The Washington National Cathedral tolled its 12-ton bell 500 times in memory of the approximately 500,000 Americans who have died due to COVID-19 on Monday. The cathedral, affiliated with The Episcopal Church and is known as the Cathedral Church of Saint Peter and Saint Paul in the City, livestreamed the event in the afternoon. The ceremony included prayers and reflections from individuals representing multiple faith traditions.
Rev. Canon Jan Naylor Cope, provost of the National Cathedral, read a passage from the Book of Common Prayer. “We thank you for giving them to us,” she read from the prominent Anglican Commu-nion liturgical resource, “to know and to love as companions on our earthly pilgrimage.”

It was packed. Some of Sister André’s’s great-nephews and great-great nephews were expected to join a morning video call for her, and the bishop of Toulon was due to celebrate a Mass in her honor.
“She was very proud when I told her. She said, ‘A Mass for me?’” Tavella said.
The menu for her birthday feast included a starter of foie gras, followed by capon with fragrant mushrooms and wrapping up with baked Alaska, the nun’s favorite dessert.
“All of it washed down with red wine, because she drinks red wine. It’s one of her secrets of longevity. And a bit of Champagne with dessert, because 117 years have to be toasted,” Tavella said.
As for packing dozens of candles onto a cake, “we stopped trying a long time ago,” he added. “Because even if we made big cakes, I’m not sure that she would have enough breath to blow them all out. You would need a fire extinguisher.”
Sister André’s birth name is Lucile Randon. The Gerontology Research Group, which validates details of people thought to be 110 or older, lists her as the second-oldest known living person in the world, behind only an 118-year-old woman in Japan, Kane Tanaka.
Tavella told French media earlier this week that Sister André tested positive for the coronavirus in mid-January but she had so few symptoms that she didn’t even realize she was infected. Her survival made headlines both in France and beyond.
“When the whole world suddenly started talking about this story, I understood that Sister André was a bit like an Olympic flame on a ‘round the world tour that people want to grab hold of, because we all need a bit of hope at the moment,” Tavella said.
By strange coincidence, Tavella was celebrating his 43rd birthday.

Anger is increasing in the Cologne archdiocese over Cardinal Rainer Maria Woelki’s refusal to publish the results of the investigation into the handling of abuse cases, as record numbers of Catholics opt to quit the Church. The number of Catholics officially leaving the Church has increased at an unprecedented rate, by 70%, and is now a record 1000 a month.
In order to leave the Church in Germany and stop having to pay 8-9% of net income in compulsory church tax which is collected at source, Catholics have to make an appointment with their municipal office and state that they intend to leave in writing.
The number wanting to leave in the Cologne archdiocese has risen so sharply in recent weeks that hundreds of extra appoint-ments have had to be squeezed in. The archdiocesan council, an elected body of representatives of the parishes and Catholic associations in the archdiocese which advises the archdiocesan leadership, has taken the unprecedented step of terminating its cooperation with the archdiocese.
According to the Kölner Stadt-Anzeiger, the council decided at a plenary meeting on 28 January to suspend active cooperation with the archdiocese. The decision was unanimous.
More than 50 priests, including the secretary of the priests’ council, have, moreover, sent highly critical, urgent letters to Cardinal Woelki accusing him of forcing them to distance them-selves from the archdiocese and pointing out that he is responsible for their conflict of loyalties.

Church leaders in Portugal have welcomed moves by their country’s president to block a new euthanasia law, citing its imprecision and implications for human rights.
“I find it strange that the Twenty-First Century state feels entitled and duty-bound, in the name of civilisational progress, to foster a culture of death,” said Bishop Antonino Fernandes Dias of Portalegre-Castelo Branco.
“Nobody is going to ask parliamentarians to enter upon a metanoia process… We merely ask them not to forget the real problems of those who trusted them and whom they promised to serve.”
The 72-year-old bishop was reacting to a weekend letter from President Marcelo Rebelo De Sousa to the Constitutional Tribunal, questioning the compatibility of the law on “medically assisted death”, passed on 29 January, with Portugal’s legal order.
Preaching on Sunday, he said “omniscient and omnipotent” legislators had ignored advice from top medical professors, jurists and bioethicists, while the centre-left government of premier Antonio Costa also appeared intent on using “fracturing causes” to conceal a crisis caused by Covid-19 and other national problems.
The law, merging five right-to-die bills, passed by 136 votes to 78 in the 230-seat Lisbon parliament, and will enable mentally fit over-18s to request assistance in dying if faced with “intolerable suffering, with extremely serious and permanent harm… or incurable and fatal disease.”

The German Catholic Bishops’ Conference (DBK) elected a woman for the first time as the conference’s top administrator on, in a move aimed at modernizing the body. Theologian Beate Gilles was appointed as general secretary of the conference, which is based in Bonn. After her election to the post, the 50-year-old noted her skills as a runner are also well suited to her new role.
“I am an endurance athlete,” Gilles said. “That means I know that a marathon is not decided in its 40 kilometers, but rather by the 1,000 kilometers in training — that’s my distance.” Gilles is taking on the role as Germany’s bishops face deep disquiet among 22 million German Catholics as well as demands for more leadership roles for women. During virtual bishop’s conference gathering, DBK chair Georg Bätzing described Gilles’ election as a “strong signal that the bishops are fulfilling their pledge to advance women into leadership positions.”
Gilles, who takes over as general secretary on July 1, will not only be the first woman to hold the top bishops’ conference post, but also the first layperson.
The high-ranking role of general secretary is responsible for implementing decisions made by the bishops.
She currently heads a department for youth, family, and childcare in Bätzing’s Limburg diocese.
From Stuttgart, where for a decade Gilles previously headed a Catholic educational entity, colleagues wished her endurance.

As Perseverance, the latest probe on Mars, gears up to send to Earth high-definition images, video and audio of its surroundings, one papal astronomer said he hoped the fresh new discoveries will inspire future explorers.
With advanced degrees in physics, philosophy and theology, Jesuit Brother Robert Macke said, “What really inspired me to come into this field was growing up with the results that were coming out of the spacecraft missions, like Voyager, and all the photographs that nobody had ever seen before” of Saturn and its moons and other objects in the solar system.
Born in Fort Worth, Texas, in 1974, Macke told Catholic News Service he only “dabbled a little” in enjoying science fiction, influenced by his father’s interest in the genre, and he credits it with inspiring him to think of new ideas.
But it was the reality of scientific discoveries that made him say, “Wow, these are real places that you can really explore and photograph and study,” he said Feb. 19 in a call from the Vatican Observatory in Castel Gandolfo near Rome.
“Seeing the results and the images that come out of missions like Perseverance, I hope these will be an inspiration to the next generation of young scientists,” he said.
The popular imagination has come a long way since early speculations about little green men and artificial canals of some ancient civilization once populating the red planet.

A group of Spanish lawyers has launched petitions and lawsuits to prevent the removal of crosses by local officials, after claims that Christian symbols are linked with the country’s former dictatorship.
“Many towns are being pressured to get rid of public crosses, which local people have spent weeks and months defending,” said Maria Riesco, spokeswoman for the Association of Christian Lawyers. “We are checking the documentation and investigating each case, as well as maintaining a dialogue with regional governments in hopes of having them restored.”
Riesco, a Catholic, spoke as the Valladolid-based association announced legal proceedings against the mayor of Aguilar de la Frontera, near Cordoba, for ordering the demolition of a cross outside the town’s Carmelite convent.
In a Feb. 12 interview with Catholic News Service, she said the 20-foot concrete cross had been taken down illegally amid Catholic protests, in violation of religious freedom.
The press office of the Spanish bishops’ conference told February 12 the Association of Christian Lawyers was acting independently of the church. It said the conference would not comment on the removal of public crosses.
Meanwhile, Polonia Castellanos, lawyers association president, said action was also under-way to protect crosses in Spain’s western Extramadura region, after at least 34 municipalities were ordered to remove them from streets and parks.

Microsoft multi-billionaire Bill Gates is calling for a “global alert system” backed by “mega-diagnostic platforms” that could test over “20% of the global population every week” in preparation for the next pandemic.
“The world wasn’t ready for the COVID-19 pandemic. I think next time will be different,” declares the pro-abortion philanthropist, warning that “the threat of the next pandemic will always be hanging over our heads — unless the world takes steps to prevent it.”
“The world needs to regularly run germ games — simulations that let us practice, analyze and improve how we respond to dis-ease outbreaks, just as war games let the military prepare for real-life warfare,” exhorts Gates, boasting his foundation has donated $1.75 billion in the fight against COVID-19.
Researchers say the vaccine zealot has become “the subject of a diverse and rapidly expanding universe of conspiracy theories,” including 44% of Republicans and 19% of Democrats in the United States who believe Gates “is linked to a plot to use vaccinations as a pretext to implant microchips into people.”
“Until vaccines reach every-one, new clusters of disease will keep popping up,” Gates asserts. “Those clusters will grow and spread. Schools and offices will shut down again. The cycle of inequality will continue.” Gates did not confirm if a blanket bombing of the globe with vaccines would include encoding of medical information in a patient’s skin using near-infrared quantum dots (NIR QDs).
A Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) project fund-ed by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation developed the technique — popularly misunderstood as “a cover for implanting some form of microchip, radio frequency identification (RFID) chip or other digital tracking device” — interpreted by some as the satanic “Mark of the Beast,” the Australian Strategic Policy Institute noted.
The MIT report, published in December 2019 in Science Translational Medicine, confirm-ed that “intradermal QDs can be used to reliably encode information and can be delivered with a vaccine, which may be particularly valuable in the developing world and open up new avenues for decentralized data storage and biosensing.”

The Vatican said it expects a deficit of nearly 50 million euros ($60.7 million) this year because of pandemic-related losses, a figure that grows to 80 million euros ($97 million) when donations from the faithful are excluded.
The Vatican released a summary of its 2021 budget that was approved by Pope Francis and the Holy See’s Council for the Economy, a commission of outside experts who oversee the Vatican’s finances. The publication was believed to be the first time the Vatican has released its projected consolidated budget, part of Francis’s drive to make the Vatican’s finances more transparent and accountable. The Vatican has run a deficit for the past several years, narrowing it to 11 million euros in 2019 from a hole of 75 million euros in 2018. The Vatican said Friday it anticipated the deficit would grow to 49.7 million euros in 2021 but that it expected to make up the shortfall with reserves.
Francis particularly wanted to release information about the Peter’s Pence collections from the faithful, which are billed as a concrete way to help the pope in his ministry and works of charity but are also used to run the Holy See bureaucracy.
The funds have come under scrutiny amid a financial scandal about how those donations were invested by the Vatican’s secretariat of state.