WASHINGTON - A wide majority of Massgoers are satisfied with the new English translation of the Roman Missal introduced a year ago at Advent, a survey showed.

VATICAN CITY - A papal astronomer gave his reassurances that the world will not end Dec. 21, 2012.

VATICAN CITY - The universal church needs Catholics in the Americas who are joyful missionaries

In response to an invitation earlier this year by the Canadian Catholic Aboriginal Council

ROME - In the immaculate conception of Mary, Christians recognize the

MEXICO CITY - Ana Rita Valero received an unlikely request in 2008. Valero, an anthropologist and president of the Archconfraternity of Our Lady of Guadalupe, was asked by an official with the Mexican consulate in Shanghai to send two large images of Our Lady of Guadalupe.

VATICAN CITY - When the Catholic Church affirms the importance of how all the faithful understand matters of faith and morals, it is not saying Catholic beliefs are open to a popular vote, Pope Benedict XVI said.

BRAMPTON, ONT.  - St. Anne’s Church in Brampton is offering parishioners the chance to re-examine their catechetical teachings during the Year of Faith through a series of guest speakers who’ll engage them in deep philosophical conversation.

“It is difficult to have adult catechism so I thought that this year is a great opportunity to bring that sense of adult catechetical formation here,” said pastor Fr. James Cherickal. “What people hear from the Toronto Star or the CBC or Cable Pulse 24, many of our Catholics think that whatever they say is the truth. So we need to let people know exactly what the Church’s concerns are for these kinds of issues.”

Over the next year the parish will host speakers on the second and third Wednesday of the month to address a variety of topics, including evangelical questions, treasures of the Catholic Church and the Church in media. Following the talks parishioners will have a chance to chime in with their own specific questions for the experts.

Among the notables slotted to speak are Fr. Tom Lynch, national director of Priests for Life, journalist and Register columnist Michael Coren and Salt + Light TV CEO Fr. Tom Rosica. Cardinal Thomas Collins will celebrate the closing Mass next November.

“They are all very comfortable in taking questions because these are their fields of expertise and these are the things that they usually deal with,” said Cherickal. “These are the people who have both intellect and the calling of the theme which they try to live in their life.”

In addition to the speakers the parish will also be offering eucharistic adoration services from 7 p.m. to midnight, with confessions starting at 10 p.m., on the first Friday of each month. Months will close off with another learning opportunity, Apostolic Letters and Teaching of the Church, on the final Friday run primarily by Fr. Ephram Nariculam.

With so much happening it should be no surprise there were challenges in organizing everything.

“Because St. Anne’s is a very, very active and vibrant parish, it was very difficult to find the time. There (needed to be some) consistency in order for the people to remember the programs are going on,” said Cherickal. “By the grace of God everything worked together.”

The Year of Faith Committee was instrumental in organizing the events, said Cherickal. Organized shortly after Cherickal came to the parish in July, the committee first met in late September to brainstorm ideas on how to best celebrate the Year of Faith.

“Fr. James wanted to do something to kind of allow the adults in the parish to have opportunities to hear talks and opportunities to deepen their faith,” said committee member Dwight Stead. “Very quickly the slate of speakers emerged.”

As an academic consultant for the Dufferin-Peel Catholic District School Board, Stead sees the average parishioner’s limited understanding of the Church’s teachings on a regular basis. It is this reason that, when asked by Cherickal to join the committee, Stead immediately said yes.

“A lot of times adults go through the sacraments and then they kind of fall into a period of time when their faith isn’t really deepened,” he said. “They have a lot of catechism when they are a student but when you’re a student you can’t really grasp a lot of the deep philosophical messages that adults need to know about.”
While the intended audience is adults, both Stead and Cherickal encourage youth to attend — in fact they’ve planned a speaker for each day of Catholic Education Week who’ll address issues relevant to teens.

On Nov. 14 when the series kicked off with Fr. Joseph Singh, there was at least one teenager among the 100 or so who attended and now she plans to attend as many talks as possible.

“I thought it was going to be boring. I just thought the priest was going to be reading off a piece of paper,” said 17-year-old Yesennia Guzman, who’s mother insisted she attend.

“I feel that after that session that it is necessary for myself to go every week to learn something more about the faith. I learned how ignorant I was.”

For Guzman the information that she received that Wednesday night has helped her to deepen her faith and allows her to live the Eucharist fuller — the goal Cherickal had in mind when dreaming up the idea in the first place.

“The goal is to bring them more closer to Christ and the Church.”

SAN SALVADOR - The Salvadoran government will open a tourist route in honour of Archbishop Oscar Romero, who was killed by death squads in March 1980.

The initiative, which will begin next year, aims to boost tourism in the country and at the same time remember the legacy of Archbishop Romero, a staunch defender of human rights and the poor who was hated by the military and oligarchs.

The tour should ensure that “his life and thought are known by foreign visitors and also by new generations of Salvadorans,” El Salvador President Mauricio Funes said from Archbishop Romero’s crypt in the Metropolitan Cathedral, where he announced the plan.

The route will include sites like the cathedral, where the archbishop denounced the injustices that occurred in this country in the late 1970s. On the steps of the cathedral, dozens of people participating in the archbishop’s funeral were massacred by government forces March 30, 1980.

It also will include the Romero Centre and Martyrs Museum, both on the campus of Central American University. They display objects belonging to the archbishop, to the Jesuits murdered in 1989 and to Jesuit Father Rutilio Grande, the first priest executed by death squads, in 1977.

The tour includes the Museum of the Word and Image and Divine Providence Hospital, where Archbishop Romero was shot dead while celebrating Mass.

The Truth Commission, created in 1993 to investigate political crimes committed during the 1980-92 civil war, established that Archbishop Romero’s assassination was carried out by a right-wing command led by Maj. Roberto D’Aubuisson, founder of Nationalist Republican Alliance. D’Aubuisson died of cancer in 1992.

TORONTO - The New Evangelization that anchors Pope Benedict XVI’s call for a Year of Faith looks a little different from an African perspective, Cardinal Peter Turkson told a capacity audience at the Regis College chapel in Toronto.

The Ghanaian cardinal who heads up the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace delivered the Martin Royakers Lecture Sept. 26, speaking about “Vatican II: A Council of Justice and Peace.” He also spoke with The Catholic Register in an exclusive interview.

For African Catholics the New Evangelization is a challenge to form better leaders in the Church and society, and an invitation to deepen the commitment of all Christians to the body of Christ, Turkson said.

Since the Second Vatican Council the African Church has grown to a degree almost inconceivable to the Churches in North America and Europe, Turkson said. From 29 million Catholics in 1962 to 186 million today, Africa’s Catholic population has grown 541 per cent.

The old image of Africa as a mission land under the tutelage of European and North American priests and sisters is beginning to fade. Between 1962 and 2012 African- born priests have risen from just 15,000 to more than 40,000. Seminaries are bursting. There were 26,000 religious women from Africa in 1962, compared to 68,000 today.

Many Africans have become missionaries to underserved regions of Canada, the United States and Europe.

It seems that the old evangelization worked.

“We did teach people the catechism and we did baptize them,” Turkson told The Catholic Register.

But that doesn’t mean Africa doesn’t now need the New Evangelization — a concept first spoken about by Pope John Paul II at a meeting of the bishops of Latin America in Puebla, Mexico, in 1979.

Just as the majority of African Catholics trace their Catholic roots to the great ecumenical council of 1962-1965, the majority of African nations were released out of colonialism either just before or during Vatican II.

“The educated elite, the educated class that emerged in the emerging states, mostly was educated in mission schools,” pointed out Turkson.

Unfortunately they included corrupt politicians such as Zairian President Mobutu Sese Seko, who amassed a personal fortune of some $5 billion, and Robert Mugabe, still in power in Zimbabwe.

“That has caused several Church leaders in Africa to sit back and think, ‘What did we do wrong?’ ” said Turkson.

But it isn’t just the politicians and business leaders of the continent that worry African bishops. In Turkson’s native Ghana almost a quarter of the population is Pentecostal, compared to just 15 per cent who are Catholic. Many people opt for a simpler, more personal, more emotionally expressive brand of faith.

What’s missing in the merely intellectual and notional religion of Africa’s leaders and the purely personal religion of the poor is the social doctrine of the Church, Turkson said.

“But their social consciousness, what we now call the social doctrine of the Church, wasn’t taught much. That was missing. People became Christians but the transition — the fact they were Christian — did not impact much on their social lives. That is something we are now discovering,” he said.

Just recording baptisms won’t do any more. Nor will mere catechism lessons make Christians.

“That is not quite the experience of conversion,” he said. “The Evangelical movement is appealing more to the heart, with lively music, lively prayer, the power of the spiritual world.”

All of that is embedded in the Catholic way of living out the sacraments, but it has to be uncoveredand presented in new ways, said Turkson.

“We need to find a way of bringing it down to basically these needs — to people’s life situations,” he said. “All of that serves as vehicles of God’s grace.”

He believes Catholic parish life has to afford people more opportunities to bear witness and testify to their faith.

“The world is now looking for witnesses,” he said. “We don’t make it alive. We don’t make it come alive in such a way that it encourages them, motivates them, touches their lives in faith. It would be great if we fashioned a little space in our worship for moments like that.”