Claire Lai, daughter of imprisoned Hong Kong activist and Catholic Jimmy Lai, speaks with EWTN News President Montse Alvarado on “EWTN News Nightly” on Dec. 8, 2025. / Credit: “EWTN News Nightly”/Screenshot
Washington, D.C. Newsroom, Dec 9, 2025 / 06:00 am (CNA).
Daughter of imprisoned Catholic activist Jimmy Lai spoke out for the first time ahead of her father’s 78th birthday.
“As a daughter, every day I wake up and I hope that today is the day we get my dad home … the day we get to go to Mass together, or to eat dinner around the table, things that years ago I almost took for granted,” Claire Lai said in an interview with EWTN News.
Jimmy Lai, the pro-democracy entrepreneur and human rights activist, was arrested in 2020 in Hong Kong. He underwent a trial that lasted nearly two years for allegations of colluding with foreign forces under a national security law put in effect by the communist-controlled Chinese government.
The trial ended in August, and Lai continues to wait for the verdict in prison where he faces inhumane living conditions, deteriorating health, and is denied the Eucharist, his daughter said.
In an interview with Montse Alvarado, president and COO of EWTN News, Lai’s daughter Claire said: “We’re still waiting for a verdict, five years after he was charged. He is turning 78. We have waited a very, very long time for his cases to be resolved. We do not believe that they will be through the domestic system. Our only hope is outside, and that’s why I’m here now.”
Dec. 8 was Jimmy Lai’s 78th birthday, which falls on the feast of the Immaculate Conception. His daughter highlighted Lai’s deep devotion to the Blessed Mother.
She said her family has tried to send him a rosary in prison, but “each attempt failed.” She said he fell down once in the shower, and “because of his waist pain he wasn’t able to get up.”
“Even some of the guards came over and tried to help him … but he couldn’t get up. So he pretended as though he had a rosary in his hand and prayed to the Blessed Mother. Then he was able to get up without pain,” Claire Lai said.
“When you’re a daughter … and you hear stories like that, you wish you could yourself physically pull him up when he is in pain like that. But you find such great comfort in the fact that Our Lady is protecting him,” she said.
Conversion to the faith
Lai said her father’s conversion to Catholicism has been a stable presence during his time in prison.
“My father had quite an unconventional childhood. He came to Hong Kong when he was 12. He had nothing to his name, nothing in his pockets. But he was full of optimism and he had a yearning for freedom,” she said.
“It was only later on that he understood that there was something, a higher force, guiding him all along, which was why he was able to go from child laborer to a successful entrepreneur and do so almost without fear. It was later on that he understood that to be God,” she said.
Jimmy Lai converted the year of the handover of Hong Kong from the United Kingdom to China when “people were filled with doubt and with a certain amount of fear,” his daughter said. “As Our Lady has taught us, there is nothing that conquers doubt and fear except for the love of God. And that was a time when he was ready to receive it.”
“My father converted one year after I was born. Really, the only memories I have are of growing up in a very loving Catholic family,” she said.
Legal saga
Claire Lai studied law and has been involved with her father’s case and lengthy trial. “There’s an equal amount of outrage, but also it’s a privilege to be able to be there and witness it as closely as I have,” she said.
“As someone who grew up admiring the Hong Kong legal system … it has been heartbreaking to see the rule of law break down, but even more so to see my father and his case is at the helm of it.”
The bench was “not neutral in any sense of the word,” she said. “They just grilled him repeatedly. There were gag orders that were imposed when the evidence just did not suit the narrative … it was just so deeply unfair.”
The trial had unexplained delays that were “clearly meant so that people would forget about my father and so that it would crush his spirit,” she said. But “with the good Lord as his guide, his spirit remained just as strong.”
Prison conditions
Lai has been in prison for five years, but “his incarceration has just deepened his faith,” his daughter said.
“I think there isn’t anything quite as much as suffering that opens your heart to God’s love. We are so grateful that Our Lord has accompanied my father. He wakes up around midnight every night to pray,” she said.
“Before the crack of dawn, he would read the Gospel,” Lai said. “At first, he would ask the guards if they could turn on the light so that he could read … For about the first six months, they said ‘yes.’ Afterwards, they always said ‘no.’”
“The conditions he’s kept in have just gotten worse over time. They aren’t a natural byproduct of prison. In the prison cell, there is a window that leads outside that should give access to sunlight. His is deliberately blocked so that he doesn’t have access,” she said.
“He’s been denied holy Communion for over two years and got it only very, very intermittently this year,” she said. “It’s something that costs them nothing … for him to get. It costs them nothing for him to get the rosary, and it costs them nothing to turn on the light so that he can read the Gospel.”
Kept in solitary confinement, he faces extreme heat conditions in his small cell. “In summer, the heat can get up to … 111 degrees Fahrenheit,” she said. “To say that it’s sweltering is a massive understatement.”
“He gets heat rushes all over his body, and they last until the middle of autumn. It is outrageous, and it is torturous,” she said.
“We have typhoon seasons in Hong Kong … and the cells get wet. Almost everything in there gets wet. Once that happened, the first thing he checked was his Bible, and it was the one thing that remained dry. We’re very grateful that Our Lord and Our Lady continue to watch over him,” she said.
Lai’s health has declined rapidly while behind bars.
“In less than a year, he lost 10 kilos … after already having lost a significant amount of weight the last few years. His nails are rotting … He has infections that last for months in spite of antibiotics. And his limbs get swollen, very red, and they’re agonizingly painful,” she said.
“My dad is not someone who complains. He doesn’t even make faces. You know that when he does, it’s very painful,” she said. “There are times when even from a distance, you can tell that he’s pale and he’s shivering.”
“Then there’s the less visible signs,” she said. “He’s diabetic, and he’s had heart issues. He had a perfectly healthy heart before he went to prison.” He has said “that every few days he would have heart palpitations and they would be disabling,” his daughter said.
Call for international involvement
Jimmy Lai is a British citizen and his daughter said that any communication between Britain and the Chinese government should include discussion of her father.
“He is in prison for basically standing in defense for the freedoms he first came to know as a child in Hong Kong when it was still a British embassy and for hoping that they would keep the promise made during the sign of the British Joint Declaration,” she said.
U.S. President Donald Trump has vowed to do “everything” possible to “save” Lai. A White House official told EWTN News in October that Trump spoke with Chinese President Xi Jinping about his imprisonment.
“We are so extremely grateful to President Trump and his administration,” Claire Lai said. “They have a long, proven record of freeing the unjustly detained, and we hope that my father will follow soon.”
“We are also very, very grateful for members of the public. My father is sustained by your prayers,” she said.
She shared that Pope Leo XIV is also praying for her father during this time. In October, Lai’s wife, Teresa Lai, and his daughter met Pope Leo after a general audience. “It was such a privilege and a blessing to have an audience with our Holy Father,” Claire Lai said.
Hope for a release
“The government has no case,” she said. “All they’ve proven is that my father is a good man, a man who loves God, a man who loves freedom, who loves truth, and loves his family.”
If she could speak with the Chinese government, Lai said she would say to “do the only just and … only honorable thing, which is to release a 78-year-old man, my father, Jimmy Lai, against whom no case has been made.”
“Don’t let him die a martyr in these conditions, in this health. It is a stain on your history that you will never be able to wipe off,” she said.
She said she does “worry” that her father could die in prison, but she is “hopeful.”
When her father “reflected on his earlier years, he said that even before he converted and before he opened his heart to the love of God, he was always guided by him — even before he knew it,” she said. “I think that’s how he wants to be remembered, as a faithful servant of Our Lord.”
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![‘As men, you’re called to act!’ speaker says to a packed room of young men at SEEK 2026 #Catholic
John Bishop, founder of Forge, speaks to hundreds of young men at the SEEK 2026 conference in the Diocese of Fort Worth, Texas, on Jan. 2, 2026. | Credit: Amira Abuzeid/CNA
Jan 6, 2026 / 07:00 am (CNA).
Hundreds of young men at the SEEK 2026 conference in the Fort Worth, Texas, Diocese this weekend filled a cavernous room to learn about what it means to be a man formed by “Jesus Christ and his Church.”John Bishop, founder and executive director of Forge, an organization that supports the family with an emphasis on masculinity, told the young men that “you are much more than your animalistic desires. Live something higher for someone higher.”In his talk titled “God Made Men,” Bishop spoke about how when Adam, the first man, “opened his eyes, he had never seen a woman before. She was completely naked.”“It was a great day for Adam,” Bishop said to waves of laughter. “Adam was the Elon Musk of the garden.”Taking a more serious tone, Bishop asked: “How would Adam see Eve? In his theology of the body, Pope John Paul II said Eve’s body was a manifestation of her soul. Eve had a perfect body, but when Adam saw her naked body, he didn’t lust over her.”“He realized who she was and who he was: made to make a gift of himself to her,” he said.Bishop then turned to what happened next: “What did Adam do as the snake came into the garden?” he asked.“Nothing! The most common, toxic, nauseating sin that runs rampant throughout men in the world is that we don’t do a damn thing.”“When we see our brothers walking into sin, we twiddle our thumbs. When we see our daughters walking out wearing next to nothing, we say nothing. When we’re grandfathers seeing the culture going in a bad way, we watch football,” he said.‘The image of God lives in a man fully alive’“You’re called to act!” Bishop admonished the group. “You might be filled with doubt … but it might be time for you to take the first step.”“The image of God lives in a man fully alive … Study after study shows that when a good man acts and doesn’t hold anything back, when he follows Christ with all [he is], … when he gives himself over [to Christ], the effect of that one man’s life multiplies beyond anything that we can understand,” he said.Hundreds of young men listen to John Bishop’s talk on masculinity on Jan. 2, 2026, at the SEEK conference in Grapevine, Texas. | Credit: Amira Abuzeid/CNAPatricio Parra, a sophomore at Texas A&M University, told CNA that he enjoyed Bishop’s talk because he and his friends have noticed how “society says it’s toxic to be masculine.”Parra said a New York Times journalist asked him and his friends after the talk why his generation of men was so invested in the faith.“There’s a striving for men to want to be men again,” he told her. “As a society, we see male role models on YouTube, but they are deformed. Recently, there aren’t a lot of good masculine models to follow.”Parra said what stood out to him the most after Bishop’s talk was the idea that Adam saw Eve’s physical beauty as the same as her internal beauty and recognized her dignity.“We have to strive to be as masculine as that,” Parra said.He said he took to heart three pieces of advice Bishop gave the men in the audience.First: “There’s no glory without the cross, no sainthood without suffering; so suffer a little bit. Make your body go through hard things,” Parra recalled. “Everything we suffer now will bring fruit for others, including our children someday, who will want to emulate us.”Next, Parra said Bishop advised that young men invest in solid, masculine friendships where they encourage one another toward sainthood.Last, Bishop told his listeners to be like St. Joseph, who, after Adam, was “one of the most manly men in Scripture.”“Joseph never said a word. We just know what he did,” Parra said. “We should do the same: just be quiet and act.”Parra demonstrated a hand motion he and his other friends from Texas A&M invented to go with the words “Zip it and act!” He made a zipper motion across his mouth and then the letter “A” with his fingers.“Don’t just talk about asking a girl out; do it!” he said enthusiastically. “Don’t just think about seminary; go do it!”](https://unitedyam.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/01/as-men-youre-called-to-act-speaker-says-to-a-packed-room-of-young-men-at-seek-2026-catholic-john-bishop-founder-of-forge-speaks-to-hundreds-of-young-men-at-the-seek.jpg)
![Should Catholics use AI to re-create deceased loved ones? Experts weigh in #Catholic
A child holds a phone with the Replika app open and an image of an AI companion. Apps that promise to help recreate digital versions of deceased family members using AI pose a “spiritual danger” to Catholics and others who may use the technology in place of healthy grief, experts say. / Credit: Generated by an Artificial Intelligence (AI) system on Shutterstock
CNA Staff, Dec 27, 2025 / 07:00 am (CNA).
Apps that promise to help re-create digital versions of deceased family members using AI pose a “spiritual danger” to Catholics and others who may use the technology in place of healthy grief, experts say.The AI company 2wai ignited a controversy on social media in November after it revealed its eponymous app, which will allow users to fabricate digital versions of their loved ones using video and audio footage.App co-founder Calum Worthy said in a viral X post that the tech could permit “loved ones we’ve lost [to] be part of our future.” The accompanying video shows a family continuously interacting with the digital projection of a deceased mother and grandmother even years after she died.What if the loved ones we've lost could be part of our future? pic.twitter.com/oFBGekVo1R— Calum Worthy (@CalumWorthy) November 11, 2025 The reveal of the app brought praise from some tech commentators, though there was also considerable negative reaction. Many critics denounced it as “vile,” “demonic,” and “terrifying,” with others predicting that the app would be used to ghoulish ends such as using dead relatives to promote internet advertisements. Tech ‘could disrupt the grieving process’2wai did not respond to requests for comment on the controversy, though company CEO Mason Geyser told the Independent that the ad was deliberately meant to be “controversial” in order to “spark this kind of online debate.” Geyser himself said he views the app as a tool to be used with his children to help preserve the memories of earlier generations rather than as a means to having a relationship with an AI avatar. “I see it … as a way to just kind of pass on some of those really good memories that I had with my grandparents,” he said. Whether or not such an app is compatible with the Catholic understanding of death — and of more diffuse, esoteric topics like grief — is unclear. Father Michael Baggot, LC, an associate professor of bioethics at the Pontifical Athenaeum Regina Apostolorum, acknowledged that AI avatars “could potentially remind us of certain aspects of our loved ones and help us learn from their examples.”But such digital replicas “cannot capture the full richness of the embodied human being,” he said, and they risk “distorting the dead’s legacy” by fabricating conversations and interactions beyond the dead’s control. Catholic leaders have regularly remarked on both the heavy burden of grief and its redemptive power. Pope Francis in 2020 acknowledged that grief is ”a bitter path,” but it can “serve to open our eyes to life and the sacred and irreplaceable value of each person,” while helping one realize “how short time is.”In October, meanwhile, Pope Leo XIV told a grieving father that those mourning the death of a loved one must “remain connected to the Lord, going through the greatest pain with the help of his grace.” The Resurrection, he said, “knows no discouragement or pain that imprisons us in the extreme difficulty of not finding meaning in our existence.”Brett Robinson, the associate director of the McGrath Institute for Church Life at the University of Notre Dame, warned that there is “spiritual danger” in technology that outwardly appears to bring loved ones back from the dead. Technology is not a neutral product, he said, but one that “has a profound ability to shape our perception of reality, regardless of the content being displayed.”“In the case of re-presenting dead loved ones we meet one such case where prior conceptions about identity, vitality, and presence are being reshaped along technological lines,” he said. “If someone who no longer exists in human form, body and soul, can be ‘resurrected’ from an archive of the digital traces of their life, who or what are we actually engaging with?” he said. Robinson argued that present modes of technology have echoes of earlier centuries “when the cosmos was filled with presence — the presence of God, of angels, of demons, and of magic.” The problem at hand, he said, is that the “new magic” of modern technology “is divorced from the hierarchical, ordered cosmos of creation and the spiritual realm.”Donna MacLeod has worked in grief ministry for decades. She first became involved in Catholic grief counseling after the death of her youngest daughter in 1988. The funeral ministry evolved into Seasons of Hope, a grief support program for Catholics that “focuses on the spiritual side of grieving the death of a loved one.”MacLeod said the program is one of “hospitality and spirituality” that arises in an intensive community of individuals suffering from grief. “It builds parish communities,” she said. “People discover they’re not alone. That’s a big deal to grieving people — a lot of people feel very alone in their loss.” “And society expects everybody to move on,” she continued. “But grief has its own timetable. Those who are grieving start to understand that the Lord is with them and that he really cares about them. There’s hope and healing at the end of it.” “It’s doing what Christ asks us to do — walking with each other in hard times,” she said. Regarding the AI avatar technology, MacLeod acknowledged that those who have lost a loved one make it a “very high priority” to “seek connection” with the deceased. “People will say, ‘I’m not taking my loved one’s voice off of my answering machine,’” she said. “Or we have people taking out videos of family gatherings so they can see their loved ones again.”“Everyone seeks to still be connected with their loved ones,” she said. “It’s related to our Catholic faith and the communion of saints — people feel this spiritual connection with their loved ones.”MacLeod described herself as “on the fence” about how people could be affected by AI avatar apps. There could be “emotional and psychological risks interacting with AI versions of loved ones,” she admitted, though she said that many users “might look at it, but not get hung up on it,” unless they have underlying mental health issues. But “where the difficulty arises is that some people get stuck in the denial stage,” she said. Those suffering from grief can get desperate in such circumstances, she said, and sometimes resort to means such as mediums or psychics, which MacLeod pointed out the Church explicitly forbids. Whether or not AI avatars fall under that forbidden category is unclear. The Catechism of the Catholic Church expressly outlaws any efforts at “conjuring up the dead.” The use of mediums or clairvoyants “all conceal[s] a desire for power over time, history, and, in the last analysis, other human beings,” the Church says. Baggot said apps like 2wai’s “assemble data about the deceased without preserving the person.” He further argued that AI avatars “could also disrupt the grieving process by sending ambiguous signals about the survival of the departed person.”Robinson, meanwhile, acknowledged that it is “good to want to connect to deceased loved ones,” which he pointed out we do “liturgically through prayer and memorials that honor those souls that are dear to us.” He warned, however, against “technocratic creators of complex computational machines that are becoming indistinguishable from magic.”Such technology, he said, alters “the spiritual order” in ways “that are disordered and disembodied from the ritual forms that sustain religion and our belief that our eternal destiny rests with God in heaven and not in a database.”](https://unitedyam.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/12/should-catholics-use-ai-to-re-create-deceased-loved-ones-experts-weigh-in-catholic-a-child-holds-a-phone-with-the-replika-app-open-and-an-image-of-an-ai-companion-apps-that-promise-to-help-recr.webp)
![Vice President Vance presents a Christian vision of politics #Catholic
U.S. Vice President JD Vance. / Credit: Gage Skidmore, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
CNA Staff, Dec 23, 2025 / 14:27 pm (CNA).
U.S. Vice President JD Vance, America’s second Catholic vice president, laid out a distinctly Christian vision for American politics in a speech this week, declaring that “the only thing that has truly served as an anchor of the United States of America is that we have been and, by the grace of God, we always will be a Christian nation.”Speaking to more than 30,000 young conservatives at Turning Point USA’s AmFest 2025 some three months after the death of its founder Charlie Kirk, Vance called for a politics rooted in a Christian faith that honors the family, protects the weak, and rejects what he described as a decades-long “war” on Christianity in public life.The Christian faith has provided a “shared moral language” since the nation’s founding, the Yale-trained lawyer argued, which led to “our understanding of natural law and rights, our sense of duty to one’s neighbor, the conviction that the strong must protect the weak, and the belief in individual conscience.”“Christianity is America’s creed,” the vice president said to loud cheers, while acknowledging that not everyone needs to be a Christian and “we must respect each individual’s pathway” to God. Even so, he said, “even our famously American idea of religious liberty is a Christian concept.” Vance described how, over the past several decades, “freedom of religion transformed into freedom from religion” as a result of the cultural assault on Christian faith from those on “the left” who have “labored to push Christianity out of national life. They’ve kicked it out of the schools, out of the workplace, out of the fundamental parts of the public square.”He continued: “And in a public square devoid of God, we got a vacuum. And the ideas that filled that void preyed on the very worst of human nature rather than uplifting it.”Vance said cultural voices opposed to Christian faith “told us not that we were children of God, but children of this or that identity group. They replaced God’s beautiful design for the family that men and women could rely on … with the idea that men could turn into women so long as they bought the right bunch of pills from Big Pharma.” The former U.S. senator and Catholic convert credited President Donald Trump for ending the cultural “war that has been waged on Christians and Christianity in the United States of America,” touting the administration’s policy priorities as the fruit of Christian motivation.“We help older Americans in retirement, including by ending taxes on Social Security, because we believe in honoring your father and mother rather than shipping all of their money off to Ukraine,” he said. “We believe in taking care of the poor, which is why we have Medicaid, so that the least among us can afford their prescriptions or to take their kids to see a doctor.”Speaking of the despair he felt after the assassination of his friend Kirk, he said: “What saved me was realizing that the story of the Christian faith … is one of immense loss followed by even bigger victory. It’s a story of very dark nights followed by very bright dawns. What saved me was remembering the inherent goodness of God and that his grace overflows when we least expect it.”Of masculinity, Vance said: “The fruits of true Christianity are good husbands, patient fathers, builders of great things, and slayers of dragons. And yes, men who are willing to die for a principle if that’s what God asked them to do.”He described how he saw the fruits of Christian men living out their faith during a recent visit to a men’s ministry that aids those who struggle with addiction and homelessness: “They feed them. They clothe them. They give them shelter and financial advice. They live out the very best part of Christ’s commission.”After eating lunch with some of the men who were “all back on their feet” after receiving help, Vance said he saw that the answer to “What saved them?” was not “racial commonality or grievance … a DEI prep course” or “a welfare check.”“It was the fact that a carpenter died 2,000 years ago and changed the world in the process.” “A true Christian politics,” he said, “cannot just be about the protection of the unborn or the promotion of the family. As important as those things absolutely are, it must be at the heart of our full understanding of government.” On immigration policy, Vance has challenged U.S. bishops, popesThe vice president has publicly disagreed with the U.S. bishops on their reaction to the Trump administration’s immigration policies, as well as with Pope Leo XIV and the late Pope Francis, who seemed to criticize Vance in a letter the pontiff penned to the U.S. bishops last winter. In defense of the administration’s approach to immigration, Vance had in a late January interview invoked an “old school … Christian concept” he later identified as the “ordo amoris,” or “rightly ordered love.” He said that according to the concept, one’s “compassion belongs first” to one’s family and fellow citizens, “and then after that” to the rest of the world.After Pope Leo on Nov. 18 asked Americans to listen to U.S. bishops’ message opposing “the indiscriminate mass deportation of people” and urging the humane treatment of migrants, Vance countered: “Border security is not just good for American citizens. It is the humanitarian thing to do for the entire world.”Vance continued: “Open borders” do not promote “[human] dignity, even of the illegal migrants themselves,” citing drug and sex trafficking.“When you empower the cartels and when you empower the human traffickers, whether in the United States or anywhere else, you’re empowering the very worst people in the world,” Vance said.In this week’s AmFest speech, he touted the administration’s successes regarding immigration: “December marks seven months straight of zero releases at the southern border. More than 2.5 million illegal immigrants have left the United States. The first time in over 50 years that we have had negative net migration.”At the end of the speech, Vance told the thousands of young people that while “only God can promise you salvation in heaven” if they have faith in God, “I promise you closed borders and safe communities. I promise you good jobs and a dignified life … together, we can fulfill the promise of the greatest nation in the history of the earth.”](https://unitedyam.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/12/vice-president-vance-presents-a-christian-vision-of-politics-catholic-u-s-vice-president-jd-vance-credit-gage-skidmore-cc-by-sa-4-0-via-wikimedia-commonscna-staff-dec-23-2025-1427-p.webp)
![‘Our Lady of Guadalupe is the mother of all’: DC pilgrimage highlights value of migrants #Catholic
Bishop Evelio Menjivar speaks with “EWTN News in Depth” on Friday, March 14, 2025. / Credit: “EWTN News in Depth”
Washington, D.C. Newsroom, Dec 15, 2025 / 16:36 pm (CNA).
The Virgin Mary’s role as comforter to all was specially highlighted during a pilgrimage through the streets of Washington, D.C., Saturday morning. “Our Lady of Guadalupe is the mother of all. She envelops each one of us with the same tenderness and the same love, no matter our country of origin or language,” Auxiliary Bishop Evelio Menjívar said during his homily at the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception. The words from the bishop, who was born in El Salvador, came after the Archdiocese of Washington’s annual “Walk with Mary” procession that began at the Shrine of the Sacred Heart, a Hispanic Catholic parish. Participants also prayed a rosary upon arriving at the basilica, which holds 2,500 people and was filled to capacity, according to the archdiocese. The archdiocese billed this year’s celebration of the pilgrimage honoring Our Lady of Guadalupe on her feast day as “highlight[ing] a call to accompany and pray for migrants and refugees, reflecting the Church’s mission of compassion, solidarity, hope, and peace.” “For more than a decade, thousands of pilgrims from diverse cultures and backgrounds have walked side by side, lifting their voices in prayer and songs of praise,” the archdiocese said. “Along the way, participants celebrate the archdiocese’s rich cultural diversity and unity in Jesus Christ, while reflecting on the appearance of the young mestiza Virgin of Guadalupe to the peasant St. Juan Diego on a hilltop near Mexico City in 1531.”The Mass, which included a reenactment of the story of Mary’s apparition to St. Juan Diego, was celebrated by Cardinal Robert McElroy of Washington; Cardinal Christophe Pierre, apostolic nuncio to the United States; and Auxiliary Bishops Menjívar, Juan Esposito, and Roy Campbell.Menjívar interspersed his homily, which was mostly in Spanish, with reflections in English on the Virgin Mary and the Church’s role in accompanying poor and marginalized communities, particularly migrants.“Let me say this in English because I believe it is very important for us to understand Mary reflects what the Church is called to be,” Menjívar said. “In the apostolic exhortation Dilexi Te [“I Have Loved You”] Pope Leo affirms the Church, like a mother, accompanies those who are walking. Where the world sees threats, she sees children. Where walls are built, she builds bridges.”The Virgin Mary, he said, regards “every rejected migrant” as “Christ himself, who knocks at the door of the community.” Reflecting on the significance of Our Lady of Guadalupe, Menjívar noted that Mary “did not manifest herself to a powerful or well-educated person.” “She appeared to Juan Diego, a simple, poor, Indigenous man, marginalized by the systems of his time,” the bishop said. “With this, God proclaims another truth. He takes the side of the little ones, the despised, the ones who do not count.” “So the good news,” he concluded, “is this: For God, we do count, and a lot, because we are his sons and daughters.”](https://unitedyam.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/12/our-lady-of-guadalupe-is-the-mother-of-all-dc-pilgrimage-highlights-value-of-migrants-catholic-bishop-evelio-menjivar-speaks-with-ewtn-news-in-depth-on-f.webp)
![Ancient Advent Mass gains new interest among younger Catholics #Catholic
The Rorate Caeli Advent Mass celebrated at The National Shrine of Our Lady of Champion. / Credit: The National Shrine of Our Lady of Champion
CNA Staff, Dec 14, 2025 / 06:00 am (CNA).
Advent is a season filled with rich Catholic traditions, but a slightly lesser-known one is growing in popularity among younger Catholics. The ancient liturgy of the Rorate Caeli Advent Mass honors the Blessed Virgin Mary through a Mass celebrated at dawn, in complete darkness, and lit only by candles, which symbolizes Christ, the Light of the World, entering into the world with Mary as the vessel. Emerging in the Middle Ages, the Rorate Caeli Mass gets its name from the prophecy of Isaiah. Rorate Caeli is Latin for “drop down, ye heavens.” These are the opening words of this liturgy’s Introit, which is used as an opening psalm or entrance antiphon and comes from Isaiah 45:8.Father Tony Stephens, rector at the National Shrine of Our Lady of Champion in Champion, Wisconsin, calls this Mass “a teachable moment.”“As all of us are gathered in the church, only lit with the candles, slowly the light begins coming in through the windows and it’s like the light of Christ,” he told CNA. The process symbolizes “the light of Christ coming into our lives, slowly but surely and progressively as we go through life.”“And just like that light begins to come in through the windows, as the physical sun rises, so in our journey as Catholics, the closer we get to Christ, the more his light shines in our life,” he said. Fr. Nathaneal Mudd, CPM, celebrates the Rorate Caeli Advent Mass at the National Shrine of Our Lady of Champion in 2024. Credit: The National Shrine of Our Lady of ChampionStephens has been rector of the National Shrine of Our Lady of Champion for two years but was scheduled to celebrate the Rorate Caeli Mass there for the first time on Dec. 13. The shrine is the first and only approved Marian apparition site in the United States. It was here that the Blessed Mother is believed to have appeared to Adele Brise in 1859. When speaking about the Blessed Mother’s role in Advent, Stephens described it as “a season of anticipating Our Lord, but when you look at the subtext of Advent, things about Mary are everywhere — in the readings and her role in salvation history is so important. And so that’s, again, part of the reason you have these special Marian Masses honoring her during this Advent season.”He also highlighted the fact that this ancient Mass is seeing a resurgence in popularity and credited Pope Benedict XVI, in part, for reintroducing Catholics to older, traditional practices and his “desire of the hermeneutic of continuity.” “He in his pontificate really emphasized a desire to have that continuity between the earlier traditions of the Church, even prior to the [Vatican II] council … looking at all of the rich liturgical heritage that we have as Catholics,” he added. The priest pointed out that young people are also searching for more traditional practices.“There is a great love, especially amongst young people, for things that are traditional,” he said, adding that the Mass also “appeals to the senses in a way that technology and phones don’t.” “The real light of a candle is way different than the electronic light put off by a cellphone screen,” he said. “A burning, living candle, the way it flickers, and you can’t recharge a candle — it gives everything it has like Jesus did on the cross. A candle burns with all its might to put off that light. And so there is a selflessness about that light of that candle that’s different than technology, and young people desire that kind of self-gift and authenticity.”Stephens said he hopes those who attend a Rorate Caeli Mass will leave with “an eager anticipation of Jesus coming at Christmastime.”“A Rorate Caeli Mass is one of those times that we can have a little consolation and we’re reminded of the author of all consolation and his mother,” he said.](https://unitedyam.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/12/ancient-advent-mass-gains-new-interest-among-younger-catholics-catholic-the-rorate-caeli-advent-mass-celebrated-at-the-national-shrine-of-our-lady-of-champion-credit-the-national-shrine-of-ou.webp)
![What is ‘papal infallibility?’ CNA explains an often-misunderstood Church teaching #Catholic
When Pope Pius IX declared the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception of the Virgin Mary on Dec. 8, 1854, he had a golden crown added to the mosaic of Mary, Virgin Immaculate, in the Chapel of the Choir in St. Peter’s Basilica. / Credit: Daniel Ibañez/CNA
CNA Staff, Dec 8, 2025 / 06:00 am (CNA).
On Dec. 8 the Catholic Church celebrates the solemnity of the Immaculate Conception — a paramount feast in the Church’s liturgical calendar and one that indirectly touches on a regularly misunderstood but important piece of Church dogma.The solemnity is the patronal feast of the United States and marks the recognition of the Blessed Mother’s freedom from original sin, which the Church teaches she was granted from the moment of conception.The Catechism of the Catholic Church states that Mary was “redeemed from the moment of her conception” (No. 491) in order “to be able to give the free assent of her faith to the announcement of her vocation” (No. 490). The dogma was disputed and challenged by Protestants over the centuries, leading Pope Pius IX to affirm it in his 1854 encyclical Ineffabilis Deus, stating unequivocally that Mary “was endowed with the grace of the Holy Spirit and preserved from original sin” upon her conception. Ineffabilis Deus is among the papal pronouncements that theologians have long considered to be “infallible.” But what does papal infallibility mean in the context and history of the Church?Defined by First Vatican Council in 1870Though Church historians argue that numerous papal statements down through the centuries can potentially be regarded as infallible under this teaching, the concept itself was not fully defined by the Church until the mid-19th century.In its first dogmatic constitution on the Church of Christ, Pastor Aeternus, the First Vatican Council held that the pope, when speaking “in the exercise of his office as shepherd and teacher of all Christians, in virtue of his supreme apostolic authority,” and while defining “a doctrine concerning faith or morals to be held by the whole Church,” possesses the infallibility that Jesus “willed his Church to enjoy in defining doctrine concerning faith or morals.”Father Patrick Flanagan, an associate professor of theology at St. John’s University, told CNA that the doctrine of papal infallibility “does not concern the pope’s character.”“The pope is human,” Flanagan said. “In other words, he is fallible. He can sin and err in what he says about everyday matters.”Yet in “rare historical, narrowly defined moments” when the pope “exercises his authority as the supreme teacher of the Church of the Petrine office” and speaks “ex cathedra,” he is guided by the Holy Spirit to speak “indisputable truth” about faith and morals, Flanagan said. Flanagan underscored the four specific criteria that a papal statement must make to be considered infallible. For one, the pope must speak “in his official capacity as supreme pontiff,” not off-the-cuff or informally. The doctrine, meanwhile, must concern a matter of faith or morals. “No pope would speak ex cathedra on scientific, economic, or other nonreligious subjects,” Flanagan said. The statement must also be “explicitly straightforward and definitive,” he said, and it “must be intended to bind the whole Church as a matter of divine and Roman Catholic faith.” John P. Joy, a professor of theology and the dean of faculty at St. Ambrose Academy in Madison, Wisconsin, told CNA that the doctrine can be identified in part by the reading of Matthew 16:19.In that passage, Christ tells Peter, the first pope: “I will give you the keys to the kingdom of heaven. Whatever you bind on earth shall be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven.”“Part of what Jesus is promising here is that he will endorse and ratify in heaven all of the judgments that Peter makes on earth,” Joy said. “So when Peter (or one of his successors) turns the key, so to speak, that is, when he explicitly declares that all Catholics are bound to believe something on earth, then we have the words of Jesus assuring us that God himself will hold us bound to believe the same thing in heaven,” he said. Though the concept of papal infallibility is well known and has become something of a pop culture reference, the number of times a pope has declared something infallibly appears to be relatively small. Theologians and historians do not always agree on what papal statements through the centuries can be deemed infallible. Joy pointed to the Immaculate Conception, as well as Pope Pius XII’s declaration on the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin in 1950, as two of the most well known.He pointed to numerous other statements, such as Pope Benedict XII’s Benedictus Deus from 1336 and Pope Leo X’s Exsurge Domine in 1520, as infallible statements. Flanagan pointed out that there is “no official list” of papally infallible statements. Such declarations are “rare,” he said. “A pope invokes his extraordinary magisterial powers sparingly.” When Catholics trust a papally infallible statement, Joy stressed, they “are not putting [their] faith in the pope as if he were an oracle of truth or a source of divine revelation.” “We are rather putting our faith in God, whom we firmly believe will intervene in order to stop any pope who might be tempted to proclaim a false doctrine in a definitive way,” he said.](https://unitedyam.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/12/what-is-papal-infallibility-cna-explains-an-often-misunderstood-church-teaching-catholic-when-pope-pius-ix-declared-the-doctrine-of-the-immaculate-conception-of-the-virgin-mary.webp)
