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Pope Francis delivers a video message to the conference “100 Years Since the ‘Concilium Sinense’” at the Pontifical Urban University in Rome on Tuesday, May 21, 2024. / Credit: Fabio Gonnella/EWTN

Rome Newsroom, May 21, 2024 / 13:57 pm (CNA).

Pope Francis has praised the Catholic Church’s first council in China 100 years ago as “an authentic synodal journey” that opened the way for the Church in China “to increasingly have a Chinese face.”

In a video message to a conference in Rome on the Catholic Church in China, the pope noted that Chinese Catholics have endured “times of patience and trial” in the past century.

“The Lord in China has safeguarded the faith of the people of God along the way. And the faith of God’s people has been the compass that has shown the way throughout this time,” Pope Francis said in the May 21 address.

The pope pointed to a Church council that took place in Shanghai 25 years before the Chinese Communist Revolution as an example of a moment when “the communion between the Holy See and the Church in China manifested its fruits, fruits of good for all the Chinese people.” 

The 1924 council, called the Primum Concilium Sinense, brought together 105 Catholic missionaries, bishops, and Chinese Catholics to establish a framework for a native Chinese hierarchy.

“The Fathers gathered in the Concilium Sinense lived an authentically synodal experience and made important decisions together,” Pope Francis said.

“Remembering the Council of Shanghai can also suggest today new paths to the entire Church and open paths to be undertaken with boldness to proclaim and bear witness to the Gospel in the present,” he added. 

Among the crowd listening to the pope’s video message were representatives from the People’s Republic of China, including Bishop Shen Bin of Shanghai, who was unilaterally installed by Chinese authorities as bishop of Shanghai in April 2023 without a papal mandate, thereby breaking the terms of the Vatican-China deal. Pope Francis confirmed his appointment in July 2023.

The Holy See first entered into a provisional two-year agreement with Beijing on the appointment of bishops in 2018, which has since been renewed twice and is again up for renewal this fall. 

Pope Francis opted not to speak of the Vatican’s diplomatic efforts with Beijing or religious freedom in China in his message but said that Chinese Catholics today “bear witness to their faith through works of mercy and charity, and in their witness they give a real contribution to the harmony of social coexistence.”

A large statue of Our Lady of Sheshan stood on the pope’s desk as he spoke. The pope noted that during the month of May many Chinese Catholics usually go on pilgrimage to the Marian Shrine of Sheshan, located near Shanghai.

“I too ideally climb the hill of Sheshan, and let us all together entrust to Mary, Help of Christians, our brothers and sisters in the faith who are in China, all the Chinese people, and all our poor world, asking for her intercession, so that peace may always win everywhere,” Pope Francis said.

Following the pope’s message, Shen Bin delivered a 15-minute speech in Chinese to the packed auditorium of the Pontifical Urban University on the Janiculum Hill overlooking St. Peter’s Basilica.

The Chinese bishop offered a different interpretation of the 1924 council from the pope in his speech, saying that “the Council of Shanghai did not lead to an immediate and radical change in the Church in China,” adding that by the 1949 Communist Revolution “only 29 of China’s 137 dioceses had Chinese bishops, and only three of 20 archbishops were Chinese.”

“The Catholic Church in China had not really freed itself from foreign powers to become a work led by Chinese Christians and had not yet managed to shed the label of ‘foreign religion,’” he said.

Shen Bin, who has held leadership positions in the Chinese Catholic Patriotic Association established by the Chinese Communist Party and under the control of the United Front Work Department, went on to defend Beijing’s religious freedom record and underlined the need for the Church in China to “follow a path of sinicization.”

“The policy of religious freedom implemented by the Chinese government has no interest in changing the Catholic faith but only hopes that the Catholic clergy and faithful will defend the interests of the Chinese people and free themselves from the control of foreign powers,” Shen Bin said in his speech.

“Today the Chinese people are carrying out the great rebirth of the Chinese nation in a global way with Chinese-style modernization, and the Catholic Church in China must move in the same direction, following a path of sinicization that is in line with Chinese society and culture today,” the Shanghai bishop added.

The conference, titled “100 Years Since the ‘Concilium Sinense’: Between History and the Present,” was held in Chinese and Italian in the Great Hall of the Pontifical Urban University. The Pastoral Commission for China and Agenzia Fides, the information service of the Pontifical Mission Societies, organized the conference, which featured Vatican Secretary of State Cardinal Pietro Parolin and Cardinal Luis Antonio Tagle as speakers.

Speaking to journalists on the sidelines of the conference, Parolin said the Holy See would like to increase and deepen its contacts in China.

“We have been hoping for a long time now to have a stable presence in China, even if initially it may not have the form of a papal representation of an apostolic nunciature,” Parolin said.

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Pope Francis prays with members of the Synod on Synodality during one of its meetings in the Vatican’s Paul VI Hall on the morning of Oct. 12, 2024. / Credit: Vatican Media

Rome Newsroom, Oct 12, 2024 / 12:30 pm (CNA).

Prayer groups are sponsoring an online platform through which you can “adopt” a Synod on Synodality member to pray for during the month of October.

After submitting an email address on the webpage oremusprosynodo.org, the name of one of the 368 voting members (also called delegates) of the 2024 meeting of the Synod on Synodality appears with the exhortation to pray for them.

The synod prayer campaign also sends a daily email with a guide for how to pray for the “adopted” synod delegate throughout the Vatican assembly Oct. 2–27.

The initiative is organized by synod leaders in collaboration with three Church-connected groups: The Pope’s Worldwide Prayer Network, Click to Pray, and The Church Is Listening.

The second session of the assembly of the Synod on Synodality is taking place at the Vatican this month. It marks the end of the discernment phase of the Catholic Church’s synodal process begun in 2021.

Throughout the October meeting, synod participants will pray together daily and attend prayer services and Masses.

During the first half of the monthlong gathering, synod members attended a retreat, a penitential liturgy, the synod opening Mass, and an ecumenical prayer vigil. They will also join in a Mass of canonization on Oct. 20 and participate in a mini-retreat on Oct. 21 before the synod’s concluding Mass on Oct. 27.

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Vatican City, Sep 30, 2017 / 10:08 am (CNA/EWTN News).- Pope Francis on Saturday told mayors that they must go to those on the margins of their communities in order to learn how to best serve the common good, including the needs of the poor, unemployed, and migrants and refugees.

“To you, mayors, let me say, as a brother: You must frequent the peripheries, those urban, those social and those existential,” the Pope said Sept. 30.

To do so is to learn from the best school, he continued, because it teaches us about the real needs of people, shows us injustice, and helps us to build better communities, where everyone is recognized as a person and citizen.

“I think about the situation in which the availability and quality of services is lacking, and new pockets of poverty and marginalization are formed,” he said.

This is where a city becomes divided, he said: on one side of the highway are the secure and well-off and on the other are the poor and unemployed – including families and migrants who have no support.

Pope Francis’ speech was made in an audience with Italian mayors, members of the National Association of Italian Towns (ANCI), in the Clementine Hall of the Vatican Sept. 30.

In the audience he spoke about the specific issue of immigration, saying that he understands that many people are uncomfortable in the face of the massive arrival of migrants and refugees.

This discomfort is understandable, he said, especially when there is innate fear of the “stranger,” and the already-present wounds of economic crisis, lack of community, and inadequate response to emergencies by the government.

Francis said that these challenges can only be overcome through personal encounter, including the mutual exchange of artistic and cultural riches, as well as the knowledge of people’s places and communities of origin.

“I am delighted to hear that many of the local administrations represented here can be among the main advocates of good reception and integration practices, with encouraging results that deserve broad dissemination. I hope that many follow your example,” he said.

It is this way that politics can fulfill the “fundamental task” of helping people to see the future with hope, he noted, saying that it is “hope in tomorrow that brings out the best energies of everyone, of young people first of all.”

If a mayor is close to his or her people, directing everything toward the common good, then things will go well, he continued.

Pope Francis also spoke about the symbol of the city as it is found in Sacred Scripture.  

At the beginning of the Bible we hear the story of the history of Babel, a city “unfinished, destined to remain in the memory of humanity as a symbol of confusion and loss, presumption and division, of that inability to understand that makes any common work impossible,” he said.

The Bible also closes with the vision of a city. But unlike the city of Babel, the new Jerusalem “smells of heaven and tells of a renewed world.”

It is significant, the Pope continued, that the image of the city recurs throughout Sacred Scripture. It teaches us that human society can only stand when rested on the foundation of true solidarity.

Envy, unbridled ambition and a spirit of adversity, on the other hand, condemn us to the violence of chaos. To move away from this we need a politics and economy centered on ethics, “an ethics of responsibility, relationships, community and the environment,” he said.

“I would like to talk to you about a city that puts the public well-being above private interests, not allowing corruption or the privatization of public spaces, where the ‘us’ is ‘reduced to slogans, to rhetorical artifice that masks the interests of few,'” he said.

It is this view that helps people to grow in dignity. “It promotes social justice, therefore labor, services, opportunities,” he said.

“To embrace and serve this city it takes a good and great heart, in which to preserve the passion of the common good,” he encouraged, “because what contributes to the good of everyone also contributes to the good of the individual.”

If we do this, he concluded, “then the city will advance and reflect the heavenly Jerusalem.”

“It will be a sign of God’s goodness and tenderness in man’s time. A mayor must have the virtue of prudence to govern, but also the virtue of courage to move forward and the virtue of tenderness to approach the weakest.”

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