Glory to God!
Above all else, this is what Christmas bids us to do: give glory to God, for he is good, he is faithful, he is merciful. Today I voice my hope that everyone will come to know the true face of God, the Father who has given us Jesus. My hope is that everyone will feel God’s closeness, live in his presence, love him and adore him.
May each of us give glory to God above all by our lives, by lives spent for love of him and of all our brothers and sisters.
Pope Francis addressed anti-Christian persecution today, on the day after attacks on two Christian churches in Baghdad left at least 38 dead. He called for a moment of silence in honor of victims of such violence and said it must be “denounced and eliminated.”
His remarks came in an Angelus address on the feast of St. Stephen, the day after Christmas, and they marked the latest reference to anti-Christian persecution in what has become an emerging theme for Francis.
In the abstract, it’s tempting to ask what any pope can do to affect anti-Christian persecution beyond issuing a cri de coeur. Both John Paul II and Benedict XVI raised the issue, and their rhetoric didn’t seem to put a dent in a scourge that claims somewhere between 9,000 and 100,000 lives every year, depending on which set of estimates one chooses to trust, working out to somewhere between 1 and 11 new martyrs every hour.
The shepherds were the first to see this “tent”, to receive the news of Jesus’ birth. They were the first because they were among the last, the outcast. And they were the first because they were awake, keeping watch in the night, guarding their flocks. Together with them, let us pause before the Child, let us pause in silence. Together with them, let us thank the Lord for having given Jesus to us, and with them let us raise from the depths of our hearts the praises of his fidelity: We bless you, Lord God most high, who lowered yourself for our sake. You are immense, and you made yourself small; you are rich and you made yourself poor; you are all-powerful and you made yourself vulnerable.
Also overlooked amidst the fallout from Evangelii Gaudium was a statement by Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI, which defended not only Francis’s remarks in EG, but also their specific context, as as well as the greater role of the Church vis-Ã -vis economics and morality….
— The trafficking of human beings is a crime against humanity and must be stopped, Pope Francis told diplomats.
“It’s a disgrace” that people are treated “as objects, deceived, raped, often sold many times for different purposes and, in the end, killed or, in any case, physically and mentally damaged, ending up thrown away and abandoned,” he said.
The pope’s comments came Dec. 12 in a speech to 17 new ambassadors to the Vatican who were presenting their letters of credential to the pope. Among the 17 were ambassadors representing the state of Palestine, Kuwait, Sierra Leone and Iceland.
Pope Francis said the church must pay attention to the ‘sense of the faithful’ (‘sensus fidelium’) when exercising its teaching authority, but never confuse that sense with popular opinion on matters of faith.
The pope made his comments Dec. 6, in an address to members of the International Theological Commission, a Vatican advisory body.
At a December 2 program at Georgetown University, two prominent Washington columnists, E.J. Dionne and Michael Gerson, assess Pope Francis’s call for the Catholic Church not only to make caring for the poor a higher priority but also to work for a more just economic system….
Now it’s certain. This will be a populist papacy. Denunciations of unfettered free market economics in Evangelii Gaudium””“an economy of exclusion and inequality”””attracted a great deal of attention in the secular press. But for the most part commentators ignore the fact that Francis’ populism has a very strong ecclesial dimension as well.
He calls for a renewed commitment to evangelization. It’s something we all can do. This does not require a capacity for acute theological analysis or familiarity with subtle apologetic arguments. Instead, what’s needed is a lively faith.
He exhibits a similar ecclesiastical populism when it comes to clergy. In a long section, perhaps the longest in the document, he details the many things that go into the preparation and delivery of good homilies. None require specialized expertise. All grow out of basic Christian virtues. The everyday priest can make an outsized difference””if he gives himself to Christ and his people.
Where things get really interesting is when Pope Francis brings up the financial crisis. “One cause of this situation,” he writes, “is found in our relationship with money, since we calmly accept its dominion over ourselves and our societies. The current financial crisis can make us overlook the fact that it originated in a profound human crisis: the denial of the primacy of the human person!”
It’s nothing new to say the financial crisis came from a lack of regulation. That’s a fairly popular analysis. But what Pope Francis is saying is more Polanyan, hearkening back to the idea that the tipping point has to do with the relationship between the market and society/humanity, and which is subordinate to the other. Just as Polanyi argued that the extension of the market economy across the globe (through the gold standard) was the root cause of World War I (and you’ll have to go back to the original book for that, but it’s a beautifully, hilariously gutsy, Guns, Germs, and Steel kind of argument), Francis is arguing that failing to keep humanity at the center of our economic activity was the root cause of the financial crisis.
…Pope Francis devotes much of his exhortation to the shortcomings of the church itself. He laments its “excessive centralization” in the Vatican, which he finds a hindrance to the church’s “missionary outreach.” He complains about members of religious orders who show an “inordinate concern for their personal freedom and relaxation,” and about priests “obsessed with protecting their free time.”
The pope criticizes those who show an “ostentatious preoccupation with the liturgy, doctrine and the church’s prestige, but without any concern that the Gospel have a real impact on God’s faithful people and the concrete needs of the present time.” He upbraids Catholics with a “business mentality, caught up with management, statistics, plans and evaluations, whose principal beneficiary is not God’s people but the church as an institution.” And he regrets that women do not yet have a sufficient role in decision-making within the church.
Pope Francis also deplores divisiveness within the ranks, writing: “It always pains me greatly to discover how some Christian communities, and even consecrated persons, can tolerate different forms of enmity, division, calumny, defamation, vendetta, jealousy and the desire to impose certain ideas at all costs, and even persecutions which appear as veritable witch hunts. Whom are we going to evangelize if this is the way we act?”
Pope Francis called for renewal of the Roman Catholic Church and attacked unfettered capitalism as “a new tyranny”, urging global leaders to fight poverty and growing inequality in the first major work he has authored alone as pontiff.
The 84-page document, known as an apostolic exhortation, amounted to an official platform for his papacy, building on views he has aired in sermons and remarks since he became the first non-European pontiff in 1,300 years in March.
In it, Francis went further than previous comments criticizing the global economic system, attacking the “idolatry of money” and beseeching politicians to guarantee all citizens “dignified work, education and healthcare”.
2. Besides being the centre of creation, Christ is the centre of the people of God. We see this in the first reading which describes the time when the tribes of Israel came to look for David and anointed him king of Israel before the Lord (cf. 2 Sam 5:1-3). In searching for an ideal king, the people were seeking God himself: a God who would be close to them, who would accompany them on their journey, who would be a brother to them.
Christ, the descendant of King David, is the “brother” around whom God’s people come together. It is he who cares for his people, for all of us, even at the price of his life. In him we are all one; united with him, we share a single journey, a single destiny.
In the Vatican today, a surreal scene: {the Vimeo link shows]… Pope Francis, the 266th Bishop of Rome, holding what the church believes are the bone fragments of St. Peter, the apostle and the first Bishop of Rome.
Pope Francis cradled the relics during a mass at St. Peter’s Square, which marked the end of the global church’s Year of Faith. It was also the first time the Catholic Church has displayed the relics in public.
When Italian journalist Gianni Valente traveled to Argentina to cover the country’s economic collapse in 2002 for a Roman Catholic magazine, he came away not with just a story in his notebook but with the seeds of a friendship with a man who struck him as a singular priest ”“ a man with a broad-spectrum empathy, whom the journalist continues to this day to call “my priest.”
Mr. Valente says that Jorge Mario Bergoglio ”“ then-cardinal of Argentina ”“ seemed particularly close to the people; he didn’t just speak in political and social terms about the crisis that wiped out the savings of his nation’s middle class, but he actually spoke with a deep sense of humanity that set him apart from other church leaders of the time. “He talked about the suffering of parents, and how they would cry, but only at night so that their children wouldn’t see,” he recalls.
Cardinal Bergoglio’s ability to see “the heart of each individual,” says Valente, became clear in his own life, as a friendship formed between the two men, over the phone and through letters.
“Speaking of Pope Francis, obviously as an observant Catholic, I believe the pope is infallible. But he’s also wrong about a lot of things.”
“By the way, is the pope here? Pope Francis, are you here? Because if you were we probably wouldn’t know because His Humbleness would be out washing the feet of the coat check guy or something. We get it, you’re modest.”
“If Pope Francis were throwing tonight’s party we wouldn’t be in white tie at the Waldorf. We’d be in sweat pants crammed into a corner booth at the IHOP.”
Archbishop Longley, wanting to sound positive, says that he could “imagine and foresee one of the fruits of our ecumenical engagement as moving towards a deeper understanding of communion and a deeper sharing between our churches ”¦ which perhaps would lead to a reconsideration of some of the circumstances.” That’s all very well-meaning: but since the chances of prelate-speak of this kind being misunderstood by the secular press are about 100 per cent, it really would have been better not to have said it….Archbishop Longley’s fantastical notion that there has been a “deeper theological understanding of one another’s Churches”, presumably because of the work of ARCIC, requires a little more attention. What theological understanding would that be? The trouble with ARCIC always was (as a former Catholic member of it once explained to me) that on the Catholic side of the table you have a body of men who represent a more or less coherent view, being members of a Church which has established means of knowing and declaring what it believes. On the Anglican side of the table you have a body of men the divisions between whom are just fundamental as, and sometimes a lot more fundamental than, those between any one of them and the Catholic representatives they face: they all represent only themselves.
Read it all from William Oddie in the Catholic Herald (emphasis his).
Pope Francis has called an Extraordinary General Assembly of the Synod of Bishops on the theme “The Pastoral Challenges of the Family in the Context of Evangelization”, the Vatican has announced.
The synod, which will take place at the Vatican 5-19 October, 2014, is a means through which the Holy Father “wishes to continue the reflection and journey of the whole Church, with the participation of leaders of the Episcopate from every corner of the world,” said Vatican spokesman Fr. Federico Lombardi.
“It is important that the Church move forward together as a community, in reflection and prayer, and decide on common pastoral orientations dealing with the most important aspects of our life together – particularly on the family – under the guidance of the Pope and the bishops,” he continued. “The convening of this Extraordinary Synod is a clear indication of this direction.”
MARK SHIELDS: I cannot think of a single public figure””secular, religious, or any other kind””who has inspired, provoked the level of civil discourse and discussion and animated exchanges that this man has.
[BOB] ABERNETHY: But could all the adulation of Francis be too much?
[JOHN] CARR: One of my more cynical friends, someone skeptical about all this, said “this is just a big Vatican PR campaign.” And I said, “Name the last successful Vatican PR campaign.”
ABERNETHY: Alongside Francis’s popularity, Brooks saw a danger. He called it “mushiness.”
[DAVID] BROOKS: Francis’s core message is the person of Francis. The risk therein, it seems to me, is the Church is not only a feel-good institution about a humble guy. It is a doctrine and a creed, and it is a specific set of beliefs and convictions, and they are beliefs that are reasonably tough-minded, and if you lose contact with the doctrine, the stuff that actually makes outsiders a little uncomfortable, with a charming guy who washes people’s feet, then you are losing something elemental to the Church.
Pope Francis’ highly publicized recent interview with an Italian Jesuit magazine has ushered in a new era for the Roman Catholic Church – an era of record levels of misinterpretation of the pontiff’s words, both by the liberal media and by conservative Catholics who have been grousing about Francis ever since he washed the feet of a Muslim girl during Holy Week….
In fact, Francis, as he made clear in his interview, isn’t likely to deviate from any aspect of traditional Catholic teaching. He reiterated that God doesn’t “condemn and reject” anyone, including gays, but loves them, is cognizant of the pain they feel and yearns for them to repent of their sins and confess them. The very day after the interview was published, Francis, in an audience with Catholic gynecologists, vociferously denounced abortion as a symptom of today’s “throwaway culture.”
But that is in some ways beside the point. The Catholic Church really is changing, although not exactly in the fashion liberals would like. The church is changing because the world itself is changing. The hegemony of the West, technologically advanced but in demographic, economic, cultural and religious decline, may well be over.
Pope Francis cranked up his charm offensive on the world outside the Vatican on Tuesday, saying in the second widely shared media interview in two weeks that each person “must choose to follow the good and fight evil as he conceives them” and calling efforts to convert people to Christianity “solemn nonsense….”
Some conservative Catholics were also taken aback by the interview.
“My e-mail is filled with notes from people who need to be talked off the ledge,” wrote the Rev. John Zuhlsdorf, author of one of the more popular blogs for Catholic conservatives.
Pope Francis told me: “The most serious of the evils that afflict the world these days are youth unemployment and the loneliness of the old. The old need care and companionship; the young need work and hope but have neither one nor the other, and the problem is they don’t even look for them any more. They have been crushed by the present. You tell me: can you live crushed under the weight of the present? Without a memory of the past and without the desire to look ahead to the future by building something, a future, a family? Can you go on like this? This, to me, is the most urgent problem that the Church is facing.”
Three days after an attack on an Anglican church in Peshawar, Pakistan, left at least 85 people dead, Pope Francis today urged Christians to an examination of conscience about their response to such acts of anti-Christian persecution.
“So many Christians in the world are suffering,” the pope said during his general audience this morning in St. Peter’s Square. “Am I indifferent to that, or does it affect me like it’s a member of the family?”
“Does it touch my heart, or doesn’t it really affect me, [to know that] so many brothers and sisters in the family are giving their lives for Jesus Christ?”
It has become an all too familiar narrative: Muslim militants in some majority Islamic country going out of their way to kill and intimidate the local Christian populace.
What happened this past Sunday in Pakistan, however, has shocked even the most jaded and cynical observers.
Peshawar’s All Saints Church is an Anglican parish that has existed since 1893. Around noon, after services this past Sunday, two suicide bombers, each wearing 13 pounds of explosives, forced their way past two police guards and detonated their devices. At least 83 people have died from the blast, including 34 women and seven children, with more than 175 people injured. The attack decimated entire families.
In a wide-ranging interview for 16 Jesuit publications around the world, including America magazine in the United States, Pope Francis once again has waded into hot-button questions such as homosexuality, abortion and the role of women, not breaking with traditional doctrine but trying to shift the church’s emphasis from condemnation to mercy.
“The church sometimes has locked itself up in small things, in small-minded rules,” Francis says. “Ministers of the church must be ministers of mercy above all.”
The pope also warns against a “restorationist” mentality in Catholicism and insists that “thinking with the church” cannot mean solely thinking with the hierarchy. Francis also pointedly says, “I have never been a right-winger.”
In remarkably blunt language, Francis sought to set a new tone for the church, saying it should be a “home for all” and not a “small chapel” focused on doctrine, orthodoxy and a limited agenda of moral teachings.
“It is not necessary to talk about these issues all the time,” the pope told the Rev. Antonio Spadaro, a fellow Jesuit and editor in chief of La Civiltà Cattolica, the Italian Jesuit journal whose content is routinely approved by the Vatican. “The dogmatic and moral teachings of the church are not all equivalent. The church’s pastoral ministry cannot be obsessed with the transmission of a disjointed multitude of doctrines to be imposed insistently.
“We have to find a new balance,” the pope continued, “otherwise even the moral edifice of the church is likely to fall like a house of cards, losing the freshness and fragrance of the Gospel.”
Pope Francis has warned that the Catholic Church’s focus on abortion, contraception and gay marriage risked overshadowing its pastoral mission and threatened to bring down the church “like a house of cards.”
The Pope’s comments, made as part of a blunt, wide-ranging interview with the Italian Jesuit journal Civilta’ Cattolica, didn’t mark a break with church teaching. But they set out a vision of a church that is more welcoming and less preoccupied with strict doctrine.
In doing so, Pope Francis appeared to put more distance between himself and his two predecessors, Pope Benedict XVI and Pope John Paul II, who strongly supported traditional church dogma. Indeed, the interview comes in the wake of grumblings from some bishops that the new pope has failed to issue strong pronouncements on divisive issues.
Editor’s Note: This interview with Pope Francis took place over the course of three meetings during August 2013 in Rome. The interview was conducted in person by Antonio Spadaro, S.J., editor in chief of La Civiltà Cattolica, the Italian Jesuit journal. Father Spadaro conducted the interview on behalf of La Civiltà Cattolica, America and several other major Jesuit journals around the world. The editorial teams at each of the journals prepared questions and sent them to Father Spadaro, who then consolidated and organized them. The interview was conducted in Italian. After the Italian text was officially approved, America commissioned a team of five independent experts to translate it into English. America is solely responsible for the accuracy of this translation…..
This 47thSocial Week is placed in this perspective, with the preparatory document that preceded it. It intends to offer a testimony and to propose a reflection, a discernment, free of prejudices, as open as possible, attentive to the human and social sciences. As Church we offer first of all a conception of the family which is that of the Book of Genesis, of the unity in difference between man and woman, and of fecundity. In this reality, moreover, we recognize a good for all, the first natural society, as accepted also in the Constitution of the Italian Republic. In fine, we wish to reaffirm that the family, understood thus, remains the first and principal subject builder of the society and of an economy to the measure of man, and as such merits to be actively supported. The consequences ”“ positive and negative –, of the choices of a cultural character, first of all, and political regarding the family touch the different realms of the life of a society and a country: from the demographic problem ”“ which is serious for the whole European continent and, in particular, for Italy, to the other questions regarding work and the economy in general, to the upbringing of children, to those that concern the anthropological view itself which is at the base of our civilization (cf. Benedict XVI, encyclical Caritas in veritate, 44).
These reflections do not just interest believers but all persons of good will, all those who have at heart the common good of the country, precisely as happens with the problems of environmental ecology, which can help very much to understand those of “human ecology” (cf. Id, Address to the Bundestag, Berlin, September 22, 2011). The family is the privileged school of generosity, of sharing, of responsibility; school that educates to overcome a certain individualistic mentality that has gained ground in our societies. To support and promote the family, valuing its fundamental and central role, is to work needed for a just and solidaristic development.
Leading a crowd in prayer for peace in Syria, Pope Francis said that war is ultimately caused by selfishness, which can be overcome only though expressions of fraternity and never with violence.
“Leave behind the self-interest that hardens your heart, overcome the indifference that makes your heart insensitive towards others, conquer your deadly reasoning, and open yourself to dialogue and reconciliation,” the pope said Sept. 7 before an estimated 100,000 people in St. Peter’s Square.
The pope had called the prayer vigil less than a week earlier, as the central event of a worldwide day of fasting and prayer for peace in Syria, the Middle East and the world.
he Vatican is ramping up its opposition to threatened military strikes against Syria as it draws attention to Pope Francis’ plans to host a day of fasting and prayer for peace this weekend.
The Vatican has invited all ambassadors accredited to the Holy See to attend a briefing Thursday on the pope’s agenda for the four-hour vigil Saturday night in St. Peter’s Square, and bishops’ conferences from around the world have announced plans to host local versions of the vigil as well.
Even the Vatican’s often dysfunctional bureaucracy seems to be on message with the initiative, Francis’ first major foray into international diplomacy since being elected in March.