California bishop banned a priest — but that didn’t keep him from ministering in Chicago (Chicago Sun-Times) While ministering in San Bernardino, California, in 2014, a Chicago-area priest named Joseph Jablonski told a boy something that prompted the bishop’s office there, when it found out, to notify the authorities and bar him from ever again ministering in that diocese. The bishop’s office decided that Jablonski’s words — deemed to be an attempt at “grooming” for a possible sexual encounter — amounted to “sexual abuse,” according to records and interviews. But that didn’t prevent Jablonski from continuing over the next several years to serve as a priest in other places — including Chicago, Aurora and Joliet…
A Catholic sinner seeks Communion — and it’s the President (The Atlantic) Sinners abound in politics. The question facing the Catholic hierarchy is whether to offer the most famous Catholic sinner in America an invitation to closeness with God, or to withhold Communion until the president falls fully in line with his Church’s teachings…
Bishop blesses streets of drug-infested city with holy water (CNS) The bishop of a Colombian city suffering from a deadly spike in drug violence boarded a fire truck to spray the town’s main street with holy water and help to “cleanse it” of evil. Bishop Rubén Jaramillo Montoya performed the gesture Feb. 10 during a protest against violence in Buenaventura, a city of about half a million people on Colombia’s Pacific Coast. Thousands of local residents, dressed in white and wearing face masks, also formed a human chain that crossed most of the city…
Pope Francis visits writer and holocaust survivor (CNA) Pope Francis on Saturday visited the home of the writer and Holocaust survivor Edith Steinschreiber Bruck in Rome. The 89-year-old Bruck is Hungarian-born, but has lived in Italy since her early 20s. She survived the Nazi concentration camps in Auschwitz and Dachau, where she was sent with her parents, two brothers, and a sister at the age of 12…
Biography of Arrupe makes the case for his canonization (Crux) As a help in promoting Pedro Arrupe’s cause for canonization, the Institute of Jesuit Sources at Boston College has made available now for the first time in English Pedro Arrupe: Witness of the Twentieth Century, Prophet of the Twenty-First. The biography, originally composed in Spanish by Jesuit Father Pedro Miguel Lamet, has seen over twenty editions in multiple languages. Lamet knew Arrupe personally and had opportunities to interview him, making this work the definitive biography of this Jesuit who, like Ignatius Loyola, came from the Basque region of Spain…
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