HeadlineBistro

Elections in Haiti Present a New Challenge

2010 has been a difficult year for Haiti, and it does not appear to be ending on a positive note.

Ten months after a devastating earthquake leveled the country – killing 250,000 and leaving another million homeless – Haitians are mired in violence and outrage over voting irregularities during this weekend’s much anticipated presidential elections. This election comes at a key moment for the future of Haiti, which is battling a cholera epidemic and desperately trying to rebuild after the earthquake. Haiti has often been a forgotten topic in the daily news cycle. However, for the next weeks the world will watch to learn if this struggling nation can begin the long journey to rebirth.

Haiti's general election was held on Sunday. More than a dozen candidates were competing for the presidency, including Jude Celestin, President Rene Praval’s hand-picked successor. Unfortunately, it became clear early on that this election would not be drastically different from Haiti’s infamous past. Many voters claimed they had no idea where to vote, while others arrived at polling stations only to discover that their names were not on the rolls. Frustrated Haitians took to the streets, and is some cases resorted to violence. United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon issued a statement expressing concern for Haiti and calling for calm as the ballot counting continues. 

Initially, twelve of the nearly 20 presidential candidates called for the vote to be annulled due to fraud. Many feared that President Preval had interfered with the electoral process in order to ensure a victory for his political party.  However, the joint mission from the Organization of American States and Caricom, which was overseeing the electoral process, declared the elections valid despite “serious irregularities.” Two apparent frontrunners – Mirlande Manigat, a longtime voice of opposition, and Michel Martelly, a popular recording artist better known as “Sweet Micky” – later backed away from calls to cancel the election. The results of the elections will most likely be revealed on Dec. 7, and a final tally should come before Christmas. 

Haiti simply cannot afford a post-election spiral into confusion and violence. Haiti’s history is replete with numerous manipulated elections, bloody coups and failed leaders. In 1983, Pope John Paul II visited Haiti as a guest of the brutal dictator Bebe Doc. The pope was criticized by many for granting legitimacy to Haiti’s corrupt leadership. However, John Paul had no intention of spouting diplomatic niceties. When his plane landed in Port-au-Prince, the pope walked away from the red carpet and kissed the Haitian soil. He ignored a large banquet thrown in his honor and instead spoke directly to the people in their native Creole. In a nationally televised speech, the Holy Father attacked the mistreatment of Haiti’s poor and the misery of life under a government more intent on enriching its leaders then serving its people. John Paul’s memorable words in Creole – “fok sa chanj!” (“Things have got to change here!”) – were widely hailed as the beginning of the end of Bebe Doc’s rule.

Nearly thirty years later, John Paul II’s words still ring true. Change in Haiti must begin with strong leadership grounded in the voice of the people. Following last January’s earthquake, President Praval was barely visible and failed to inspire the confidence of the people of Haiti or the international community. Today, with Haiti in ruins and hundreds of millions of dollars in foreign aid being held up until the political situation is resolved, Haiti’s future rests on its ability to democratically elect a president who can fairly administer a rebuilding effort. If change doesn’t happen now, Haiti’s lagging reputation as the world’s oldest “failed state” may no longer be an insensitive moniker, it will be the nation’s epitaph.

- David Naglieri

Why the Pope's Words on Condoms Matter in the Philippines

From the BBC to the pages of the Los Angeles Times, numerous commentators have spent the past week and half explaining why Pope Benedict XVI’s comments on condoms and AIDS – discussed here in a news wrap last week – do not amount to a shift on the Catholic Church’s view of contraception.

Yet the media-fueled story – one could hardly call it a controversy, considering the pope said nothing to contradict Church teaching – has particularly resonated in one region of the world far from the Vatican press office: the Philippines.

“[The way I see it], there’s been a dent in the solid stance of the Church,” said Philippines House Speaker Feliciano Belmonte, Jr., who is seeking to steer a contentious bill on reproductive health through the legislature.

For years, lawmakers in the predominately Catholic nation have debated legislation that, under the pretense of improving maternal and child health and combating poverty, would provide access to government-funded birth control, among other provisions. It was news earlier this year when then-presidential candidate Benigno Aquino stated his support of the Reproductive Health (RH) Bill, despite his Catholic faith. (Headline Bistro contributor Christian Huebner has a recent column on the latest incarnation of the bill, which also encourages a two-child family for the sake of stemming the Philippines’ population growth.)

The Filipino bishops have been adamant in their opposition to legislation that they say views human beings as a liability to economic success; promotes contraceptives that can act as abortifacients and, overall, cheapens the dignity of human life. The laity as well have come out strong in “Walks for Life,” from Manila to Mindanao.

So when reports on the pope’s comments about condoms hit media outlets last week, proponents of the RH Bill were quick to turn his words against faithful Filipino Catholics themselves – falsely suggesting that if Pope Benedict was softening his position on contraception, the bishops ought to follow suit.

You can quickly see the impact of such political tactics. With most news stories already taking Pope Benedict’s comments out of context – he never endorsed condom use or distribution in the fight against AIDS, and he stressed that it could never be a “real or moral solution” – it’s been easy for politicians to reinforce that misinformation to their constituents.  

“Our clergy cannot be more popish than the pope,” President Aquino’s spokesman told the press. He added, “They’ve always referred to the Vatican when they stated their position; now that the Vatican’s position is such, then I think that should result in a corresponding flexibility on the part of our Church.”
 
And then there was the statement by the bill’s author himself, House Minority Leader Edcel Lagman, who said Pope Benedict’s words had “weakened the Church opposition” to his legislation.

“That is a welcome development because the papacy is opening up to the eventual contraceptive use,” Lagman told the Philippine Daily Inquirer. “Once you have opened up and made an exception, the liberalization of the Church outlook has started. And we'd expect further liberalization. He has made an exception, then more exception would be forthcoming.”

In its most recent issue, the front page of the Philippine Bishops Conference’s newspaper carries a story on the bishops calling for the government to stop its “opportunistic misuse” of Pope Benedict’s words to promote the RH Bill. But damage has been done – the extent of which may be seen as the bill undergoes several hearings over the coming months (including one before Congress’ Committee on Population and Family Relations this Dec. 8 – the Feast of the Immaculate Conception).

To be sure, the nation’s bishops will continue their campaign to educate the Filipino people about the Church’s teachings on family planning, and why promises of prosperity built on contraception and population control are short-sighted. Pope Benedict himself encouraged his brother bishops in the Philippines in their outspokenness in the public square, as they completed their ad limina visits to Rome today. He said:

... I commend the Church in the Philippines for seeking to play its part in support of human life from conception until natural death, and in defense of the integrity of marriage and the family. In these areas you are promoting truths about the human person and about society which arise not only from divine revelation but also from natural law, an order which is accessible to human reason and thus provides a basis for dialogue and deeper discernment on the part of all people of good will.

May they continue their proclamation of that truth – and may God grant the Philippines the grace to listen.

- Elizabeth Hansen

Pondering the Future of Faith-Based Social Services

Can you imagine Greenpeace being forced to hire someone who had no regard for the environment, or the ACLU hiring a fundamentalist Christian lawyer to prosecute its cases?

Of course, both of those situations are absurd, yet that is precisely what many critics believe should happen to faith-based groups that receive federal funds to run various social service programs. While an executive order issued by President Barack Obama last week preserves the right of religious charitable organizations to give preferential hiring to people of faith, Catholics in America should not be celebrating yet. The continual clamor for changes to the system threatens to erode the freedom of religious organizations to serve those in need.

Back in 2001 President Bush launched an ambitious plan that called for religious social service organizations to partner with the federal government in helping Americans in need. The resulting White House Office of Faith-based and Neighborhood Partnerships has provided federal funds to numerous groups which provide critical assistance to our nation’s neediest citizens. Bush’s initiative was widely hailed as a successful merger of federal dollars with charitable zeal. However, during his 2008 presidential campaign, Barack Obama hinted at major changes to the office. In particular he vowed to remove provisions that safeguarded the right of faith-based organizations to hire individuals on the basis of their faith. After two years of careful study, the new changes have been announced.

The order sets in place new provisions aimed at silencing critics who long claimed the program blurred the constitutional separation between Church and State. Groups receiving federal tax dollars can only offer religious activities at a different time and place from the taxpayer-funded content, and the religious component must be voluntary. Furthermore, the government will be required to offer alternatives if a beneficiary objects to the religious character of an organization offering services. On the other hand, participating faith-based groups will not be asked to remove religious art or icons from their facilities, and they can retain religious names and choose board members on the basis of personal faith.

This compromise has earned a mixed reaction.  Father Larry Snyder, president of Catholic Charities USA, voiced his support for the Obama administration’s plan, saying his organization “looks to President Obama to continue to embrace joint cooperation in the wake of this executive order.”

However, Jim Towey, who led Office of Faith-Based and Communitive Initiatives under President George W. Bush, says the new policies represent burdensome rules and documentation requirements that could scare away potential future partners. Despite these reactions, the majority of public sentiment centered on Obama’s decision to keep in place provisions allowing these groups to hire people of faith.

That decision was blasted in a New York Times editorial and by figures such as Rev. Barry W. Lynn, executive director of Americans United for the Separation of Church and State.  Lynn expressed his disappointment that Obama had failed to live up to his campaign promises, saying:

This leaves much of George W. Bush's faith-based initiative in place. That's not the change many Americans hoped for when President Obama took office… I am particularly frustrated that President Obama still has done nothing to ban hiring bias by publicly funded religious charities. That's the 800-pound gorilla in the room. No American should be denied a government-funded job because he or she holds the 'wrong' views about religion."

What Lynn and others fail to understand is that restricting the right of faith-based groups to hire the people who best fit their mandate will lead many organizations to abandon this successful program – causing more hardship to those who desperately rely on these social services. Likewise, the right to hire individuals who fit into a company’s core mission and belief system is not tantamount to discrimination. On the contrary it is the preservation of religious freedom itself.

When Congress set forth the rules governing federal employment non-discrimination in 1964, it was sure to allow for religious organizations to hire according to faith. The fact that federal tax dollars are being provided to these groups does warrant careful attention and oversight. However, one cannot expect these organizations to reject their institutional character and spiritual mission when hiring the employees who will guide them into the future. We will never see a Catholic president of the Jewish anti-defamation league or an atheist head of Catholic Charities. That is not prejudice; that is merely accepted reality. To focus on a rigid understanding of Church-State relations at a time when millions of Americans are in desperate need of social services is not only a disservice to our nation’s poor, it threatens to secularize some of the greatest charitable institutions in American history.

- David Naglieri

 

 

What Did the Pope Say on AIDS and Condoms?

By now, media reports of Pope Benedict XVI’s comments on AIDS and condoms – spoken in an interview with German journalist Peter Seewald in the soon-to-be released book Light of the World – have spanned the globe.

Asked whether he thought the use of condoms could be morally acceptable in the fight against AIDS, the pope answered:

There may be a basis in the case of some individuals, as perhaps when a male prostitute uses a condom, where this can be a first step in the direction of a moralization, a first assumption of responsibility, on the way toward recovering an awareness that not everything is allowed and that one cannot do whatever one wants. But it is not really the way to deal with the evil of HIV infection. That can really lie only in a humanization of sexuality.

Unfortunately – and unsurprisingly – most reporters grabbed onto the first few words of that nuanced statement, the result being incredibly erroneous headlines like this one in The Telegraph: “The pope drops Catholic ban on condoms in historic shift.”

A much better article on the issue can be found at another British source, The Catholic Herald, which provides the fuller context of Pope Benedict’s comments, as well as quotes from experts on the Church’s teaching on human sexuality.

Three immediate points should be kept in mind when reading reports on this story:

First – and this ought to be obvious – Pope Benedict’s comments on whether the use of a condom in one very specific situation could be morally acceptable in no way amount to overturning the “Catholic ban” on condoms as contraception, especially between married people. Frenzied questions over whether this is leading to an overhaul of the Church’s views on birth control are completely missing the point.

Second, and hopefully just as obvious, what Pope Benedict shares of his personal opinions in an interview is far from being an official Church pronouncement, or, as the New York Times article suggested in its lede, a statement from the Vatican itself. The truth is, this is an issue that theologians have been grappling with for decades, and there is not yet any official Church teaching on the use of condoms to protect from disease. A theologian himself, Pope Benedict knows that what he tells a journalist doesn’t suddenly shape 2,000 years of the Church’s understanding of humanity.

Third, this segment of the Light of the World interview is not Pope Benedict backing down from the argument he made en route to Africa last year – that condom distribution was not the solution to the AIDS epidemic. He is very clear about this in the interview (see below), even going so far as to say he felt “provoked” by the original question – an accusation, really, that the Church ought to help more by allowing condoms.

So how to make sense of this interview segment? Headline Bistro columnist Pia de Solenni offers the fuller context of Pope Benedict’s reflections on her blog. She quotes two pages from Light of the World, and I’ve highlighted some key lines in bold.
 

On the occasion of your trip to Africa in March 2009, the Vatican’s policy on Aids once again became the target of media criticism. Twenty-five percent of all Aids victims around the world today are treated in Catholic facilities. In some countries, such as Lesotho, for example, the statistic is 40 percent. In Africa you stated that the Church’s traditional teaching has proven to be the only sure way to stop the spread of HIV. Critics, including critics from the Church’s own ranks, object that it is madness to forbid a high-risk population to use condoms.

The media coverage completely ignored the rest of the trip to Africa on account of a single statement. Someone had asked me why the Catholic Church adopts an unrealistic and ineffective position on Aids. At that point, I really felt that I was being provoked, because the Church does more than anyone else. And I stand by that claim. Because she is the only institution that assists people up close and concretely, with prevention, education, help, counsel, and accompaniment. And because she is second to none in treating so many Aids victims, especially children with Aids.

I had the chance to visit one of these wards and to speak with the patients. That was the real answer: The Church does more than anyone else, because she does not speak from the tribunal of the newspapers, but helps her brothers and sisters where they are actually suffering. In my remarks I was not making a general statement about the condom issue, but merely said, and this is what caused such great offense, that we cannot solve the problem by distributing condoms. Much more needs to be done. We must stand close to the people, we must guide and help them; and we must do this both before and after they contract the disease.

As a matter of fact, you know, people can get condoms when they want them anyway. But this just goes to show that condoms alone do not resolve the question itself. More needs to happen. Meanwhile, the secular realm itself has developed the so-called ABC Theory: Abstinence-Be Faithful-Condom, where the condom is understood only as a last resort, when the other two points fail to work. This means that the sheer fixation on the condom implies a banalization of sexuality, which, after all, is precisely the dangerous source of the attitude of no longer seeing sexuality as the expression of love, but only a sort of drug that people administer to themselves. This is why the fight against the banalization of sexuality is also a part of the struggle to ensure that sexuality is treated as a positive value and to enable it to have a positive effect on the whole of man’s being.

There may be a basis in the case of some individuals, as perhaps when a male prostitute uses a condom, where this can be a first step in the direction of a moralization, a first assumption of responsibility, on the way toward recovering an awareness that not everything is allowed and that one cannot do whatever one wants. But it is not really the way to deal with the evil of HIV infection. That can really lie only in a humanization of sexuality.

Are you saying, then, that the Catholic Church is actually not opposed in principle to the use of condoms?

She of course does not regard it as a real or moral solution, but, in this or that case, there can be nonetheless, in the intention of reducing the risk of infection, a first step in a movement toward a different way, a more human way, of living sexuality.

That last sentence is key. In the case of the HIV-positive male prostitute, the pope is not citing condom use as the be-all and end-all solution – much less, as a method for Catholic charities to help combat the AIDS epidemic. He doesn’t even say it’s a moral action in itself – rather, that it “can be a first step in the direction of a moralization.”

As Father Joseph Fessio, SJ, editor-in-chief of Ignatius Press and a former student of the pope, put it: “It would be wrong to say, ‘Pope Approves Condoms.’ He’s saying it’s immoral but in an individual case the use of a condom could be an awakening to someone that he’s got to be more conscious of his actions.”

Critics attack the Church’s teaching on sexuality as oppressive – a list of “Thou shall not’s” – yet here we have a pope who speaks of lifting sex from the gutter – “the banalization of sexuality” – and placing upon it the true value it’s meant to have.

What’s easily lost in the headlines is the same point that the pope was stressing on his way to Africa in 2009, and what he told Peter Seewald in Light of the World: that “the sheer fixation on the condom” only cheapens the gift of human sexuality and, ultimately, men and women themselves. That is why the Church – already on the ground in Africa, Asia and elsewhere around the world caring for AIDS patients – instead proposes a fuller, “more human way of living sexuality” – a way that acknowledges that human behavior can change, and that true freedom is much more than the ability to sleep with whomever one wants.

So is the Church nearing a sweeping change in its teaching on contraception? No. Might the use of a condom in order to protect someone from disease be at least a step in the right direction – especially when that direction is away from prostitution and toward a healthy, authentic sexuality? The pope, sharing his private opinion, is literally saying “maybe,” and a very qualified one at that. Because ultimately, love calls us to even better than that.

- Elizabeth Hansen

African Americans and Abortion Continued...

In Monday’s thought-provoking column, Vicki Thorn opened the proverbial Pandora’s box on the African American abortion issue, a tragic reality which in recent months, has slowly begun to gain national attention. Curious to know how African American women are responding to the glaring statistics, it took just a few conversations to learn that the poverty clause, while true in many instances, barely begins to scratch the surface when it comes to unearthing ‘why’ so many black women are opting for abortion.

“If we’re talking about black communities in the south, I agree that poverty largely comes into play --you don’t know poverty until you’ve visited the projects in the south. But stating poverty as the only reason is oversimplifying the issue,” says Erica from Connecticut. “The more north you travel, the more the conversation changes. You have to consider that when Bill Clinton signed the Welfare Reform Bill in 1996, everything changed for the black community. Many women who once relied on state assistance are now working. I’m not saying they’re rich, but poverty is not an issue like it once was, at least not in the North East,” explained Erica.

Nicole from New York had heart-wrenching insight into what she refers to as the ‘I don’t care cycle,’ a prevailing attitude among black women she claims takes root at an early age. “I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard friends of mine in the black community say ‘If I get pregnant, I’m going straight to Planned Parenthood.’ There’s no thought that goes into in. It’s so sad to admit it, but it’s literally ‘the thing to do,’” said Nicole.

She went on to explain that an education gap on the subject of abortion is largely to blame. “Many women just don’t understand what happens when they enter that clinic. They have no concept of the human life inside them, not to mention the risks involved,” said Nicole, adding that both a careless attitude and a lack of awareness form part of a vicious cycle that is tough to break from one generation to the next. “No one is offering us the truth. The churches in our community have failed us, our parents have failed us and we are now failing our own children…we were never taught to respect life, starting with our own.” 

Allowing me to probe on the question of faith, Nicole shared how her exposure to Catholic teaching had a huge impact on her. “I can tell you that if I knew at 14, at 17 and at 20 what I know now….I would have made some very different choices in life.” She explained how it took both the shock of a bad experience at Planned Parenthood and the shock of learning (through Catholic friends in her adult life) that you can hear a heart beat in the first trimester, to change everything.  “If I could stop every woman who walks into one of those clinics to have a 10 minute conversation with her, I would,” said Nicole.

(While never having claimed or followed a religious practice, Nicole revealed that she has begun serious inquiry into the Catholic faith.)

Yvette from New Jersey agreed with much of what Nicole had to say concerning attitude and education, adding to Vicki Thorn’s point about how Planned Parenthood makes itself all too readily available in black neighborhoods. “When there’s one on every corner, it becomes the easy and acceptable thing to do,” said Yvette.

The personal experiences of Erica, Nicole and Yvette may not be quantifiable, but they certainly speak volumes on the very issue Thorn has raised, namely, the urgent need to break the silence. What they also do is confirm, once again, how undeniably important are the efforts of the pro-life community. Knowing, for example, how an ultra sound can make all the difference, and how it takes just one life changed to lead new generations on the path towards a culture of life and love…the onus, once again, falls on us.

- Michèle Nuzzo-Naglieri

*Note: the identity of the women in this column has been changed to protect their privacy. 

Archbishop Dolan Ascends to president of USCCB

Not since the Giants vanquished the vaunted and until-then undefeated New England Patriots in Super Bowl XLII has New York pulled off an upset like this. Yesterday, Archbishop Timothy Dolan was elected by his peers as president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops after three ballots.  He narrowly beat out Bishop Gerald Kicanas of Tuscon, Arizona, who was the vice president behind outgoing president Cardinal Francis George of Chicago. Archbishop Dolan’s election “was the first time since the 1960s that a sitting vice president was on the ballot for the post of president and lost,” reported Zenit.

Archbishop Dolan, of course, was humbled by his selection. He received 54% of the vote to 46% for Bishop Kicanas. "I've got to be honest, it was unexpected," Archbishop Dolan admitted. http://bit.ly/bIo6lz.

“You might interpret this as the bishops are tired of short and skinny presidents,” he jokingly told reporters after his election. He also defused speculation about whether his selection was somehow a shift in policy on certain issues. When reporters asked whether his election signaled a greater emphasis on issues of life, abortion, and marriage, Archbishop Dolan responded, “We bishops would bristle at the characterization that there are some bishops who tend to be more pro-life and family issues while others tend to the social-justice issues. I don’t think that characterization would apply to Bishop Kicanas and myself. I once invited him to speak to one of our town meetings. He addressed pro-life, education, and marriage and family. I don’t find that kind of caricaturing to be accurate.” http://bit.ly/a9hsat

Leaving aside the media’s endless search for palace intrigue, one can see three factors that might have made Archbishop Dolan an attractive pick (besides his engaging demeanor and personality). 

First, Archbishop Timothy Dolan has been head of Catholic Relief Services and was heavily involved in the Church’s response to the tragic events in Haiti earlier this year. So, he sees and understands first hand the Church’s true charitable mission in action and has led it successfully.

Secondly, he has also been a mediator of sorts between clashing cultures. He has worked not only for greater interactions with the Jewish community, but also in terms of engaging Islam, particularly on the issue of the Islamic center being erected near the World Trade Center site. He was fair toward both sides in that debate and argued for a common sense solution, even if some weren’t interested in one.

Thirdly, he has pushed back firmly against those with a secular agenda. The fact is, anti-Catholicism is alive and well today, and Archbishop Dolan has been fighting articulately against it. He has challenged the New York Times and called them out for their sloppy and biased reporting, which over the last year devoted itself to an obsessive quest to attack priests and defame the Catholic Church in its pages. See his blog posts at “The Gospel in the Digital Age” for some of his writings on this issue: http://bit.ly/dzvLo4.

If Archbishop Dolan could navigate through the perilous environment of New York City, where the challenges the Church faces are amplified like almost nowhere else, he has more than proven his ability to lead the USCCB.

-- Paul Ciarcia

Honoring a Hero

This afternoon, in what is sure to be an emotional ceremony in the East Room of the White House, President Barack Obama will present the Medal of Honor to Army Staff Sergeant Sal Giunta. Giunta will become the first living recipient of the nation’s highest honor since the Vietnam War. His remarkable story of an “average” guy” transformed into an American hero reminds us all that regardless of our personal feelings about the ongoing wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, we can all celebrate the authentic heroism and self-sacrifice of our nation’s bravest young men and women.

Sal Giunta grew up in Hiawatha, Iowa where he is remembered by locals as an energetic youth who never sought the spotlight. He learned from his parents the importance of faith in God and strength of character.

"Sal had a desire to do things right," Rosemary Giunta told a local Iowan TV station. "And he would speak about that desire right there. ‘Mom, I want to do things right. I want to leave a mark. I want to be somebody that did it right.’”

One harrowing October night in 2007, while on patrol in the treacherous terrain of the Korengal Valley in Afghanistan, Giunta had his chance to “do things right.” Here is an excerpt from Sebastian Junger’s bestselling book “War,” which chronicles Giunta’s unit:

….A dozen Taliban fighters with rockets and belt-fed machine guns are shooting from behind cover at a distance of fifteen or twenty feet; First Platoon is essentially inside a shooting gallery. Within seconds, every man in the lead squad takes a bullet. Brennan goes down immediately, wounded in eight places. Eckrode takes rounds through his thigh and calf and falls back to lay down suppressive fire with his SAW. Gallardo takes a round in his helmet and falls down but gets back up. Doc Mendoza, farther down the line, takes a round through the femur and immediately starts bleeding out. After months of fighting an enemy that stayed hundreds of yards away, the shock of facing them at a distance of twenty feet cannot be overstated. Giunta gets hit in his front plate and in his assault pack and he barely notices except that the rounds came from a strange direction. Sheets of tracers are coming from his left, but the rounds that hit him seemed to come from dead ahead. He’s down in a small washout along the trail where the lip of packed earth should have protected him, but it didn’t. “That’s when I kind of noticed something was wrong,” Giunta said. “The rounds came right down the draw and there are three people  —  all friends  —  in the same vicinity. It happened so fast, you don’t think too hard about it, but it’s something to keep in mind.”

Twenty or thirty RPGs come sailing into their position and explode among the trees. When Gallardo goes down with a bullet to the helmet, Giunta runs over to him to drag him behind cover, but Gallardo gets back on his feet immediately. They’re quickly joined by Giunta’s SAW gunner, PFC Casey, and the three men start pushing forward by throwing hand grenades and sprinting between the blasts. Even enemy who are not hit are so disoriented by the concussion that they have trouble functioning for a second or two. The group quickly makes it to Eckrode, who’s wounded and desperately trying to fix an ammo jam in his SAW, and Gallardo and Casey stay with him while Giunta continues on his own. He throws his last grenade and then sprints the remaining ground to where Brennan should be. The Gatigal spur is awash in moonlight, and in the silvery shadows of the holly forests he sees two enemy fighters dragging Josh Brennan down the hillside. He empties his M4 magazine at them and starts running toward his friend.

One of the Taliban fighters falls to the ground, dead, and the other releases Brennan and escapes downhill through the trees. Giunta jams a new magazine into his gun and yells for a medic. Brennan is lying badly wounded in the open and Giunta grabs him by the vest and drags him behind a little bit of cover. He cuts the ammo rack off his chest and pulls the rip cord on his ballistic vest to extricate him from that and then cuts his clothing off to look for wounds….”

Brennan would not survive his wounds, but Giunta’s courageous efforts to rescue his friend turned the tide of the battle and saved the lives of the other members of the patrol. Mike Brennan, Josh’s father, praised Giunta’s actions.

"He is very modest and does not want to really take any recognition for what he did because he said he was only doing his job,” he said. “He allowed us to have our son back because had he not done what he did, we don't know what would have happened if the Taliban would have dragged Josh up and we would never have gotten him back. So I am very grateful for everything that he did."

Giunta, who is currently serving a tour of duty in Italy, has been extremely modest and self-effacing in his public comments. In an interview with 60 Minutes broadcast Sunday evening, he called himself a “mediocre soldier.”

“This is the single greatest honor that the military can bestow on its own. And it comes right from the president of the United States himself. That's pretty good for a mediocre soldier," the 60 Minutes correspondent Lara Logan remarked.

Giunta's reply? "Think how good the great soldiers are."

We usually are not provided the opportunity to get to know a recipient of the Medal of Honor. That is because the award by its very nature is rarely given to those who survive. It is reserved for those who demonstrate acts of extreme bravery in the face of almost certain death. Sal Giunta’s humility and unwillingness to bask in the glow of his newfound fame reveals a deep insight into the soul of an authentic hero.  He teaches us that true greatness lies not in the desire to “stand out above others” but to “stand up for others” – even to the point of being ready to sacrifice one’s life.

 - David Naglieri

Prayers and Solidarity for Iraq

 
Two weeks after the horrific attack on Baghdad’s Our Lady of Salvation cathedral, Iraq’s Christian community is still reverberating with the sobering implications of the massacre that left 58 dead – including two priests – in their own place of worship.

It was the worst attack on Iraqi Christians since American troops invaded the country in 2003, underscoring the life-threatening conditions the Church there has faced in recent years. Now, the question of whether the ancient Christian community can survive in its home country remains unanswered yet more pressing than ever.

Archbishop Francis Chullikatt, who served as papal nuncio to Iraq and Jordan before being made the Holy See’s permanent observer to the United Nations this year, called the Oct. 31 bloodbath the “worst possible nightmare.”

Speaking at a prayer service over the weekend for the victims, Archbishop Chullikatt described the situation of persecuted Iraqi Christians “intolerable” and pleaded for peace.

On behalf of the U.S. Catholic bishops, Cardinal Francis George of Chicago urged President Barack Obama to ““take additional steps now to help Iraq protect its citizens, especially Christians and others who are victims of organized attacks.”

Writing in a letter last Wednesday, the president of the U.S. bishops conference had strong words to say on America’s particular responsibility to ensure stability in Iraq:

Our troops have served with bravery and distinction, and we welcome the end of U.S.-led combat in Iraq; however, the United States has so far failed in helping Iraqis to develop the political will needed to deploy effective strategies to protect the lives of all citizens, especially Christians and other vulnerable minorities. More must be done to help ensure that refugees and displaced persons are able to return to their homes safely. Having invaded Iraq, our nation has a moral obligation not to abandon those Iraqis who cannot defend themselves.

Meanwhile, Christians around the world are uniting with their Iraqi brothers and sisters in prayer. In London last Friday, friends and relatives of some of the victims packed a memorial service led by the chaplain to Syrian Catholics in Britain. And in Egypt – another increasingly volatile place for Christians – dozens of Coptic Christians, as well as some Muslims, held a candlelit vigil in front of the Iraqi embassy in Cairo.

Deacon Greg Kandra, author of “The Deacon’s Bench” blog and a deacon in the Diocese of Brooklyn, N.Y., preached last weekend on such solidarity in the midst of suffering within the body of Christ.

“Consider what this entails,” he said:

We are his head, crowned with thorns. We are his hands, stabbed with nails. We are his face, spit upon and slapped. We are his back, bearing a cross, whipped without mercy. We are his heart, pierced and bleeding. We are his voice, crying out to the Father.

We are the body of Christ, shattered by bullets in a cathedral in Iraq.

All this we suffer, in ways large and small, because of his name.

Because we are Christians.  We are the Body of Christ.

“We suffer together. We grieve together. We persevere together,” he said.

In a recent article on the Baghdad aftermath, the Christian Science Monitor captured the perseverance of one young Christian woman:

In the flickering candlelight of Our Lady of Salvation Church, Nagam Riyadh sits against a pillar singing Ave Maria, her voice rising to the shrapnel-marked rafters.

“We are singing the hymns we couldn’t finish on Sunday,” says Ms. Riyadh …

Readers can express their solidarity with Iraqi Christians by writing a letter to Patriarch Emmanuel III Delly, patriarch of Chaldean Catholics as well as the leader of the Catholic bishops conference in Iraq. Through an initiative organized by the lay movement Communion and Liberation, emails of support sent to [email protected] by tomorrow – Tuesday, Nov. 16 – will be printed and passed on by Archbishop Francis Chullikatt at the U.N. directly to the Patriarch.

Our suffering brothers and sisters in Iraq have been in our thoughts and prayers – let’s let them know.

- Elizabeth Hansen

The Pope on the Word

"All authentic and living Christian spirituality is based on the word of God proclaimed, accepted, celebrated and meditated upon in the Church."

That line could sum up the driving thesis of Pope Benedict XVI's new apostolic exhortation on Sacred Scripture – the rest of which is filled with jewels of wisdom from the Holy Father and 2,000 years of Tradition behind him on the role of the Word of God in the Church and each individual Christian's life.

The document, entitled Verbum Domini – "The Word of the Lord" – essentially serves as Pope Benedict's synthesis of the 2008 Synod of Bishops on "The Word of God in the Life and Mission of the Church," and is the most important Church document on Scripture since Vatican II's Dei Verbum. (CatholicCulture.org provides a good outline).

From the very beginning of his pontificate, Benedict XVI has stressed that Christianity is about a relationship, an encounter with the living person of Jesus Christ. And from the very beginning of Verbum Domini, the Holy Father writes that our faith is not "a religion of the book ... but of the incarnate and living Word" – the Word that is sustained and proclaimed throughout the centuries within the Church.

However, that encounter, and the joy that it produces in the Christian's life, is meant to be shared: All are called to be part of this communion. The pope's words of mission, set forward for the Church as a whole, seem to hold particular meaning for us laity who find ourselves entrenched in an all-too-often joyless world:

I encourage all the faithful to renew their personal and communal encounter with Christ, the word of life made visible, and to become his heralds, so that the gift of divine life – communion – can spread ever more fully throughout the world. ... [I]t is the Church’s gift and unescapable duty to communicate that joy, born of an encounter with the person of Christ, the Word of God in our midst. In a world which often feels that God is superfluous or extraneous, we confess with Peter that he alone has “the words of eternal life ” (Jn 6:68). There is no greater priority than this: to enable the people of our time once more to encounter God, the God who speaks to us and shares his love so that we might have life in abundance (cf. Jn 10:10) (2).

Benedict's conviction that only in this relationship can one find fulfillment is clear throughout Verbum Domini, such as in this moving passage:

The word of God in fact is not inimical to us; it does not stifle our authentic desires, but rather illuminates them, purifies them and brings them to fulfillment. How important it is for our time to discover that God alone responds to the yearning present in the heart of every man and woman! (23).

The document's third and last section, "Verbum Mundo," provides the Holy Father's thoughtful commentary on the role of the Word of God in a plethora of spheres one might encounter in the world: politics, education, charitable work, ministry to migrants, interreligious dialogue – even environmental care. ("As men and women who believe in and proclaim the Gospel, we have a responsibility towards creation," writes the pontiff who's been dubbed "the Green Pope" in a beautiful section on protecting the natural world around us.)

Pope Benedict's call to put faith in action – to allow the Word of God to act through us in the way we treat our neighbors – resonates in this last section.

Christians, he writes, must “translate the word that we have heard into gestures of love, because this is the only way to make the Gospel proclamation credible, despite the human weakness that marks individuals” (103).

He goes on to quote St. Augustine:

It is essential to realize that love is the fullness of the Law, as it is of all the divine Scriptures … Whoever claims to have understood the Scriptures, or any part of them, without striving as a result to grow in this twofold love of God and neighbour, makes it clear that he has not yet understood them.

There's a mine of riches in Verbum Domini – for the bishop, the parish priest, the catechist, the pro-life leader, the politician ... and the mother and father striving to impart a love of God and His Word to their children. Don't miss out on it.

- Elizabeth Hansen

Bringing exorcism into the light

Have you been experiencing trouble sleeping or loss or appetite? Have you noticed yourself speaking in strange tongues, such as Greek or Latin, even though you’ve never studied either language? Have you noticed a new and unexplainable physical strength? Do you feel a persistent aversion to everything holy and sacred?

If you’ve experienced these symptoms, don’t bother rushing to the pharmacy. And no, it’s not this year’s strain of swine flu. You better call your priest and make an appointment, because you may have come down with a case of demonic possession.

Exorcism may have fallen out of favor in the decades following Vatican II, but there is a growing recognition of the importance of fighting the demonic. Bishops in the U.S. are recommitting to training new priests to perform this mysterious rite. The demand for exorcisms is growing, and the bishops have recognized that more exorcists are needed. From CNS:

In response to growing interest in the rite of exorcism and a shortage of trained exorcists nationwide, the bishops are sponsoring a two-day conference just prior to their 2010 fall general assembly Nov. 15-18 in Baltimore. Interest in the Nov. 12-13 Conference on the Liturgical and Pastoral Practice of Exorcism proved great. When registration closed Nov. 1, 56 bishops and 66 priests had signed up.

This new initiative is not simply idle curiosity, but a reflection of genuine need among the faithful. Even in our modern culture, the power of the “evil one” is real, and people are reaching out to priests for help. Currently, the Church is woefully undermanned.

Bishop Thomas J. Paprocki of Springfield, Ill., chairman of the bishops' Committee on Canonical Affairs and Church Governance, told Catholic News Service he knows of perhaps five or six exorcists in the United States. They are overwhelmed with requests to perform the rite, he said.

In the midst of the renewed interest in exorcism is Matt Baglio’s book The Rite. It is an excellent account of his experiences following the training of a practicing exorcist, Father Gary Thomas. His account is neither weighed down by secular skepticism nor dissipated by uncritical belief, and is well worth a read. Father Thomas offered an interview with Headline Bistro last year discussing his experiences with the rite of exorcism insert link: . Now, Baglio’s book has been made into a feature film with Anthony Hopkins. You can watch the trailer here:

We often fear what we don’t understand, and perhaps this is especially true of exorcism. The bishops have decided, certainly with a bit of courage, to bring exorcism into the light with this new conference, and remind a new generation of priests that this is an integral part of the Church’s mission. Now that numerous bishops, including Archbishop Timothy Dolan of New York, are educating the Church and emphasizing the true nature of exorcism, the rite will hopefully become less a mysterious vestige of ancient times and horror films, but once again occupy its proper place as an invaluable weapon in the Church’s mission of salvation.

-- Paul Ciarcia