Today, Dominique Dawes is a three-time Olympian and Olympic gold medalist. But back in 1996, she was a teenage girl feeling the weight of the world on her shoulders. “Before the 1996 Olympic games, all of us, we were known as the Magnificent Seven being the first women’s team to win gold. And I felt, and I’m sure my other six teammates felt that as well, a great deal of pressure,” Dawes said in an April 8 interview with CNA. “It was in the Georgia dome, (with) 50,000 people watching. 3.4 billion people, I’ve been told, watching worldwide,” she said. “Prior to marching out…I broke down emotionally. It was just like, ‘Oh my gosh, this is too much for me. What if I make a mistake now? I’m not ready.’ And this is something I had prepared for for my whole childhood.”
Her team captain, Amanda Borden, knelt down beside her. And together, they prayed. Dawes said that moment of prayer grounded her. It reminded her that God was on her side, even in that moment of fear.
“It was good to have that reminder that I’m not alone… because he is the one that is going to strengthen me, and he is the one that’s going to strengthen us,” Dawes said. “I remember when I stood up after that prayer with Amanda, I felt free. I felt light…And we went out, marched out together and we all made history.”
God has been a big part of Dawes’ life for as long as she can remember. She was raised in the Baptist faith. Her mother was a Sunday school teacher.
“The seed that my mom planted in me really took. She sowed a seed that has been one that has kept me grounded, (and) has given me this level of discernment, as I think the spirit has protected me quite a bit in my life and has steered me away from some people and situations that maybe weren’t the healthiest for me,” she said.
Vatican considering sale of London property at heart of financial scandal
The Vatican is thinking about selling the London property at the centre of a financial scandal at the Secretariat of State, which lost an estimated $100 million in the building’s purchase. Bloom-berg reported this week that the Vatican is considering selling the former car showroom of the Har-rods department store, located at 60 Sloane Avenue in the ritzy Chelsea neighbourhood of London. The Secretariat of State began to purchase the building seven years ago as an investment property intended for develop-ment into luxury apartments.
According to Bloomberg, sources in the Vatican said that the London property is valued at about $369.1 million. The Vatican confirmed to Bloomberg that, while there is no rush to decide, selling is one of the options being considered.
The secretariat bought the property at 60 Sloane Avenue in London in stages between 2014 and 2018 from Italian business-man Raffaele Mincione. Torzi earned millions of euros for his role in the final stage of the deal.
Police fired tear gas at Catholic Mass in Haiti
Police in Haiti reportedly fired tear gas as dozens were participating in a “Mass for the freedom of Haiti” led by Catholic bishops on April 15 as part of an ongoing national protest against recent kidnappings of priests and others in the Caribbean nation. Nearly a dozen Catholic bishops and dozens of people were attending the mass at the Church of St. Peter in Pétion-Ville, a suburb of the capital, Port-au-Prince. According to Miami Herald, the crowd had overflown onto the streets when police fired tear gas and gunshots.
Chinese police ban pastor from receiving Christian books
Chinese Communist Party (CCP) police and state security officers have prohibited a pastor from having Christian books.
According to religious freedom charity China Aid, police turned up at the home of a rural minister in Linyi, Shandong Province. They demanded that he allow them to check his mobile phone. After learning that the pastor had joined a WeChat group, “Help rural ministers read books,” they showed him a document that required him to leave the group and refuse any books the group might mail him.
The charity said officers probably thought some members of the group lived abroad and belonged to the overseas force and violated the 15th decree the National Reli-gious Affairs Administration issued on 9th February.
The law, which includes Article 12 in the Measures for Administration of Religious Staff, effective 1st May, pertains to what religious staff are forbidden to do and includes two clauses about overseas forces:
religious staff are dominated by overseas forces, accept religious positions offered by overseas religious groups or institutions without authorization, and violate the principles of independence, self run;
Religious staff violate related national rules and accept overseas donation….
The “Help rural ministers read books” started in 2019 and asks Christians to donate money to purchase books for ministers who cannot afford legal copies of books. It sends theology books to those pastors each month.
The rural minister CCP security officers and police interrogated about books the group gifted him serves at a historic 100-year-old church. Authorities have demolished the church building several times, but members have rebuilt it.
23,000 Christians reported returning to Iraq after Pope’s visit
Thousands of families are said to be returning to Iraq, just a few years after the towns were taken over by ISIS and Christians killed.
Pope Francis’ visit to Iraq has apparently given hope to Iraqi Christians returning to their homeland after fleeing years of violence. Qaraqosh, in the Nineveh Plains, is Iraq’s largest Catholic town, 20 minutes from Mosul, and it had a population of 55,000 before it was occupied by ISIS for two years.
According to priest Father Ammar Yako, who runs a centre for displaced families, 23,000 Christians have already returned.
Fionn Shiner, parliamentary and press officer for religious freedom charity Aid to the Church in Need told Premier the fleeing goes back further for some: “In Saddam Hussein’s time, he did a census and there was 1.4 million Christians there’s now thought to be less than 250,000. This movement away from Iraq really picked up during the Iraq War in 2003 and then with ISIS’ invasion of the Nineveh plains, that really sent it into turbo drive.”
However, exactly one month on from the papal visit, which took place in Baghdad, Mosul, Ur and Erbil, other people in the mainly Syriac Catholic town of Qaraqosh have reported that the Pope’s visit has caused people to consider a return.
Speaking to ACN, Revan Possa from the Qaraqosh reconstruction board, said: “We have heard about families from Qaraqosh who cried when they saw photos of the trip and are thinking about returning home.
Vatican punishes Polish churchmen for alleged abuse cover-up
The Vatican said March 29 that it is punishing a retired Polish archbishop and a bishop for their alleged roles in covering up sexual abuse committed by other clergymen.
Former Gdansk Archbishop Slawoj Leszek Glodz and former Bishop Edward Janiak of Kalisz have also been forbidden from living in their former dioceses or participating in any public religious celebrations there.
The Vatican Embassy in pre-dominantly Roman Catholic Poland also said each of the two is being required to contribute personal money into a fund helping victims of clerical abuse.
The embassy cited “omissions” by Glodz “in cases of sexual abuse committed by some clergy against minors, and other issues related to the administration of the archdiocese.”
In a separate statement, the embassy said the Holy See was acting on the basis of “reported negligence of Bishop Edward Janiak in cases of sexual abuse committed by some clergy against minors, and other issues related to the management of the diocese.”
Both Glodz and Janiak retired in 2020 as their cases were being investigated. Glodz was featured in a 2019 documentary about priestly sex abuse and cover-up in Poland that sparked a reckoning in the country.
Chinese Christians honour ancestors at Easter
As the Easter Vigil on Holy Saturday approached, parishioners of Holy Trinity Catholic Church in Xiantao city in China’s Hebei province were alarmed by the sounds of fireworks and firecrackers.
Xiantao, some 100 kilometres from provincial capital Wuhan, where the first human infections from the deadly novel coronavirus were detected in late 2019, was mostly lifeless at Easter last year due to a strict lockdown to stem the invisible enemy that has claimed some three million lives globally. Authorities gradually lifted restrictions following the decline of new cases and deaths across China, while nations in most parts of the world continue to grapple with the contagion.
US Catholics must do more to reject anti-Asian discrimination
In 2018, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops published “Open Wide Our Hearts: An Enduring Call to Love.” The pastoral letter was the first collective bishops’ statement on racism in almost 40 years and describes the discrimination against Latinos, African Americans and Native Americans. It makes no mention of Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders.
Since Asian immigration to the United States began in the 19th century, Asians have been targets of white supremacist violence. Yet this history is, at best, ignored or revised, at worst, altogether erased.
In 1871, a mob killed 19 Chinese residents during a racial massacre in Los Angeles. Four years later, the United States passed the Page Act of 1875 that prohibited Chinese women from entering the country. It was the country’s first restrictive immigration policy. During World War II, the U.S. government incarcerated more than 100,000 Japanese Americans in U.S. internment camps. Despite this violence, the Asian community has continued to thrive in our nation and church.
67% “religious” in UK have questioned beliefs: Survey
After just over a year of lockdown, a new study has found the coronavirus pandemic has raised a host of questions – particularly around belief in God, religious practice and death.
To mark the launch of Season 3 of The Big Conversation – a series of video debates featuring some of the biggest intellectual thinkers across the religious and atheistic spectrum – Savanta Com Res has released a new survey, commissioned by Premier Christian Radio, that shines a light on the impact the pandemic has had on people’s spiritual beliefs and behaviours.
It found 67% of those who call themselves religious have questioned their belief during the pandemic. Meanwhile, 24% are more fearful towards dying because of the pandemic, with the figure rising slightly among the religious at 27%.
The survey of 2,092 UK adults also showed that a third of people say that the pandemic has had an effect on their prayer life. However, there is no consensus on whether it’s made us more or less likely to pray. Sixteen percent have increased their prayer and 15% have decreased.
Unbelievable? presenter, Justin Brierley, who hosts The Big Conversation said the pandemic has raised major issues for those with spiritual leanings and none:
“A year of living in the pandemic has caused many of us to re-evaluate life. The survey shows that whether we are religious or non-religious, we are all more aware of our own mortality. However, it was interesting to see just how many people of faith have been led to doubt the existence of a loving God. I believe that our opening Big Conversation on God, suffering and the pandemic will help people to find answers to their questions.”
In the first of the six-episode Big Conversation series Brierley welcomes Los Angeles-based Bishop Robert Barron, founder of Word on Fire, along with Alex O’Connor who is a Philosophy & Theology student at Oxford University.
Italy sees worst gap between births, deaths since 1918 Spanish Flu
With Italy already facing a diminishing population, low birth rates and fewer religious and civil marriages, the COVID-19 pandemic severely impacted those numbers for 2020, according to the Italian National Institute of Statistics.
In fact, it said, Italy set new records in 2020 with the lowest number of births since its unification in 1871, the highest number of deaths since the end of World War II and the largest gap between the number of deaths and births since the Spanish flu pandemic of 1918.
The statistics were released March 26 in a report on Italian demographics during the COVID-19 pandemic for 2020.
The first COVID-19 cases in Europe were registered in late January in Italy, and the country’s northern regions, especially Lombardy, were hit the hardest by the contagion until nationwide lockdowns and restrictions slowed the surge.
According to the Italian National Institute of Statistics, commonly referred to as ISTAT, more than 746,000 deaths were registered in 2020, almost 112,000 more than 2019 — an increase of 17.6% — and the highest number recorded since the end of World War II.
There were 7,600 fewer deaths recorded in January and February 2020 — the pre-pandemic phase — than the average for those two months in each of the preceding five years, it said.
But starting in March, when the epidemic exploded in Italy, until the end of 2020, the number of deaths nationwide went up 21 percent compared to the same period in the previous five years, the report said. The number of deaths registered as being due to COVID-19 were 10% of all deaths in 2020 with nearly 76,000 lives lost; ISTAT estimated that those deaths accounted for 70 percent of the increase over a normal year.
However, the highest numbers were during the worst phase of the crisis, from March to May 2020 when the number of deaths was 31.7 percent higher than the national average with almost 51,000 additional deaths than those recorded in the same period over the preceding five years, ISTAT said.
Northern Italy saw the highest concentration of deaths with the number of deaths being 61% higher than its norm from March to May; the number of deaths were 95% higher than the norm in March and 75% higher in April, it said.
The northern region of Lombardy — the epicentre of the pandemic — saw a 111.8 percent increase in the number of dead in that first phase, it said.