Full text of dubia cardinals’ letter asking Pope for an audience

Vatican City, Jun 29, 2020 / 05:30 am (CNA).- On the Solemnity of Saints Peter and Paul on Monday, Pope Francis urged Christians to pray for one another and for unity, saying “only prayer unlocks chains.”

“What would happen if we prayed more and complained less?” Pope Francis asked in his homily in St. Peter’s Basilica on June 29.

“The same thing that happened to Peter in prison: now as then, so many closed doors would be opened, so many chains that bind would be broken. … Let us ask for the grace to be able to pray for one another,” he said.

Pope Francis said that Peter and Paul were two very different people, yet God gave them the grace to be closely united in Christ.

“We celebrate together two very different individuals: Peter, a fisherman who spent his days amid boats and nets, and Paul, a learned Pharisee who taught in synagogues. When they went forth on mission, Peter spoke to Jews, and Paul to pagans. And when their paths crossed, they could argue heatedly, as Paul is unashamed to admit in one of his letters,” he said.

“The closeness that joined Peter and Paul did not come from natural inclinations, but from the Lord,” the pope said.

The Lord “did not command us to like one another, but to love one another,” he said. “He is the one who unites us, without making us all alike.”

St. Paul urged Christians to pray for everyone, Pope Francis said, “especially those who govern.” The pope underlined that this is “a task that the Lord has entrusted to us.”

“Are we carrying it out? Or do we simply talk … and do nothing?” he asked.

Pointing to the account of St. Peter’s imprisonment in the Acts of the Apostles, Pope Francis said that the early Church responded to persecution by joining in prayer. Chapter 12 of the Book of Acts describes Peter as imprisoned “by double chains” when an angel appeared to him to facilitate his escape.

“The text says that, ‘while Peter was kept in prison, the Church prayed fervently to God for him,’” Pope Francis said. “Unity is the fruit of prayer, for prayer allows the Holy Spirit to intervene, opening our hearts to hope, shortening distances and holding us together at times of difficulty.”

The pope said that none of the early Christians described in Acts “complained about Herod’s evil and his persecution” as they faced martyrdom.

“It is pointless, even tedious, for Christians to waste their time complaining about the world, about society, about everything that is not right. Complaints change nothing,” he said. “Those Christians did not cast blame; they prayed.”

“Only prayer unlocks chains, only prayer paves the way to unity,” the pope said.

Pope Francis said that both St. Peter and St. Paul were prophets who looked to the future.

He said: “Peter is the first to proclaim that Jesus is ‘the Christ, the Son of the living God’. Paul, who considers his impending death, said, ‘From now on there is laid up for me the crown of righteousness, which the Lord will award to me.”

“Peter and Paul preached Jesus, as men in love with God,” he said. “At his crucifixion, Peter did not think about himself but about his Lord, and, considering himself unworthy of dying like Jesus, asked to be crucified upside down. Before his beheading, Paul thought only of offering his life; he wrote that he wanted to be ‘poured out like a libation.’”

Pope Francis offered Mass at the Altar of the Chair, which is located behind the main altar that is built upon St. Peter’s tomb. The pope also prayed before the basilica’s bronze statue of St. Peter, which was adorned for the feast with a papal tiara and a red cope.

During this Mass, the pope blessed the “pallium,” the white woolen vestments to be given to each new metropolitan archbishop. These were made with wool woven by the Benedictine Sisters of St. Cecilia in Trastevere, and are adorned with six black silk crosses.

The tradition of the pallium dates back to at least the fifth century. Metropolitan archbishops wear the pallium as a symbol of authority and of unity with the Holy See. It serves as a sign of the metropolitan archbishop’s jurisdiction in his own diocese, as well as the other particular dioceses within his ecclesiastical province.

“Today we bless the pallia to be bestowed on the dean of the College of Cardinals and the metropolitan archbishops named in the last year. The pallium is a sign of the unity between the sheep and the Shepherd who, like Jesus, carries the sheep on his shoulders, so as never to be separated from it,” Pope Francis said.

The pope, who himself was also wearing a pallium during the Mass, bestowed a pallium on Cardinal Giovanni Battista Re, who was elected as the dean of the College of Cardinals in January.

The recently appointed metropolitan archbishops will receive their blessed pallia from their local apostolic nuncio.

After the Mass, Pope Francis prayed the Angelus from the window of the Vatican’s Apostolic Palace with a small crowd spread throughout St. Peter’s Square for the feast.

“It is a gift to find ourselves praying here, near the place where Peter died a martyr and is buried,” the pope said.

“Visiting the tombs of the Apostles will strengthen your faith and testimony.”

Pope Francis said that only in giving can one become great, and said that God desires to help each Christian grow in their capacity to give life.

“The most important thing in life is to make life a gift,” he said, saying this is true for parents as well as consecrated.

“Let us look to Saint Peter: he did not become a hero because he was freed from prison, but because he gave his life here. His gift transformed a place of execution into the beautiful place of hope in which we find ourselves,” he said.

“Today, before the Apostles, we can ask ourselves: ‘And I, how do I arrange my life? Do I think only of the needs of the moment or do I believe that my real need is Jesus, who makes me a gift? And how do I build life, on my capacities or on the living God?,’” he said. “May Our Lady, who entrusted everything to God, help us to put Him at the foundation of every day.”

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Synod on the Family meeting in the Synod Hall in Vatican City on Oct. 21, 2015. / L’Osservatore Romano.

Vatican City, Sep 7, 2021 / 03:30 am (CNA).
The Vatican released Tuesday a preparatory document and handbook for the 2023 synod on synodality… […]

Vatican City, Nov 6, 2017 / 11:45 am (CNA/EWTN News).- As the Church prepares to celebrate the first World Day of the Poor, an event announced by Pope Francis last year, one Vatican official said the event will be an opportunity to grow in mercy and charity, shaping attitudes toward the poor and needy.

The World Day of the Poor, which was announced in Pope Francis’ closing letter for the Jubilee of Mercy, is founded on “this whole notion of reciprocity, of sharing with each other of what each other has,” Msgr. Geno Sylva told CNA in an interview.

It’s also based on “our understanding that each of us is poor in some way, and that we need to empty ourselves of certain things so that God’s grace can fill us, God’s mercy can fill us,” he said, adding that “there’s so much we can learn from those who are poor as we try to provide.”

An English-language official of the Pontifical Council for the Promotion of the New Evangelization, Msgr. Sylva spoke ahead of the first-ever World Day of the Poor, which is titled “Love not in word, but in deed,” and is set to take place exactly one year after the close of the Jubilee of Mercy.

The event, Sylva said, is “so beautiful and so powerful as a perpetual fruit of the jubilee of mercy.”

World Day for the Poor “ties perfectly in with the New Evangelization,” he said, “because the New  Evangelization is able to engage people by presenting the mercy of God and seeing people in that mercy.”

Pope Francis has announced the World Day for the Poor as an annual observance on the Thirty-Third Sunday of Ordinary Time, a week before the Solemnity of Christ the King.

“This would be the worthiest way to prepare for the celebration of the Solemnity of our Lord Jesus Christ, King of the Universe, who identified with the little ones and the poor and who will judge us on our works of mercy,” he said, adding that the event would also “represent a genuine form of new evangelization which can renew the face of the Church as She perseveres in her perennial activity of pastoral conversion and witness to mercy.”

In Rome, the event will begin with a Nov. 18 prayer vigil and solemn vespers for all those who volunteer in organizations or associations that care for the poor.

The vigil, which will be presided over by Archbishop Rino Fisichella, President of the Council for the New Evangelization, will be held at the Roman Basilica of St. Lawrence Outside the Walls, a venue symbolically chosen in honor of the saint who once said that “the treasure of the Church are the poor.”

The following morning, local poor and needy people will be bused to the Vatican for Mass with Pope Francis in St. Peter’s Basilica, and will be offered a celebratory lunch afterward in different locations around Rome, including the Vatican’s Paul VI Hall.

In addition, the council has arranged for Italian doctors, nurses and specialists from varying practices to provide free medical care to the poor and needy attending the World Day of the Poor. They will set up tents and offer free services to attendees the week prior.

The council is expecting around 3,000 people to participate in the event. Since not everyone will be able to fit in the Vatican’s hall, other organizations and institutions have offered to host groups of the poor for lunch, such as the Pontifical North American College, which will serve around 200 people.

The meal, Syvla said, is meant to show attendees “that they are really special, and that we’re honored to be with them.”

Flowers will be placed on all the tables, multiple courses will be served, and a group of children will come into the Paul VI Hall to sing, while a band plays outside.

Those serving lunch will include a group of deacons from the Diocese of Rome, which Sylva said is a “very symbolic” gesture.

The World Day of the Poor will also be celebrated in dioceses and parishes “around the world,” Sylva said.

To this end, he said the council has developed a pastoral aid for parishes and schools, available on the council’s website, which has already been given to bishops’ conferences and nunciatures around the world.

Available in seven languages, the aid includes, among other things, prayer vigils, lectio divina prayers and the stories of Saints associated with the poor, “so it really will give priests and laypeople involved with leadership a concrete pastoral resource they can use with the people to whom they minister.”

Pointing to the logo for World Day of the Poor, Msgr. Sylva said the essence of the event can be summed up in the design, which portrays two people reaching toward each other – one from a doorway and the other from the outside – with a road in between.

<blockquote class=”twitter-tweet” data-lang=”en”><p lang=”en” dir=”ltr”>If you haven't seen it yet, here's the logo for the World Day of the Poor (Nov. 19) <a href=”https://twitter.com/hashtag/Catholic?src=hash&amp;ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw”>#Catholic</a> <a href=”https://t.co/ma1fWx99jo”>pic.twitter.com/ma1fWx99jo</a></p>&mdash; Michelle Bauman (@Michelle_Bauman) <a href=”https://twitter.com/Michelle_Bauman/status/927613427542925312?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw”>November 6, 2017</a></blockquote>
<script async src=”https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js” charset=”utf-8″></script>

“It’s so beautiful because you almost don’t know who’s the one asking for assistance and who’s the one giving assistance, but what we see is that this reciprocity, this shared essence in being in that the one on the outside realizes that to get in he’s got to hold that hand out, and the one on the inside realizes that he or she has to go out in order to encounter one another,” he said.

The image, he said, is a reminder that “everybody has something to share, everybody has something to give, and everybody is poor in some way.”

“So how do we hand-in-hand, heart-in-heart reach out to one another, and again to not only welcome each other into the doorway of the Church, into the heart of each believer, but also along that road in which we also accompany each other closer toward heaven?”

Pointing to Pope Francis’ message for the World Day of the Poor, published in June, Sylva noted that the Pope had said care for the poor shouldn’t be limited to occasional offerings that appease our consciences, but that charity must be a true encounter that shapes our daily lives.

As Christians, we are called to love everyone simply because “he or she has a need,” he said, explaining that the World Day of the Poor event “expands the notion of what ‘neighbor’ means.”

Christian charity, Sylva explained, is “not just for one day to put a coin in, but it’s an attitude towards the other that needs to change in each one of us, that we need to see each other as brothers and sisters, and that’s the real profundity of what our experience can be.”

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