We Are Our Mother of Perpetual Help Parish

Feast date: Jun 04

“Zeal for Thy house has consumed me!”

Born in Villa Santa Maria, Italy on October 13, 1563, Francis Caracciolo was given the name Ascanio at his baptism.  His mother was a relative of St. Thomas Aquinas. He lived a virtuous life as a youth and seemed inclined towards a religious vocation. When he was 22 he contracted a form of leprosy which he begged God to cure him of.  He promised to follow what seemed clear to him as his calling to the priesthood immediately upon being cured.

He was cured instantly upon making the promise, and left immediately for Naples to study for the priesthood.  On his ordination he joined the confraternity of The White Robes of Justice, who were devoted to helping condemned criminals to die a holy death, reconciled with God.

Five years after he went to Naples, a letter was delivered to him which was in fact addressed to another Ascanio Caracciolo, a distant relative.  The letter was an appeal from Father Giovanni Agostino Adorno, of Genoa, to this other Ascanio to join him in founding a religious order. Reading the lettter he realized that the vision of Fr. Adorno was in total compliance with his own ideas for a religious institute and he interpreted this as a sign of God’s plan.

He responded to the letter and the two men spent a few weeks together in retreat to draw up the institutions and rule. The congregation was approved by Pope Sixtus V on July 1, 1588.

The congregation lives both and active and contemplaive life, perpetual adoration of the Blessed Sacrament being one of the pillars of their life.  They work with the sick, poor, prisoners and as missionaries. In addition to the vows of chastity, poverty and obedience, they have a fourth which forbids them to seek or accept ecclesiastical honors.

Upon making his profession, Caracciolo took the name Francis in honor of the saint of Assissi. He was noted for his ardent devotion to the Blessed Sacrament, often being found in ecstasy, and frequently repeating the words of the Psalm, “Zeal for Thy house has consumed me.” He died of a severe fever on the eve of Corpus Christi in Agnone, on June 4 in 1608, with his oft-repeated words on his lips.  Those same words were found burned into the flesh of his heart when his body was opened after his death.

He was canonized by Pope Pius VII on May 24, 1807.

Feast date: Jun 04

The church remembers St. Optatus on June 4. As a convert from paganism, he is best known for his opposition to the heresy of Donatism, and his six treatises composed against them. One of them, against Parmenian, is still extant, and was mentioned by St. Jerome in his De Viris Illustribus as having been composed in six books. The treatise stresses the need for unity and is conciliatory in tone, but it criticizes Donatist teachings on Baptism, and stresses that the Church cannot be limited to Africa but is “catholic.”

Optatus was highly praised by such contemporaries as Augustine and Fulgentius of Ruspe. He died in 387 A.D. as Bishop of Milevis, Numidia, in Africa.

Washington, D.C. Newsroom, Jun 4, 2025 / 17:35 pm (CNA).

A report from the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee revealed that the 2023 anti-Catholic Richmond FBI memo involved coordination with field offices around the country and that similar disparaging language about certain Catholics was found in at least 13 separate documents.

In February 2023, the FBI retracted a memo from the Richmond, Virginia, field office that detailed an investigation into so-called “radical traditionalist” Catholics after the internal document was leaked to the public and prompted heavy pushback.

The memo called for the FBI to develop sources within parishes that offer the Latin Mass and online Catholic communities for the purpose of “threat mitigation.” Relying almost entirely on designations from the left-wing Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), the memo expressed concerns about a potential link between “radical-traditionalist” Catholics and racially motivated violent extremism.

Although the FBI removed the document from its systems and asserted the issue was isolated to one product from one field office, the new report found that multiple field offices were involved in producing the memo and that it was distributed to more than 1,000 FBI employees throughout the country.

The report reveals that analysts at the Richmond field office had consulted with the offices in Louisville, Kentucky; Portland, Oregon; and Milwaukee to gather information about “radical traditionalist” Catholics in preparation for the Richmond office’s report.

Conversations with the Louisville office reportedly helped Richmond analysts conclude that the beliefs of “radical-traditional Catholicism” are “comparable to Islamist theology.” Less is known about what was discussed with the Portland and Milwaukee field offices, but the report found that Richmond’s analysts had phone conversations with them about the subject.

After the Richmond field office produced the memo, the report found that it was sent to other field offices throughout the country.

The report cites an email exchange from the Richmond office to the office in Buffalo, New York, which notes that two “radical traditionalist” Catholic groups are in Buffalo’s area of responsibility.

Some FBI officials in the Milwaukee and Phoenix field offices were concerned about the memo, according to email exchanges. The report notes, however, it’s unclear whether the concerns were shared with the Richmond field office. 

One official questioned: “Is anyone really asking for a product like this?” and complained that “apparently we are at the behest of the SPLC” and another responded: “Yeah, our overreliance on the SPLC hate designations is … problematic.”

According to the report, the Richmond FBI had produced a draft of a second memo on the same subject, which was intended to be distributed to the entire FBI. This was shelved following the backlash to the initial leaked memo.

The draft contained similar assertions of a link between “radical traditionalist” Catholics and racially motivated violent extremism and called for source development within parishes that celebrate the Latin Mass and within Catholic online communities. The draft, which was being written in 2023, asserted that the threat of violence will likely increase during the election cycle.

Although the second draft expressed similar concerns, one noticeable difference is that it did not reference the SPLC.

The report also revealed an internal FBI email, which acknowledged that the phrase “radical traditionalist Catholic” appeared in 13 separate FBI documents and five attachments throughout the agency.

Senate Judiciary Committee Chair Chuck Grassley is requesting that the new FBI director under President Donald Trump — Kash Patel — provide the committee with those documents and any other documents that “purport to tie religious groups to violent extremism based on SPLC and other biased sources.”

The report also chastises former FBI Director Christopher Wray, accusing him of “misleading testimony on the scope of the memo’s distribution” when he classified the memo as “a single product by a single field office.”

“I and other members had already expressed concern as to whether the memo’s production was isolated to Richmond or part of a larger problem,” Grassley wrote. “Testimony calling it the work of a single field office was misleading at best and appears to be part of a pattern of intentional deception.”

Grassley further notes that internal emails demonstrate that FBI leadership was aware that the scope of the issue extended beyond the Richmond office and accuses the agency under Wray’s leadership of “[obstructing] my investigation by not providing these answers for many months.”

He told Patel he is “determined to get to the bottom of the Richmond memo, and of the FBI’s contempt for oversight in the last administration.” 

“I look forward to continuing to work with you to restore the FBI to excellence and prove once again that justice can and must be fairly and evenly administered, blind to whether we are Democrats or Republicans, believers or nonbelievers,” Grassley added.

Washington, D.C. Newsroom, Jun 4, 2025 / 17:06 pm (CNA).

Pope Leo XIV spoke with Russian President Vladimir Putin in a phone call Wednesday afternoon.

“The pope made an appeal for Russia to take a gesture that would favor peace, emphasizing the importance of dialogue to create positive contacts between the parties and seek solutions to the conflict,” Holy See Press Office Director Matteo Bruni said in a statement.

Bruni told members of the press that the Holy Father appealed to the Russian leader about the humanitarian situation in Ukraine and advocated for the facilitation of aid into affected areas.

The two leaders also discussed Cardinal Matteo Maria Zuppi’s efforts to facilitate prisoner exchanges. 

“Pope Leo made reference to Patriarch Kirill, thanking him for the congratulations received at the beginning of his pontificate, and underlined how shared Christian values can be a light that helps to seek peace, defend life, and pursue genuine religious freedom,” Bruni added. 

“Gratitude was expressed to the pontiff for his readiness to help settle the crisis, in particular the Vatican’s participation in resolving difficult humanitarian issues on a depoliticized basis,” the Kremlin said in a statement following the call, according to Reuters. 

The Kremlin’s statement further said Putin stressed his belief to the Holy Father “that the Kyiv regime is banking on escalating the conflict and is carrying out sabotage against civilian infrastructure sites on Russian territory.”

Pope Leo XIV’s first call with Putin comes just over three weeks after his first call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy on May 12. At the time, Bruni confirmed the two leaders had spoken after the pope expressed concern for Ukraine during his May 11 Sunday address.

“I carry in my heart the sufferings of the beloved Ukrainian people,” Pope Leo had said after singing the Regina Coeli prayer with approximately 100,000 people.

“May everything possible be done to reach an authentic, just, and lasting peace, as soon as possible,” the Holy Father continued.

At the time, Zelenskyy shared a photo on X of him purportedly having a telephone call with Pope Leo. After expressing gratitude to the Holy Father “for his support for Ukraine and all our people,” Zelenskyy said he and the pope specifically discussed the plight of thousands of children deported by Russia.

“Ukraine counts on the Vatican’s assistance in bringing them home to their families,” he added. 

Reiterating Ukraine’s commitment to work toward a “full and unconditional ceasefire” and the end of the war with Russia, Ukraine’s president said he also invited the Holy Father “to make an apostolic visit to Ukraine.” 

The final Easter message delivered by Pope Francis the day before his death included a prayer for the embattled country: “May the risen Christ grant Ukraine, devastated by war, his Easter gift of peace and encourage all parties involved to pursue efforts aimed at achieving a just and lasting peace.”

CNA Staff, Jun 4, 2025 / 16:59 pm (CNA).

The Trump administration on Tuesday nixed a Biden-era requirement that forced emergency room doctors to perform abortions.  

The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), a branch of the Department of Health and Human Services, announced on June 3 that it would rescind the July 2022 guidelines issued under the Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act (EMTALA).

That law, originally passed in 1986, was designed to prevent “patient dumping” by requiring Medicare-participating hospitals to provide stabilizing treatment to patients who can’t pay for treatment rather than transferring them. The Biden administration expanded the requirements in the wake of the repeal of Roe v. Wade, requiring hospitals to perform abortions as “stabilizing treatment” in emergency situations. 

The government will “continue to enforce” EMTALA “including for identified emergency medical conditions that place the health of a pregnant woman or her unborn child in serious jeopardy,” CMS said this week.

In its announcement, the government noted that it “will work to rectify any perceived legal confusion and instability created by the former administration’s actions.” 

Pro-life, conscience advocates hail decision

Major pro-life voices celebrated the decision, arguing that the Biden-era guidelines promoted abortion and spread pro-abortion disinformation. 

Marjorie Dannenfelser, president of SBA Pro-Life America, called the Tuesday decision “another win for life and truth — stopping Biden’s attack on emergency care for both pregnant moms and their unborn children.” 

The Biden administration’s guidelines were the subject of a lawsuit by the Catholic Medical Association, a national network that promotes Catholic ethics in the medical industry. The group argued that the mandate unlawfully violated conscience rights. 

Alliance Defending Freedom, the legal nonprofit arguing on behalf of the Catholic Medical Association, celebrated the decision, saying that doctors can now “perform their life-giving duties without fear of government officials forcing them to end life and violate their beliefs.”

“Doctors — especially in emergency rooms — are tasked with preserving life. The Trump administration has rolled back a harmful Biden-era mandate that compelled doctors to end unborn lives, in violation of their deeply held beliefs,” stated ADF Senior Counsel Matt Bowman.

Heritage Foundation Vice President of Domestic Policy Roger Severino celebrated the move, saying that EMTALA under the Biden administration had been “inverted” to “unlawfully mandate abortion nationwide.”

“Wide majorities of Americans oppose forcing doctors and hospitals to take innocent human life and this change goes back to respecting conscience and the rule of law,” Severino said in a post on X. 

“A stain on America’s conscience is now gone, and good riddance,” he said. 

Pro-abortion advocates criticized the decision. Jamila Perritt, the president and CEO of the pro-abortion group Physicians for Reproductive Health, said the decision “sends a clear message: The lives and health of pregnant [women] are not worth protecting.” 

But Dr. Ingrid Skop, who serves as vice president and director of medical affairs at the Charlotte Lozier Institute, called the decision “welcome news for both of my patients — a pregnant woman and her unborn child.” 

In a statement, she criticized the Biden-era guidelines, calling them a “coercive effort … to subvert existing laws to promote abortion.” 

“Although I do not perform elective abortions, I have always been able to provide quality care in obstetric emergencies, seeking to preserve the lives of both mother and child,” Skop noted.

Dannenfelser emphasized that “pregnant women are protected under pro-life laws” and warned that obfuscating this fact is dangerous for women across the nation. 

“Democrats have created confusion on this fact to justify their extremely unpopular agenda for all-trimester abortion,” she said. “In situations where every minute counts, their lies lead to delayed care and put women in needless, unacceptable danger.” 

Washington, D.C. Newsroom, Jun 4, 2025 / 16:29 pm (CNA).

Bishop Robert Barron sat down with conservative political commentator Tucker Carlson this week to talk about the Catholic faith and discuss some hot cultural topics. Carlson, an Episcopalian, began the June 2 interview by saying that his friends urged him to have Barron on his show. 

“I don’t think I’ve ever received more texts about any guest than I did about you,” Tucker told Barron. “From Catholics I know, from non-Catholics I know.” 

Barron, founder of Word on Fire Catholic ministries and bishop of the Winona-Rochester Diocese in Minnesota, and Carlson discussed a wide range of subjects, including how to find happiness, prayer, grace, persecution, technology, and the future of the Church.

Finding happiness

The interview began with a discussion about happiness. Carlson cited falling birth rates and increased suicides as evidence of a widespread lack of happiness in the culture.

“The joy of life” comes when “you forget about yourself and you lose yourself in some great value,” Barron said. 

“God is the highest good, the ‘summum bonum.’ That’s why you love the Lord your God. That’s the First Commandment. But when the culture has lost that, which ours is in danger of, you, by definition, become unhappy,” Barron said. 

In order to find happiness, people must let go of their egos and pursue “the good,” he said. “The ego is like a black hole … that will draw everything into itself, suck all of life and light and energy into itself. Nothing can escape.” 

People who feel unhappiness have “lost a sense of God” and therefore lost “the supreme good,” according to Barron. “The best people are those who breathe life into a room. And that happens because they’re not preoccupied with the ego. They’re captivated by some objective good, and they want to show it to you.”

What is true freedom?

The discussion turned to the topic of freedom. 

If we focus too much on choices in our lives, we will “get lost,” Barron said.

“I thought the whole point of the West was choices,” Carlson responded. 

“But, you have to know what your choice is for,” Barron said. “When you deify choice itself, when you say, ‘Autonomy, that’s my God.’ No, choice is for some good.”

He continued: “The idea is to order freedom. Freedom is not an end in itself. Freedom is ordered towards some good. When it’s disordered, it tends to collapse in upon itself.” 

“The whole point of America, I thought, was choice and freedom for its own sake,” Carlson responded. 

“Well, and I would argue it’s not for its own sake,” Barron said. “If that happens to us, something’s gone wrong.”

Of the founding fathers, Barron said they didn’t “have the full Catholic imagination as I would like it, but they certainly had a sense of the objective good, and that the purpose of life is to find that good and be ordered toward it.”

“An ordered freedom is what they were interested in, not freedom for its own sake.”

“Your freedom has to be disciplined and directed,” he continued.

“Our culture, it’s … banks to a river, the river has energy. It’s going somewhere. You knock down the banks. You say, ‘Oh, I don’t want to be limited. Don’t set limits to my freedom.’ It just floods the fields.”

When asked by Carlson what are the banks that we’ve demolished, Barron said: “The life of the mind, the moral good, religious good, aesthetic … When that’s lost, the banks are knocked down.” 

Barron explained: “The goal for the Bible is not autonomy, it’s theonomy.” 

“God, ‘theos,’ … becomes the law of my life … When God becomes the norm of my life, I become more myself. I find who I really am. If I jettison God and I say, ‘No, I’m the leader of my own life,’ I get lost.”

“What does Jesus say? ‘The one who loses himself will find it. The one who’s trying to hang on to himself is going to lose it.’ Lose your freedom in God’s greater freedom, and you become now authentically free.”

Prayer and God’s transcendence

Barron spoke of prayer as a way to let go of ego. “Prayer is a conscious exercise in overcoming autonomy. It’s a conscious exercise to say, ‘I want to get out of my preoccupations. I’m placing myself in the presence of God.’”

Prayer is a way to “overcome” and “calm the mind,” Barron explained. He highlighted that the rosary is a “meditative prayer” that can really help the mind “open up to a deeper consciousness or a deeper awareness.” 

When distraction occurs during prayer, Barron instructed people to “acknowledge” it. “Don’t try to fight it,” he said. “Acknowledge it and then go back.”

Related to the topic of the transcendent nature of God, Barron said: “You’re not going to find him in the world … you can’t say things like, ‘Oh, there’s no evidence for God,’ as though he’s a chemical reaction.”

“God is, at the same time, as transcendent as you can imagine, not a thing in the world, and as imminent as you can imagine. He’s higher than anything I could imagine, and he’s closer to me than I am to myself. Now, figure that one out,” Barron said.

When Carlson asked if God needs our sacrifice, Barron responded firmly: “He doesn’t require it.” 

“How could the one who made the entire universe from nothing possibly need anything from it?” Barron said. “It’s just a logical contradiction.”

“He wants the openness of heart signaled by the sacrifice, because he wants us to be alive. And when we say, Lord, ‘I’m opening my heart to you. I’m ordering my life to you in this great sacrifice of praise,’ God delights because now we’re going to find the joy he wants us to have.”

God “needs nothing,” Barron said. “We eat the body and drink the blood of Jesus. We consume the sacrifice. It’s for our benefit, not for God’s.”

Christian persecution

During the interview, Barron highlighted the fact that the 20th century has been “the worst century for Christian martyrs [in] all of Christian history.”

“Now, around the world, we are by far the most persecuted religion,” he said. “It’s a crime. It’s an outrage. We talk in a demure way about religious liberty in our country, which is indeed under threat, but you want the real threat to religious liberty? It’s in different parts of the world. People are being killed for their Christian faith.”

Barron pointed to the late-19th-century Pope Leo XIII, who believed “the devil would have a unique control over the 20th century,” so he formulated “the famous St. Michael prayer … asking for the protection of Michael, the archangel.”

“It’s hard to argue” that Leo XIII’s premonition was not real, Barron explained. “If you believe in the devil, as I do, and you see what happened in the 20th century, it’s hard to imagine it wasn’t to some degree.”

Religion and violence

When asked if Christianity leads to violence, Barron said: “It’s one of the myths of enlightenment historiography that religion is the problem.”

There was a “careful study of all the great wars” conducted, Barron said. “And the conclusion was something like 8% could be traced to a religious cause.”

“There’s the totality of human dysfunction. God’s response to that is not to more violence. It’s to respond with forgiving love. That’s Christianity ... It’s not a religion of violence,” he said.

Technology and faith

In the course of the more-than-hourlong interview, Barron and Carlson discussed digital technology, social media, and artificial intelligence.

“We’re all addicted to [them],” Barron said in reference to smartphones. “Those machines were designed to be addictive.”

He highlighted a program whereby priests have given up their phones for a whole year as a part of a study. Barron said the result was that “they all feel liberated.”

“They all come back saying, ‘It was the best year of my life, and I read books again, and I talked to people. I cultivated friendship. I played games. I played sports … That’s almost an illustration of Augustine’s ‘incurvatus in se,’ that I’m ‘caved in’ over my iPhone.”

Barron mentioned another study that found a “direct correlation between screen time and depression,” which he said he finds “perfectly plausible.” 

“Look how unhealthy it’s making our young kids,” Barron said. “I think taking those things out of the hands of our kids would be a great idea, at least to some degree.”

Later in the interview, however, Barron said “technology is not bad in itself.” It becomes a problem when “you couple technology with a sheer celebration of autonomy or a bracketing of God.” 

Artificial intelligence is “frightening” Barron said. “It [has] to be grounded in a moral vision … or it will become a Frankenstein’s monster.” 

We cannot try to “become God” and “decide to dictate terms to reality. It’ll turn on us and wreck us,” Barron said.

Pope Leo XIV and the future of the Church

When asked what changes Pope Leo XIV may make as the new pontiff, Barron said “I don’t know.” But he did share that he thinks the pope has “made some interesting gestures” so far. 

Pope Leo’s use of Latin and his appearance in the mozzetta on the loggia after his election was a “gesture toward more traditional Catholics,” Barron said. 

At the end of the interview, Carlson voiced a paid advertisement of the Catholic prayer app Hallow, a sponsor of the podcast interview, offering listeners a three-month free trial with the code “TUCKER” at Hallow.com/Tucker and promoting the app’s consecration to Jesus through St. Joseph.

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Vatican City, Jun 4, 2025 / 15:52 pm (CNA).

Pope Leo XIV will gather the cardinals at the Vatican on June 13 to give final approval to the canonizations of eight blesseds whose causes were promoted by Pope Francis.

This event is known as an ordinary public consistory and will be the first of Pope Leo XIV’s pontificate. It should be noted that Pope Francis convened it at the end of February, when he was hospitalized at the Gemelli Hospital in Rome, but no date was set.

This ceremony determines the final step of the canonization process through a vote to set the date on which the blessed will be proclaimed a saint.

On Wednesday, the Office of Liturgical Celebrations confirmed the list of blesseds.

Among them is Blessed Bartolo Longo, an Italian layman and lawyer and founder of the Shrine of Our Lady of the Rosary in Pompeii, Italy.

After abandoning spiritualism and Satanist sects, he embraced Catholicism, became a fervent catechist and a man dedicated to assisting those most in need. He is also recognized as one of the 20th century’s greatest disseminators of devotion to the rosary.

The June 13 consistory is also expected to vote on the date of canonization of the “doctor of the poor,” Venezuelan José Gregorio Hernández.

Also on the list is Peter To Rot, the first blessed from Papua New Guinea, who was killed in World War II for defending marriage.

The cardinals will also decide the date of canonization of Vincenza Maria Poloni, founder of the Sisters of Mercy of Verona, credited with the inexplicable cure of Audelia Parra, a Chilean woman.

Ignazio Choukrallah Maloyan, a bishop martyred in the Armenian genocide of 1915, will also be canonized soon.

María del Monte Carmelo Rendiles Martínez, founder of the Congregation of the Servants of Jesus, is slated to become Venezuela’s first female saint. “Mother Carmen,” as many knew her, will be remembered for her immense kindness and wise prudence.

Maria Troncatti, a professed religious of the Congregation of the Daughters of Mary Help of Christians. This future saint was an Italian missionary who spent much of her life in Ecuador.

Finally, there is Pier Giorgio Frassati, a lay member of the Third Order of St. Dominic, whose canonization is scheduled for Aug. 3. This adventurer and mountain climber developed a profound love for Christ in the Eucharist and the Virgin Mary from a young age.

In his youth, he devoted himself entirely to serving the poor and sought to evangelize through politics, bringing his friends closer to the faith.

This story was first published by ACI Prensa, CNA’s Spanish-language news partner. It has been translated and adapted by CNA.