Page 4, 1st February 2008

1st February 2008

Page 4

Page 4, 1st February 2008 — Sect excommunicated for 'lies' about the Pope
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Locations: Madjugorje, Naju, Surrey, Kwangju

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Sect excommunicated for 'lies' about the Pope

BY SIMON CALDWELL
AN ARCHBISHOP has excommunicated a mystical seer who allegedly encourages her followers to drink her urine to cure their illnesses.
Julia Youn has constructed a huge sect around herself since she began to claim that she had seen a statue of the Virgin Mary weeping blood at her home in Naju, South Korea.
Since the first apparition in 1985, the housewife also claims to have developed the stigmata and says she has bled from the head as if she was wearing a crown of thorns.
She often enters into ecstatic raptures during which she receives divine messages from Jesus and Mary urging the world to repent of the "murder" of abortion, and claims to have witnessed a number of "Eucharistic miracles".
But Archbishop Andreas Choi Chang-mou of Kwangju has declared Mrs Youn, 60, a fraud. He issued a decree excommunicating Mrs Youn and her sect and strictly forbidding all Catholics from taking part in any of their religious rituals, threatening automatic excommunication if they do.
The decree comes just a fortnight after neighbouring Archbishop John Choi Young-soo of Daegu warned worshippers to avoid the sect.
He issued a pastoral letter in which he said the cult "is not Catholic but defames the Catholic Church". He wrote that the followers "collect much money and do supersti tious activities like using or drinking Youn's urine for a cure".
Archbishop Choi Changmou said that he had no choice but to expel Mrs Youn from the Church after she ignored a final warning to stop her claims two years ago.
The last straw was when Youn and her followers declared that her bizarre claims had the approval of Pope Benedict XVI. "They speak as if the Holy Father approves them," Archbishop Choi Chang-mou said. "They libel me, the Korean bishops and the Korean Church through their publications and the internet."
These actions prove "Julia Youn and her followers have no will to reconcile with the Catholic Church", he said.
The archbishop said he wanted to help to prevent Catholics from "straying into a groundless and blind faith".
The sect which calls itself Mary's Ark of Salvation — is based at "Blessed Mother's Mountain" in Naju.
The archdiocese issued directives in 1998, 2003 and 2005 banning Catholics from visiting the site, but has failed to stem the flow of pilgrims.
Mrs Youn's followers even include a local priest who was 'subsequently suspended by the archbishop.
Fr John Chrysostomus Kim Kye-hong, chancellor of Kwangju archdiocese, said that the sect was on the verge of becoming an international phenomenon. 'They are reach ing beyond our archdiocese's boundary, and making this the problem of the whole Church," he said. "That is the main reason for issuing the decree."
Mrs Youn's followers responded to the excommunication by denouncing it as the "worst measure" and a "heretical error".
Peter Kim Jae-seok, a spokesman for the sect, told UCA News agency that the decrees were fundamentally ineffective and the "Kwangju archbishop commits a crime by spreading such errors, abusing his power and threatening the faithful with such illegal punishment".
Although the excommunications were not ordered by the Pope they come as part of wider crackdown by the Catholic Church on a boom in the numbers of claims of socalled "private revelations".
Last year the Vatican denounced as "hysterical" the claims of Patricia de Menezes, who says that the Virgin Mary has been visiting her in her garden in Surbiton, Surrey, for more than 20 years.
It also announced the excommunication of members of the Army of Maly, a sect in Canada which follows MariePaule Giguere, a woman who claims to be the reincarnation of the Virgin Mary.
At present, the Vatican is investigating claims that the Virgin Mary has appeared to six seers in Madjugorje, Bosnia Herzegovina, more than 30,000 times since the early 1980s.




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