WASHINGTON, D.C., FEB. 14, 2011 (Zenit.org).- The Church in the United States will take up a collection on Ash Wednesday, March 9, to aid Catholics in Central and Eastern Europe.
The U.S. bishops’ conference is organizing the collection in parishes with the theme “Great Needs Remain” to raise awareness of the impoverishment of the Church in that region.
A press release from the conference noted in particular the “aging physical structures, insufficient funding, and a lack of trained lay persons and religious” as challenges of the Catholics in Central and Eastern Europe.
Cardinal Justin Rigali, archbishop of Philadelphia and chairman of the conference’s Subcommittee on Aid to the Church in Central and Eastern Europe, affirmed, “Our assistance is vital to the growth and strength of the Church in these regions.”
Last year, the subcommittee was able to give 112 scholarships to students in that region with the donations collected. It also gave $6.3. million to fund 314 projects in 21 countries.
For example, funds were sent to help repair a broken heating system in a Poor Clare convent in Przasnysz, Poland, where 22 nuns were undergoing illnesses exacerbated by the lack of heat in that region’s severe winters.
Uniquely terrible
Declan Murphy, director of the collection, reported that many needs still exist in countries such as Albania, where the “communist legacy” regarding religion, “particularly the Catholic Church, is uniquely terrible.”
Murphy, who recently traveled to Albania, reported that “fully 95% of the country’s houses of worship were razed or forcibly converted to secular uses.”
“The Catholic cathedral in Shkoder, for example, was degraded to a sports arena,” he added.
Murphy stated: “The human toll was even worse.
“There were 300 Albanian Catholic priests in 1944. By the fall of communism, there were 30.”
“Today Albania’s ancient Catholic community, which dates from the time of St. Paul, is again a mission territory where heroic bishops and priests are hard at work on a Catholic revival,” he said. “It will take decades to reverse the damage.”
