The Catholic Weekly 26 April 2020

catholicweekly.com.au 16 26, April, 2020 WORLD A TOP Catholic humanitarian group expressed concern for the tens of thousands of Iraqis displaced inside their coun- try and dependent on assis- tance, because access to them has become severely restrict- ed due to COVID-19. “The government in the northern Kurdish area of Iraq has been very careful and restrictive (with regard to measures to tackle coronavi- rus), more so than in central or southern Iraq,” said Hani El-Mahdi, Iraq country rep- resentative for US Catholic Relief Services. “But access to people is a challenge,” El-Mahdi said of the current situation as most of Iraq faces lockdown in a bid to stem the spread of IN 2018, Alessandro DiSan- to quit a promising job in fi- nance to join friends in start- ing an app for Catholics centred around meditation and prayer. That app, Hallow, is now the top Catholic app in app stores, has 150,000 downloads in 50 countries and has been used to pray over 1 million times, according to DiSanto. The Hallow team also re- cently launched special fea- tures related to the coronavi- rus for the many people who must stay at home during this time. DiSanto and some friends with whom he attended the US University of Notre Dame came up with the idea when they found they were all struggling with being con- nected to their jobs all the time and finding little peace in their lives. “My experience personally was coming from this per- spective of being just stressed, having rising anxiety living in a constantly connected world where my life was being run by my email inbox at work,” DiSanto told the Chicago Catholic newspaper. He was working extraordi- narily long hours and looking for a way to reduce his stress. People told him that medita- tion and practicing mindful- ness would help. They recom- mended the apps Headspace and Calm, which he down- loaded and used. “But themore that I created peace inmy life in the sense of absence of activity, the more I realised that what I was actu- ally searching for were deeper questions about purpose and It started out as something for a group of friends. Now it’s used the world over ¾ ¾ Dale Gavlak ¾ ¾ Joyce Duriga Catholic app becomes major global success Aid fears for Iraqis An advertisement for the Catholic app Hallow. GRAPHIC: CNS/HANDOUT VIA ARCHDIOCESE OF CHICAGO Displaced women and children wait in a medical centre of a camp in Iraq on 7 March. CNS PHOTO/ARI JALAL, REUTERS COVID-19. Iraq had reported 1,434 cases of the coronavirus as of 17 April, but some med- ical professionals claim the number could be higher. “Travel between cities and within cities in the first two to three weeks was very restric- tive. Now, the government is looking into requests (by aid groups) to access certain areas. But still, most of the nongovernmental organisa- tions and Caritas, whom we work with closely, and others in Irbil, we are all under the same situation – we cannot access the population in these circumstances,” El-Mahdi ex- plained. “People are stranded more than ever,” he said. El-Mahdi said NGOs and the Kurdish government are considering how to change the way groups like CRS and Caritas can operate under the current constraints, perhaps implementing remote sys- tems and technologies. The CRS representative saidmost of the organisation’s work in recent years has been aiding the “returnees,” Iraq’s religious minorities, such as Christians, Yazidis and Shi- ite Shabak, who were victims of the Islamic State militants’ violent takeover of their towns and villages, both in and out- side the Ninevah Plain region from 2014 until 2017. This has involved aiding about 10,000 people by reha- bilitating houses and schools, providing people with liveli- hood opportunities, educa- tional services and training as well as encouraging ways to reconcile different religious and ethnic communities by building social cohesion among those groups. - CNS what I should be doing with my life,” he said. “That was inherently a faith-based question for me, and really not addressed by those secular mediation apps.” In 2018, DiSanto’s friend Alex Jones developed a ru- dimentary version of an app where friends recorded pas- sages from Scripture and spiritual books that they all could use for meditation. The more time they spent using it and developing it, the more their friends and family showed interest in using it too. The turning point came when a friend told DiSanto that she had used the app to discern a vocation to religious life. “That was an ‘Oh, wow’ moment. Certainly, we didn’t do anything. That was God’s grace that moved her heart,” he said. “But it kind of hit us in the head and we thought maybe we should spend time discerning whether we’re be- ing called to build this as a resource for the world to help them find God’s call in their lives.” So the friends quit their jobs and launched Hallow in December 2018. It wasn’t easy for any of them to walk away from promising careers in the secu- lar world, but all felt like God was calling them to make the leap. They launched a Kickstart- er campaign to raise initial funding to build the app. Now they have what they call “an- gel investors” who support their work. They also formed partnerships with parishes and Catholic groups around the US to promote subscrip- tions. The app is subscrip- tion-based but free to down- load. Parts of the app are free to users and those areas are updated regularly. That’s a deliberate choice by DiSanto and his co-found- ers to make it accessible to people who can’t afford a sub- scription. Subscriptions cost A$95 a year or A$14 a month. There is usually a seven-day free trial period for the premium version, but that has been extended to three months be- cause of the COVID-19 pan- demic. The app has several sec- tions, such as “lectio divina,” which is a meditative way of reading the Bible; a daily “exa- men”; traditional prayers like the rosary and stations of the cross; and “praylists.” There are several options for meditation, such as one that walks users through the words of the Our Father, prayer challenges and “min- ute mediations” for when someone just wants a quick check-in with God. To help people during the pandemic, the Hallow team also released a 15-session “stuck at home” playlist with sessions focused on the pow- er of prayer and finding peace in trusting God. They are also releasing a function within the app to al- low users to create friends and family groups, helping people stay connected to their com- munities of faith during this time. - CNS In brief WYD set for one year later Singer mourns POPE FRANCIS has agreed with a recommen- dation by the Dicastery for Laity, the Family and Life to postpone by one year the next gatherings of the World Meeting of Families andWorld Youth Day. “Due to the current health situation and its consequences on the movement and gather- ings of young people and families,” the WorldMeet- ing of Families in Rome will be pushed back un- til June 2022 and World Youth Day in Lisbon, Por- tugal, will be pushed back until August 2023, the Vatican announced on 20 April. - CNS PIANIST, CROONER and actor Harry Connick Jr mourned the coronavi- rus-related death of the priest who gave him his first job in New York City and who married Con- nick and his wife, actress Jill Goodacre. The priest, Mons Rich- ard Guastella, died 9 April after battling COVID-19 symptoms for about a week. Connick, who has de- buted his own YouTube showduring the pandem- ic, “Hunker Down With Harry,” used the opening sequence of the Easter episode of his show to pay tribute to the priest. When he was 18, broke, and looking for a piano-playing job, said Connick, the then-young priest gave hima job play- ing at Mass. - CNS ... most of the nongovernmental organ- isations and Caritas ... are all under the same situation -- we cannot access the population in these circumstances ... People are stranded more than ever.” Hani El-Mahdi, Catholic Relief Services Iraq