Category Archives: Papal Address

Cloistered life, Papal Address

Entrustment to Mary

Leave a comment

On this feast of the Dedication of the Basilica of St. Mary Major which Pope Francis visited on the eve of his departure for World Youth Day in Rio de Janeiro, it seems appropriate to post the counsel he gave to seminarians, novices and those discerning a vocation in a gathering held on July 7, 2013:

I entrust you to the intercession of Mary Most Holy.

She is the Mother who helps us to take life decisions freely and without fear.

May she help you to bear witness to the joy of God’s consolation,

without being afraid of joy,

she will help you to conform yourselves to the logic of love of the Cross,

to grow in ever deeper union with the Lord in prayer.

Then your lives will be rich and fruitful! Amen.

With cloistered Nuns in Rio de Janeiro

News, Papal Address

Go and Make Disciples

Leave a comment

Jesus did not say: “if you would like to, if you have the time,” but: “Go and make disciples of all nations.” Sharing the experience of faith, bearing witness to the faith, proclaiming the Gospel: this is a command that the Lord entrusts to the whole Church, and that includes you; but it is a command that is born not from a desire for domination or power but from the force of love, from the fact that Jesus first came into our midst and gave us, not a part of Himself, but the whole of Himself, He gave His life in order to save us and to show us the love and mercy of God.

 Krakow 2016

 

 

Papal Address

The Source of Mission

Leave a comment

On Sunday, July 7, Pope Francis celebrated Mass before 6000 seminarians and novices who have been on a 4-day pilgrimage to the tomb of St. Peter, reflecting on their call from God and their vocation.

The Holy Father described the three reference points to the missionary call, part of his reflection on the Sunday readings.

First: the joy of consolation. “If we first experience the joy of being consoled by Him, of being loved by Him, then we can bring that joy to others. This is important if our mission is to be fruitful: to feel God’s consolation and to pass it on to others!”

Second: the Cross of Christ. “The fruitfulness of the Gospel proclamation is measured neither by success nor by failure according to the criteria of human evaluation, but by becoming conformed to the logic of the Cross of Jesus, which is the logic of stepping outside oneself and spending oneself, the logic of love. It is the Cross – the Cross that is always present with Christ – which guarantees the fruitfulness of our mission.”

Third: Prayer. “If the Apostle is born of prayer, he finds in prayer the light and strength for his action. Our mission ceases to bear fruit, indeed, it is extinguished the moment the link with its source, with the Lord, is interrupted.”

The spread of the Gospel is not guaranteed either by the number of persons, or by the prestige of the institution, or by the quantity of available resources. What counts is to be permeated by the love of Christ, to let oneself be led by the Holy Spirit and to graft one’s own life onto the tree of life, which is the Lord’s Cross.

To see the complete text, visit the Vatican News website.

News, Papal Address

The Winds of the Holy Spirit

Leave a comment

The older theologians used to say that the soul is a kind of sailboat, the Holy Spirit is the wind which fills its sails

and drives it forward,and the gusts of wind are the gifts of the Spirit.

Lacking His impulse and His grace, we do not go forward.

The Holy Spirit draws us into the mystery of the living God

and saves us from the threat of a Church which is gnostic and self-referential, closed in on herself;

He impels us to open the doors and go forth to proclaim and bear witness to the good news of the Gospel,

to communicate the joy of faith, the encounter with Christ. The Holy Spirit is the soul of mission.

Pope Francis

Pentecost Sunday

News, Papal Address

Pope Francis: Be Mothers, not “Spinsters”!

Leave a comment

Pope Francis continues to puncture the vast blog-o-sphere with his direct, challenging and fresh way of expressing Church truths. In an address earlier today to the plenary assembly of the International Union of Superiors General (UISG), the Holy Father spoke to the sisters about obedience, poverty, and chastity. His reflections are not just for religious but for all people.

Poverty: “Is also expressed in a soberness and joy of the essential, to put us on guard against the material idols that obscure the true meaning of life. …. Theoretical poverty doesn’t do anything. Poverty is learned by touching the flesh of the poor Christ in the humble, the poor, the sick, and in children.”

Chastity: “Please, [make it] a ‘fertile’ chastity, which generates spiritual children in the Church. The consecrated are mothers: they must be mothers and not ‘spinsters’! Forgive me if I talk like this but this maternity of consecrated life, this fruitfulness is important! May this joy of spiritual fruitfulness animate your existence. Be mothers, like the images of the Mother Mary and the Mother Church. You cannot understand Mary without her motherhood; you cannot understand the Church without her motherhood, and you are icons of Mary and of the Church.”

Obedience: “It isn’t possible that a consecrated woman or man might ‘feel’ themselves not to be with the Church. A ‘feeling’ with the Church that has generated us in Baptism; a ‘feeling’ with the Church that finds its filial expression in fidelity to the Magisterium, in communion with the Bishops and the Successor of Peter, the Bishop of Rome, a visible sign of that unity….It is an absurd dichotomy to think of living with Jesus but without the Church, of following Jesus outside of the Church, of loving Jesus without loving the Church.”

This is a call to all Christian people—to physically be with the poor, to actively evangelize and beget spiritual children, to be united in all things with the Rock of Peter.

Papal Address, Saints

Seen Through the Eyes of Mercy

Leave a comment

Pope Francis has chosen to retain his episcopal motto, Miserando atque eligendo, for his Papal coat-of-arms. In English it means: Because He saw him through the eyes of mercy and chose him. Taken from a homily by the Venerable Bede, the phrase comes from the Gospel of Matthew (Mt 9:9-13) who wrote about Jesus’ calling of Matthew, the tax collector. Jesus tells him, “Follow me.”

St. Matthew has a special significance for Pope Francis for it was on the Feast of Saint Matthew in 1953 that the seventeen-year-old Jorge Bergoglio was “touched by the mercy of God and felt the call to religious life in the footsteps of Saint Ignatius of Loyola,” as reported by Vatican Radio.

Tomb of the Venerable Bede

The Venerable Bede (d. 735) wrote the classic treatise: “Ecclesiastical History of the English People” which outlines the history of Christianity in Britain from its beginnings up to his present time. Long after his death, he was proclaimed a Doctor of the Church by Pope Leo XIII in 1899. I had the good fortune of stumbling across the Ven. Bede’s grave in northern England while on vacation. It is located in beautiful Durham Cathedral, a Romanesque Church which was once Catholic. On the Cathedral website it says : It is the only cathedral in England to retain almost all of its Norman craftsmanship, and one of few to preserve the unity and integrity of its original design. The Cathedral was built as a place of worship, specifically to house the shrine of the North’s best-loved saint, Cuthbert, in whose honour pilgrims came to Durham from all over England. It was also the home of a Benedictine monastic community. In fact, the Ven. Bede was a Benedictine monk.

The Venerable Bede said, “(Jesus) saw the tax collector and, because He saw him through the eyes of mercy and chose him, He said to him, ‘Follow me.’ This following meant imitating the pattern of His life – not just walking after Him…This conversion of one tax collector gave many men, those from his own profession and other sinners, an example of repentance and pardon….Matthew drew after him a whole crowd of sinners along the same road to salvation.”

Liturgical Year, Papal Address

A Visual Look at Holy Saturday

Leave a comment

Before Pope Benedict XVI’s resignation, he agreed to allow a viewing of the Shroud of Turin to be broadcast live across the world on RAI, the state television channel, on March 30 in commemoration of Holy Saturday for the Year of Faith.

Now, I read today, Pope Francis has recorded a voice-over introduction for the broadcast. There is also an app called “Shroud 2.0” which enables people to explore the holy relic in detail on their smart phones and tablets.

Even more interesting is the release of a new book  called The Mystery of the Shroud by Giulio Fanti, a professor of mechanical and thermal measurement at Padua University, and Saverio Gaeta, a journalist. According to their tests, the shroud dates from between the years 300 BC and 400 AD.

Holy Saturday is a day of anticipation. We ponder with gratitude the sacrifice of Our Lord who bore our sins on the Cross to redeem us from sin and death. And we await with joy and hope the Resurrection of our Lord on Easter Sunday. Forever will this day be linked in my mind to the image of the Shroud of Turin.

“The shroud, of course, reminds us of the passion, death and burial of the Lord, and then to Holy Friday, the day in which the Church remembers and celebrates the passion of Christ,” reflected Archbishop Cesare Nosiglia of Turin. “Holy Saturday is a day of silent prayer and meditation on the Lord’s death, but it is also a day of joyful waiting of the light of the Resurrection that will explode in the great celebration of the Easter vigil.” The shroud, he noted, “is a witness of this double mystery: It brings us back to the darkness of the tomb, but it also opens the way to receive the light that from it will emerge, in the event of the Resurrection.”

Pope Benedict gave a beautiful homily about Holy Saturday while on a visit to the Shroud in 2010. Here is an excerpt:

Holy Saturday is a “no man’s land” between the death and the Resurrection, but this “no man’s land” was entered by One, the Only One, who passed through it with the signs of His Passion for man’s sake: Passio Christi. Passio hominis (the Passion of Christ, the suffering of man).

….In this “time-beyond-time,” Jesus Christ “descended to the dead”. What do these words mean? They mean that God, having made Himself man, reached the point of entering man’s most extreme and absolute solitude, where not a ray of love enters, where total abandonment reigns without any word of comfort: “hell.”

Jesus Christ, by remaining in death, passed beyond the door of this ultimate solitude to lead us too to cross it with Him. We have all, at some point, felt the frightening sensation of abandonment, and that is what we fear most about death, just as when we were children we were afraid to be alone in the dark and could only be reassured by the presence of a person who loved us. Well, this is exactly what happened on Holy Saturday: the voice of God resounded in the realm of death. The unimaginable occurred: namely, Love penetrated “hell.” Even in the extreme darkness of the most absolute human loneliness we may hear a voice that calls us and find a hand that takes ours and leads us out.

Human beings live because they are loved and can love; and if love even penetrated the realm of death, then life also even reached there. In the hour of supreme solitude we shall never be alone: Passio Christi. Passio hominis.