCIAL TEACHING (CST)
THE CHURCH’S BEST KEPT SECRET?

My pastor on Sunday 26 June called himself “an agitator”. Me too! As a Laudato Si’ Animator I am also an agitator. I will speak boldly (using parrhesia ). So in answer to the question: Let me be frank, I think it is because the clergy generally either were unaware, indifferent, opposed or too busy. They were too busy “avoiding scandal” by covering it up and protecting their prestige & power. This was clericalism. “They were too busy concentrating on “safe” interior individualistic and family spirituality, charity rather than justice, avoiding controversial political issues; all good but missing other essentials including the environment. Moral theology focused on personal morality rather than social morality. There were some notable exceptions, of course; mentioned below are just a few examples. The following is from my Understanding JPIC (2013 as amended):”

3.2.1. Prior to Vatican II, with some notable exceptions, spirituality was generally inward looking and other worldly, and so the great majority of Christians were not concerned with the social and political problems tied to questions of justice, peace and care for creation. They were concerned with living a holy life and practicing charity rather than confronting the root causes of poverty and injustice or the structures of sin (a term then not yet in use). [Structural injustices were referred to as “structures of sin” (Bl John Paul II, 1987, Sollicitudo rei socialis, e.g. nn. 16, 36, 37).]

3.2.2. OFS examples include Louis IX of France and Elizabeth of Hungary (both patrons of the OFS), Rose of Viterbo, Angela of Foligno, and Elzear and Delphine. Thomas More was an exception and in a class of his own, being concerned with freedom of conscience and justice but, understandably, not in a way we would characterize as modern concern for JPIC. He is the Patron Saint of Politicians and Public Servants. St Joan of Arc is also in a class of her own.

3.2.3. However, there were important exceptions to this inward looking which include, e.g. Franciscan friars such as Bartholomew the Englishman (1203-1272); Roger Bacon (1220-1294); Bernadino de Sahagún (1499-1590); and concern with the concept of Just Price and the Montes Pietas described below. Perhaps the actual beginning of modern Papal concern for social justice was Gregory XVI’s Apostolic Letter In Supremo Apostolatus, 1839, condemning the slave trade (although it was not the first to condemn slavery which was Paul III’s Sublimus Dei, 1537); followed by the Bishop of Mainz, Wilhelm von Ketteler, in The Worker-question and Christianity (1864), and Leo XIII’s Rerum novarum (1891) generally considered the first social doctrine encyclical.

3.2.4. Some later Canadian examples of outward looking are: The Farmers' Bank of Rustico, PEI, 1864; Church support for the Métis in the Red River Rebellion, 1869-70; the caisse populaire in Québec, 1900; Québec youth in the Ligue de Sacré-Coeur, 1910; the Antigonish Movement, 1913 and Peoples’ School, 1921; Canadian Catholic Confederation of Labour, 1921; Jeunesse Ouvrière Chrétienne, 1932; some forms of Catholic Action e.g. Friendship House, 1930 and Madonna House, 1954; Rosary Credit Union, 1940 in Vancouver; Institute for Social Action, St. Patrick's College, Ottawa, 1949; Joseph Charbonneau, Archbishop of Montréal who asked for support for the Asbestos strikers; the Coady International Institute, 1959; and the Interamerican Cooperative Institute, 1964 to name a few. [I could add many more e.g. Latin Americans Don Samuel Ruiz, St Oscar Romero, and Canadians Catherine Doherty, Bishop Remi De Roo and Canadian/Englishman Mgsr Bruce Kent (a Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament leader)]
…
The Term Social Justice
3.2.6. The term social justice was first used in 1840 by a Sicilian priest, Luigi Taparelli d’Azeglio, SJ. In his Theoretical Treatise on Natural Right Based on Fact, 1840-1843, he elaborated a natural law approach to politics that became a hallmark of Catholic Social Doctrine. Natural law theory holds that morality is a function of human nature and reason which can discover valid moral principles by looking at the nature of humanity in society. Taparelli supported revival of the philosophical school of St Thomas Aquinas, and his social thought influenced Pope Leo XIII. Pope Pius XI introduced the term into Catholic teaching in his encyclical, Studiorum Ducem (1923). He later made extensive use of it in two important social encyclicals: Quadragesimo Anno (1931) and Divini Redemptoris (1937). In the former the following paragraphs refer: nn 57, 58, 71, 74, 88, 101, 110, & 126. In the latter nn 32, 51 & 52.”

Now let’s consider some modern encouragement of Catholic Justice, Peace and Integrity of Creation. Then ask yourselves how often you hear about them from your bishop or pastor.

1. Among the many contributions of Vatican II to the Church, one of the most important is its attitude towards the world, history and social issues.
“Christians, in particular, realize that their responsibility within creation and their duty towards nature and the Creator Among the many contributions of Vatican II to the Church, one of the most important is its attitude towards the world, history and social issues. This orientation is described in the famous opening statement of Gaudium et Spes: “The joys and the hopes, the griefs and the anxieties of the men [people] of this age, especially those who are poor or in any way afflicted, these are the joys and hopes, the griefs and anxieties of the followers of Christ.” (1965, n.1)
2. Octogesima adveniens (1971); “It is up to these Christian communities, with the help of the Holy Spirit, in communion with the bishops who hold responsibility and in dialogue with other Christian brethren and all men of goodwill, to discern the options and commitments which are called for in order to bring about the social, political and economic changes seen in many cases to be urgently needed.” (n 4) and: “Man is suddenly becoming aware that by an ill-considered exploitation of nature he risks destroying it and becoming in his turn the victim of this degradation.” (n 21)
3. “...action on behalf of justice and the participation in the transformation of the world is a constitutive dimension of the preaching of the Gospel.” (Synod of Bishops, 1971, Justicia in mundo, n 6) and
“Unless the Christian message of love and justice shows its effectiveness through action in the cause of justice in the world, it will only with difficulty gain credibility with the people of our times.” (n 35)
4. “Christians, in particular, realize that their responsibility within creation and their duty towards nature and the Creator are an essential part of their faith.” (St John Paul II Peace Day Message, 1990, n 15) and then quoted/repeated by Francis:
5. “If the simple fact of being human moves people to care for the environment of which they are a part, Christians in their turn “realize that their responsibility within creation, and their duty towards nature and the Creator, are an essential part of their faith”.[36] It is good for humanity and the world at large when we believers better recognize the ecological commitments which stem from our convictions.” (2015, Laudato Si’, n 64)
6. “3.2.83. As the Bishops of Ontario (1998) stated:
“Our first concern is to remind all Roman Catholics of their duty to become informed, to vote and to be involved politically, at the very least in the sense of knowing the issues and the policies of the parties with regard to them. … Pope Pius XI spoke of "political charity" as one of the highest forms of the virtue of charity. In more recent times, the Church has told us that "a merely individualistic morality" will not suffice, and that Christians must "give an example by their sense of responsibility and their service of the common good." "Christians who take an active part in present day socio-economic development and fight for justice and charity should be convinced that they can make a great contribution to the prosperity of mankind and to the peace of the world". (The Church in the Modern World, No. 30, 75 and 72).” (emphasis added)” (UJPIC)
7. (From my UJPIC, 2013) “3.2.86. Finally let us remember this: “As far as the Church is concerned, the social message of the Gospel must not be considered a theory, but above all else a basis and a motivation for action.” (Bl John Paul II, 1991, Centesimus Annus, n. 57) and we have seen that the 1971 Synod of Bishops stated: “in [Apostolic Letter] Octogesima Adveniens is found a summary of guidelines for political action.” (n. 56, emphasis added). Pope Francis (7 June 2013) said: “To be involved in politics is an obligation for a Christian. We Christians cannot “play Pilate,” wash our hands: we can’t do this. We must be involved in politics, because politics is one of the highest forms of charity, because it seeks the common good. And lay Christians must labour in politics.”
8. Pope Francis, Fratelli tutti, (2020):
“For whereas individuals can help others in need, when they join together in initiating social processes of fraternity and justice for all, they enter the “field of charity at its most vast, namely political charity”.[165] This entails working for a social and political order whose soul is social charity.[166] Once more, I appeal for a renewed appreciation of politics as “a lofty vocation and one of the highest forms of charity, inasmuch as it seeks the common good”.[167] (n 180)
9. Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church, 2004:
“531. The Church’s social doctrine must be the basis of an intense and constant work of formation, especially for the lay faithful. … It belongs to the layman, without waiting passively for orders and directives, to take the initiative freely and to infuse a Christian spirit into the mentality, customs, laws and structures of the community in which they live.” How exactly laity can do that within the church without bishops’ and pastors’ support is a huge problem because, while we are listening and trying to take action in accordance with the magisterium of the Church, many, if not most, are not listening or acting or speaking and acting too infrequently. Inaction is a choice and has consequences! You might like to see the video (1 hr 6 mins): The Age of Consequences Everything is connected

If we do not hear about Share Lent, Laudato Si’ Week, Laudato Si’ Action Platform or the Season of Creation in our parish perhaps we should remind our pastor that it is an essential part of our faith! If it is not mentioned and encouraged by our Bishop perhaps we can also remind the Bishop! Let us hear them actually encourage us to put it into action!

6. A SIGN OF HOPE
FINALLY!

Canada’s single use plastics ban: see FINALLY!
Not perfect but a step forward! More needs to be done.

175 nations, including Canada, endorsed a historic resolution to End Plastic Pollution and forge an international legally binding agreement by 2024.
.

I’ll be back in September after an August break. Let’s all enjoy the break!
Peace & joy, Andrew, ofs

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June 2022 Blog

6/5/2022

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I acknowledge and thank the Lkwungen People
for allowing me to live, pray, work, and play on their lands. I am deeply sorry for the injustices inflicted upon the First Nations, Inuit and Métis peoples in Turtle Island by the complicity of settlers and the Catholic Church in the colonialism inherent in the Indian Act and Residential Schools including racism, neglect, many forms of abuse & cultural genocide.

WARNING!!!

1. THE UKRAINIAN FLAG & PEACE SIGNS

On left: posted by D&P/Caritas Canada see here:
The Dove is a time honoured peace symbol shared by Christians (also adopted by Stalin!).
The Cross, dove and peace symbol comes from the Christian Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CCND) which has many Catholic members.

As Editors, George and I were astounded to hear from a reader who wrote: “As a Secular Franciscan I found it offensive to find a Masonic symbol on the Ukrainian Flag [shown above] and the promoting of the teachings, clearly opposed to Christ’s and the church’s teachings, of a now deceased priest.” [A reference to Bishop Emeritus Remi De Roo, RIP]

First, we have to recognise and respect peoples’ freedom of opinion but in both cases George and I totally disagree with the reader and at the risk of entering into the Catholic “culture wars” we feel a short response is necessary. The reader’s first assertion is totally untrue while the second is certainly a matter of opinion.

As to the peace symbol let me just say that perception of symbols is in the mind of the perceiver e.g. the crucifix actually represented a death penalty punishment but was adopted by Christians as a venerated symbol of redemption and the passion of Christ found in our churches, shrines and around some necks etc. Obviously in the minds of some, the peace symbol may have some similarities with previous symbols and their interpretation as anti-Christian. The symbol incorporated the semaphore letters N (for Nuclear) and D (for Disarmament). [Letter N (both flags held down and angled out from the body) and letter D (one flag pointing up, the other pointing down). The designer, Gerald Holtom, was an Anglican and the symbol was adopted by the Campaign For Nuclear Disarmament in England and supported by many Anglican bishops (and Catholics). It later was adopted world wide as a peace sign (and Greenpeace).

Rather than supposition and plain wrong interpretation, one might want to check for the actual facts in this source: https://cnduk.org/the-cnd-logo/ from which I now quote:

“Misrepresentation and misuse…
There have been claims that the symbol has older, occult or anti-Christian associations. In South Africa, under the apartheid regime, there was an official attempt to ban it. Various far-right and fundamentalist American groups have also spread the idea of Satanic associations or condemned it as a Communist sign. However the origins and the ideas behind the symbol have been clearly described, both in letters and in interviews, by Gerald Holtom who designed it in 1958.”

I, Andrew, thought I should clarify this for those who might have become “infected” with these “far-right and fundamentalist American” views.

But let us not forget that, in the words of Gaudium et Spes (Joys and Hopes), the Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World (one of the four constitutions resulting from the Second Vatican Council in 1965: “For the bonds which unite the faithful are mightier than anything dividing them. Hence, let there be unity in what is necessary; freedom in what is unsettled, and charity in any case.” (n 92).

2. THE ROOT MEANING OF RELIGION AND RULE

Lastly, since the Common Good quotes the OFS Rule, I think it is worth reminding ourselves, thanks to Dan Horan, OFM : “The English word "religion" comes from the Latin word religio, which itself arose from a compound Latin verb religare. The suffix "re" is pretty self-evident in its meaning: to do again. But the root word ligare, which is the foundation of our modern English word "ligature," means "to bind" or "tie" or "connect."

Those of us in professed religious life [which, given the above definition, would include the OFS] understand the medieval usage of this term to describe being bound to a particular regula, a "rule" or way of life, such as that of St. Benedict, St. Francis, or St. Clare. You belong to a religion insofar as you are bound, tied or connected to a distinctive way of life, tradition or community.”

How well do we know and practice Catholic Social Teaching & our Rule?
How spiritual are we?

3. BISHOP REMI DE ROO

I will only say that I rely on those who knew and worked with him closely. These include Cardinal Czerny, SJ; retired Senator Douglas Roche; Sr Marie Zarowny, SSA & Patrick Jamieson, Editor of the Island Catholic News. The latter extensively covered the funeral and life of Bishop Remi De Roo and wrote about Remi’s vindication of charges regarding investments. The Cardinal’s homily and the Senator’s Eulogy and Sr Marie Zarowny’s vigil reflections can be easily found online.

“Bishop Remi De Roo was one of the great bishops in the history of the Catholic Church in Canada,” Bishop De Roo’s friend of 60 years, retired Senator Doug Roche said in an email. “He became a driving figure for change in the Church. In fact, he was a prophetic figure who advocated the outreach of the Church into the modern world. He leaves a lasting legacy of understanding the Church as the People of God.” Read more...

George and I accept their assessments over any other negative views. Amen.

4. POPE FRANCIS APPEALS FOR AN END TO THE BLOCKAGE OF GRAIN EXPORTS FROM UKRAINE.

Click on this quoting Vatican News:

“Ukrainian grain must not be used as a weapon of war!”

"Of great concern," the Pope said,
"is the blockade of grain exports from Ukraine, on which the lives of millions of people depend, especially in the poorest countries."

“I earnestly appeal for every effort to be made to resolve this issue and to guarantee the universal human right to food.”

"Please do not use wheat, a staple food, as a weapon of war!"

Ukrainian President Zelensky stated that the invaders had stolen at least half a million tonnes of grain in the temporarily occupied territory of Ukraine and were looking for ways to illegally sell it. Due to the blockade of Ukrainian seaports, 7 million tonnes of wheat, 14 million tonnes of corn grain, 3 million tonnes of sunflower oil, and 3 million tonnes of sunflower meal are unable to reach the global market. This has already led to a record rise in global market prices and will inevitably result in a global food crisis and rising inflation.

5. UKRAINIAN CATHOLIC PRELATE
TO BE RECOGNIZED AS PATRIARCH?

There are six Eastern Catholic patriarchates: (1) the Coptic Catholic Church, which is based in Egypt and is governed by the patriarch of Alexandria; (2, 3 & 4) three of Antioch, (one each for the Syrians, Maronites, and Greek Melkites); the Chaldean Catholic Church, which is based in Baghdad and is governed by the patriarch of Babylon of the Chaldeans (5); and the Armenian Catholic Church, which is based in Lebanon and is governed by the katholikos of Sis, or Cilicia (6).

But one Eastern Catholic Church, the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church does not have a Patriarch. Instead it has a Major Archbishop. Why? So as not to offend the Russian Orthodox Church!

22 February 2022: Anatolii Babynskyi, is a Church historian at the Ukrainian Catholic University in Lviv, Ukraine. He said: “The pope talks a lot about the need for justice in the world. That is why many in Ukraine do not understand why he does not give a moral assessment of what is happening. Russia is destroying all possible international agreements and principles, holding a gun to Ukraine's head, and wanting to make the whole world play by its rules.”

A way to offer that assessment in symbolism would be to grant the Ukrainian Catholic Church’s long standing request for a patriarch, Babynskyi said. He told The Pillar: “For our tradition, it's natural to have a patriarch as a primate of the local Church.” He explained why many Ukrainian Catholics have hoped to see the Church recognize the Metropolitan Archbishop of Kyiv as a patriarch. The people have the right to pray for the patriarch. And no one can take this right away from them. In addition, this type of terminology corresponds to our glorious Church Slavonic tradition. The terminology of “major archbishop” comes from the Greek world [and] does not correspond to Ukrainian realities.

Ukrainian Catholics have sought that recognition for years, and have frequently referred to the Major Archbishop as a Patriarch. But the Vatican has not conferred that status, mindful that the gesture would create new tensions with the Russian Orthodox Church, which still [regards] Ukraine as its “canonical territory.” But he added: “As long as the Moscow Patriarchate is a tool of Russia's state policy, it will be fruitless to try to convince the Moscow Patriarchate that the Greek Catholic Patriarchate in Ukraine is in no way a threat to the ecumenical dialogue. In their eyes, it undermines their claims for the political and ecclesiastical dominance in Eastern Europe.”

Archbishop Borys Gudziak, is the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Archeparch of Philadelphia, USA. Sources close to the Vatican congregation have told The Pillar that after Gudziak’s presentation, members of the Vatican’s Congregation for Oriental Churches were scheduled to discuss the prospect of elevating the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church to a “patriarchal Church” — the highest canonical status possible for an Eastern Catholic, or sui iuris, [i.e. autonomous] Church.

Practically speaking, there are few differences between an Eastern Catholic patriarch and a “major archbishop,” like Archbishop Sviatoslav Shevchuk, who leads the Ukrainian Catholic Church. While the election of a major archbishop by an eastern church’s synod of bishops must be confirmed by the pope, a patriarch does not need that confirmation, and there are few other noticeable distinctions. The title “patriarch” is an ancient one, used since the early centuries of the Church. While the term is used more commonly today in Orthodoxy, not Catholicism, in Eastern Catholic Churches the term denotes respect and authority. Watch and see what happens!

6. SHIREEN ABU AKLEH
(1971-2022, RIP)

FAMOUS AL JAZEERA REPORTER
KILLED BY ISRAELI FORCES
Israeli forces shot Abu Akleh in the head while she was on assignment in Jenin in the occupied West Bank. Shireen Abu Akleh was a Palestian American and a Greek-Melkite Catholic.

Another Al Jazeera journalist, Ali al-Samoudi, was also wounded by a bullet in the back at the scene. He is now in stable condition.

Al-Samoudi and other journalists at the scene said there were no Palestinian fighters present when the journalists were shot, directly disputing an Israeli statement referencing the possibility that it was Palestinian fire.

“We were going to film the Israeli army operation and suddenly they shot us without asking us to leave or stop filming,” said al-Samoudi.
Shatha Hanaysha, a local journalist who was standing next to Abu Akleh when she was shot, also told Al Jazeera that there had been no confrontations between Palestinian fighters and the Israeli army. She said the group of journalists had been directly targeted.

The senior Catholic in Israel condemned police actions at Shireen Abu Akleh’s funeral. Jerusalem’s Latin patriarch Pierbattista Pizzaballa, OFM, described the intervention as a ‘disproportionate use of force’ against mourners. Police are under immense international scrutiny for other scenes captured at the Friday funeral, namely of officers rushing at and beating mourners as they carried Abu Akleh’s casket outside the hospital, nearly causing it to fall to the ground, and the firing of stun grenades.

Church Leaders in Jerusalem Condemn Israeli Police Violence at St. Joseph Hospital during Abu Akleh’s Funeral: “We, the Greek Patriarch of Jerusalem, the Latin Patriarch of Jerusalem and the Bishops and the faithful of the Christian Churches in the Holy Land, hereby condemn the violent intrusion of the Israeli Police into a funeral procession of the slain journalist Shireen Abu Akleh, as it was going from Saint Joseph Hospital to the Greek-Melkite Cathedral Church,” the church leaders said in a statement.

Security camera footage shows officers with batons out in Jerusalem Saint Joseph’s Hospital before heavily criticized intervention at the procession for Shireen Abu Akleh. An independent international investigation has been widely demanded.
This info about Shireen came from various sources available via google.

7. DID YOU KNOW?
BIG TOBACCO IS [STILL] HAVING A ‘DEVASTATING’ IMPACT ON THE ENVIRONMENT,
WHO report REVEALS

By Rosie Frost

As well as killing eight million people every year, the tobacco industry has a far bigger impact on the planet than many people realise. A new report from the World Health Organisation (WHO) released today [31 May 2022] details the destructive impact of this deadly industry on the environment and health of ordinary people.

Every year, tobacco costs the world 600 million trees, 200,0000 hectares of land, 22 billion tonnes of water and releases 84 million tonnes of CO2 into the atmosphere, according to the report. The CO2 emissions alone are equivalent to one-fifth of what is produced by the airline industry.

Most tobacco is grown in low or middle-income countries where water and farmland are desperately needed to produce food. Instead, they are being used to grow these “deadly” tobacco plants, the WHO says, while more and more forests are cleared.

Leaching more than 7000 toxic chemicals into the environment

Growing the crops that create these items isn’t the only issue either. They produce mountains of waste that persist and damage our environment, the WHO says. “Tobacco products are the most littered item on the planet, containing over 7000 toxic chemicals, which leech into our environment when discarded,” says Dr Ruediger Krech, director of health promotion at WHO.

Cigarette butts are the second biggest source of plastic pollution worldwide, containing microplastics that persist in the environment. Other products like smokeless tobacco and e-cigarettes also add to the plastic pollution problem. “Roughly 4.5 trillion cigarette filters pollute our oceans, rivers, city sidewalks, parks, soil and beaches every year,” Krech adds. Each filter that is carelessly thrown away can pollute up to 100 litres of water.

And the cost of cleaning up littered tobacco products often falls on taxpayers - not the industry causing the problem. China spends around €2.4 billion [CAD 3.23 B] every year and India roughly €714 million [CAD 962.9 M] to pick up these items. In Europe, Germany spends more than €180 million [CAD 242.8 M] on cleaning up littered tobacco products each year.

Krech told AFP that the findings were “quite devastating,” adding that the industry was “one of the biggest polluters that we know of.” A hugely costly legal addiction! And Big Tobacco can legally advertise to sell more!

8. FIRST NATIONS, INUIT & MÉTIS
B.C. FIRST NATIONS GROUPS URGE HALT TO NEW PIPELINES

It's difficult for me to think about the climate crisis without pointing to the need to dismantle systems of injustice, disassemble structures of inequality:

This is outrageous. In the middle of a climate emergency, and without the consent of the Secwépemc people, the federal government just approved a $10 billion loan guarantee for TMX from the public purse. [1] The Liberal government is saying one thing, and doing another thing entirely. This news comes a mere two months after they promised to put an end to fossil fuel subsidies and stop sinking taxpayer money into this climate-killing, Indigenous rights-trampling pipeline. [2,3]

The federal government is facing intense backlash for this reckless decision – from Indigenous land defenders, everyday Canadians, and environmental organizations. It's outrageous that instead of investing in a Just Transition that supports workers with secure, sustainable jobs, and backs Indigenous-led transition plans — the federal government is pouring more public funds into this disastrous pipeline.

We know that the Liberal government is trying to offload TMX because they know holding onto it completely shreds their environmental credibility. Let's show them that they're going to pay that price now. If we can ramp up the public outrage with a massive petition, while the government is feeling the heat over their decision, it could convince them to reverse the loan guarantee — and ultimately abandon the project altogether.

We can’t let the federal government get away with pouring even more public money into this failed pipeline. Let’s make sure they feel the pressure. Will you add your name?

9. RESIDENTIAL SCHOOL SURVIVORS & INDIGENOUS LEADERS SAY QUEEN SHOULD APOLOGIZE NEXT

Métis leader says she'll bring up an apology when she meets with Prince Charles and Camilla.
Following a suggestion from a Métis residential school survivor, Cassidy Caron is calling on Queen Elizabeth II, as Canada's head of state and leader of the Church of England, to apologize for the operation of residential schools and pay reparations to survivors.

10. THE RIGHT TO TELL THE TRUTH AND THE CONSEQUENSE

Tomson Highway
After a press interview several years ago Tomson Highway, author of Permanent Astonishment (Doubleday Canada, 2021) found himself sidelined by Indigenous and media elites for his apostasy in saying that some good things came out of residential schools. He said: “Nine of the happiest years of my life were spent at that school…You may have heard stories from 7000 witnesses that were negative. But what you haven’t heard are the 7000 stories that were positive stories. There are very many successful people today that went to those schools and have brilliant careers and are very functional people like myself. I have a thriving international career, and it wouldn’t have happened without that school. You have to remember that I came from so far north and there were no schools there.”
[Guy Hill Residential School on the Saskatchewan–Manitoba border, near The Pas.]

T Highway
The 11th of 12 children, Highway arrives two weeks early [born 6 December 1951] while his family is en route from hunting grounds 150 miles from Brochet, “the village that serves them as home base but home base only for they are almost always out on ‘the land.’” [Founded as an HBC trading post and RC mission, the community was originally called Fort du Brochet, first appearing on maps in 1883. The community's name was shortened in 1924 to Brochet, which is the French name of the northern pike, commonly known in Manitoba as the "jackfish.]

Highway doesn’t flinch from the school’s horrors, though. One chapter follows his abuse, and the abuse of boys in his dormitory, at the hands of a brother. He fully acknowledges the crippling toll of those experiences: “The men these boys grow into have nightmares. For life. … Their lives are destroyed. And they think about it and think about it and think about it. Sometimes to make the thinking stop, they kill themselves. And the fallout goes on to affect the next generation and the next and the next. The field is littered with dead male bodies.” Most crucially, he writes, “From what I understand, that is their experience. And one day, I hope they write about it because I can’t. And to those who can’t, I have tried my best to write this story of survival for you.”

11.

Agnes Richard (Coordinator, MLSM) writes “Really good news about SHARE's work with faith based investors and their successful efforts to change corporate practices in favour of social, including Indigenous, justice. Thought you might find this interesting, and worth sharing.”

12. UNDERSTANDING JPIC
(MORE TRUTH AND CONSEQUENCE)
Quote by Andrew Conradi, ofs, 2013, UJPIC at para 3.2.98
Thanks to Margaret Ross, ofs for the reminder

Source: Antonisse, Marcel / Anefo –
[1] Dutch National Archives, The Hague, Fotocollectie Algemeen Nederlands Persbureau (ANEFO), 1945-1989,
Nummer toegang 2.24.01.05 Bestanddeelnummer 931-7341

Peace & joy, Andrew Conradi, ofs. JPIC & Mouvement Laudato Si’ Movement Animator

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May 2022 Blog

5/7/2022

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I acknowledge and thank the Lkwungen People
for allowing me to live, pray, work, and play on their lands. I am deeply sorry for the injustices inflicted upon the First Nations, Inuit and Métis peoples in Turtle Island by the complicity of settlers and the Catholic Church in the colonialism inherent in the Indian Act and Residential Schools including racism, neglect, many forms of abuse & cultural genocide.
I commit to work for truth, healing and reconciliation.

UKRAINE – CLIMATE – FIRST NATIONS –
LAUDATO SI’ WEEK 2022

Laudato Si’ 13: “Everything is connected”

As the Québec Bishops wrote in 2001: “On this point it is good to recall the conclusions already made in 1987, by the World Commission on Development and the Environment:
Until recently, the planet was a large world in which human activities and their effects were neatly compartmentalized within nations, within sectors (energy, agriculture, trade), and within broad areas of concern (environmental, economic, social). These compartments have begun to dissolve. This applies in particular to the various global ‘crises’ that have seized public concern particularly over the past decade. These are not separate crises: an environmental crisis, a development crisis, an energy crisis. They are all one. 1

1 The World Commission on Environment and Development, Our Common Futures, Oxford University Press, Oxford, England, 1987, p. 4.”

1. Ukraine: ‘Putin’s altar boy’: Pope Francis on Kirill

The Russian Orthodox Church scolded Pope Francis (4 May) for using the wrong tone after he urged Moscow Patriarch Kirill not to become Putin’s “altar boy,” cautioning the Vatican that such remarks would hurt dialog between the churches. Francis told Italy’s Corriere Della Sera newspaper that Kirill, who has given the Ukraine war his backing, “cannot become Putin’s altar boy.” [My comment: Much as I love the Pope: too late! Many long ago realised that Kirill has long been Putin’s altar boy! I have written in earlier blogs about their common KGB past.]

2. Ukraine: learning from the Via Crucis 2022 (Coliseum)

N.B. Catholics are a minority in Ukraine and the majority of Catholics in Ukraine belong to the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church, while significant numbers of others belong to the Latin Rite (Roman) Catholic, Ruthenian Greek Catholic Church, or Armenian Catholic Church.

According to the Vatican, 15 families were selected to write the Stations of the Cross meditations to mark the Amoris Laetitia Family Year, which will conclude on 26 June with the 10th edition of the World Meeting of Families, to be held in Rome. The families were asked to write the series of prayers and reflections for the 14 stations based on their actual experiences carrying difficult “crosses” in life, such as the loss of a family member, infertility, illness and disability as well as migration, but who also seek hope in their faith.

For the 13th station, “Jesus dies on the Cross,” a Ukrainian family and a Russian family were to read a reflection that they wrote together about how their lives were upended by the pain of war. Ukrainian nurse Iryna [or Irina] and Russian nursing student Albina met and became friends while studying nursing and working at a Rome medical university campus. They had told Vatican News on April 11 that such friendships were common and many families are made up of the two nationalities, living in both or either country.

The war “is a tragedy that hits both people. I am certain that neither the Ukrainian people nor the Russian people want this war. Everyone wants a normal life,” said Iryna.

The original text of the meditation for the 13th Station of the Cross reflected on the horror of war, without mentioning Ukraine by name. It follows:

“Death everywhere. Life that seems to lose its value. Everything changes in a few seconds. Our life, our days, the carefree winter snow, bringing the children to school, work, embraces, friendships ... everything. Everything suddenly loses meaning and value.

‘Where are you Lord? Where are you hiding? We want our life back as before. Why all of this? What wrong did we do? Why have you forsaken us? Why have you forsaken our peoples? Why did you break up our families like this? Why do we no longer have the desire to dream and to go on living? Why has my land become as dark as Golgotha?’

We have no tears left. Anger has given way to resignation. We know that you love us, Lord, but we don’t feel this love and it drives us to desperation. We wake up in the morning and feel happy for a few moments, but then we suddenly think how difficult it will be to reconcile ourselves to all this.
Lord, where are you? Speak to us amid the silence of death and division, and teach us to be peacemakers, brothers and sisters, and to rebuild what bombs tried to destroy.”

This original plan for the Via Crucis 13th Station was strongly criticized by Major Archbishop Sviatoslav Shevchuk, head of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church, who described it as “untimely.”

[The Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church is a Byzantine Rite Eastern Catholic Church in full communion with the Holy See. The ordinary (or hierarch) of the church holds the title of Major Archbishop of Kyiv-Halych and All Ruthenia, though the hierarchs and faithful of the church have acclaimed their ordinary as "Patriarch" and have requested Papal recognition of, and elevation to, this title. Major archbishop is a unique title within the Catholic Church that was introduced in 1963 as part of a political compromise. Since March 2011, the head of the church is Major Archbishop Sviatoslav Shevchuk who is considered by the faithful as their Patriarch but not recognised under that title as such by the Vatican].

“For the Greek Catholics of Ukraine, the texts and gestures of the 13th station of this Way of the Cross are incoherent and even offensive, especially in the context of the expected second, even bloodier attack of Russian troops on our cities and villages,” he said.

Andrii Yurash, the Ukrainian ambassador to the Holy See, also expressed concern about the format. Bishop Vitaliy Kryvytskyi, the Latin Rite bishop of Kyiv-Zhytomyr, described it as “incomprehensible.” As John L. Allen Jnr wrote: “A consortium of Catholic media outlets in Ukraine actually refused to carry the Via Crucis ceremony in protest of the Russian/Ukrainian duo.”

Personally, I found the original reflection perfectly understandable and not at all offensive. I did not see a moral equivalence between Russia’s unprovoked war of aggression and Ukraine’s legitimate right to self-defence; indeed I was pleased it implicitly acknowledged that some hundreds of thousands of Russians oppose Putin’s war and have had to flee rather than face prison for protesting. Putin has called opponents un-patriotic scum and traitors.

But then I am neither Ukrainian nor do I live and suffer in Ukraine. But I had many Ukrainian friends in Montreal while at McGill and my daughter-in-law is partly Ukrainian and her mother, a Secular Franciscan, has Ukrainian roots; also I have attended and participated in their beautiful liturgies so I am very, very strongly pro-Ukrainian; but that makes me neither anti-Russian people, nor do I deny their culture and achievements. I am just against the war, pro-sanctions and wanting reparations for Ukraine and justice for war crimes.

That said, I agree with Major Archbishop Shevchuk’s arguments about what is necessary. I also strongly believe we can start now as individuals to bring about reconciliation especially for the many thousands of mixed Ukrainian/Russian families and Russian speaking Ukrainians [e.g. Zelensky himself] who oppose the war; reconciliation is never premature at the personal level.

Reacting to the suggestion that the gesture was an attempt to foster reconciliation between Russia and Ukraine, Shevchuk said that it was premature because several conditions must be met before reconciliation can be attempted. “The first condition would be: you must stop killing us,” he said. “We can’t speak of healing wounds while the enemy is still constantly wounding you. In order to reconcile, you have to be alive. That’s why I called this idea ‘untimely,’ not bad or erroneous, but untimely [my emphasis]. In order to achieve reconciliation in the future, we all need to work very hard. And until this is done, it is not yet the time to discuss verbal or dramatized acts of reconciliation, particularly between the Ukrainian and Russian people. [My comment: As mentioned earlier, the two women met and became friends while studying nursing and working in Rome. So surely if individuals want to start reconciliation now, then God bless them! As John L Allen Jnr put it: “To begin with, the pope undoubtedly sees the improbable friendship between Albina and Irina as a symbol of the capacity to see past nationality and ethnicity to recognize our common humanity, and thus as something worth celebrating – and its power is precisely that it comes now, while the conflict is at its peak.” As Sr Marge Wissman, OSF wrote: “ Over and over, Pope Francis has preached encounter, not confrontation, … dialogue, not debate”]
Because of the criticism, to which the Pope obviously listened and reacted, in place of the reflection written by the Russian and Ukrainian families, a reader merely said: “In the face of death, silence is more eloquent than words. Let us therefore pause in prayerful silence and each one in his heart pray for peace in the world.” What the Pope did not change was that, during the silence, the cross was held tightly by the two friends, Irina and Albina, who looked at each other as they held the cross with tears in their eyes.

Ukrainian nurse Iryna and Russian nursing student Albina, who are friends, hold a cross at the 13th station as Pope Francis leads the Way of the Cross outside the Colosseum in Rome 15 April 2022.

(CNS photo/Paul Haring)

Shevchuk continued: “A second factor, without which there can be no beginning of reconciliation, is condemning criminal acts, in order to achieve justice for the victim,” [Shevchuk] continued. “For example, a reconciliation between the Polish and German peoples – initiated by the Catholic episcopate in the 1960’s — would not have been possible if the Nuremberg trials had not occurred, and if Nazism as an ideology had not been condemned. In our situation, any dialogue on reconciliation between Ukrainians and Russians can only take place when the Nuremberg Trials are conducted over the present murderous ideology, which has been declared a textbook case of genocide against Ukrainians by official Russian publications, including [state news agency] RIA Novosti. We cannot talk about justice if there is no criminal trial.”

The major archbishop was also asked why Pope Francis seems reluctant to condemn Russia by name for its aggression in Ukraine. [Because he has to leave the door open to being a mediator; nothing new in that. But I wonder if Pius XII would have mediated with Hitler? We know the Pope was not against tyrannicide regarding Hitler as the war dragged on and reports of the death camps spread.]
And I pray fervently that in this faith of ours, seeing these crimes, we will grow from raw human anger to righteous wrath, which will constantly disturb our conscience, not allowing us to forget, giving us no right to remain silent, no right to ever sit back passively for a moment.

We must be courageous, resilient and move towards victory.
And I wish this for all of us.”

The Pope offered a final prayer at the end of the Via Crucis, saying, “Take us by the hand, like a father, lest we stray from you. Turn our rebellious hearts to your own heart, so that we may learn to pursue plans of peace. Inspire adversaries to shake hands, and taste mutual forgiveness. Disarm the hand of brother raised against brother, so that where there is hatred, concord may flourish. Grant that we never act as enemies of the cross of Christ, so that we may share in the glory of his resurrection.”

I do not know the origin of the following prayer. It resonates very deeply with me; especially the parts I have underlined. I found it on my local Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church’s website as linked in this title:

PRAYER FOR THE AFFLICTED PEOPLE OF UKRAINE IN TIME OF WAR
“O Lord Jesus Christ, our God, we entreat You to hear the earnest prayer of Your beloved Church of Kyivan Rus’ for her deeply afflicted children abiding in the land of Ukraine. Behold their grave sorrow and grievous plight, and speedily come to their aid. Deliver Your vulnerable people from unjust aggressors, foreign invasion and the terror of war. Strengthen courageous defenders of the nation to fight virtuously, inspired more by love of those they protect than hatred of the enemy. O compassionate Lord, shelter the displaced, heal the wounded, console the orphan, protect the widow, comfort those who mourn, and mercifully receive into Your Kingdom those who have nobly died guarding their homeland against every aggression. Quickly make cease the spilling of blood of friend and foe alike, yet stir many to bravely struggle for that true justice which alone can bring lasting peace. O kind-hearted Lord, as You are our peace, soften the hearts of the unmerciful and convert those who promote hostilities toward reconciliation, so that Your beloved children of the land of Ukraine, may abide in that tranquility, justice and freedom which reflects your Kingdom, where You reign with Your eternal Father, and Your most holy, good and life-giving Spirit, now, and forever and ever. Amen.”

(N.B. The rectory of this church and priest’s family residence in Victoria, BC, was recently subject to an arson attack at night while the priest and his family were asleep upstairs; thank God they escaped. So far the culprits have not been found.)

Franciscans might be interested to know about Stanislav Shyrokoradiuk, OFM, born 23 June 1956, a Ukrainian prelate of the Catholic Church who became Bishop of Odessa-Simferopol 18 February 2020 after a year as Coadjutor Bishop there. He was Bishop of two other Ukrainian dioceses before that.

He has an interesting background. Shyrokoradiuk was born into a Polish Roman-Catholic family in Kornachivka, Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic on 23 June 1956. He graduated from a railway college, performed his compulsory service in the Red Army from 1974 to 1976, and also worked in factories. In 1980 he entered the Major Theological Seminary in Riga, Latvia, and one year later, he clandestinely joined the OFM. After completing his studies in theology and philosophy, he was ordained a priest on 4 June 1984. He returned to Ukraine in 1984 and worked as a parish priest from 1984 to 1994. He made his solemn profession as a Franciscan on 26 August 1988, again in secret. From 1996 to 2016 he was national director of Caritas-Spes Ukraine. In 2014 his diocese was split by the Russian annexation of Crimea and since 2022 further parts are under occupation by Russian invaders.
In Ukraine, the Secular Franciscan Community first appeared in the XIV century. It now has about 1,100 members, in about 50 communities of Roman Catholic parishes. Among them are people of different social backgrounds, different professions. Responding to the needs of modern society, the Order established a Franciscan School of Evangelization, which helps in the renovation of parishes and local OFS communities. The OFS spiritual assistant in Kiev and Ukraine is Fr Yuriy Zelinsky OFM(Cap).
We can only imagine what Franciscans in Ukraine feel about the situation and pray for them and indeed all those who live in Ukraine and elsewhere who suffer from the inhumanity of war.

3. PEACE NOT OIL

Activists from Greenpeace Italy daubed the message “peace not oil” on the side of a Russian oil tanker, as pressure increases on European governments to wean themselves off fossil fuels. The environmental protestors approached the ship in two rubber dinghies as it was entering the port of Santa Panagia in Sicily on Easter Sunday 17 April 2022.

They painted the message – and the Greenpeace symbol – in yellow paint before speeding away. Greenpeace has said that, since the start of Moscow’s war in Ukraine, EU nations have spent more than €33 billion on fossil fuel imports from Russia.

The London Economic Newspaper Ltd

4. First Nations, Inuit & Métis

In March 2013 , Idle No More formed an alliance with Defenders of the Land, a network of activists that has been involved in Indigenous land rights issues since 2008. As part of this alliance, Idle No More agreed to support nonviolent direct action (e.g., blockades).

Idle No More started in November 2012, among Treaty People in Manitoba, Saskatchewan, and Alberta protesting the Canadian government’s dismantling of environmental protection laws, endangering First Nations who live on the land. Born out of face-to-face organizing and popular education, but fluent in social media and new technologies, Idle No More has connected the most remote reserves to each other, to urbanized Indigenous people, and to the non-Indigenous population. Led by women, and with a call for refounded nation-to-nation relations based on mutual respect, Idle No More rapidly grew into an inclusive, continent-wide network of urban and rural Indigenous working hand in hand with non-Indigenous allies to build a movement for Indigenous rights and the protection of land, water, and sky.

Idle No More’s Vision: calls on all people to join in a peaceful revolution which honours and fulfills Indigenous sovereignty and which protects the land, the water, and the sky. Colonization continues through attacks to Indigenous rights and damage and harm to all our relations. We must repair these violations, live the spirit and intent of the treaty relationship, work towards justice in action, and protect Mother Earth.

Idle No More! reminds me of Laudato si’ Revolution. We can work with Idle No More! In fact when our local diocese or parish does not follow the Pope’s lead to act in this regard i.e. ignores Laudato si’ Week, Laudato Si’ Action Platform, Season of Creation, I am tempted to turn away from the church to work with such groups as Idle No More, The Last Stand, Greenpeace etc.

On 21 June 2021, the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples Act received Royal Assent and immediately came into force in Canada but it has not paved the way for settlement of all land claims; some are disputed by the Federal or a Provincial Government.

The Nuchatlaht First Nation is currently in a B.C. Supreme Court fight for official recognition of the rights and titles held solely by Nuchatlaht for thousands of years to 230 square kilometres of Nootka Island off the west coast of Vancouver Island. The Nuchatlaht’s lawsuit claims the B.C. and federal governments have denied their rights by approving logging and “effectively dispossessing” them of the land. The Nuchatlaht’s barrister Jack Woodward says their claim meets the test for

Aboriginal title set out in the Supreme Court of Canada’s landmark Tsilhqot’in decision in 2014. Woodward represented the Tsilhqot’in in that case. The B.C. government has denied that the Nuchatlaht hold aboriginal title over the area and said in earlier arguments at the trial that it has met its obligations under agreements with the nation related to forest resources.

Just a reminder of how long First Nations resistance has been going on in Canada:
In 1990, The Oka Crisis, also known as the Kanesatake Resistance, was a 78-day standoff (11 July–26 September 1990) between Mohawk protesters, Quebec police, and the Canadian Army.

1. At The Water’s Edge, book and film by Mohawk author Sonia Bonspille Boileau
CBC's Oka 101 (6 mins 21 secs)
2. Kanehsatake: 270 Years of Resistance (119 mins)
National Film Board of Canada, directed by Alanis Obomsawin - 1993

3. Then there were the two rebellions led by Métis Leader Louis Riel.
These were:

The Red River Rebellion of 1869
The North-West Rebellion of 1885

22-29 May 2022

Laudato Si’ Week 2022 is sponsored by the Vatican Dicastery for Promoting Integral Human Development and facilitated by Laudato Si’ Movement in collaboration with a cohort of Catholic partners. More information can be found here.

The annual celebration has become a way for all Catholics to unite and rejoice in the progress we’ve made in bringing Laudato Si’ to life and to commit ourselves to further prayer and action for our common home.

This year, with the theme of “Listening and Journeying Together” Catholics on six continents will work on “bringing the human family together to protect our common home” (LS 13), which is the guiding Laudato Si’ quote for the weeklong celebration. Catholics across the globe will unite their communities in action and learn more about how Laudato Si’ offers a blueprint on how to tackle the climate crisis. Globally, Catholics will come together as one family in prayer and action. Schedule of daily events: Laudato Si' Week 2022 events

I, Andrew, beg you: please join in this prayer and action as best you can in your parish & community. Be an advocate for us all to listen to the cry of the earth and cry of the poor for they are one, as the Québec & Canadian Bishops have said. I see nothing on the CCCB site about Laudato Si’ Week nor on my diocesan site. Pre-Covid my pastor had not even heard of it and seems to have forgotten what I told him about it. I and some new friends are going to remind him!

Brian Roewe

Such indifference has been noticed by young Catholics who are frustrated and dissatisfied. “Bishops and priests have largely failed to engage church teaching on creation care, and so far have approached climate change less as a matter of moral importance and more as a political flashpoint to be avoided.
Anna Robertson, director of youth and young adult mobilization with (the US) Catholic Climate Covenant, cited recent polling from the Springtide Research Institute showing that 74% of young Catholics (ages 13-25) are concerned about environmental issues, and a separate survey by the British medical journal The Lancet showed overall 84% of young people ages 16-25 globally are worried about climate change, with half reporting negative day-to-day impacts on their lives.

‘This is a huge concern, and this is a really pastoral crisis for our church,’ Robertson said. ‘Young people want to see our joys and hopes and our griefs and anxieties reflected in the church and embraced by it.’ So far, that hasn't happened around climate change.”

I detect a similar feeling of frustration and dissatisfaction in Canada and not just among the young.
“Dan DiLeo, a theologian … said it was important for Catholics to recognize not just a moral responsibility to respond to climate change, but that the church has ‘an extraordinary opportunity to take action’ to reduce heat-trapping greenhouse gas emissions and expand ecological awareness through its vast structure and network of parishes, schools, health care centers and more.

‘I think the most significant thing that young Catholics can do, frankly, is to advocate that the bishop commits the diocese to net-zero emissions,’ he said.”

I would add that Pope Francis wrote in Laudato si’: “Young people demand change. They wonder how anyone can claim to be building a better future without thinking of the environmental crisis and the sufferings of the excluded.” (Laudato Si’, 13).

I will ask my parish’s brand new social ecological committee which grew out of D&P/Caritas Canada’s Share Lent 2022 campaign to consider that this advocacy become one of our projects.

Here is a link to the Caritas Canada Laudato Si’ Week May 23, 2020 webinar to celebrate the 5th anniversary of Laudato Si', Pope Francis' encyclical. It was organized in collaboration with the Canadian Religious Conference and GCCM – Canada (now the Mouvement Laudato Si’ Movement Canada).

6. ‘HOPE IS A MORAL IMPERATIVE’
A Review of Maude Barlow's new book

Barlow, a senior water advisor to the UN General Assembly, among countless other roles within the Canadian & international global justice movement.

Peace & joy, Andrew Conradi, ofs. JPIC & Mouvement Laudato Si’ Movement Animator

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April 2022 Blog

4/9/2022

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I acknowledge and thank the Lkwungen People for allowing me to live, pray, work, and play on their lands. I am deeply sorry for the injustices inflicted upon the First Nations, Inuit and Métis peoples in Turtle Island by the complicity of settlers and the Catholic Church in the colonialism inherent in the Indian Act and Residential Schools including racism, neglect, many forms of abuse & cultural genocide.

WAR – JUSTICE – CLIMATE - INEQUALITY
LAUDATO SI’ 16: “EVERYTHING IS CONNECTED.”

As a Canadian I’ll start with Justice.
1. JUSTICE - POPE’S APOLOGY TO
CANADA’S FIRST NATIONS, INUIT & MÉTIS
Ephesians 5:8-9: “Live as children of light. Light produces goodness, justice & truth.”
Hallelujah! Hallelujah! Hallelujah!

Photo: Vatican Media /The Canadian Press, Globe & Mail

Pope Francis met with all three indigenous delegations 1 April 2022. He told those present that he had listened to their stories. By doing this, the Pope said, he was able to enter into and be deeply grieved by the stories of the suffering, hardship, discrimination and various forms of abuse that some of them experienced, particularly in the residential schools. Excerpts from his apology follow: “For the deplorable conduct of those members of the Catholic Church, I ask for God's forgiveness and I want to say to you with all my heart: I am very sorry. And I join my brothers, the Canadian bishops, in asking your pardon.”

“It is chilling to think of determined efforts to instill a sense of inferiority, to rob people of their cultural identity, to sever their roots, and to consider all the personal and social effects that this continues to entail: unresolved traumas that have become intergenerational traumas,” “Without real indignation, without historical memory and without a commitment to learning from past mistakes, problems remain unresolved and keep coming back. We can see this these days in the case of war. The memory of the past must never be sacrificed at the altar of alleged progress."

The Pope added that he felt shame “for the role that a number of Catholics, particularly those with educational responsibilities, have had in all these things that wounded you, in the abuses you suffered and in the lack of respect shown for your identity, your culture and even your spiritual values.” He said he hoped to visit Canada in July for the pilgrimage to Lac Ste Anne in Alberta 25-28 July 2022. Lac Ste. Anne was first called Wakamne (God's Lake) by the Nakota Sioux and Manitou Sakhahigan (Lake of the Spirit) by the Cree before the arrival of the settlers. A priest named Lestanc organized the first pilgrimage to Lac Ste. Anne in 1889 in honour of Saint Anne, whose feast day is on July 26. Thirty to forty thousand people now attend the annual pilgrimage.

Archbishop of Regina, Saskatchewan, Donald Bolen with Kevin Haywahe of the Nakoda Nation of Saskatchewan in St. Peter's Square, at the Vatican, Friday, April 1, 2022. Photo: Fabrizio Troccoli/The Globe and Mail

Amber Bracken's photo 19 June 2021 named World Press Photo of the Year titled Kamloops Residential School
(Amber Bracken for The New York Times/World Press Photo via AP)

 2. WAR UKRAINE

Ps 130: “Out of the depths I cry unto thee, O Lord! Lord, hear my voice! Let thine ears be attentive to the voice of my supplications!”

Creator: Andrej Ivanov | Credit: AFP

Protester pictured in Montreal, February, 2022.
UNITED NATIONS, April 7 (Reuters) - The United Nations General Assembly on Thursday suspended Russia from the U.N. Human Rights Council over reports of "gross and systematic violations and abuses of human rights" in Ukraine, prompting Moscow to announce it was quitting the body.
The U.S.-led push garnered 93 votes in favor, while 24 countries voted no and 58 countries abstained.
That’s a lot of complicity (82)! Silence is complicity!

For the Roman Catholic Bishop of Odessa, Stanislav Schyrokoradiuk, one of the main reasons for the invasion of Ukraine is the way the Russian population has been misinformed: “We Ukrainians are the victims of war, the Russian people are the victims of propaganda.” According to Bishop Schyrokoradiuk, the war is “not a conflict between our two peoples.” [But for some it now is after atrocities perpetrated by Russian soldiers came to light]. However, people living in Russia have no access to complete information, “therefore many of them would support the Russian government.” This adds more fuel to the aggression. “I hope that their eyes will be opened, so that peace can come,” says Schyrokoradiuk. But: Poll 24-30 March in face-to-face interviews with 1,632 Russians across the country showed 83 percent of Russians backing Putin, up from 71 percent in early February. [Poll released 30 March] They obviously believe Putin’s lies.

The atrocities revealed in Mariupol and after Russian withdrawal from Bucha and Borodyanka, to name just one town and a village, and also the ‘monstrous’ war crime of the Kramatorsk railway station missile attack have been denied by Russia which says they were committed by Ukrainians against their own people! Not that informed people would believe that stupidity and the satellite evidence and evidence from a rocket shot down contradicts such Russian claims.

W.D. Auden wrote this after the Soviet Union’s takeover of Czechoslovakia in 1968:
“The ogre does what ogres can, Deeds quite impossible for man, But one prize is beyond his reach: The ogre cannot master speech. Across a subjugated plain, Among its desperate and slain, The ogre strolls with hands on hips, While drivel gushes from his lips.”
Reminds me of … I’m sure you know who! Talking about drivel, sad to say in the USA the Republican G.O.P.'s Putin Wing includes supporters of Putin. Just click on this link. Unbelievable! (There may also be Canadian supporters). And in Europe there is Viktor Orbán, Hungary’s Prime Minister and in France Marine Le Pen.

Brave protests in Russia have taken place.
As of 22 March The Economist reported
“More than 15,000 Russians have been arrested in anti-war protests”

Protester Marina Ovsyannikova

with 'NO WAR' sign disrupts Russian state TV news broadcast 14 March 2022.

The sign, in English and Russian, read: "NO WAR. Stop the war. Don't believe propaganda. They are lying to you here." Another phrase, which looked like "Russians against war," was partly obscured.
- wikipedia

State TV is the main source of news for millions of Russians, and closely follows the Kremlin line that Russia was forced to act in Ukraine to demilitarize and "de-Nazify" the country, and to defend Russian-speakers there against "genocide." Ukraine and most of the world have condemned that as a false pretext for an invasion of a democratic country. The woman was identified by OVD-Info, an independent protest-monitoring group, and by the head of the Agora human rights group, as Marina Ovsyannikova, an employee of the channel. Reports say this brave woman as been arrested and fined.

Russian businessman Alex Konanykhin. On March 1, 2022 during the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine, Konanykhin announced on social media that he was offering a $1 million bounty for the arrest of Vladimir Putin as a war criminal under international laws, with the text "Wanted: Dead or Alive. Vladimir Putin for mass murder". Despite the wording of his online poster, Konanykhin subsequently re-iterated that he was not advocating assassination, but admitted that he would celebrate Putin's death. Konanykhin claimed that Putin was not the President of Russia because he ‘murdered his opponents’.

Killing a tyrant, i.e. Tyrannicide, has had support from various philosophers and theologians through the centuries, including the ancient Greeks and Romans, most notably Cicero; Catholics, most notably John of Salisbury (d. 1180) Jean Petit (d. 1411), and Suarez (d. 1617); and Protestants, most notably, Luther, Melanchthon, Zwingli, and Calvin. The Catholic St. Thomas Aquinas gave the most substantial argument for tyrannicide. He based his position on his arguments for just war and capital punishment. St. Thomas concluded, "He who kills a tyrant (i.e. an usurper) to free his country is praised and rewarded" (In 2 Sentences, 44.2.2). It has long been known that Pope Pius XII was complicit in a variety of plots, initiated by patriotic, anti-Nazi Germans, to assassinate Hitler and replace the Nazi regime with a government that would make peace with the Allies. Food for thought given the war crimes in Ukraine?

Sasha Filipenko: ‘No one wants to be a little brother’: Belarus, Russia and Ukraine – a dysfunctional family affair.
Putin loves to evoke the family to describe the relationship. This closeness has been greatly exaggerated by Moscow, and in fact they are all quite different. … the Russian language is not Russia’s property; it’s merely a means of communication. Speaking French in Geneva doesn’t make you French, speaking German in Zurich doesn’t make you German – you remain Swiss. [Welsh, Scottish and Irish speak English but that does not make them English!] As an example, according to the 2001 census, Russian is the main language of 74.9% of residents in Donetsk Oblast [Region] and 68.8% in Luhansk Oblast even though ethnic Ukrainians form 58% of the population of Luhansk Oblast and 56.9% of Donetsk Oblast.

In 2022, paying his debts to Putin, Lukashenko turned Belarus into an aggressor, leaving his own people completely bewildered. ‘Ukraine did its best to escape the Soviet Union, Lukashenko deliberately returned to it.’

We see today: Zelenskiy proposes a dialogue, but Putin can’t listen to anyone else’s point of view. This is the difference between the countries: Russia likes monologue, Ukraine likes [dialogue] argument and Belarus likes silence.

Putin relies on Ukraine, Belarus and Russia all having their origins in a great ancient state, Kievan Rus, but that’s precisely where the schism begins: the Ukrainians see those times in a radically different way, rightly pointing out that it is their country that can claim its descent from Kievan Rus, since its capital was in what is now Ukraine. Putin calls everyone around him little brothers, not really understanding that no one wants to be a little brother. Putin insists on the fact that in the Russian empire, [and USSR] the Ukrainians and the Belarusians were not seen as separate peoples, and that’s where he makes a basic mistake, neglecting to ask whether they themselves saw themselves as such. Ukraine declared independence in 1917, but Putin isn’t bothered about that: his memory is selective, allowing him to remember just one thing: that Stalin got rid of Ukrainian national leaders. Moscow didn’t want to let its “children” go, perhaps unable to fully understand that those it had adopted many years ago weren’t even teenagers – they were grownups. But now, the Kremlin will never again be able to claim it is the head of the family.

Some historical background. Crimea became part of Ukraine in 1954 when the Soviet government transferred Crimea from the Russian Soviet Federation of Socialist Republics (RSFSR) to the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic (Ukr SSR). This in spite of the fact that the population of Crimea — approximately 1.1 million — was then roughly 75 percent ethnic Russian and 25 percent Ukrainian. Communist Party of the Soviet Union First Secretary Nikita Khrushchev [a Ukrainian] saw the transfer as a way of fortifying and perpetuating Soviet control over Ukraine after the post WWII the civil war in Ukraine had finally been won. Some 860,000 ethnic Russians would be joining the already large Russian minority in Ukraine.

The legal system in the Soviet Union was mostly a fiction, but the transfer did occur in accordance with the rules in effect at the time. Moreover, regardless of how the transfer was carried out, the Russian Federation expressly accepted Ukraine’s 1991 borders both in the December 1991 Belovezhskaya Pushcha accords (the agreements that precipitated and codified the dissolution of the Soviet Union) and in the December 1994 Budapest Memorandum that finalized Ukraine’s status as a non-nuclear weapons state.

In early 1991, after a referendum was held in the Ukrainian SSR and a resolution was adopted a month later by the Ukrainian SSR parliament, the status of Crimea was upgraded to that of an “autonomous republic.” Crimea retained that designation within Ukraine after the Soviet Union broke apart.

Russia illegally annexed Crimea in 2014 even though Russia had no legal right to own Crimea and actually signed an international treaty, after the fall of Communism but before Vladimir Putin came to power, accepting that Crimea was part of Ukraine. Under the USSR the Donbas and Luhansk were part of Ukraine; but they declared independence as separate Peoples Republics in 2014. As mentioned previously, according to the 2001 census, ethnic Ukrainians form 58% of the population of Luhansk Oblast and 56.9% of Donetsk Oblast. Ethnic Russians form the largest minority, accounting for 39% and 38.2% of the two oblasts respectively.[87] Modern Donbas is a predominately Russophone region. As mentioned previously, according to the 2001 census, Russian is the main language of 74.9% of residents in Donetsk Oblast and 68.8% in Luhansk Oblast.[88] The proportion of native Russian-speakers is higher than ethnic Russians because some ethnic Ukrainians and other nationalities also indicate Russian as their mother tongue. But that does not necessarily mean they want to live under Russian rule. To what extent the separation is a result of Russian mercenaries and forced persuasion is a matter of debate.

So now let me, as a Franciscan, return to the language of the Gospel. “While God also bore witness by signs and wonders and various miracles and by gifts of the Holy Spirit distributed according to his will.” (Luke 17:11-19) “I am the LORD, the God of all mankind. Is anything too hard for me?” (Jeremiah 32:27). Let us pray for miracles in Ukraine because that is what we need (and elsewhere also).

Pope Francis holds a video call with Russian Orthodox Patriarch Kirill to discuss the war in Ukraine, and calls on Church leaders to use the language of Jesus, not that of politics.

If only Kirill and Putin would not just use the words of Jesus but act on them!
But let me as a Secular Franciscan with an interest in Christianity, geography, history and geo-politics, speak in political & historical terms. I wonder how two ex-KGB men talk about Jesus?
Pius XII issued his Encyclical Orientales omnes: of December 23, 1945. In it the Pope not only condemned Communism; he openly and specifically attacked Moscow Patriarch Alexis II. "The situation got worse March 8-10, 1946, when Soviet authorities forcibly convened an assembly of 216 priests and the so-called Synod of Lvov was held, at which the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church was forcibly ‘reunited’ to the Russian Orthodox Church and forced to revoke its union with Rome. The UGCC first became a ‘Church of Silence,’ then a ‘Church of Martyrs,’ as many Ukrainian Catholics who were imprisoned by the communists were tortured and/or murdered.” (Ibid., English ed., p. 91)

Pacepa confirms that “patriarch” Alexis was also a KGB agent: “On December 5, 2008, Alexis II, the 15th Patriarch of Moscow of All Russia and the Primate of the Russian Orthodox Church, died. He had worked for the KGB under the code-name of Drozdov and was awarded the KGB Certificate of Honor, as was revealed in a KGB archive accidentally left behind in Estonia when the Russians pulled out of it. For the first time in history, Russia had the opportunity to conduct the democratic election of a new patriarch, but that was not to be.

"In 1971, the KGB had sent Kirill [code name “Mikhailov”] to Geneva as the representative of the Russian Orthodox Church to that Soviet propaganda machine that was the World Council of Churches. In 1975, the KGB infiltrated Kirill into the Central Committee of the WCC, which had become a Kremlin pawn. In 1989, the KGB appointed him chairman of the Russian patriarchate’s foreign relations as well. He still held those positions when he was elected patriarch.” This Kirill is now the Patriarch of Moscow of All Russia and the Primate of the Russian Orthodox Church.

So if Kirill and Putin talk religion it is not in any way we would understand it to lead to concrete action for peace. After all they do not even call it a war and deny evidence of war crimes that came to light after Russian withdrawal north west of Kyiv. Prussian Major-General Von Clauswitz (who served in the Russian–German Legion during the Napoleonic War) famously said: "War is the continuation of [diplomatic] policy with other means."

Problem with Kirill and Putin is that their word is not trustworthy nor do they accept that Ukraine is an independent nation and is no longer part of a Russian Empire or USSR regardless of close historical and many family links and Russian speakers in Ukraine (including Ukrainian President Zelensky whose first language was Russian).
Putin pretends Ukraine is threat to Russia which is part of his disinformation and twisted interpretation of history. After independence upon breakup of the USSR, Ukraine voluntarily gave up nuclear weapons.

So why would Ukraine want to join NATO? Ukraine saw what happened to Chechnya, Georgia, and Syria from Russian military action. Destruction, obliteration and death to civilians as part of deliberate policy. Do you think Putin would have dared to invade Ukraine if it had become a member of NATO?
The Pope was silent at first: reluctant to name Putin and “war” in Ukraine. He now clearly alludes to Putin and does call the invasion a war.

VALLETTA, April 2 (Reuters) - Pope Francis said on Saturday he was considering a trip to Kyiv and implicitly criticised Russian President Vladimir Putin over the invasion of Ukraine, saying a "potentate" was fomenting conflict for nationalist interests. Francis made the comments, first to reporters on the plane taking him to Malta for a two-day visit, and then in a hard-hitting speech in the island's presidential palace that left little doubt who he was referring to.

"From the east of Europe, from the land of the sunrise, the dark shadows of war have now spread. We had thought that invasions of other countries, savage street fighting and atomic threats were grim memories of a distant past," the pope said.
Moscow denies targeting civilians in the action it launched on Feb. 24, which it dubs a "special military operation" designed not to occupy territory but to demilitarise and "denazify" its neighbour. Francis has already rejected that terminology, calling it a war.

The Pope’s reticence was not shared by the head of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church, who has been emphatic in his daily denunciations of the Russian invasion. Nor has it been shared by Polish bishops, who are now helping to mobilize the reception of tens of thousands of Ukrainian refugees who have crossed the border. “I ask you, Brother, to appeal to Vladimir Putin to stop the senseless warfare against the Ukrainian people,” Polish Bishop Gadecki said in his letter to Kirill. “I ask you in the most humble way to call for the withdrawal of the Russian troops from the sovereign state that is Ukraine.”
“I also ask you to appeal to Russian soldiers not to take part in this unjust war, to refuse to carry out orders which, as we have already seen, lead to many war crimes,” he added. “Refusing to follow orders in such a situation is a moral obligation.”

[St Oscar Romero said the same thing for which he paid with his life. 23 March 1980, in his homily Romero ordered the army to stop killing people: "Brothers," he said, "you are all killing your fellow countrymen. No soldier has to obey an immoral order. It is time to regain your conscience. In the name of God and in the name of the suffering people I implore you, I beg you, I order you, stop the repression." The next day, a shot killed Romero, aged 62, as he said Mass.]

Realpolitik. We live in the world and as Franciscans,
IN THE WORDS OF THE PRAYER OF ST FRANCIS (SO CALLED EVEN THOUGH HE DID NOT WRITE IT), “WE SEEK TO UNDERSTAND.”

So let’s try!
A look further back into Russian history is required to appreciate the sense of destiny that drives Vladimir Putin, with his purposefulness rooted in ages-old Ukrainian-Russian dynamics. …At the beginning of the war Patriarch Kirill, the leader of the Russian Orthodox Church, gave a sermon in which he emphasized the God-given unity of Ukraine and Russia; he also denounced the “evil forces” in Ukraine that are out to destroy this unity. Last Sunday (March 6) he sounded even less conciliatory. Invoking the intercession of two of medieval Russia’s most important saints, “Holy Prince Vladimir” and Sergei of Radonezh, he called on God to “prohibit and overturn the designs of the foreign pagans [sic] who want war and are gathering troops against Holy Russia.” …

But much more is at stake than the liberation of the oppressed Russians, [in the Donbas] he said: the salvation of mankind ⁠— people are weak and no longer following God’s Law, they are no longer hearing His Word and His Gospel, they are blind to the Light of Christ. The future of human civilization itself is at stake; then the patriarch went into an angry tirade against gay parades … which he characterized as a great sin against God. In fact, he said, participation in such parades demonstrates a clear denial of God and His Truth. This is how Kirill speaks; he appears to believe that Orthodox Russia, or Holy Russia as he calls it, is engaged in an apocalyptical struggle with the Godless West about the future of mankind. In fact, in last Sunday’s sermon he invoked the Last Judgement and the Day of Reckoning. …It is stunning to see that the patriarch has remained completely passive although representatives of western churches have repeatedly called on him to speak to Putin (most recently the papal nuncio). A petition by more than 150 Russian Orthodox priests and monks calling on Kirill to denounce the war has also remained unanswered. …

The Russian Orthodox Church is providing much of the symbolism and ideology that Putin has used to cement his popularity. …Putin has been flaunting his religious faith; he is often seen on television praying, crossing himself, kissing icons, and lighting candles. Priests have held ceremonies to bless Putin, and Patriarch Kirill has called Putin “a miracle of God.” Putin’s Orthodoxy is less about spirituality and faith than about religious performance. It derives from the Kremlin’s mythologization of Russia’s historical past. One of Putin’s first acts was to convince the church to canonize the last Romanov tsar and his family; and clearly the empire created by Peter the Great is very much on Putin’s mind. …

Putin is, of course, not the first 20th century Russian ruler for whom medieval Russia was important. Stalin initiated two of the Soviet Union’s largest film projects about medieval figures. The great filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein was commissioned to make films about Prince Alexander Nevsky and Tsar Ivan the Terrible; these are clearly propaganda films but nevertheless masterpieces of world cinema …
Both Nevsky and Ivan are portrayed as heroic military figures who destroyed foreign invaders and occupiers of the Russian lands. Nevsky supposedly defeated the Teutonic knights who are said to have invaded Russia in the 13th century. A famous line from the film reads something like “who comes to Russia with the sword will perish by the sword.” And when Alexander leads his troops into battle against the Germans the battle cry was “Za Rus’” (“For Russia”). [This is why “Z” has become a symbol for the Russian forces and their supporters although the letter “Z” does not exist in the Cyrillic alphabet]. The film was completed before the Hitler-Stalin pact of August 1939 and it was immediately shelved. However, when the Germans invaded in June 1941, the film became a blockbuster watched by millions of Russians, …Alexander Nevsky is not only one of Russia’s greatest national heroes but also among its most important saints. Why did Alexander become a saint? For two reasons: first, for defending Russia against the perceived onslaught of the Catholic church; the Teutonic knights were after all a crusading order. Second and perhaps more importantly, for giving Metropolitan Kirill of Kiev, the head of the Orthodox Church, a new home after he had been expelled from Kiev by the Mongols. He thus facilitated — so goes the common nationalist narrative — the migration of Holy Russia from Kiev to Moscow. …

A close look at Patriarch Kirill’s choice of words during his Sunday sermon reveals that he equates “Holy Russia” with “Holy Rus’’ (Sviataia Rus’). The medieval state of Rus’ was founded in the 9th century by Vikings to control trade routes connecting Scandinavia with the Byzantine Empire (Constantinople) and the Abbasid Empire in the Middle East (Baghdad). The capital of this Viking state was Kiev; in the year 988 the ruler of Kievan Rus’, the Viking Prince Woldemar, converted to Eastern Orthodoxy on Crimea and adopted the Christian name Vladimir. He later was made a saint for this act. According to the now-dominant Russian nationalist view, Vladimir was the founding father of the first Russian state and the Russian Orthodox Church. State and church formed a productive symbiosis and Kiev became the cradle of Russian civilization. The destruction of Rus’ by the Mongols in the 13th century was a world historical tragedy, but the legacy survived in Moscow where the descendants of Vladimir established a second Russian state—the core of the future Russian Empire. This is how the nationalist narrative presents the Kievan past and its legacy; there is no room for Ukrainians in this narrative. …

Putin considers Vladimir “the savior of Russia” and has promoted the cult of Vladimir. To him Kiev and Crimea, where Vladimir was baptized, are “sacred Russian lands.” …

The glorification of Russia’s holiness is not new; in fact, the ideology of Russia’s sacred mission in the world was developed in the 19th century. Dostoevsky was only one of many so-called Slavophile thinkers who developed concepts like Russian spirit, Russian soul, and Russian God to differentiate the Russian Orthodox nation from the liberal and secular nations that “were rearing their ugly heads” in France, Germany, Hungary, Spain, and Poland in the aftermath of the Napoleonic wars. …

I am surprised that the Western press has not covered Putin's rapture with the Russian Orthodox Church and religion, especially the myths of Holy Russia and St. Vladimir. In my opinion, these and similar historical myths are crucial underpinnings of Russia’s conflict with Ukraine. They provide the basic elements for what the American historian Richard Hofstadter has called “a paranoid style.”

Russian leaders are convinced that the West has long been conspiring against Russia by coopting Ukraine. And not surprisingly, the war in Ukraine is assuming the proportions of an apocalyptic battle between absolute good and absolute evil; it is in-line with Putin’s reading of Russian history, a reading that emphasizes the perpetual fight against foreign intruders (Mongols, Lithuanians, Poles, Swedes, French, and Germans). The Russian Orthodox Church is seen as absolutely crucial in the defense of the threatened and victimized Russian nation. The collective memory of these century-old struggles emphasized in Russian school curricula provides an explosive legacy. …

Ukraine is different from the other territories lost in what Putin describes as the greatest catastrophe of the 20th century, that is, the collapse of the Soviet Union. The unravelling of the USSR began with Ukraine’s declaration of independence on Dec. 1, 1991. There is also a long history of independence in Ukraine that started with the Cossack revolts of the 17th century and culminated in the establishment of an independent Ukrainian nation state in January 1918. Russian tsars and church leaders have therefore fought the idea of a Ukrainian nation for centuries and Orthodox Russian nationalism was one of the principal instruments to keep Ukrainians in check.

The annexation of Ukraine from Poland began with the elimination of the independent Metropolitan, See of Kyiv, in 1686 and the takeover of Kyivan Rus’ principal monasteries and holy sites by the Moscow patriarchate. During the next 200 years, the Russian church acted in unison with the imperial government to secure Ukraine (which was incidentally renamed “Little Russia”). This was considered vital for the survival of the Russian empire because many Ukrainians lived just across the borders in Catholic Poland and later in the Habsburg Empire. …

In general, there is very little indication that Patriarch Kirill has ever seriously disagreed with Putin; in fact, the two seem to get along very well. Putin attends Mass with the patriarch in Kremlin churches, visits monasteries with him, and takes his blessing. Almost 30 years ago, the well-known dissident priest Gleb Yakunin found evidence in the Secret Police archives that Kirill, like so many other Russian church hierarchs, rose to prominence because of his close affiliation with the KGB (now FSB). Thus, the patriarch likely shares a very similar career trajectory with Putin, who also rose to power through the KGB.

I don’t know how Putin reacted to the break-up of the Moscow patriarchate in Ukraine. I am not aware of any public statements by the Kremlin on this matter. But for Patriarch Kirill this is a matter of life and death. There have been until recently three different Orthodox churches in Ukraine, the Kyivan Patriarchate, the Ukrainian Autocephalous Orthodox Church and the Ukrainian Orthodox Church of the Moscow Patriarchate (note, I am leaving out the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church, which follows the Orthodox rite but joined the Catholic Church in late 16th century). In 2018, the Autocephalous Church and the Kyivan Patriarchate were united and officially recognized as the only Ukrainian Orthodox Church by the ecumenical patriarch of Constantinople. In other words, almost 350 years of history were reversed; the Moscow Patriarchate’s claim to ecclesiastical jurisdiction over the Ukrainian lands was no longer recognized by the nominal head of the Eastern Orthodox churches. It seems that now the last vestiges of Moscow’s control over Ukrainian Orthodox clergy, parishes, and monasteries are disappearing. On the first day of the Russian invasion, Metropolitan Onufrii, the head of the Moscow Patriarchate’s Ukrainian Orthodox Church, declared his support for the Ukrainian army and Ukrainian sovereignty. He appealed to Patriarch Kirill and Putin to stop this fratricidal war: “War between Russia and Ukraine is like Cain killing Abel…it has no justification either with God or man.”

Evaluation of Russia by Finnish Intelligence Colonel (subtitles) | December 3, 2018 (60 mins)
Martti J. Kari (former intelligence colonel in the Finnish Defence Forces): Russian strategic culture - Why Russia does things the way it does?

Think about it! Similarities & differences?

Something else to think about: Ukraine needs charity & weapons
Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba told a Nato meeting Ukraine needs
“weapons, weapons, weapons”
The EU is paying 35 times as much for Russian fuel as it has given Ukraine for defense,
chief diplomat says
Josep Borrell told the European Parliament 6 April that since the invasion, the bloc had paid Russia 35 billion euros ($38 billion) for fuel and sent Ukraine 1 billion euros ($1.09 billion) to bolster its defense against Russia, the BBC reported.

How Saint Javelin raised over $1m for Ukraine
Bernd Debusmann Jr BBC News, Washington
Christian Borys helped develop the unlikeliest of images - a rocket-armed saint.
The image - known as "Saint Javelin" - depicts the Virgin Mary cradling a US-made FGM-148 Javelin anti-tank weapon The Toronto-based Mr Borys, 35, is no stranger to Ukraine and its people, and is of Ukrainian heritage. He does not take credit for the original concept behind Saint Javelin.

Mr Borys was inspired by the work of US artist Chris Shaw, who in 2012 painted a Madonna holding a gold-plated AK-47 - which was later, in online memes, replaced with a rocket launcher - when he commissioned a colleague to draw the image and began printing stickers. His initial goal was to raise C$500 for the Help Us Help Charity, a long-standing, Canadian-based organisation operating in Ukraine that helps the families of killed soldiers, as well as veterans suffering from post-traumatic stress.

TWO CARITAS ORGANISATIONS HELP UKRAINE

Caritas Ukraine’s work first began in 1992, after Ukraine declared independence. It was set up by local Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church communities to distribute humanitarian assistance to poor families. Today, it works to coordinate the efforts of charitable organisations run by local Ukrainian Greek Catholic churches and to build cooperation with foreign Caritas chapters.

Caritas-Spes which means “Love-Hope” in Latin, is a charitable mission of the Roman Catholic Church in Ukraine. It was founded by the Roman Catholic Bishops of Ukraine in May 1995 and was later registered by the State Committee on Religious Issues in September 1996. Caritas was the first organisation to offer humanitarian assistance after Ukraine’s independence from the Soviet Union in 1991.

The two Caritas organisations are providing internally-displaced people on the move with essential information, food, drinking water and personal hygiene kits, as well as a safe and secure place to sleep, eat and wash themselves. Caritas staff and volunteers also provide safe transport for displaced families to reach their loved ones.

Another Catholic organisation helping in Ukraine is the Catholic Near East Welfare Association. As of 18 March, CNEWA Canada has raised over $1.16 million for Ukraine. Also, a generous family from Alberta matched donations up to $500,000.

3. CLIMATE

Ps 19a (Grail): “The heavens proclaim the glory of God, and the firmament shows forth the work of his hands. Day unto day takes up the story and night unto night makes known the message.”

IPCC's latest report on Mitigation of Climate Change was published on 4 April.
Emissions must peak by 2025 to limit global warming and reduce by 43% by 2030.
We need to cut fossil fuel use, transition to renewable energy at scale and invest in carbon dioxide removal.

And yet: Canada in deepwater: behind the Trudeau government’s approval of the Bay du Nord offshore oil development

Environment Minister Steven Guilbeault greenlit Newfoundland’s first deepwater oil and gas development project. Questions remain about how that decision was made. The Bay du Nord project proposes to extract up to one billion barrels of crude oil from the seabed about 500 kilometres northeast of St. John’s. There, in depths ranging from 300 metres to 1,200 metres, owners Equinor, of Norway, and Husky Energy (now owned by Cenovus), of Canada, hope to operate for up to 30 years. [N.B. Cenovus has substantial Chinese ownership]. In a decision released Wednesday, April 6, Guilbeault concluded Bay du Nord is “not likely to cause significant adverse environmental effects,” and will, therefore, move ahead. [Forgive me for sounding sceptical and suspecting gobbledygook.]

Six key lifestyle changes
can help avert the climate crisis

Research shows that governments and individuals making small changes can have a huge impact in reducing emissions. Last week (4 April) the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) issued its “bleakest warning yet”, saying the climate crisis was accelerating rapidly with only a narrow chance left of avoiding its worst ravages.
Bailey said as the world reaches the edge of ecological collapse, it needed a workable alternative to this ‘universal consumer society’ in the next decade.

Eat a largely plant-based diet, with healthy portions and no waste
Buy no more than three new items of clothing per year
Keep electrical products for at least seven years
Take no more than one short haul flight every three years and one long haul flight every eight years
Get rid of personal motor vehicles if you can – and if not keep hold of your existing vehicle for longer

Make at least one life shift to nudge the system, like moving to a green energy, insulating your home or changing pension supplier.

Left: 1millionwomen.com.au Right: 23 June 2020. (The Canadian Press/Darryl Dyck)

Climate-Fossil Fuels-War
How sad; they were warned but did not pay attention:

European oil receipts boosting Putin’s war chest by $285m a day, study finds (The Guardian)
How Europe is funding Putin’s war (Politico)

WAR - INEQUALITY : RUSSIA CAN ONLY AFFORD ITS WAR IN
UKRAINE BECAUSE BRITAIN HELPED RAISE THE CASH
by Oliver Bullough author of Butler to the World: How Britain Became the Servant of Tycoons, Tax Dodgers, Kleptocrats and Criminals

SHARE LENT - WAY OF THE CROSS

In this Way of the Cross, Development and Peace ― Caritas Canada invites us to understand the experiences of communities in the Global South that are affected by climate change and by the misbehaviour of socially irresponsible companies that do not respect human rights and the environment. Download Here

Powerpoint for the Way of the Cross can be found here to be Downloaded Here

And a final thought:

Peace & joy, Andrew Conradi, ofs. JPIC & Mouvement Laudato Si’ Movement Animator

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March 2022 Blog

3/5/2022

0 Comments

I acknowledge and thank the Lkwungen People
for allowing me to live, pray, work, and play on their lands. I am deeply sorry for the injustices inflicted upon the First Nations, Inuit and Métis peoples in Turtle Island by the complicity of settlers in the colonialism inherent in the Indian Act and Residential Schools including racism, many forms of abuse & cultural genocide.

UKRAINE

1. CCCB STATEMENT ON RUSSIAN INVASION OF UKRAINE
Statement
In solidarity with the Head of the Ukrainian Catholic Church, His Beatitude Sviatoslav Shevchuk, in unison with Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew, with the people of Ukraine as well as with Canadians of Ukrainian origin and descent, we encourage the faithful and all people of good will to pray for the imminent restoration of peace, dialogue, and human fraternity.
An excerpt from a message from His Beatitude Sviatoslav:

We pray especially for those who defend Ukraine, who in these days are for us an example of loving sacrifice and dedicated service to their people.
May the merciful Lord protect them from every danger and crown their efforts with the victory of truth and good.
We call for the gracious blessing of a loving God and Creator upon Ukraine and its people!
The blessing of the Lord be upon you.

† SVIATOSLAV

Ukrainian Christian Background Simplified.
In Ukraine Christianity has a fractured history. It is practically an Orthodox country, and most Catholics are Ukrainian Greek Catholics (Byzantine Rite) with about 7 million believers or about 9.4% of the population and Roman (Latin Rite) Catholics at only 0.8%. A few Roman Catholics priests are bi-ritual (Roman and Byzantine).

About 67.3% of the population declared adherence to one or another strand of Orthodox Christianity which is split into at least two strands in spite of the recent unification of four strands.

The Orthodox Church of Ukraine
The church was united at the unification council in Kyiv on 15 December 2018 as a condition for recognition of it by the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople and was granted the tomos of autocephaly (decree of ecclesial independence) by the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople in Istanbul on 5 January 2019. The unification council voted to unite all the existing Ukrainian Orthodox major jurisdictions: the Ukrainian Orthodox Church – Kyiv Patriarchate (UOC-KP) and the Ukrainian Autocephalous Orthodox Church (UAOC) as well as a part [only part] of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church of the Moscow Patriarchate (a branch of the Moscow-based Russian Orthodox Church, which claims jurisdiction over Ukraine). The Unification Council elected Epiphanius Dumenko – previously the Metropolitan of Pereiaslav-Khmelnytskyi and Bila Tserkva (UOC-KP) – as its primate, the Metropolitan of Kyiv and all Ukraine.
Formation of the new On 5 January 2019, Patriarch Bartholomew and Metropolitan Epiphanius celebrated a Divine Liturgy in St. George's Cathedral in Istanbul. The Tomos was signed thereafter, also in St. George's Cathedral. The Tomos "had come into force from the moment of its signing."[46][47] The signing of the tomos officially established the autocephalous Orthodox Church of Ukraine.[48]
Protestants are 2.2%.

Read more on the complicated history.

N.B. In solidarity please remember to use the Ukrainian spelling and pronunciation, rather than the Russian, for the Ukrainian capital city. Ukrainian is KYIV (pronounce the ending like “Steve”). Please do not use the Russian KIEV (pronounced like Key ev - ending like the "ev" in “ever”). Ukrainians appreciate this.

2. FRANCISCANS OFM

Help to Ukraine Through Our Friars
Emergency Ukraine: Help to Ukraine through our Friars

Friar Danyil Botvina, OFM, the Provincial of the Franciscan Province of St. Michael the Archangel in Ukraine has sent an urgent request for funds to help provide food, medicine, and shelter to the refugees living through this tragedy.

The province has 16 friaries with 65 friars serving 54 parishes in Ukraine. As you read this, women and children are seeking food and protection at the friaries as the country undergoes siege by the Russians.
Friar Botvina described to Friar Massimo Fusarelli, OFM Minister General, the situation of serious difficulty experienced by the friars who live in the city of Konotop, (about 250 km east of Kyiv) occupied by the Russians last Thursday, February 24. “The friars are well and have remained there with the people, not to abandon them”.

The words of Fr Romualdo, parish priest of the Konotop friary, describe in detail a scenario that no one thought possible until a few days ago. The streets have become a theatre of war, armoured vehicles have been knocked down, cars have been set on fire and, above all, military and civilian victims are scattered throughout the city. The picture is compounded by the despair into which the population has fallen on hearing the news that the city has been lost to the Ukrainian army.

The parish immediately opened its doors to everyone. The friars offered answers to basic needs such as a place to spend the night or to get a meal, but also to the need for a word of comfort. They are mostly elderly people, women and children who have found themselves helpless in the face of the outbreak of war on their doorstep. In spite of these efforts, it is becoming increasingly difficult to provide food, medicine and other essentials for those who have all left their homes. The number of people being cared for is increasing and the friars need help.

I ask you to donate to support our brothers and sisters who are suffering in Ukraine. In the letter of the Minister Provincial of Ukraine, (in Italian) Br Danyil Botvina, you can find a further witness of the urgency with which we launch this appeal. Thank you.

3. OFM (Conv) Office of Communications
Minister General: The Situation in the Ukraine
and
Provincial Custody of the Holy Cross in the Ukraine

28 February 2022: The OFM (Conv) Minister General, Friar Carlos A. TROVARELLI, has been receiving many questions about the situation with our friars in the Ukraine, since the Russian aggression began on February 24, 2022.

The Minister General would like to assure you that he is in contact with our friars working in the Ukraine along with our Bishop Friar Edward KAWA and our friars in neighbouring countries. The Custos of the Provincial Custody of the Holy Cross in the Ukraine, Friar Stanisław KAWA, reports: “All the friars remain in their friaries and are working, making themselves available to the people in every possible way. The bombing has forced everyone, when necessary, to go down into bomb shelters. The most difficult situation is now in BORYSPIL (БОРИСПІЛЬ), where there is an important airport. The other friaries (LVIV [ЛЬВІВ], MACKIVCI (МАЦЬКІВЦІ), KREMENCHUK [КРЕМЕНЧУК], BILSHIVTSI [БІЛЬШІВЦ]) are already taking in and assisting refugees.”

Friar Marian GOŁĄB, reports that the friars, especially those in Poland, are preparing their friaries to take in refugees. The friary in Kalwaria Pacławska, Poland, is closest to the border and is already assisting the needy. The Minister Provincial of the Province of St. Joseph, Spouse of the B.V.M. in Romania, Friar Damian-Gheorghe PĂTRAȘCU, is in contact with the friars in the Ukraine and is ready to provide any needed help. The Province of Romania has a friary near the border with the Ukraine, in Cacica, Romania.

The Minister General reminds us of Pope Francis’s invitation to pray and fast, and our friars in the Ukraine are also asking for prayer. Friar Carlos assures us that we will do everything possible to help those in need and to support those who are working with the needy.

In summary, we are there, standing with and for the people. Let us pray and work. Amen.

4. OFM (Cap)
Capuchins in Ukraine
Capuchins have been working for over three centuries in Ukraine
In the Soviet Ukraine, only one Franciscan remained: Servant of God Serafin Kaszuba. After his death in 1977, the Capuchins remained outside the country until 1988, when Ukrainian Franciscan Father Stanislao Padewski, today Bishop of Kharkiv-Zaporizhia, was invited by the parish priest of Bar, to return to the Ukraine.

The Capuchins of the Custody of Ukraine dedicated to Saint Pio, responding to the invitation of Bishop Milan Shashik of the Greek-Catholic Diocese of Mukachevo (siu iuris) arrived in Uzhhorod Ukraine (right on the Slovak border) on August 15, 2012.

On November 23, 2020, the bishop of the Greek-Catholic diocese of Mukachevo (close to the Slovak and Hungarian border) gave his written consent for the erection of a Capuchin house in his diocese. This first attempt at the presence of the Capuchins in the Byzantine Catholic rite gives hope for the possibility of extending this ministry.

Here is a video (1 min 10 sec) showing Polish Capuchins in Ukraine in their monastery’s cellar praying with people to whom they have given refuge. The friars are dressed in bulletproof vests, boots, and combat helmets, suggesting they’ve spent quite a bit of time outside and in danger. The people who they pray with look haggard and scared, but they lift their voices in song to praise the Lord and ask for intercession.

This is their prayer which we can pray in solidarity:
Holy God, holy Mighty, Holy and Immortal, Have mercy on us …
From air, hunger, fire and war, Save us, Lord!
From sudden and unexpected death, Save us, Lord!
We sinners are asking you, God, Hear us, Lord!

5. OFS (Ukraine)
In Roman Catholics in Ukraine see Movements & Communities

In Ukraine the Secular Franciscan Community first appeared in the XIV century. It now has about 1100 members in about 50 communities in Roman Catholic parishes. Among them are people of different social backgrounds, & different professions. Responding to the needs of modern society, the Order established a Franciscan School of Evangelization, which helps in the renovation of parishes and local OFS communities. The spiritual assistant community OFS in Kyiv and Ukraine is Rev.Yuriy Zelinsky, OFM (Cap). Tertiaries involved in the work of evangelization in Ukraine, help to organize retreats, parish groups, & ecumenical meetings. Members of the Order serve orphans, retired, blind, & homeless people. Admiring nature, they collaborate with the ecological movement.

A Ukrainian, Dina Franczeska Shabalina, ofs, is a link for Wells4Africa. The Canadian OFS National Minister wrote to her about Canadian support for Ukraine. We can contact her (email: franczeska@ukr.net) to let her know she and all Ukrainians are in our prayers. We support their efforts to maintain their independence and pray for a ceasefire and withdrawal of Russian forces. Dina wrote that they are praying twice a day by zoom. Let us also not forget brave Russians and Belorussians who suffer under Putin and Lukashenko and oppose the war. At time of my writing advancing Russian forces were only approx 80 km away from Dina, unless she has moved and become a refugee.

Now I must disclose my personal opinion. First, I am a human being; second, a Christian; third, a Roman Catholic Franciscan and fourth, a retired British and Canadian Army officer. I have attended Ukrainian Greek Catholic church services and worked on a project with an Eparch (Bishop), now retired. I am reminded that Pope Paul VI said: “If you want peace work/struggle/fight for justice.” (different translations use different words but Spanish uses lucha which definitely means fight). Then I am reminded of this saying attributed to Pope Francis: “You pray for the hungry, then you feed them. That is how prayer works.” Authentic prayer always includes action. So we must support the Ukrainian people in the defence of their independence.

For me, but I know not for all Franciscans, that includes their right to, and our support of, their armed defence. That is the Teaching of the Catholic Church (see Catechism of the Catholic Church, 2265) and is supported by the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Bishops of Canada. The New Westminster (Diocese) Eparchy writes: You can send financial support to the Ukrainian army and volunteers, protecting their country against the aggression. Here are the contacts of trusted organizations: Help the people of Ukraine to survive the war. Donate.

Possibly many Franciscans will want to restrict their financial support to non lethal relief and humanitarian support. Others who served in the Canadian or other NATO Armed Forces, [like me] and some as UN Peacekeepers, may want to support the Ukrainian army. Many will realise that Putin would not have invaded if Ukraine were a member of NATO. Without a no-fly zone the Ukrainians have little chance but for NATO to enforce one would risk a larger confrontation for which NATO is unwilling. So Ukraine is fighting with one hand tied. May God bring peace!

6. CLIMATE CHANGE AND THE WAR IN UKRAINE

The perspectives of the Laudato Si’ Movement
on the war in Ukraine

Laudato Si’ Movement joins Pope Francis and the global Catholic Church in praying for a peaceful and swift resolution to the Russian invasion of Ukraine. This movement is active in Ukraine, with passionate staff and volunteers there working every day to inspire Catholics and care for our common home. We unite in solidarity with them, and with all of the people of Ukraine.

As a Catholic organization, we are people of faith and people of peace, and we urge the international community to unite in the face of Russian aggression and achieve lasting peace in Ukraine. We call on world leaders to find creative solutions that end the invasion without escalating the violence.

Finally, we ask you to join us in prayer, using this adaptation from Pope John Paul II’s “Hear My Voice, Lord for Justice and Peace.”

To you, Creator of nature and humanity, of truth and beauty, I pray:
Hear our voice, for it is the voice of the victims of the war and violence currently happening in Ukraine.
Hear our voice, for it is the voice of all children who suffer and who will suffer
when people put their faith in weapons and war.
Hear our voice when I beg you to instill into the hearts of all human beings
the vision of peace, the strength of justice and the joy of fellowship.
Hear our voice, for we speak for the multitudes
in every country and in every period of history who do not want war
and are ready to walk the road of peace.
Hear our voice and grant insight and strength so that we may always respond
to hatred with love, to injustice with total dedication to justice,
to need with the sharing of self, to war with peace.
O God, hear our voice. Amen

The foregoing material is from the Statement 24 Feb 2022 found here.
The following comes from the Statement on Fossil Fuels and war in Ukraine, 28 Feb 2022

Excerpts follow:
“It’s an unprecedented war aggression by Russia, the largest country in the world with 60% of their economy based on fossil fuels exploration and trade. …Currently we observe the big shift happening in these few days against Russian fossil fuels hegemony that fueled and weaponised a war against Ukraine. There is hope for the European Union (EU) and countries outside of the EU to end both war and fossil fuel expansion the soonest. In Berlin there were 500,000 protesters in the streets expressing solidarity against the war in Ukraine and demanding Germanian [sic] government to embargo Russian oil and gas.”

Canada has done that but Canadian banks and insurance companies are pouring millions into Russian oil and gas. See Canada's National Observer: News & Analysis. If you are a customer with one of those banks let them know you are not happy!

7. POPE FRANCIS MESSAGE FOR LENT 2022

Dear Brothers and Sisters,
Lent is a favourable time for personal and community renewal, as it leads us to the paschal mystery of the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. For our Lenten journey in 2022, we will do well to reflect on Saint Paul’s exhortation to the Galatians: “Let us not grow tired of doing good, for in due time we shall reap our harvest, if we do not give up. So then, while we have the opportunity (kairós), let us do good to all” (Gal 6:9-10). It has three subheadings:

Sowing and reaping
“Let us not grow tired of doing good”
“If we do not give up, we shall reap our harvest in due time”

Full message here

8. Laudato Si’ Lent 2022 Themes

There are inspiring prayers for each week of Lent from the Laudato Si’ Movement.
They can be found here: https://laudatosilent.org

Here is the one from week 3:

“Prayer for fundamental human rights.”
“God of Justice, we pray for the courage and determination to defend
fundamental human rights. We ask for the courage to actively combat poverty,
inequality, lack of work, land and housing, and the denial of social and labour rights.
We pray for equality, that there would not be first, second or third class people;
much less the so-called “disposable”.
We also pray for those who defend human rights.
For those who risk their lives while fighting for fundamental rights
under dictatorships, authoritarian regimes and even in democracies in crisis,
that they may see their sacrifice and their work bear abundant fruit.
Amen.”

Prayer based on Pope Francis’ prayer intention for fundamental Human Rights,
by Ana Carolina Gutierrez, LSM Spiritual consultant, Italy.

9. Share Lent is an annual highlight for D&P/Caritas Canada.

Development and Peace
It is when the bishops of Canada encourage the faithful to give to Development and Peace, especially through the collection on Solidarity Sunday, the fifth Sunday of Lent.
This Lent, let us walk in solidarity with our sisters and brothers in the Global South who put people and planet first. Join us and bring Share Lent to life in your community!
Bring the campaign to life in your community.

We have many resources to help you run the Share Lent campaign in your parish or school. Visit our Resources section to discover our Mini-magazine Solidarity Calendar, Way of the Cross. See the resources

WAY OF THE CROSS
In this Way of the Cross, Development and Peace ― Caritas Canada invites us to understand the experiences of communities in the Global South that are affected by climate change and by the misbehaviour of socially irresponsible companies that do not respect human rights and the environment. Let us be inspired by the resilience that these communities show in confronting unjust situations while respecting nature. May this act of solidarity allow us to commemorate the Passion of Christ and to enter into the mystery of God’s love, manifested in his Son Jesus.

For an example here is the 1st STATION.

Jesus is condemned to death
Celebrant: We adore you, O Christ, and we praise you.
All: Because by your Holy Cross, you have redeemed the world.
Scripture: “[Pilate] took some water and washed his hands before the crowd, saying, ‘I am innocent of this man’s blood; see to it yourselves.’” ― Matthew 27:24
Meditation: Under pressure from the crowd, manipulated by an elite anxious to maintain their domination and privileges, Pilate unjustly allows Jesus to be condemned to death as if he were a criminal, and washes his hands of the deed. In the name of economic interests, companies that operate with no social and environmental responsibility are complicit in criminalizing human rights and environmental defenders.
Quote: “Now more than ever, we need mandatory supply chain due diligence to stop corporate abuse and guarantee global solidarity. Through their operations, irresponsible companies are complicit in acts of violence and suffering. We, Catholic leaders throughout the world, call on states to put an end to this.” ― Worldwide bishops’ statement in support of mandatory human rights and environmental due diligence legislation.
PRAYER
Celebrant: Let us pray in silence for a moment.
Let us pray together: Lord Jesus, teach us to denounce human injustices so that we do not become accomplices. Give us the courage to not remain silent before powers and legislations that do not respect human rights and the environment.

You can print the whole Way of the Cross here

BULLETIN ANNOUNCEMENTS
Another thing you can do is check the resources for Bulletin announcements and ask your pastor to insert them. Here is an example:

Week 3: March 20

The power of mobilized citizens
One of Development and Peace’s strengths is our ability to mobilize thousands of Canadians like you to amplify marginalized voices from the Global South. Our partners want businesses to not be able to perpetrate abuses in their countries with impunity. That is why our People and Planet First campaign is asking you to help ensure that Canada adopts strong due diligence laws to prevent Canadian corporations from abusing human and environmental rights across their global operations.

Sign our petition for this at devp.org/act and spread the word.
Thank you for supporting our campaign!

SHORT TALK
If you are brave enough you can ask your pastor to let you give the Short Talk.
Here is the one page text.

VIDEO
The Development Council of Andohatapenaka (CDA), a Development and Peace partner, has implemented 51 climate change adaptation microprojects in the capital of Madagascar. CDA is also helping residents transform one of the most vulnerable neighborhoods into an ecological village. This project was realized with financing from the Government of Quebec and meets the objectives of its 2030 Plan for a Green Economy.

Our programs and our partners in the Global South promote alternatives to unjust social, political, economic and environmental structures. To learn more or make a donation: https://www.devp.org
Rarivoarinoro Hanta Manana, project manager, CDA says:
“What makes the collaboration between Development and Peace and CDA special is that the beneficiaries of the project participate. They don’t wait for us to give them something. They are both beneficiaries and actors in the realization of their initiatives.”

Here is a video about this ecological conversion in Madagascar (4 mins 51 sec)

Pope Francis Speaks about Ukraine
Pope Francis spoke at length about the war in Ukraine after the Angelus prayer on March 6, 2022. He expressed his closeness to “this troubled country” where “rivers of blood and tears flow” inviting once again to resume the path of negotiation. He also expressed a heartfelt tribute to the journalists working in this extremely dangerous area.

Two cardinals sent to Ukraine
He said that “the Holy See is willing to do everything to put itself at the service of this peace,” explaining that Cardinal Konrad Krajewski, Apostolic Chaplain, and Cardinal Michael Czerny, acting Prefect of the Dicastery for Promoting Integral Human Development, have been in Ukraine in recent days to assist the population. [because of his work with refuges]
“This presence of the two Cardinals is the presence not only of the Pope, but of all the Christian people who want to come closer and say: ‘War is madness! Stop, please! Look at this cruelty!” implored the Bishop of Rome.

“Let us not grow tired of doing good, for in due time we shall reap our harvest, if we do not give up. So then, while we have the opportunity, let us do good to all” (Galatians 6:9-10)

“The developed countries ought to help pay … by assisting poorer countries to support policies and programmes of sustainable development.” (Pope Francis. Laudato Si’, 52)

Peace & joy, Andrew Conradi, ofs. JPIC & Mouvement Laudato Si’ Movement Animator

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SPECIAL BLOG FOR UKRAINE

2/27/2022

1 Comment

UKRAINE: CATHOLIC SOCIAL TEACHING:
THE RIGHT TO SELF–DEFENCE
by Andrew Conradi, ofs (Laudato si’ Animator)

Catechism of the Catholic Church: “2265 Legitimate defence can be not only a right but a grave duty for one who is responsible for the lives of others. The defence of the common good requires that an unjust aggressor be rendered unable to cause harm. For this reason, those who legitimately hold authority also have the right to use arms to repel aggressors against the civil community entrusted to their responsibility.”

Ukraine’s self-defence is a “Just War “. Read more

Ukraine has a “Responsibility to Protect” which is a recognised United Nations and Canadian policy. Andrew Conradi, ofs, 2013, Understanding JPIC : “3.2.50.g. The Responsibility to Protect principle, sometimes referred to as R2P, was adopted unanimously by the UN in 2005. It holds that sovereign states have a responsibility to protect their own citizens from avoidable catastrophe, but that when they are unwilling or unable to do so, that responsibility must be borne by the broader community of states.” (emphasis added)

From Gospel to life: Ecclesiastes 8:3: 3,7,8
“a time to kill, and a time to heal;
a time to keep silence, and a time to speak;
a time to love, and a time to hate;
a time of war, and a time of peace.”

The gravity of the present moment cannot be understated. Pope Francis has called for a World Day of Fasting and Peace for Ukraine on Ash Wednesday, 2 March.

Please go to the New Westminster Eparchy (Diocese) of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church in Canada to read their short overview of the situation:
http://nweparchy.ca/help-the-people-of-ukraine-to-survive-the-war-donate-here/

The Eparchy writes: You can send financial support to the Ukrainian army and volunteers, protecting their country against the aggression. Here are the contacts of two trusted organizations:

CNEWA Canada
Development and Peace / Caritas Canada

Development & Peace/Caritas Canada sent an immediate allocation of $75,000 to help with the provision of food, shelter, medical care and transport to safe locations. In addition, we ask for your solidarity and support to help us respond to the needs on the ground. Both D&P/Caritas Canada and CNEWA Canada are partners of Caritas Internationalis which is supporting Caritas Ukraine.

We have known about Putin for years but many did not want to believe. He is a product of the KGB practice of "Disinformation" which continues as Putin's governmental policy. Now he has revealed his true colours for all to see: CBC Fifth Estate 9 Jan 2015 (44 mins). Good news is that the threat of nuclear war is actually not great except by mistake. Bad news is that Putin seems to have become unbalanced and no one in his entourage is brave enough to remove him which is what it will take for a real peace. See the TYEE article "Use of Nukes ‘Extremely Unlikely".

RUSSIAN OPPOSITION TO PUTIN’S WAR:
Russian rights activist launches anti-war movement, petition collects more than 810,000 signatures.

Russian tech workers sign petition opposing invasion of Ukraine - The Washington Post

Francis, (2015), Laudato Si', 79: “The work of the Church seeks not only to remind everyone of the duty to care for nature, but at the same time ‘she must above all protect mankind from self-destruction’ ”. [emphasis added. quoting Benedict XVI, (2009), Caritas in Veritate ,51.]

“Virgin of Perpetual Help pray for Ukraine”
Source: http://www.ukrainianchurchesofcanada.ca/iconography/uf_theotokos.html

May the Lord give us peace!

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Homeless Jesus - Jesuits.ca

Andrew Conradi, ofs

What makes me tick is Catholic Social Teaching, now encapsulated in Laudato Si’ and Fratelli Tutti. My view is that while the OFS Rule & Constitutions call us to courageous action in JPIC it seems to me our infrastructure, while saying the right things, is not always acting with the required urgency and forcefulness. It seems at times to be more self-sustaining and self-perpetuating and about the status quo. This risks being seen as irrelevant in the eyes of some, especially youth.

In encouraging us to be aware and act with urgency and forcefulness I can be seen to be a bit of a joyful nuisance. Forgive me for not apologising. “Jesus himself warns us that the path he proposes goes against the flow, even making us challenge society by the way we live and, as a result, becoming a nuisance.”
(Pope Francis, 2018, Gaudete et exultate – Rejoice & be glad, n 90)
After all, Our Seraphic Father Francis was a rebel (check out the 2018 book Francesco il ribelle by Enzo Fortunato, OFM Conv)

(Poster from Canadian Jesuits)

BTW I am a Brit immigrant, ex Canadian high school geography and history teacher and Cold War armoured reconnaissance soldier. Other accomplishments include OFM JPIC Animators course 2014, Pontifical University Antonianum, Rome; JPIC Animator; Provocateur (Challenger); Enfant Terrible and sometimes definitely a deliberate NUISANCE! I am open to correction, chastisement, and/or teaching by email!
apconradi@telus.net

2. LAUDATO SI’ - THE 2022 FILM: “THE LETTER - A MESSAGE FOR OUR EARTH”

Andrew Conradi, ofs

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2. LAUDATO SI’ - THE 2022 FILM:
“THE LETTER - A MESSAGE FOR OUR EARTH”