Honduran auxiliary bishop accused of sexual misconduct resigns

Washington, D.C. Newsroom, Mar 5, 2023 / 08:20 am (CNA).

During his Sunday morning Angelus address, Pope Francis urged the faithful to reflect on the miracle of the Transfiguration and to see the same beauty in the faces of the people we interact with every day. 

In the March 5 address, the pope discussed the “beauty” shown in Sunday’s Gospel reading of Matthew 17:1-9. In this passage, Peter and James and his brother John witness Christ “transfigured before them” with his face shining “like the sun” and his clothes “dazzling white” as he conversed with Moses and Elijah on the top of a mountain. 

Pope Francis said that we must “see the same beauty on the faces of the people who walk beside us every day,” such as family, friends, and colleagues. 

“How many luminous faces, how many smiles, how many wrinkles, how many tears and scars reveal love around us,” the pope said.

“Let us learn to recognize them and to fill our hearts with them. And then let us set out in order to bring the light we have received to others as well, through concrete acts of love diving into our daily occupations more generously, loving, serving, and forgiving with greater earnestness and willingness,” the Holy Father said. “The contemplation of God’s wonders, the contemplation of God’s face, of the Lord’s face, must move us to the service of others.”

Reflecting on beauty the apostles respond to in the Gospel account, the pope asked, “Of what does this beauty consist? What do the disciples see? A special effect? No, that is not it.

“They see the light of God’s holiness shining on the face and on the clothing of Jesus, the perfect image of the Father,” the pope continued.

“God’s majesty, God’s beauty is revealed. But God is Love. Therefore, the disciples had been beholding with their eyes the beauty and splendor of divine Love incarnate in Christ. They had a foretaste of paradise. What a surprise for the disciples!” he said. “They had the face of Love before their very eyes for so long without ever being aware of how beautiful it was! Only now do they realize it with such joy, with immense joy.”

Pope Francis warned against reducing the miracle to simply a “magical moment,” which he said would be “false, artificial, something that would dissolve into the fog of passing sentiment.” He said, rather, this demonstrates something deeper.

“Christ is the light that orients our journey like the pillar of fire for the people in the wilderness,” the pontiff explained. “Jesus’ beauty does not alienate his disciples from the reality of life, but gives them the strength to follow him all the way to Jerusalem, all the way to the cross. Christ’s beauty is not alienating. It always brings you forward. It does not make you hide. Go forward!”

The Gospel reading also “traces a path for us,” according to Pope Francis. He explained how the passage “teaches us how important it is to remain with Jesus even when it is not easy to understand everything he says and does for us.” By staying with Christ, he said “we learn to recognize on his face the luminous beauty of love he gives us, even when it bears the marks of the cross.”

Near the end of his address, Pope Francis told people to ask themselves whether they “recognize the light of God’s love in our lives” and whether they “recognize it with joy and gratitude on the faces of the people who love us.” 

“Do we look around us for the signs of this light that fills our hearts and open them to love and service?” the pope told people to ask themselves. “Or do we prefer the straw fires of idols that alienate us and close us in on ourselves? The great light of the Lord and the false, artificial light of idols. Which do I prefer?”

Following his address, Pope Francis said he is continuing to pray for the victims of a Feb. 28 train accident in Greece, many of whom are young students. He said he is also praying for the victims of a Feb. 26 shipwreck near Crotone, Italy. The pope also welcomed pilgrims and asked people to continue praying for him.

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Vatican City, Oct 26, 2019 / 03:45 pm (CNA).- The Amazon synod final document, published Saturday, laid out the need to define “ecological sins” while calling the Church to walk new paths of “integral conversion.”

“We propose to define ecological sins of commission or omission against God, one’s neighbor, the community and the environment,” paragraph 82 of the final document states. “They are sins against future generations and are manifest in acts and habits of pollution and destruction of the harmony of the environment.”

“No believer, no Catholic can live their life of faith without listening to the voice of the earth,” Bishop David Martínez de Aguirre Guinea, apostolic vicar of Puerto Maldonado, Peru explained at a press conference to present the final document Oct. 26.

“If we are going to face the problem, then we have to change,” Cardinal Michael Czerny, special secretary for the synod, added.

Czerny, who also serves as under-secretary of the Migrants and Refugees Section of the Dicastery for Promoting Integral Human Development, warned that the “good news” will not necessarily reach people in the Amazon “if we continue doing what we have been doing.”

The final document for the Synod of Bishops on the Pan-Amazon region calls for a new four-fold expression of “integral conversion” for the Church in the Amazon: pastoral, cultural, synodal, and ecological. These are framed in terms of “new paths of conversion” in the chapter titles for each of the subjects.

“New paths” are a way of saying “change,” Czerny said. “Without conversions, we are repeating what we have done before …but there is no real change.”

“We have brought our tradition into play so that we can find a way forward,” he said. For the pope, the most important necessary change is “pastoral change.”

The 33-page document, was approved article by article by a two-thirds majority vote on Oct. 26. It is the result of a three-week meeting in Rome during which the synod’s 181 voting members, together with representatives from indigenous communities, religious orders, lay groups and charities, discussed a range of issues concerning the region, spread across nine countries.

In ordinary sessions of the Synod of Bishops, delegates are elected by the world’s bishops conferences. In the special session for the pan-Amazonian region, all attendees were by special invitation.

The document was drafted by a committee of experts and special secretaries, assisted by a drafting committee elected from among the synod fathers. The draft text was presented to the assembly on Friday night, and various amendments were proposed and debated during the approval process.

The final synodal document has no teaching or binding authority of its own.

Pope Francis said in his closing remarks in the synod hall on Saturday that he will write a post-synodal exhortation, to hopefully be published before the end of the year.
 
Ecological Conversion

In addition to the synod document’s proposal to change universal Church discipline on clerical celibacy and create new roles for women, it also contains strong exhortations on environmental issues and the rights of indigenous peoples.

On the topic of integral ecology and the environment, the document references the threat of exploitation of the Amazon and its peoples.

It also criticizes as “scandalous” the criminalization of Amazonian ethnic communities whose rights are threatened, it says, by public policies favoring the exploitation of natural resources.

These projects “exert pressure on ancestral indigenous territories” and are accompanied by “widespread impunity throughout regarding human rights violations.”

The document notes the Church’s teaching on the inviolability of the human person, which is created in the image and likeness of God.

The synod fathers propose giving support to “fair” sustainable development initiatives, though it does not name specific initiatives.

“The Amazon is in the hands of us all, but it depends mainly on immediately abandoning the current model that is destroying the forest, not bringing well-being and endangering this immense natural treasure and its guardians,” the report states.

It goes on to say it is “incumbent” on the Church to help protect the Amazon by being an “ally” of the local communities, “who know how to take care of the Amazon, how to love and protect it.”

The indigenous peoples are “asking the church to become their ally and the answer of the church is yes,” Czerny said.

“With the Amazon burning, many more people are realizing that things have to change. We cannot keep repeating old responses to urgent problems,” Czerny said. “The ecological crisis is so deep that if we don’t change we won’t make it.”

Czerny said that environmental scientists and other experts who audited the synod helped the bishops to understand “the planet suffering” because “they drove scientific facts home in a way that we can feel them.”

The Canadian cardinal said that people want “a plastic solution” that is not going to affect their lives and not require them to change, but he stressed that it does not exist and conversion is required.

The synod document also condemns the theft of the “traditional wisdom” of the Amazonian peoples as “biopiracy” and a “form of violence.”

“The Church chooses to defend life, the land and the native Amazon cultures,” including in the Amazon peoples’ “registration, processing and dissemination of data and information about their territories and their legal status,” it states.

The report says the Church must guard itself against “the power of neo-colonialism” and  “unlearn, learn and relearn” in order to overcome any tendency toward “colonizing models.”

The synod reaffirms a “commitment to defend life seamlessly from conception to natural death and the dignity of each and every person.”

Pastoral service to the indigenous, it says, “obliges us to proclaim Jesus Christ and the Good News of the Kingdom of God.”

Pope Francis announced in his closing speech to the synod that he would create a new section in the Dicastery for the Promotion of Integral Human Development dedicated to the Church in the Amazon.

The synod final document also called for a “socio-environmental and pastoral office” to work in alliance with the Latin American church organizations REPAM, CELAM, CLAR, and other non-ecclesial actors representing indigenous peoples.

Cultural Conversion

The synod document states that “inculturation is the incarnation of the Gospel in indigenous cultures… and at the same time the introduction of these cultures into the life of the Church.”

The Amazon culture and spirituality already have a rich “indigenous theology, Amazonian face of theology and popular piety,” it says, adding that they “reject a colonial style of evangelization.”

“The evangelization that we propose today for the Amazon is the inculturated proclamation that generates processes of interculturality, processes that promote the life of the Church with an Amazon identity and face,” the report states.

Czerny said that it is very important for the Church to learn how to be “interculturally respectful.”

“Not to assume that the way I am or the way we are is definitive, is the norm, is the way it has to be … differences have to be embraced,” he said.

“The church is not an inflexible structure in which your cultures and traditions will find no place … it is the opposite,” Bishop Guinea said.

“A Church with an Amazonian face,” the document states, “needs its communities to be infused with a synodal spirit, supported by organizational structures of this dynamic, as authentic organisms of ‘communion.’”

“The Church’s research and pastoral centres, in alliance with the indigenous peoples, should study, compile and systematize the traditions of the Amazon’s ethnic groups in order to favor an educational effort that starts from their identity and culture…”

Synodal Conversion

The synod document also calls for “new paths for synodal conversion.”

Cardinal Czerny said that this process involved “an unprecedented process of listening” before the Amazon synod.

“You know that synodality is working when you find yourself voting for something that you knew before the synod that you disagreed with,” Czerny said.

When asked what was the working definition of “synodality” understood among the synod fathers, Czerny replied, “Everyone had a sense of what it meant because we were doing it. Could we explain that in words … does it matter?”

A synod is a consultative assembly, convened by the pope or a bishop, to advise on a particular topic of interest to the local, regional, or universal Church.

The Synod of Bishops for the Pan-Amazonian region will conclude Oct. 27 with a closing Mass in St. Peter’s Basilica.

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Vatican City, Dec 3, 2017 / 04:30 am (CNA/EWTN News).- On Sunday Pope Francis kicked off the Church’s Advent season saying it is a time to let go of the worldly distractions that take us away from God, and focus on growing closer to him through prayer and concern for others.  

Referring to the day’s readings, which stress the importance of being vigilant, the Pope said “the watchful person is one who, in the noise of the world, does not let themselves be overwhelmed by distraction or superficiality, but lives in a full and conscious way, with a concern above all for others.”

With this attitude, we quickly become aware “of the tears and necessity of our neighbor and we can also welcome the human and spiritual qualities and capacities,” he said, adding that an attentive person, “also turns to the world, trying to counteract indifference and the cruelty of it, rejoicing in the treasures of beauty that also exist and must be preserved.”

Pope Francis spoke to pilgrims present in St. Peter’s Square for his Angelus address, which took place on the first Sunday of Advent.

He focused his address on the day’s Gospel reading from Mark, in which Jesus tells his disciples to “Be watchful! Be alert!,” because “you do not know when the time will come.”

Advent, he said, is a time given to us “to welcome the Lord who comes to meet us, to verify our desire for God, to look ahead and prepare ourselves for the return of Christ.”

Christ will return again at Christmas, when we remember how he came to us “in the humility of the human condition.” However, Christ also comes to each of us “every time we are disposed to receive him,” Francis said, and “he will come again at the end of time to judge the living and the dead.”

“Because of this, we must always be watchful and attentive to the Lord with the hope of meeting him.”

Turning to the Gospel, when Jesus urges his disciples, and each of us, to “be watchful and alert,” Francis said the person who is vigilant and alert is the one “who welcomes the invitation to watch, that is, not to let themselves be overwhelmed by the sleep of discouragement, the lack of hope, or by delusions.”

At the same time, this person also rejects “the solicitation of the vanities of which the world overflows and behind which, at times, personal and familiar serenity are sacrificed.”

Pope Francis then turned to the day’s first reading from the Book of Isaiah, in which the prophet described how for the people of Israel, it seemed that God had left them alone to wander on paths that were far from his own.

However, “this was an effect of the infidelity of the people themselves,” he said, explaining that we often find ourselves in the same state of infidelity to God’s call: “he shows us the good path, the path of faith and love, but we look for our happiness somewhere else.”

So to be watchful and alert, then, “are the presuppositions” to stop wandering on paths that are far from God, “lost in our sins and in our infidelity.”

“They are the conditions that allow God to interrupt our existence, to restore meaning to it and to value his presence, full of goodness and tenderness,” he said, and closed his address praying that Mary, the model and icon of vigilant expectation, would guide us to an encounter with her son Jesus, “reviving our love for him.”

After reciting the traditional Angelus prayer, Francis noted how just yesterday he returned from a six-day visit to Burma – also called Myanmar – and Bangladesh, and voiced his gratitude for being able to meet the people in both countries, especially the small Catholic populations of each.

The Pope said he was “edified” by their witness, and the many faces “tried by life,” but who were still “noble and smiling,” made a big impression.  

He also voiced concern and prayer for Honduras, praying that the country would be able to “peacefully overcome” a recent escalation of political unrest and violent protests surrounding the country’s elections after a key candidate was accused of voter fraud.

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