Excommunicated Chinese bishop
committed 'sacrilege'
by ordaining new priests;
1 deacon refuses to be ordained
by Gerard O'Connell
June 30, 2012
The excommunicated Chinese bishop, Paul Lei Shi-yin, committed “sacrilege” by ordaining four new priests on June 29 in Leshan diocese, southwestern China, Archbishop Savio Hon Tai Fai, said in Rome the day after the ordination ceremony.
[It must be pointed out that Mons. Hon, from HongKong, is the secretary of the Congregation for the Evangelizaiton of Peoples, the Vatican dicastery directly supervising the Roman Catholic Church in China, which continues to be mission territory for the Church. That is why his opinion matters in this case.]
Lei ordained four new priests on June 29, the first anniversary of his own illicit ordination, UCA News reported. He was ordained bishop without the approval of Pope Benedict and in defiance of the Holy See’s clear instructions on 29 June 2011, and this resulted in his being the first Chinese priest to be publicly declared excommunicated by the Holy See since the Cultural Revolution ended in 1976.
Archbishop Hon told Vatican Insider today hat Lei's ordinations were not just invalid but sacrilegious, because he had already incurred excommunication latae sententiae in 2011 by being ordained bishop without the papal mandate and so “has been deprived of communion in the Church.”
Therefore, he said, “It is a sacrilege for him to receive and to administer any sacrament” and, furthermore, “No faithful layperson, not to speak of the clergy, should be involved in any act of sacrilege”.
“For the good of the community," he said, "the Church does not allow any illegitimate bishop to exercise any Episcopal function which has not been given to him by the Pope through the pontifical mandate.”
In fact, it had been planned that Lei Shi-yin would ordain five new priests, but one of the five deacons who was to be ordained refused to be ordained priest by the excommunicated bishop, local Church sources told UCA News.
The other four deacons accepted to be ordained by Lei Shi-yin after the diocese allegedly promised each of them a car and a sum of money, estimated to be worth Chinese Yuan 150,000 (Euro 18,640, or US$23,600), the Asian Catholic news agency reported.
Commenting on this courageous act by one of the deacons, Archbishop Hon, the Chinese-born Secretary of the Congregation for the Evangelization of Peoples, said; “Ever since the 1990's I have been able to meet many (Chinese) seminarians” and “most of them are firm in faith and in front of pressure have heroically refrained from being ordained by illegitimate bishops.”
[It took the reporter eight paragraphs before identifying who Mons. Hon is exactly, and why his opinion matters in this case.]
Indeed, he said, “The same is true for many candidates approved by the Holy See to be ordained bishop. At the cost of great sacrifice they have heroically resisted the con-celebration of illegitimate bishops in their ordination ceremonies”.
Aware that the Chinese authorities are planning to ordain two more bishops during the month of July – one in Shanghai (with the Pope’s approval) and the other in Harbin (without the papal mandate), and seeking to prevent further wounds to Church unity, the Vatican Archbishop reaffirmed the Holy See’s firm position on Episcopal ordinations.
It is “absolutely forbidden” for a priest to be ordained bishop without the papal mandate, he reiterated, and whoever does so incurs automatic excommunication (latae sententiae). In other words, the candidate to be bishop in Harbin should refuse to go ahead.
Likewise, he said, it is “forbidden” for an illegitimate bishop to participate in an Episcopal ordination that has the Pope’s approval, he too seriously breaks Church law. In other words, he wants to avoid this happening at the ordination in Shanghai.
Some happy news from India for a change:
Unexpected cases of healing
in the Diocese of Itanagar,
in extreme northeast India
Where the Catholic presence has increased by 40%
by Marco Tosatti
Translated from the Italian service of
June 30, 2012
'Strange' healings are taking place in the Indian diocese of Itanagar, according to its Bishop, Mons. John Kattrukudiyil, on a visit to Germany for the periodic meeting organized by the organization Aid to the Church in Need, a Vatican-sponsored organization which helps Churches and the faithful in places that are most in need.
He says that numerous inexplicabloe healings have taken place, preceded and apparently caused by community prayers, and that this could partly account for an extraordinary increase in Catholics - 40% in the past 35 years - in a remote and mountainous area of India.
He says he frequently receives reports of such healings. "The stories fill me with perplexity. I have a theological background, and it is easy to be skeptical about these things. But the persons concerned are absolutely convinced that they are the beneficiaries of miracles."
He cites a man who had been a persecutor of the Church until he married a Catholic girl and he converted. "Afterwards, someone asked him to pray for a paralytic, which he was hesitant to do, but did anyway. The following day, the paralytic got up and walked to church". The convert was so amazed that he started to be a frequent churchgoer and "is now a very active member of his parish".
[My addendum: Information about the diocese from its website - It was erected by Benedict XVI on December 7, 2005, under the patronage of St. Joseph. The diocese was created by breaking it off from the Diocese of Tezpur in India's Assam region. Geographically, it comrpises the ten civil districts of the region called West Arunachal Pradesh. Mons Kattrukudiyil, until then Bishop of Diphu in Assam, was named to be its first bishop. The diocese is named after the capital of Arunacahl Pradesh ('land of the rising sun'), and it is bordered by Bhutan to the west, China to the north and northeast, and Burma to the east. It stretches from its snowcapped mountains in the north to the plains of the Brahmaputra valley in the south. The diocese covers 84,000 sq km. Its geographical isolation has resulted in its 26 major tribes speaking their own languages to flourish with their own distinct identities.]
Mons. Kattrukudiyil is well aware of the skepticism that greets stories of miraculous healing, and in Europe, he has often been dismissed with "Come on, don't tell us tall tales!"
But he says "There are too many stories reported that I cannot ignore them".
A possible historical-theological explanation he sees is in the 'relative freshness of the local church'. "It's the experience of a very young Church which is experiencing the grace of the Church such as it was in apostolic times" when such healings were frequent, as the Bible narrates.
He says that often the healings happen after friends gather together at the home of a very sick person to pray for him. "Persons who had been ailing for a long time are healed - and it seems to me that these witnesses are experiencing what the primitive Church did".
"In the early Church," he notes, "healings were achieved by the Apostles after praying to Jesus and in his name. It was a spiritual grace that came to them by belonging to the Church".
He notes a 40% increase in Catholics in the past 35 years, and says that the situation of Catholics in the region has improved greatly. "The Church is no longer just tolerated but praised for its charitable activities. Politicians do not miss an occasion to praise the Church for its humanitarian work".
[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 01/07/2012 01:28]