Archbishop: Catholic teachers must help shape better society

The Express of May 9th has an interesting article. Catholic teachers must shape a better society, but who is shaping better Catholics in our CATHOLIC Schools. We talk about a lack of Vocations, but where do we expect to get vocations from? Yet we are not teaching our children to live the virtues.

Here is the article written by Camille Bethel:

Catholic teachers must help to shape a better society, Archbishop Joseph Harris, said yesterday .

Harris was speaking at a thanksgiving mass in celebration of the 130th anniversary of St Joseph Convent, San Fernando. The service was held at the Our Lady of Perpetual Help RC Church, Harris Promenade, San Fernando.

He said a Catholic education has to ensure that habits of prayer, love and being a Eucharistic people are engraved in Catholic students before they leave Sixth Form. This is to ensure that both purposes of a Catholic education are fulfilled.

"A Catholic education has a double end. It seeks to develop citizens of the kingdom of Almighty God and also citizens of this land. That is the purpose. A Catholic education therefore must help to revitalise Catholic culture and identity or else it would have failed.

"If it is one thing that we need among all our people we need people with merciful hearts, compassionate hearts, loving hearts. We need a society which is far more genuine than the one in which we live," he told the principal, teachers and pupils in the congregation.

Harris spoke about the purpose of the mission of the Cluny Sisters to Trinidad and he congratulated them for ensuring that the intuition was still being carried out after 130 years.

"I read an except from a letter written by the Bishop at the time, who asked the sisters if they could come to Trinidad so that they could teach young ladies of all classes and all religions. That was the founding intuition. 130 years later we can look at it and say to ourselves, 'Yes, we have been faithful'."

Drs. Bill & Camille Cosby Community Center

The Examiner.com tells an interesting story about Bill Crosby and his wife.

On April 20th, 2012, the Community Center at St. Frances Academy of Baltimore was named in honor of actor, comedian and author, Bill Cosby and his wife, Dr. Camille Cosby. The formal name of the center is "Drs. Bill & Camille Cosby Community Center". St. Frances Academy is an independent Catholic high school with African-American and Hispanic roots. Serving the community as a positive catalyst for change, St. Frances leads urban American high schools through educational excellence and responsiveness to the needs of students and community. Continuing the legacy of Mother Mary Lange, who founded St. Frances in 1828 and the Oblate Sisters of Providence one year later, the academy and community center provide the immediate neighborhood and the Baltimore area a sense of cultural heritage and giftedness. The mission initiated by Mother Lange, born Elizabeth Clarissa Lange, is to help students and members of the community, particularly the indigent, develop the skills and education needed to become productive and giving members of society. Bill Cosby has been an advocate of educational opportunity throughout his life. His career is proof of his lifelong dedication to children. Dr. Camille Cosby was educated by the Oblate Sisters of Providence when she was a child living in Washington, D.C. She remembers the vision and mission fondly and was the keynote speaker at the 175th anniversary of the Oblate Sisters of Providence. The Cosbys made the largest donation in St. Frances' history when they established the Cosby Scholars program several years ago. This celebration and dedication ceremony is an expression of gratitude for their generosity over the years. The St. Frances Academy Gala Benefitting Students was held on Friday, April 20th 2012 at 7:00 p.m. at Martin's West in Woodlawn. Individual tickets were $150. Proceeds benefit the continuing education and community programs at St. Frances.

A dad for all dads

May 1 in nearly every country is Labor Day. More than 50 years ago the Church saw this feast as an opportunity to reflect on the figure of St. Joseph, who was a model worker as support of his family.

Madona and her disturbing song - act of contrition

My wife comes home and tells me about a disturbing song that she heard on the radio. It was a song with someone saying the "act of Contrition" and then messing around with it.

SO I decided to hear what she was talking about. I Googled "song lyrics act of contrition". Surprise Surprise! The artiste was/is Madona.

How awful. Do we really need that song on the radio? I must do something about this. I intend to contact the Morning Zoo program on radio 95.1.

Not good.

St Anns Church in St Croix streaming live

St Anns Catholic Church on the island of St Croix (Holy Cross in french), in the US Virgin Islands has an active website and streams mass regularly. To vist their stream link CLICK HERE!

Catholic bishops to address child sex abuse during Guyana confab

Well they are going to discuss much more than just that.... but that was the headline in the Guyana Times dated 20th April 2012. there was no byline. Here is the article:

Roman Catholic bishops will review the region’s programme to protect children from sexual abuse when they meet in Guyana later this month for their annual general meeting.

Sixteen bishops and archbishops, who head the Roman Catholic Church in the English, French and Dutch speaking Caribbean countries from Bermuda and Bahamas to Cayenne and Curacao, will be in Guyana from April 21 to 27 to participate in their annual general meeting. This group known as the Antilles Episcopal Conference (AEC) will be joined by the Papal Representative to the Antilles region, based in Port of Spain, Italian Archbishop Nicola Girasoli.

According to a release, the event will be officially inaugurated with a mass at Brickdam Cathedral at 16:00h on Sunday. Following an old tradition, the most recently ordained bishop in the AEC, Bishop Kenneth Richards of St John’s, Antigua and Basseterre, St Kitts will deliver the homily. The meeting will also welcome two other recently appointed bishops, Archbishop Joseph Harris of Port of Spain, and Bishop Jason Gordon of Bridgetown, Barbados and Kingstown, St Vincent. With these appointments and the upcoming ordination of an auxiliary bishop in Belize, only one of the 19 dioceses in the AEC does not have a bishop resident in the territory.
The inaugural mass will be preceded by a retreat on bishops’ spirituality and followed by a Study Day on Collegiality and cooperation among bishops, both of which will be led by U.S. Emeritus Archbishop of New Orleans Alfred Hughes. On Monday April 23, the president of the Bishops’ Conference, Archbishop Patrick Pinder of Bahamas and Bishop Francis Alleyne of Georgetown will pay a courtesy call on President Donald Ramotar.

Archbishop Girasoli will present his diplomatic credentials as Vatican representative to the government of Guyana the same day. The same afternoon there will be a meeting of the bishops with the local church leadership and diocesan organisation representatives at the St Paul’s Pastoral Centre at Better Hope on the East Coast Demerara.

The working sessions of the bishops will also include a review of plans by the AEC to sponsor the training of a Caribbean team of psychologists, social workers and counsellors in June in Trinidad, who will help in the church’s response to trauma to the victims of the frequent natural and other national and regional disasters such as floods, hurricanes and earthquakes. The one week training seminar will be directed by a top international expert in the field of trauma response. Another item on the agenda is a review of the region wide programme for the protection of God’s children in the region from sexual abuse through ongoing and in-depth training and motivation of all church personnel working with children through the Virtus Programme.

The bishops will finalise plans for the AEC Youth Assembly in St Lucia on July 19 to 29. That event will be attended by more than 1000 English, French and Dutch speaking youths across the region.

This will be immediately followed by a training seminar for Diocesan vocations directors and other vocations promoters from across the region in Castries, St Lucia on July 30 to August 3, which will give serious attention to the challenges posed by the sharp reduction in vocations to the priesthood and religious life, and address creative responses to training vocations promoters and giving greater witness of unity and enthusiasm by Catholics, clergy and laity in attracting vocations to the service of Christ in the people of the region.

Given the renewed priority of sacred scripture, underlined by the 2008 Vatican Synod and emphasised by Pope Benedict XVI on the “Word of God” and similar priority of the 2007 Aparecida Conference in Brazil of the Episcopal Conferences of Latin America and the Caribbean (CELAM), the bishops will discuss ways of promoting reading, meditation and action on the Bible by believers across the region.

About 2.2 million or one quarter of the total population of the countries that make up the AEC are Catholic. This will be the third time in its 64-year history that the AEC will meet in Guyana. The Church in Guyana first hosted a meeting of the group in 1974, and a much shorter forum in 1977.

Decisions are taken at these gatherings to give the Catholic churches in this region an orientation which will make them better able to respond to the realities and expectations of Caribbean peoples.

Last year’s meeting approved a major statement in a pastoral letter on Catholic education, renewing the commitment of the church to education at all levels in the region, and promoting “ongoing faith formation and professional development programmes” for Catholic educators across the region.

Important, landmark documents and decisions have emerged from past meetings of the AEC which dealt with a wide range of issues, including child abuse, capital punishment, care for the environment, justice and peace, and freedom and development.

The Argument against Corpus Christi holiday in Trinidad.

Well, there is an interesting articel by Bridget Brereton in the Trinidad Express newspaper dated April 12, 2012 entitled Of Holidays and Holy days. The Article4 suggests why the Catholic Feast of Corpus Christi should be eliminated. The fact is Ms Brereton, there are many Christian Holidays, but only one Specifically Catholic Holiday. I wish to suggest that we do away with all holidays for the nation.... and it be law that every citizen should take no more than 6 cultural or religious off days for the year. It should be mandatory that all government offices be open on Carnival Monday and Tuesday and the only days that should be public holidays should be Independence day and Republic day.

I am fine with that.

Here is Ms Brereton's article:

We've just had two long weekends and three public holidays: Spiritual Baptist Liberation Day, Good Friday and Easter Monday. This has prompted some discussion about holidays in the press.

In an interesting article in the Express last week, Robin Montano wrote about this issue. Among other points, he addressed Corpus Christi, which celebrates the Eucharist (Mass), and is important mainly, if not exclusively, to Roman Catholics.

Mr Montano thinks that we have retained this Catholic feast day as a public holiday because of our history. And he is perfectly correct. He was indulging in a bit of myth-making, though, when he wrote that Trinidad's French (Catholic) planters "had inserted into the Treaty of Amiens that…Corpus Christi would be a holiday in the colony from that day on".

Now this Treaty, concluded early in 1802, was a major international agreement between European powers which had been at war, especially Britain, France and Spain. A few French planters in a rather obscure Caribbean island, which had recently been captured by Britain, could hardly have "inserted" anything in such a treaty. Nor would Britain, France or Spain have cared one way or another about the issue.

In fact, the Treaty of Amiens—by which Trinidad was formally ceded by Spain to Britain, and Tobago was "returned" by Britain to France—makes absolutely no mention of Corpus Christi or any other religious festival in Trinidad.

The argument that Corpus Christi was guaranteed for all time as a public holiday is more often made in reference, not to the Treaty of Amiens, but to the Articles of Capitulation (capitulation means surrender). This agreement was made in February 1797 between the Spanish governor and the British commanders after the latter had successfully "taken" Trinidad.

In another recent article, also in the Express, Louis Homer makes this argument, but about Good Friday, not Corpus Christi. He writes that "historians" and "theologians" believe that "it was agreed that Good Friday will always remain a public holiday in keeping with the terms of the Capitulation treaty".

Sadly, this is another myth—though admittedly more plausible than the one about the Treaty of Amiens. The Articles of Capitulation—a document which has been examined by students for many years in various history courses at UWI—makes absolutely no mention of Good Friday, Corpus Christi, or any other holiday or holy day.

But it does include Clause 11, which states: "The free exercise of their religion is allowed to the inhabitants"; and this was indeed an important concession to the Catholic majority in the free population, especially those powerful French planters. Britain was a Protestant power, and in 1797 British Catholics, though no longer actually persecuted, didn't enjoy civil rights, were treated as second-class citizens, and generally viewed with some suspicion.

So Clause 11 was a guarantee to the Catholic landowners and slave owners—whose support the British needed if they were to keep hold of Trinidad in a time of war and revolution in the region—that Britain would not interfere with the exercise of their faith. It's a bit of a stretch to read this clause as guaranteeing Catholic holy days would always remain public holidays, even in an independent Trinidad and Tobago. But Mr Homer writes that the late Archbishop Anthony Pantin did make this claim, quoting him as saying "Good Friday was entrenched in a treaty that makes it mandatory to remain as a public holiday".

Perhaps he did say this, though I've only heard the argument with reference to Corpus Christi. Good Friday doesn't seem to require this rather dubious claim: along with Easter Sunday it's clearly the most important day in the Christian calendar, commemorating the events which lie at the core of the Christian faith. And Christians do form a majority of the national population, counting all the many denominations and varieties, all of which (as far as I know) recognise the Crucifixion and Resurrection as the heart of their creed.

Easter Monday is perhaps more vulnerable as a public holiday; it's become an entirely secular day. But there is the argument that Easter itself falls on a Sunday and so the public holiday must be on the following Monday. And this day is especially important to Tobago, it seems; any attempt to do away with it would be especially resented there.

I agree with Mr Montano that the argument for retaining Corpus Christi as a public holiday is far weaker. This is a holy day significant only to Catholics, it seems. It's been retained, not because of any treaty obligations—we've seen that there are none, and even if there were, they couldn't possibly apply to independent Trinidad and Tobago—but because historically the Catholic Church was the dominant religious body in colonial times. Even after Independence, its clout has ensured that Corpus Christi stayed while Whit Monday, a day of special significance to Pentecostals, was axed a few years ago.

We have far more public holidays relating to the Christian calendar than to that of any other faith. If any of the "Christian" holidays should go, in my view Corpus Christi should be the one.


• Bridget Brereton is Emerita Professor of History at the University of the West Indies, St Augustine Campus, and has studied and written about the history of Trinidad and Tobago, and the Caribbean, for many decades