We Are Our Mother of Perpetual Help Parish

Rome Newsroom, Apr 20, 2024 / 07:40 am (CNA).

Pope Francis has named Father Reynaldo Bersabal as an auxiliary bishop of the Diocese of Sacramento, California. 

The Vatican announced on Saturday that the priest ordained in the Philippines and incardinated into the Sacramento Diocese in 2004 will be consecrated as a bishop.

Bersabal was born in Magsaysay in the province of Misamis Oriental in the Philippines on Oct. 15, 1962.

He was ordained a priest at the age of 28 for the Archdiocese of Cagayan de Oro in the Philippines was incardinated in the Diocese of Sacramento 13 years later.

In Sacramento, he served as the parish vicar of St. James Church in Davis and St. Anthony Church in Sacramento before being named the parish priest of St. Paul Church in 2003.

Bersabal was also the parish priest of St. John the Baptist in Folsom from 2008 to 2016 and St. James in Davis from 2016 to 2022.

The 61-year-old priest has served the parish of St. Francis of Assisi in Sacramento since 2022.

CNA Staff, Apr 20, 2024 / 07:00 am (CNA).

St. Teresa of Calcutta once said: “If you want to change the world, go home and love your family.”

Her words appear at the end of the new movie “Unsung Hero,” which tells the true story of the Smallbone family, widely recognized in the music industry for brothers Luke and Joel Smallbone of the Grammy-award-winning Christian band For King and Country, and their sister Rebecca, better known as singer-songwriter Rebecca St. James. 

After David Smallbone’s successful music company collapses in their home country of Australia, he moves his family to Nashville, Tennessee, in the hopes of a brighter future. With nothing but the clothes in their suitcases and an empty house waiting for them in Nashville, David, his pregnant wife, Helen, and their six children embark on a journey of faith to rebuild their lives.

The film, which will be released in theaters on April 26, depicts how a mother’s faith can stand firm against all odds and inspire her husband and children to do the same. Helen teaches her family how to turn to the Lord in prayer for all their needs and, in time, to begin to see God answer. 

Luke Smallbone spoke to CNA in an interview about the inspiration behind the movie, the importance of family — especially in today’s society where the family is under attack — and what he hopes people will take away from the film. 

Smallbone explained that he and his brother have shared their family’s story at concerts and have been told several times that they should write a book but instead thought of making a movie. 

“You don’t ever think you’re living a movie when you’re living it. This is just my childhood. We weren’t trying to do anything special. We were just a family that had a great love for each other, a great love for Jesus, prayed for things, saw things take place,” Smallbone, a producer of the film, said.

He pointed out that “the heartbeat behind the movie actually really is this — I believe in the power of family, I think family is more powerful today than ever in the history of the world yet we don’t value it like we should.”

“Mother Teresa says, ‘If you want to change the world, go home and love your family,’ and I think that’s actually really the blueprint behind the film,” he added. 

The major theme running throughout the movie is the importance of family. James Smallbone, David’s father (Luke and Joel’s grandfather), says in the film: “Your family isn’t in the way, they are the way.” 

Smallbone discussed this theme and how in reading the Bible, you get the “framework of family.”

“One thing I found amazing about when you read the Bible — thinking of today’s day and age where we put so much trust and faith in governments, in some cases our governments, though it’s challenging at times, for the most part do a relatively good job of giving us freedom, they protect us,” he shared. “But you don’t ever find the framework of government in the Bible, but you do get the framework of family in the Bible.”

“So what that tells me is God’s true intent for people is to belong and have healthy families … So for me, when I read Scripture it tells me that I should take family incredibly seriously,” he said.

The musician added that he has often heard that if you want your children to be raised learning how to follow Jesus, “they have to see evidence of Jesus in your home, in your family, not in your government, not in your schools, not in all the other things, it starts in your family.”

“I don’t want to fail Jesus. I want to be a great husband. And I don’t want to fail my family,” he emphasized. “If I can do those three things well, man, that’s the most satisfying life I think I can live.”

Despite losing everything in Australia, uprooting her family to a new country while expecting another child, and having to rebuild from ground zero, Helen Smallbone’s faith was firm. The movie portrays how she taught her family the importance of prayer, even creating a prayer wall — two file folders with the word “please” written on one and “thank you” written on the other —for family members to post their prayers. 

When asked about his mother’s faith, Smallbone said: “She taught me right from wrong, she taught me fear of God, she taught me how to forgive. My mom did all the invisible things that have all the power.”

In the movie there is a scene where Helen runs to her room and begins to scream into a pillow after receiving bad news. Smallbone shared that this was added into the script to make her appear more “relatable”; however, the incident wasn’t entirely true.

“We put that in the script because there were people that were like, ‘Hey man, she’s actually just not relatable. Who can go through that much struggle and not have a moment of breakdown?’” he shared. “Well, the truth is my mom never did that. My dad, yes … but my mom never did.”

“I’m telling you, if you want to change the world, do the invisible things very very well and it will be incredibly impactful … At the end of the day, that’s what my mom did well.”

As for what he hopes people will take away from this movie, Smallbone hopes that particularly fathers will “go back and they’ll say ‘I want to be a better dad.’”

“I hope that mothers see that all of the unseen things they do matter, they’re changing the next generation, and God sees those things,” he added. 

He hopes children will “dream big dreams” and that the “things that are happening to you as a young child are incredibly powerful and incredibly important and you can go and do extraordinary things.”

“There doesn’t have to be a cap onto what you can achieve, and what you can do,” he said. “Not that it’s for achievement’s sake, but because God chooses to do miracles through people like you and me, and he uses his people to do a lot of those miracles and it starts young.”

CNA Staff, Apr 20, 2024 / 06:00 am (CNA).

When Luke Burgis moved to Silicon Valley to start a business, he never expected he would become a seminarian and then go on to launch entrepreneurship programs for Catholic students. 

Burgis had attended NYU, worked on Wall Street, started several businesses in Silicon Valley, and moved to Las Vegas before deciding he wanted more meaning in his life. With the encouragement of a friend, he rekindled his Catholic faith. After five years in seminary, he ultimately discerned he would not become a priest, but he still found himself in need of deeper meaning in his work.

So he founded Catholic Entrepreneurship and Design Experience (CEDE, pronounced “seed”) in 2020 to help students across the country connect their working lives with their faith. 

Four years later, CEDE is a thriving organization based at Catholic University of America (CUA) in Washington, D.C., with programs and educational materials across the world. Burgis is the entrepreneur-in-residence and assistant clinical professor of business at CUA. He has developed educational materials shared with Catholic schools and home-school communities in addition to teaching business classes at CUA. 

“I didn’t understand how I could actually live out my values and be a Catholic in the business world that I was in, even after I’d had that reconversion experience,” Burgis said when asked what inspired him to found CEDE.

“But I knew that there was some gap that we had to close in Catholic education between the theoretical or the principles of Catholic social teaching and the way that it actually plays out on the ground, if you’re trying to start something,” he explained. “We launched CEDE to try to reintegrate these disciplines.”

This year, Burgis is launching a new project for CEDE — a summer entrepreneurship program for high school students. The 10-week virtual Startup Venture Challenge will teach high schoolers how to start a business. 

“CEDE introduces students to basic principles of entrepreneurship within the context of Catholic social teaching and helps them understand that ultimately they are the entrepreneurs of their own lives, whether they ever start a business or not,” Burgis said.

“We’re trying to train young Catholics to think more like an entrepreneur, which means finding creative ways to solve problems or to see solutions where other people only see problems,” he said. “We think that that’s really important for all Catholics, period, and that if we had a more entrepreneurial Church, we would have a more adaptive and creative Church.”

But being a “Catholic entrepreneur” isn’t necessarily about starting a business, Burgis noted. 

“Our goal here is not really to create more business owners,” he explained. “Our goal is to help more young Catholics in Catholic schools be equipped and confident to go out into the world, whatever their vocation is.” 

Burgis wanted to connect what he learned about business with Catholic teaching. 

“[At NYU] I just learned: ‘Here’s what profit is. Profit is good. Pursue it,’” he recalled. “Most of my classmates simply wanted to make as much money as they could.”

“When I left seminary, I realized that there was a real disintegration or gap between what I had learned at my Catholic schools … and what things actually look like in practice when you’re actually out there in the world trying to do things,” he explained. 

CEDE’s model of education is about “experiential learning,” “creative problem-solving,” and independence and “differs” from the rules-based form of education many American students are accustomed to, Burgis said. 

“That’s much of what being an entrepreneur feels like,” he said of the model. “You’re not given a roadmap, you’re not told what to do, you have to figure things out, and you have to make decisions and take responsibility for those decisions.”

Burgis said it will feel like “a challenge.”

“You’re being challenged, being given this mission,” he said. “We want to empower the students to accomplish that mission by working together and finding creative ways to solve problems on their own without being told how to do it. We actually want to make them a little uncomfortable.”

Students don’t need to have business ideas to join, as the first three weeks will be spent building up an idea. The full schedule involves a discernment stage, launching, testing, and then a resources and community stage.

“We want them to feel what it feels like to have a fire ignited within themselves, to exercise their own creativity, to take ownership of it, to take total responsibility, and to be proud of that, and to be able to serve others through their gifts and talents,” Burgis said. 

The program runs from June 10 to Aug. 12 and is fully virtual and amenable to the students’ work schedules. The cost is $250, with scholarships available. Applications are open for teenagers ages 14–18. 

Feast date: Apr 20

St. Agnes of Montepulciano was born in 13th-century Tuscany. At the age of six, Agnes began trying to convince her parents to allow her to join a convent. She was finally admitted to the Dominican convent at Montepulciano at age nine despite it generally being against Church law to allow a child so young to join.

Agnes' reputation for holiness attracted other sisters, and she became an abbess at the unheard of age of 15. She insisted on greater austerities in the abbey. She lived on bread and water for 15 years, slept on the ground and used a stone for a pillow.

It was said that she had visions of the Virgin Mary and that in her visions angels gave her Communion. She also had a vision in which she was holding the infant Jesus. When she awoke from her trance, she she was holding the small gold crucifix the infant Jesus was wearing.

She died in 1317. Miracles have been reported at her tomb. When her body was moved to a church years after her death, it was found incorrupt.

She was canonized in 1726.

On the sidelines of an Agidae conference at the Pontifical Urban University, Cardinal Pietro Parolin comments on the recent news from the Middle East region, saying everyone is working to ensure the conflict does not escalate.

Read all

 

Pope Francis invites Italian pilgrims from the Dioceses of Cesena-Sarsina, Savona, Imola and Tivoli Pope Francis to heed the legacy of the Servant of God Pope Pius VII, a courageous witness of the Gospel in times of struggles and divisions.

Read all

 

With Christ's loving heart, open arms and with a smile, be shepherds to your people, suggests Pope Francis when addressing seminarians of Seville, Spain, on the eve of Good Shepherd Sunday.

Read all

 

Pope Francis receives members of the Pontifical Committee for Historical Sciences on the 70th anniversary of the Committee’s foundation.

Read all

 

A new decree allows someone claiming damage from an unjust action by a judge or prosecutor (both known in Italian as “magistrates”) to sue the Vatican City State, which, in turn, could then take action against the individual judge or prosecutor.

“After having already endured years of protracted crisis in the country, the Sudanese people now face much greater threats to their safety and security, housing, water, food, essential health infrastructure and education,” a Caritas statement said.