By Kimberley Heatherington
The offering placed before the altar on Sept. 11, 2001, was unlike any ever seen at St. Peter’s Catholic Church in Manhattan’s Financial District: the lifeless body of 68-year-old Franciscan friar and New York City Fire Department Chaplain Father Mychal Judge.

He was killed when the 110 stories of the World Trade Center’s south tower collapsed at 9:59 a.m., blasting debris into the adjacent north tower lobby where Father Judge was stationed. At the moment, he reportedly was repeatedly praying, “Jesus, please end this right now! God, please end this!” He was shortly afterward carried from the apocalyptic site.

Some four blocks away, St. Peter’s own roof had been struck by landing gear from one of two hijacked jets smashed into both towers that morning. Father Judge’s journey there was captured in an instantly iconic photo seen worldwide – dust-covered, slumped in a chair and already shockingly pale as he was carried by five men.

Since he lost his life, Father Judge – a friar for 47 years; a priest for 40 – has been hailed as a hero, suggested for sainthood, and praised as a selfless friend not only to first responders, but also to the poor, sick and forgotten of the Big Apple’s sometimes tough streets.

Ahead of the 25th anniversary of the deadliest terrorist attack in recorded history, friends of Father Judge shared memories of his life and loss, and reflected on his legacy.

“People would often say about him, when you talk to him it was like you were the only person before him,” said Father Kevin Mullen, a Franciscan friar of the Province of Our Lady of Guadalupe and former president of Siena University in Loudonville, New York, where he currently teaches.

“He engaged you fully; he was not looking around for who he could talk to next. He was fully present to you,” Father Mullen told OSV News. “And that’s what made a difference to a lot of people about Mychal Judge – they could talk to him, bare their souls, share their good news, share their bad news. And he was going to be there for them.”

– ‘He was there. He was present’ –
On the morning of 9/11, Father Mullen, stationed in a parish approximately 15 miles from midtown Manhattan, was responsible for a funeral liturgy.

“I was aware before I started the funeral that the first tower had collapsed,” he recalled. “And when I finished the funeral, I was told the second tower had collapsed. So I knew things were getting worse.”

That afternoon, he heard a radio announcement reporting an injured fire chaplain at the World Trade Center.

“And my gut said, ‘That’s Mychal Judge,’” Father Mullen said. “He was right across the street from a fire station that responded immediately.” The church where Father Judge ministered and the friary where he lived, St. Francis of Assisi on West 31st Street, neighbored New York City Fire Department Engine 1/Ladder 24.

“And I had no doubt he was down there,” Father Mullen said, referring to the disaster area.

To confirm his suspicion, he called the regional head of his order.

“As soon as he answered the phone – he didn’t even say, ‘Hello, Kevin’ – he just said, ‘It was Mychal.’ And I said, ‘I thought so.’ That’s how I learned.”

Father Mullen said the already crushingly tragic day immediately became painfully personal. But nonetheless, he still found himself certain of one thing.

“I felt that if Mychal was given his choice of how he would go out of this world, that would have been his choice: to be with the firefighters, literally going with his boots on. He was there. He was present.”

– ‘He resided deeper in you than you understood’ –
The first introduction Michael Daly – journalist and author of “The Book of Mychal: The Surprising Life and Heroic Death of Father Mychal Judge” from St. Martin’s Griffin – had to the priest was the sound of his and others’ laughter.

And it was coming from, of all places, a hospital burn unit.

Accompanying Patrick “Paddy” Brown – an FDNY captain who later died on 9/11 – Daly was there in 1994 to visit FDNY Captain John Drennan, who had been critically burned battling an apartment fire.

“So I go in,” Daly recalled, “and there’s all these guys laughing because of something this priest said – and I’m thinking, ‘Who is this guy?’”
On 9/11, Daly, a Catholic, was at the scene of the attack for the New York Daily News when the north tower collapsed. He remembers running for his life as a massive cloud of debris – chokingly dense with pulverized concrete, glass, metal and the contents of countless offices – rolled like a tsunami through the surrounding streets.

He admits he was afterward “hazy about timing and hours and all that.”

But he does know the air had finally cleared when FDNY Deputy Fire Chief Peter Hayden told him Father Judge was dead.
“And my knees just went,” recalled Daly, overwhelmed with shock. “I didn’t expect that; I didn’t know Mychal had been down there. Someone had called over the radio for the fire chaplain earlier. But I didn’t hear any response. And then – he’s gone, you know?”

“I think he just …” Daly paused, searching for the right description. “He resided deeper in you than you understood.”

– ‘A genius priest’ –
Daly described Father Judge walking the streets of New York City in his brown Franciscan habit, greeting homeless people by their first names, praying with them and distributing neatly folded cash.

Daly also recalled Father Judge often worked 16-hour days ministering at blazes and rescues – counseling firemen, their families and victims – and that he gently tended AIDS patients in an era when medical staff would not make physical contact.

After Father Judge’s death, close friends and associates revealed he was gay – but by all accounts, maintained his vow of celibacy. The response of Kevin Shea, a firefighter at FDNY Engine 40/Ladder 35 in Manhattan’s Lincoln Square, apparently typified the reaction of other first responders. “He said,” Daly recalled, “Well, if you tell me Michael Judge was gay, I’ll tell you I just had my first gay friend.”

While not “out” in the fire department, Daly said Father Judge told Fire Commissioner Thomas Von Essen, who was struggling with his son’s gay identity.

“You know, he was a genius priest,” said Daly. “He just was.”

– ‘I sat with his body for about an hour’ –
Father Christopher Keenan, a friar of the Province of Our Lady of Guadalupe, entered the Franciscans more than 60 years ago at Father Judge’s urging and became a FDNY chaplain after his friend’s death. On 9/11, he was helping in the emergency room at St. Vincent’s Hospital.

About 2 miles from ground zero, St. Vincent’s staff were caring for the dust-caked and dazed people who had outrun the collapse of the towers.

“I was connecting with their families to come pick them up. And about 2 o’clock in the afternoon, it kind of stopped. I left at 5:30 to walk home from 12th to 31st Street,” Father Keenan recalled. “I had a shift of confessions at 6:00. I came out of the hospital, and there’s doctors and nurses and staff with stretchers – still waiting for all the people that never came.”

Father Keenan had been looking for Father Judge.

“So when I arrived at the firehouse across the street from St. Francis of Assisi Church, I asked the guys, had they heard from Mychal? And they said, ‘He died – and his body is in the back of the firehouse here.’ They had set up sheets and cordoned off a section, where his body was in a black bag. And so I sat with his body for about an hour.”

Father Judge had been moved to Engine 1/Ladder 24 after temporarily lying in front of St. Peter’s altar.

“Then the friars came from across the street. And the firefighters gathered that were there … and we friars sang the Blessing of St. Francis … and then an ambulance took him to the morgue.”

Father Keenan noted that six from the firehouse had also died.

– Victim 0001 –
Father Judge was later numbered victim DM (Disaster Manhattan) 0001-01 of 2,753 souls eventually tallied in New York City after the World Trade Towers crumpled into an infernal landscape of fiery and smoking rubble. Father Keenan himself would spend seven months assisting in that rubble with recovery efforts, afterward contracting several forms of cancer.

In Washington that day, 184 were killed when hijacked American Airlines Flight 77 crashed into the Pentagon. Another 40 aboard United Airlines Flight 93 died when a fourth hijacked plane crashed into a Pennsylvania field.

“The 25th anniversary is going to be a very solemn time,” Father Mullen said. “And I hope we have that consciousness still alive in our country – that this is very, very painful, especially for the families,” he shared.

“Because a lot of people have just taken this event for granted: ‘Well, that’s history – it happened, it’s over,’ he said. “But it’s never over for those families. Never, ever, over.”

(Kimberley Heatherington is an OSV News correspondent. She writes from Virginia.)

By Rob Herbst, The Catholic Week
MOBILE – When Sister Damiana Pickett professed her first religious vows Sept. 8 in Kraków, Poland, it marked another step in a journey of faith that has included conversion, disappointment, perseverance and a call to serve those in need.

The 38-year-old Greenville, Mississippi, native, who once rejected Christianity and did not enter the Catholic Church until age 27, will profess vows of poverty, chastity and obedience with the Congregation of Albertine Sisters Serving the Poor.

For Sister Damiana, formerly Zola Pickett, the path to religious life has hardly been a straight one.

She was raised in a Protestant family and remembers enjoying church as a young girl, particularly singing hymns and learning Bible stories in Sunday school. But by about age 11, she began wrestling with questions about her faith and said she could not find the answers she was seeking.

She eventually rejected Christianity during her teenage and young adult years, a period she said was increasingly affected by alcohol and drug abuse.
That changed Oct. 15, 2015.

Sister Damiana described that night as her “road to Damascus” moment.
“God gave a small whisper of grace into my heart that blinded my understanding with this intense light: He has loved me tremendously from the beginning of time, through every difficulty of my life, and He is always patiently waiting for His children to return to Him,” she said in an email interview.

While she keeps the words she experienced that night between herself and God, Sister Damiana said she came away with one unmistakable realization.
“God wanted me to belong completely to Him,” she said. “I had no idea what that looked like or how to achieve this, but I blindly resolved to try.”

She began attending RCIA (now OCIA) at St. James the Greater Parish in Tupelo, where she credits Father Lincoln Dall with patiently helping her find answers to questions about God, Christian life and prayer.
At the Easter Vigil in 2016, she was confirmed and received her first Holy Communion.

“It was the best moment of my life,” she said. “I truly can’t imagine how my life would be if I had not entered the Church.”

Her journey eventually brought her to the Archdiocese of Mobile.

Sister Damiana moved to Mobile in January 2019 to seriously discern religious life with a community in the archdiocese. She eventually found a parish home at St. Thomas the Apostle Parish in Chickasaw.

But in 2021, she said she was discouraged from applying to enter the community she had been discerning with after it was determined she was unlikely to do well in its formation program.

The setback left her questioning what she believed God had placed in her heart.|

She credits St. Thomas pastor Father William Saucier with helping her through the disappointment.

“Father William Saucier was incredibly supportive during this time, listening to my pain but always encouraging me to start again,” she said. “Without his support, I don’t think I would have had the courage to go ‘back to square one’ and start contacting other religious communities.”

She did just that.

In January 2022, Sister Damiana entered formation with a contemplative community in Minnesota and said she was happy there. But an encounter with a homeless woman led her to question whether God was calling her elsewhere.

With her superior’s blessing, she began looking for communities whose apostolates involved direct service to those experiencing homelessness.

Her search led her to the Albertine Sisters.

Founded in Kraków in 1891 by St. Brother Albert Chmielowski and Blessed Sister Bernardyna Jabłońska, the Congregation of Albertine Sisters Serving the Poor is an international congregation of pontifical right and part of the Third Order Franciscan tradition.

Its charism, Sister Damiana explained, is to see the suffering Christ in each person and “to pour out our lives doing good for all.”
The sisters serve in shelters and soup kitchens for the homeless and poor, assisted living homes for people with physical or intellectual disabilities and homes for retired priests. They also perform mission work in Bolivia, Argentina and Ukraine. The congregation has three houses in the United States, including its American motherhouse in Hammond, Indiana, near Chicago.
Sister Damiana said reading about the congregation and its founder immediately struck a chord.

“I immediately felt like Saint Brother Albert understood my desires very deeply,” she said.

She contacted the congregation’s American motherhouse and was welcomed for a visit. During the Easter octave in 2023, she left the contemplative community to continue following where she believed God was leading her.

That journey ultimately took her to Kraków and two years in the novitiate.

Her religious name also reflects her desire to serve those who may be overlooked.

In 2020, Sister Damiana worked as a certified nursing assistant in a nursing home and was among the few CNAs who volunteered to work with COVID-positive residents when needed.

During that time, St. Damien of Molokai, who ministered to people with leprosy in Hawaii, became a personal patron.
After joining the Albertines, she said she began reflecting on how the “leprosy” of sin can isolate people from God, others and even themselves.

“When I entered the novitiate and was able to choose my religious name, I knew it had to be Damiana,” she said.

During her first profession, Sister Damiana made vows of poverty, chastity and obedience that will be binding for one year. She described poverty as sharing everything she is and has while keeping nothing for herself; chastity as loving God with an undivided heart and seeking Him and His kingdom; and obedience as seeking God’s will while setting aside her own preferences.

“In a certain sense, my religious life is only beginning on the day of my first vows,” she said. “My past two years of novitiate have been a time of preparation to live by these promises.”

Sister Damiana will remain in Kraków following her first profession. When she renews her vows next year, she could receive a new assignment.

For those discerning their own vocation, Sister Damiana recommends daily Mass, Eucharistic adoration, the Rosary and making time for silence with God – even if only for five minutes.

But she has a particular message for those whose vocational journey has included the kind of disappointment she experienced.
“Don’t give up on God’s plan for you,” Sister Damiana said. “Our God turns bottomless oceans into dry land for us to walk across. Don’t listen to your fears; trust in God and let Him show you the path which He has set out for you.”

As her own path leads to the altar in Kraków, Sister Damiana is also asking for prayers.

“Please pray for me, my superiors, and all my sisters, that we may be beacons of hope and instruments of the Holy Spirit for the people we encounter in our lives and ministries.”

By Nicole Olea / Catholic Standard , OSV News

HOLLYWOOD, Md. (OSV News) – Teenagers and young adults serving at St. John’s Summer Program at St. John Francis Regis Parish in Hollywood told the Catholic Standard, Washington’s archdiocesan news outlet, what draws young people to the Church and gives them a reason to stay.

They talked about friends who invited them, Catholics they admired, communities where they felt at home and moments that helped the faith become their own.

For many, those experiences helped them come to know Christ personally.

Start with an invitation

Several of the young people at St. John’s, a Catholic day camp for ages 4 to 14, said they found their way into Catholic community because someone invited them or encouraged them to come.

Betsy Pieniadz, 19, came from New Mexico after hearing about the program through people connected to St. John’s. Ethan Lansing, 18, learned about it from a friend at Ave Maria University in Florida.

Carmen Davidson, 21, arrived from Baylor University in Texas after a friend urged her to apply, while Caroline Grifone, 21, came from Pennsylvania through people already connected to the program.

Authentic relationships matter

Grifone said young people need to meet Catholics whose faith is part of their everyday lives.

“I met people who were involved in their faith but were also athletic, fun and outgoing,” she said. “That drew me in.”

Pieniadz said negative experiences with Catholics had caused her to drift away from the Church.

“Then I came here and met people who really lived their faith,” she said.

Addie Lyons, 19, said relationships can make young people more open to the faith. Rather than beginning with a theology talk, she said, counselors build friendships, have fun with the children and let questions about faith come naturally.

Build a place where they belong

Rachel Mroz, 22, became more involved in her faith through the Catholic Student Center at the University of Maryland and returned to St. John’s looking for that same kind of community during the summer.

She said young Catholics need people around them who encourage them in the faith, “other people who want to run to heaven with us.”

Rollins Don-Simmons, 19, said the community at St. John’s gave him confidence to seek out Catholic life at the University of Maryland.

For Summer Phan, 16, and Maria Northrup, 17, older staff members offered an example to follow. Both saw teenagers and college students return year after year, showing them what staying active in the faith could look like as they grew older.

Teach the faith so they can understand it

Don-Simmons said parishes hoping to reach young people should think carefully about how they communicate the faith.

“I think we can best engage young people in the faith by explaining the faith in a way that they can understand,” he told the Catholic Standard.

Carlton Costanzo, 17, made a similar point.

“Stay rooted in our tradition while also presenting it in a way that’s accessible to younger generations,” he said.

Christopher Damron, 19, said young people respond when the faith is explained clearly and in a way they can understand.

Keep Christ at the center

Many pointed to the Eucharist as central to Catholic life.

Lansing said helping young people understand what happens at Mass can change the way they see the Church.

“If more people really understood what is happening at Mass and believed it with their whole hearts, I think it would completely change the way they look at the Catholic faith,” he said.

Hannah Lawrence, 29, said friendships first brought her to St. John’s, but daily Mass and Eucharistic adoration helped transform her faith.

Help them ask what God wants for their lives

Several also spoke about faith in terms of vocation and discernment.

Pieniadz said she initially did not want to come to St. John’s, but eventually believed God was asking her to go.

“God called me to,” she said. “God told me to.” she said.

Lansing had spent months asking St. Joseph the Worker to help him find a summer job before his friend told him about St. John’s.

“This was the opportunity that opened up,” he said. “I took it as God showing me where he wanted me to be.” he said.

Costanzo is considering college, military service, the trades and priesthood as he discerns his future.

“I think every Catholic man should be open to the possibility of seminary until he’s called to marriage,” he said.

For the young people at St. John’s, faith has grown through friendships, invitations and the example of people who took their relationship with Christ seriously.

And many of them are now doing the same for someone else.

(Nicole Olea is a reporter at Catholic Standard, the news outlet of the Archdiocese of Washington. This story was originally published by the Catholic Standard and distributed through a partnership with OSV News.)

By Simone Orendain , OSV News

(OSV News) – Joseph Connor had his back turned to the large window of his 36th floor office when he “suddenly more felt than heard” the massive impact of a commercial jet slamming into the north tower of the World Trade Center a third of a mile away on Sept. 11, 2001.

As Connor watched pages and pages of office paper slowly rain down from the burning skyscraper against the clear sunny sky, the realization hit that his cousin Steven Schlag, a bond trader at the brokerage firm Cantor Fitzgerald, worked high up in one of the towers.

The banker suspected the number of lives lost was quickly rising as he frantically tried to call his cousin, a very close relative. Then, the middle of the second tower burst into a fiery ball, struck by a second jet. For Connor, this confirmed a terrorist attack.

“How could this happen again?” he remembers asking himself. “(Steven) had a wife – a foreign-born wife, like my mom was – and three kids. My mom had two. But why, God? What? How did you let this happen?”

He knew well the anguish of a young widow left with young children. It was the story of his mother on the day she lost her husband to a terrorist bombing 26 years earlier, at a historic tavern near his Wall Street office.

Connor, 60, recently described to OSV News the devastation that unfolded before his eyes in New York on Sept. 11, 2001, as the United States prepares to mark the 25th anniversary of the terrorist attacks. The al-Qaida-led attacks in New York and Washington, with a thwarted attempt failing in Pennsylvania, left close to 3,000 people dead.

Connor said he questioned God after seeing “specks jumping” from the blazing towers to their deaths on 9/11.

“How are people left to make a choice: whether to burn or drop 1,000 feet?” Connor asked. “So, that’s something I had struggled with. But I think over time, my faith has gotten much stronger, and certainly in the last decade or so, I think it has even gotten more so.”

Connor, a regular Massgoer, credits his stronger faith after the losses in part to his son, an Augustinian friar studying for the priesthood. He said his son’s faith has helped him to “become more introspective … and understand what it means to be Catholic … to really embrace God and embrace Jesus.”

Now a New Jersey-based anti-terrorism advocate, Connor lost his father days after his ninth birthday. On Jan. 24, 1975, 33-year-old Frank Connor was at lunch at Fraunces Tavern in the heart of Manhattan’s financial district when he and three other men were killed, and nearly 60 were injured in a bombing. The Armed Forces of National Liberation (FALN), a Puerto Rican separatist group, claimed responsibility.

Connor said he has had no inclination to walk away from God, unlike some others he knew who lost loved ones on 9/11. The experience, he said, of losing his father and being raised by a mother and grandmother who were devout, Irish women kept him grounded and better able to handle the loss of his close cousin, whom he described as tough and funny.

“We went to church and all those things, but Grandma Connor always instilled in us never to be raised with hate,” said Connor.

His cousin Jean Schlag Nebbia of Naples, Florida, also clung to her faith shortly after her older brother Steven, who was 41, died in the attack.

“I never blamed God for 9/11. I felt that you’re given the gift of life, and then you’re given the gift of choice. And sometimes there’s bad people and they make bad choices, and other people are hurt through bad choices,” Nebbia, a former special needs teacher’s aide, told OSV News.

Three months after the attacks, she came to a realization.

Nebbia, 63, described watching news footage of the burning towers obsessively, trying to find her brother among those jumping out of the buildings. On the third month of non-stop viewing, her husband gave her some advice a Christian coworker had given him: “to say ‘I’m going to put this in God’s hands.'”

“The moment he said that to me is the moment I started to live … giving up my worries and giving up the unknown,” Nebbia told OSV News. “You know, ‘God, I need a good night’s sleep. I’m going to put this in your hands.’ That, to me, was a turning point. And I don’t know if I could have done that if I didn’t have my Catholic base.”

Nebbia said her 12 years of Catholic education and growing up as a regular Massgoer gave her a solid grounding in faith in God’s providence. She said she goes to God in prayer for almost every aspect of her life because “he has my back” just like her older brother, whom she was very close to, “always did.”

Vera Murphy Trayner also leaned heavily on her faith after losing her husband, Patrick Murphy.

On the morning of the attack, Trayner prayed the rosary fervently as she rushed home from her son’s nursery school while pushing him in his stroller. Murphy, 36 and the vice president for technology at the resource and management consulting firm Marsh McLennan, was on the 97th floor of the first tower that was hit three floors below. His department had moved there just months prior.

Trayner’s go-to devotion “always” came through for her with prayers answered.

“I prayed and prayed and prayed that Patrick would find a way out. He was so smart … and athletic and young … and it was the first prayer that I made that was not answered,” Trayner told OSV News.

She said she “was disappointed” but also held firm to the belief that her husband’s death “happened for a reason” and she “had to accept it.”

“Well, it’s free will. The terrorists, obviously they’re guided by evil and they were able to do such an evil act,” Trayner said. “I don’t want to feel sorry for myself because all through history, there have been traumas, wars. There’s death. There’s fires.”

Now 60, Trayner said her studies at Jesuit-run Boston College opened her up further to the faith during difficulties.

“I was able to ask questions and being a woman in the Catholic faith, being a widow in the Catholic faith, being a mother, I read quite a bit of different books … answering my own questions and talking with people,” she said.

Trayner, a Tampa-based college counselor who remarried in 2006, has relied on the Holy Spirit “to give me the right words,” the Blessed Mother to intercede in raising her children, and the saints, especially Joan of Arc, to guide her through every major challenge.

Still, she said, as she described breaking into a sweat while speaking to OSV News, she remains haunted by the thought of how her first husband must have suffered as the north tower became engulfed in an inferno and collapsed.

Nebbia admitted that as a Catholic, in recent weeks she has begun to struggle with forgiving the terrorists.

“I just feel like I don’t need to forgive them. That’s not my job. So now I’m questioning myself, like, ‘Alright, how do I go about forgiving these people, how?’ That was their goal. They achieved their goal. Now, I question that part of me,” she said.

Connor said he has come to accept his family’s tragic losses.

“Maybe I didn’t understand the reason, and maybe I don’t understand the reason why Steve was killed and the other 3,000 people, but I do feel that God does have a reason for it,” he said.

(Simone Orendain is an OSV News correspondent. She writes from Chicago.)

By James Ramos

HOUSTON (OSV News) – The death of Lorenzo Salgado Araujo following an encounter with federal immigration agents has shaken one of Houston’s most deeply rooted immigrant communities.

Since his death on July 7, family members, community advocates and Church leaders have questioned the circumstances surrounding his death and called for accountability and a full investigation.

The place where it happened sits in the heart of Magnolia Park, a neighborhood built by generations of Mexican American and immigrant families.

Along Canal Street, taquerias, refresquerías and meat markets share blocks with modest homes, aging storefronts and family-owned businesses that have anchored the East End for decades.

Just a block away, Canal Street intersects South Sgt. Macario García Drive, named for the Mexican immigrant and World War II hero who became the first Mexican-born recipient of the Medal of Honor. History doesn’t feel distant in Magnolia Park. It’s woven into the street signs.

On July 25, more than 300 Catholics, clergy, relatives and community supporters gathered in Magnolia Park for a vigil Mass to honor Salgado Araujo, with hundreds more joining the 1.5-mile prayer procession and a candlelight vigil.

Just before dusk settled over Canal Street, where the procession ended, and hundreds of vigil candles began to glow against the East End’s fading light, Ronaldo Salgado Araujo slipped away from the crowd.

He didn’t say anything. He simply walked to a patch of pavement on the 6800 block of Canal Street, bent down and touched the ground where his father died 18 days earlier.

The moment lasted mere seconds, reflecting the somber tone of a day marked by prayer and calls for answers.

The afternoon began at Immaculate Heart of Mary Church, a cornerstone of Magnolia Park, where worshippers filled the pews as Archbishop Joe S. Vásquez of Galveston-Houston celebrated Mass and called for both compassion and reform.

“Human dignity and national security are not in conflict,” Archbishop Vásquez told the congregation in Spanish. “Both are possible when people of goodwill work together.”

At the Mass, Archbishop Vásquez acknowledged the pain surrounding Salgado Araujo’s death while placing it within a broader moral framework.

“As Catholics who believe that all people are created in the image and likeness of God, we mourn every situation in which human life comes to an unnatural end,” he said.

But Archbishop Vásquez also used the occasion to revisit a larger issue.

Archbishop Vásquez echoed what he said July 15 after Salgado Araujo’s death, calling for meaningful immigration reform and an end to indiscriminate deportations.

“The U.S. Catholic bishops have repeatedly called for enforcement efforts that are targeted, proportional and humane,” Archbishop Vásquez said, adding that lasting reform requires “peaceful dialogue, mutual respect and a commitment to charity.”

“Only with Christ’s help and by working together will we have a nation under God with liberty and justice for all,” he said.

Among Salgado Araujo’s family members attending the Mass was his 29-year-old son, Ronaldo, who with his girlfriend carried forward the gifts during the offertory procession.

After Mass, the congregation stepped into the thick Houston heat and gathered outside the church.

Auxiliary Bishop Italo Dell’Oro of Galveston-Houston, who concelebrated the Mass with several other local priests, offered a blessing before the walk began.

Soon, the procession stretched across several blocks before it ended at the place where Salgado Araujo died.

Clergy walked alongside parishioners. Religious sisters moved through the crowd carrying candles, signs and rosaries. Faith leaders from multiple traditions joined the procession, which was organized by an interfaith coalition with support from the Congregation of the Sisters of Charity of the Incarnate Word.

As they walked, participants prayed the rosary and Divine Mercy chaplet in English and Spanish. Hymns floated between prayers. Responses echoed off warehouses, storefronts and passing traffic.

Drivers honked in support. Some waved from open windows. Others raised fists.

For most of the journey, Ronaldo Salgado Araujo carried a large wooden cross adorned with roses that towered over the procession, often casting a long shadow down Navigation Boulevard as the clouds dodged the setting sun.

At times he pressed it tightly against his face. At other times he leaned on it as prayers and chants continued around him.

Lázaro Contreras, director of Hispanic ministry for the Archdiocese of Galveston-Houston, said the Church’s presence was intended to show accompaniment for both the family and the broader community.

“The Church is always with us in every dimension of our lives, and this is one of them,” Contreras said. “The presence of our bishops, our shepherds, attending their flock is very important for the family and for the community.”

Contreras said Salgado Araujo’s story resonates because it feels familiar. He described him as a hardworking father who spent years building a life and helping his children succeed.

“In different ways, many of us feel that he represents our fathers and our families,” Contreras said.

Concerns about immigration enforcement continue to surface throughout the archdiocese, he said.

“Some people called me and said, ‘This has happened in our community. Some of our members have been detained and taken,'” Contreras said. “It’s something that is active and happening.”

Many Catholics, he said, are searching for guidance amid uncertainty.

“They are looking for guidance and for refuge,” Contreras said. “In these moments, they want to know the Church is standing with them and defending their dignity.”

Once the faithful arrived at Canal Street, Ronaldo Salgado Araujo carried the cross to a house near where his father died and set it down.

He addressed the vigil, thanking those “who are supporting us and calling for justice for my father.”

But he urged attendees not to focus solely on his family’s loss and referenced Johan Sebastián Durán Guerrero, a 25-year-old Colombian immigrant and father who was fatally shot during a July 13 U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement operation in Biddeford, Maine. Federal officials later said Durán Guerrero was not the intended target.

“Please do not forget that justice is still needed for Johan,” Ronaldo Salgado Araujo said. “Justice is needed for everyone, for all who have been victims.”

He then invoked the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s words from the 1963 “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” saying: “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.”

(James Ramos is content editor for the Texas Catholic Herald, newspaper of the Archdiocese of Galveston-Houston. This story was originally published by the Texas Catholic Herald and distributed through a partnership with OSV News.)

By Kimberley Heatherington
WASHINGTON (OSV News) – Artificial intelligence is quickly bringing about the end of the world as people know it – but Pope Leo XIV has an urgent message for everyone: Don’t run from the change AI brings; instead, engage it.

That was just one of the take-aways from an Aug. 1 conference at the St. John Paul II National Shrine in Washington exploring the pope’s recent encyclical “Magnifica Humanitas: On Safeguarding the Human Person in the Time of Artificial Intelligence.”

Peter Cooney, co-founder of the website platform Acutis AI – named in honor of St. Carlo Acutis and designed as a Catholic alternative to mainstream AI systems by offering responses rooted in Church teaching – walked attendees through Pope Leo’s lengthy document.

“He opens up on a strong note: Humanity is facing a pivotal choice. He gets straight to it. If you look at other encyclicals, they usually open on a much softer note,” said Cooney, 21, an incoming senior and Economics major at the University of Dallas. “So I think what Pope Leo is telling us is: This is important – listen up; pay attention.”

And there’s good reason to – given the speed with which AI is spreading into all corners of everyday life.

Cooney noted that on Nov. 30, 2022, the launch of ChatGPT, a generative AI chatbot, was announced on the social media platform Twitter, now known as X. Within five days, it had over a million users – now, less than four years later, there are over a billion monthly active users.

“This is the fastest growing technology we’ve ever seen in the world,” Cooney said. “And I think there are a few things to note about this technology that makes it different than in the past.”

Among those differences, he said, is the diversity of AI users (everyone from kids to the military); concentrated AI ownership (Cooney estimated less than 10 companies own 95% of the current market); and the competitive AI race between the U.S. and China (with the goal of weaponizing the powerful technology).

“So what you have is a few companies in two of the most powerful nations of the world competing to create the smartest AI models; to have a military advantage,” Cooney emphasized. “And that same technology is on kids’ Chromebooks in their classrooms. This is the world that the Holy Father is addressing.”

Still, the Catholic Church is not without answers.

With this encyclical, Pope Leo has “established the Church as a moral authority on this topic,” Cooney said. “Which gives tech leaders good reason to read the rest of what he has to say.”

The pontiff, Cooney said, notes three particular AI dangers: the ease of obtaining results; its impression of objectivity where it doesn’t actually exist; and its ability to simulate human communication.

While AI can be genuinely helpful, “If we’re never thinking through things anymore and just outsourcing all of that to AI, then we’ll lose the ability to think,” suggested Cooney, “which is a huge part of what makes us human.”

He also confirmed that for AI, “every answer is based on probability. It’s basically doing math and finding the highest probability of the next word being correct,” Cooney said. “AI is not neutral.”

As to human communication, Cooney added, “If we’re not careful, we can allow AI to slowly take away our human relationships … it can deteriorate human relationships.”

Cooney observed that Pope Leo says these threats place truth, work and freedom in jeopardy.

Truth, because AI amplifies the problem of misinformation through the ability to manipulate images or videos; work, because using AI to replace employees compromises their human dignity; and freedom, because it’s easy to feel like you’re choosing while your choices are actually heavily influenced by AI.

And yet, Cooney confirmed, Pope Leo is ultimately hopeful.

“He doesn’t say to hide from AI or run away from it. He acknowledges all the dangers and the confused and afraid state of the world,” Cooney said. “But he calls us to build. He says, despite this downward spiral, we can also glimpse a great part of humanity that is striving … to build the holy city.”

Pope Leo’s “Magnifica Humanitas” commissioning of people to take up their role as disciples of Jesus Christ in an “era of digital transformation” is indeed evocative.

“Let us not be afraid to get our hands dirty on the ‘construction site’ of our time,” Pope Leo writes in the encyclical. He urged people “not to be passive spectators of social and cultural fractures, nor mere commentators on what is crumbling, but men and women prepared to enter the construction sites of history – research laboratories, technology companies, schools, the media, institutions and local communities – in order to rebuild what has collapsed and protect what is threatened.”

Pope Leo’s call to men and women today, Cooney said, “is to build without fear, to protect our children, and to trust everything to Mary.”

In order to live out Pope Leo’s summons, Cooney noted three personal suggestions.

“We can’t be afraid of AI. We have to learn how to use it – and learn how to use it well,” he said.

He also urged parents “to have conversations with kids – and have a conversation with their schools, to find out how is AI being used. Because it’s being used in pretty much every school … it’s important that they have an understanding of how it works, and how it has problems sometimes.”

And finally, Cooney advised prayer.

“I would say try to pray a few Hail Marys every day for world peace,” he said, “and that the world can figure this out together.”

(OSV News correspondent Kimberley Heatherington reported from Washington.)

By Kurt Jensen
WASHINGTON (OSV News) – Independence Day is a reminder that Americans’ “inalienable rights” mentioned in the Declaration of Independence – life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness – are gifts from God, Cardinal Donald W. Wuerl said July 4 in the nation’s capital.

Cardinal Wuerl, the retired archbishop of Washington, delivered the homily at a Mass of Thanksgiving for America’s 250th anniversary held at the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception in Washington. The quietly dignified service was a cool reprise from the 100-degree heat and high humidity outside.

“We can claim to be free because we have been created free and equal by God,” Cardinal Wuerl said.

And that, he said, can be traced, in American history, all the way back to the Mayflower Compact in New England in 1620. The compact, he reminded the congregation, only had two elements: “The law of God and the need of the common good.”

In addition, American identity “doesn’t rest on blood ties, ethnic origin or national heritage.”

“Our beginnings as a nation celebrate our freedom,” the cardinal observed, calling on the congregation to “do our part now to honor that promise for everyone.”

In 1776, “We as a people collectively started down the pathway that eventually resulted in our national independence. We claimed our freedom as a nation and our civil liberties as a people,” he said.

This event, he added, “calls for our reflection, our celebration and our prayers of thanksgiving as we renew today our appreciation of our historic heritage and focus on the present effort today to live up to all those ideals that have so identified us as a nation and as a people.”

Thomas Jefferson, when he authored the declaration, told others that it did not contain ideas original to himself, but rather expressed “the common beliefs of people of his day,” Cardinal Wuerl said.

Jefferson would call the Declaration “an expression of the American mind and spirit, deeply rooted in the thoughts and faith of the American people,” he said.

As a result, the cardinal added, the many references of “our faith in God” should not come as a surprise to anyone.

“Even in this quintessentially civil declaration, we should not be surprised to find so many references to our faith in God,” he said.

So on the Fourth of July, “We renew our identity as a people who claim a God-given right: To life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Our beginnings as a nation have religious roots, deep in the convictions of the people in those original 13 states and those who we refer to as our founders,” he said.

Cardinal Wuerl, a native of Pittsburgh, was archbishop of Washington from 2006 to 2018.

One of the principal concelebrants was Archbishop Gabriele Caccia, the new Apostolic Nuncio to the United States.

Delivering a message from Pope Leo IV, Archbishop Caccia said July 4, 1776, was “the defining moment in the history of the United States of America, and giving voice to the ideas of liberty, equality, pursuit of happiness, justice, and democratic types of government.”

Religious freedom, and the ability to practice one’s faith openly without fear, has long been central to the American promise, Archbishop Caccia said.