NEWS

JOPLIN, Mo. - A Catholic hospital in Joplin that took a direct hit from a category-F4 tornado that struck the city May 22 has made plans to get back to normal as soon as possible.

Five patients and one visitor at St. John's Regional Medical Centre lost their lives in the twister, but 183 other patients were evacuated to other facilities in Missouri and Arkansas.

"A number of Mercy caregivers themselves were injured," said a May 23 statement issued by the hospital. "Their selfless efforts put their patients first and resulted in a timely and orderly evacuation."

The six fatalities recorded at St. John's, a health care ministry of the Sisters of Mercy, were included in the total of 125 confirmed dead by early May 25, and is expected to climb. The number injured in the storm was 1,150 and news reports say there are up to 1,500 people unaccounted for.

"Our first priority is to the community of Joplin and to ensure that our patients, families and co-workers are safe and receiving the best care possible. We are grateful for your support as we work together to assist the Joplin community," the hospital said.

"Please know that Mercy remains committed to the Joplin community, both in the short-term and long-term," the statement said. "We are evaluating interim approaches to providing health care services, and we will be planning for the future as soon as we address more immediate needs."

Structural engineers were set to arrive in Joplin to evaluate the hospital building, said Mercy president and CEO Lynn Britton in a May 23 statement..

Donations to the Joplin Tornado Relief Fund, or wherever the need is greatest, can be made online through a site set up by St. John's at https://ssl.4agoodcause.com/mercy/donation1.aspx?id=1.

"Please keep the people of Joplin in our prayers, especially those whose lives were taken as well as those who lost loved ones," said a May 23 statement from Bishop James Johnston Jr. of Springfield-Cape Girardeau. "We pray especially for the people of St. Mary's Catholic Church and school who suffered a total loss as well as St. John's Mercy Hospital which sustained major damage."

"Diocesan staff have been in contact with the other Missouri Catholic Charities organizations based in the Springfield-Cape Girardeau and Kansas City dioceses and the archdiocese of St. Louis," said a May 23 statement from the neighbouring diocese of Jefferson City.

The church, school and rectory buildings of St. Mary parish were all destroyed by the tornado, but the parish pastor, Fr. Justin Monaghan, was reported unhurt.

"The pastor rode it out in the bathtub. He's fine," said Leslie Anne Eidson, editor of The Mirror, newspaper of the diocese of Springfield-Cape Girardeau. "He's staying with a local parishioner right now."

At Joplin's other Catholic church, St. Peter the Apostle, parish administrator Elizabeth Runkle told Catholic News Service May 23, "St. Peter's is fine. We're OK. We didn't have any damage. Everybody's fine."

St. Peter has an outreach centre that they're trying to use to speed aid to victims, according to Eidson.

McAuley Catholic High School, which serves the city's two parishes, escaped damage, Eidson said. It was being used as an overflow triage centre.

Catholic Charities of Southern Missouri was in Joplin and seeking donations to aid tornado victims. The Society of St. Vincent de Paul also was co-ordinating its own relief efforts in the Joplin area.

Joplin, in southwest Missouri near the borders of Kansas and Oklahoma, sits in "Tornado Alley," so called for the frequency and ferocity of the region's twisters.

"The tornado has split Joplin in two," reported Eidson. Travel in and out of the city was difficult in the wake of the tornado, she added.

PORT ROYAL, N.S. - Canada's Jesuits returned to the scene of their earliest footsteps in Canada to help mark 400 years of service in Canada May 22.

About three dozen Canadian Jesuits and some 100 guests gathered to mark the landing, 400 years to the day, of Jesuit Fathers Pierre Biard and Ennemond Massé at Port Royal in what is now Nova Scotia. Halifax Archbishop Anthony Mancini presided at a jubilee Mass that was part of the day-long celebrations at Port Royal National Historical Site.

The reconstructed Habitation on the shores of the Annapolis Basin, near the Bay of Fundy, provided a back drop for a brief dramatic re-enactment of Biard and Massé’s landing at the site. The original Habitation had been built by French fur traders in 1604 but had been abandoned to Mi’kmaq control when the Jesuits arrived. It became the base for two years of missionary activity before the Jesuits returned to France.

ROME - The Salesians of St. John Bosco removed two European members from their duties after it was discovered one belonged to a pro-pedophilia organization and another made remarks defending pedophilia.

The Salesian headquarters in Rome said a Dutch priest identified only as Fr. "B" and the superior of the Salesians in the Netherlands, Fr. Herman Spronck, had both been suspended.

"The Belgium-Holland Province officially announced that Fr. B no longer has permission to carry out any pastoral activity and that Fr. Spronck has been relieved of his office as delegate," the congregation said in a May 23 press release.

The Salesian provincial of Belgium-Holland, Fr. Jos Claes, said that to the Salesians' "great surprise," Fr. "B" was a member of a Dutch-based association that advocates legalizing sexual relations between an adult and child. Claes said the association is "not compatible with our Salesian identity" and "we therefore condemn the membership and the opinions of Fr. van B."

TORONTO - An exhibit featuring a hand-written and illustrated biblical Scroll of Esther highlights the “bridge” between Christianity and Judaism, says Toronto-based scribe Laya Crust.

Crust wrote the Hebrew text of the Scroll of Esther on animal parchment using historical tools and materials. The scroll features 16 columns of Hebrew text and 32 full-colour illustrations in the style of 16th-century Persian art bringing to life the ancient story of Queen Esther. The exhibit opened at Toronto’s University of St. Michael’s College May 18 and runs until June 18.

“It was a very exciting and a wonderful way to connect with the (biblical) text and wonderful to know that it’s an ecumenical text that’s embraced by the Christian faith, by Christians around the world, as well as by Jews and has that additional bridge of religion and God,” Crust told The Catholic Register.

TORONTO - Michael Coren, Catholic author and journalist, has been chosen this year’s recipient of the Catholic Civil Rights League’s Archbishop Adam Exner Award for Catholic Excellence in Public Life.

The annual award recognizes outstanding lay achievement in advocacy, education, life issues and philanthropy.

“Michael’s really done a lot to promote Catholic understanding,” said Joanne McGarry, executive director of the CCRL. She said that Coren was chosen because of his “consistent and clear defence of Catholic teaching in the media.”

“I’m more than happy to be out on the front lines defending the Church, my Church, but the blows, the abuse and the attacks certainly cut deep at times,” said Coren. “So this honour, this affirmation, is wonderful. For someone who always has something to say, I’m almost speechless.”

The following is a list of the clergy appointments for the Archdiocese of Toronto that take effect on June 30. Listed is the priest’s name and the parish they will serve.

ROME - The city of Rome erected its first statue of Blessed Pope John Paul II and the reviews are not good. The Vatican newspaper said what a lot of people were thinking: it’s ugly.

Sculptor Oliviero Rainaldi intended to show the late pope with his cape billowing in the wind, as a symbolic image of welcome. The five-metre-tall bronze sculpture was placed outside Rome’s main train station, where tens of thousands of visitors arrive daily.

But when unveiled May 18, it looked more like an open tent, or a sentry-box, or a bell, commented L’Osservatore Romano. The papal cape looks like it was split open by a bomb. More importantly, the newspaper said, it’s unrecognizable as John Paul II — the head is “excessively spherical.”

For the sixth year in a row Canada’s birth rate has inched up, but a polarized job market and pressure on young couples to obtain and pay for their education before starting a family is pushing mothers up against a biological wall.

Statistics Canada reported the nation’s fertility rate for 2008 was 1.68 children per woman, up slightly from 1.66 per woman in 2007. The 2008 fertility rate produced 377,886 babies, a 2.7-per-cent increase over 2007.

Much of the increase can be attributed to the population bulge of children of baby boomers, the so-called “echo generation,” now in their 20s and 30s.

“Canada, in terms of fertility, is the middle of the pack (compared to other Western nations),” said Vanier Institute for the Family director of programs Katherine Scott. “Obviously, we’re below the replacement rate of 2.1.”

TORONTO - There are about 6,900 languages in the world. Anthropologists and linguists believe 90 per cent of them will be extinct by the end of this century. But Scarboro Mission priest Fr. Ron MacDonell is doing his best to save one of them.

MacDonell works with the Makushi people deep in the Amazon rainforest, near the border between Brazil and Guyana. Working with his parishioners, MacDonnell has produced a trilingual book of Makushi myths in Makushi, Portuguese and English.

The English title for the collection of 30 legends and folk tales is Jaguars, Tapirs and Foxes.

Years in the making, the book is only MacDonell’s latest effort to give momentum to Makushi language and culture. In 2008 he published a Makushi dictionary and since 2006 he has worked with native Makushi speakers to broadcast Makushi lessons on the Raraima diocese’s FM radio station.

MANCHESTER, England - American and British diplomats discussed exerting pressure on Pope Pius XII to be silent about the Nazi deportations of Hungarian Jews, according to newly discovered documentation.

The British feared that the wartime pope might make a "radio appeal on behalf of the Jews in Hungary" and that in the course of his broadcast would "also criticize what the Russians are doing in occupied territory."

Sir Francis D'Arcy Osborne, the British ambassador to the Vatican, told an American diplomat that "something should be done to prevail upon the pope not to do this as it will have very serious political repercussions."

Osborne's comments were made to Franklin C. Gowen, an assistant to Myron Taylor, the U.S. special representative to the Vatican. Gowen recorded the conversation in a letter to Taylor, saying he had promised Osborne that he would bring his concerns to the "immediate attention" of the U.S. ambassador.