Atomic bombs contrary to peace: Pope Francis 75 years after Hiroshima attack

Vatican City, May 29, 2020 / 07:10 am (CNA).- The Vatican has published a free book online that can be a resource for parents facing a difficult or fatal diagnosis for their unborn child during pregnancy. 

The nearly 300-page ebook is a compilation of speeches given at a Vatican conference held last year dedicated to the medical care and ministries that support families who receive a prenatal diagnosis indicating that their baby will likely die before or just after birth. 

“Yes to Life: Caring for the precious gift of life in its frailness,” a conference organized by the Vatican Dicastery for Laity, Family, and Life in May 2019, brought together medical professionals, bioethicists, ministry providers, and families from 70 countries to discuss how best to provide medical, psychological, and emotional support for parents expecting a child with a life-limiting illness.

“Sometimes people ask me, what does perinatal hospice look like? And I answer, ‘It looks like love,’” author and mother Amy Kuebelbeck shared at the conference. 

Kuebelbeck was 25 weeks pregnant when she received the diagnosis that her unborn son had an incurable heart defect. She carried her pregnancy to term and had a little more than two hours with her son, Gabriel, before he died after birth.

“It was one of the most profound experiences of my life,” Kuebelbeck said. She wrote a memoir of her experience of grief, loss, and love called Waiting with Gabriel: A Story of Cherishing a Baby’s Brief Life.

“I know that some people assume that continuing a pregnancy with a baby who will die is all for nothing. But it isn’t all for nothing.  Parents can wait with their baby, protect their baby, and love their baby for as long as that baby is able to live. They can give that baby a peaceful life — and a peaceful goodbye. That’s not nothing. That is a gift,” Kuebelbeck wrote in Waiting with Gabriel.

Kuebelbeck’s testimony at the conference is included in the ebook in English, as is a transcript of the presentation provided by Dr. Byron Calhoun, a medical professor of obstetrics and gynecology, who first coined the term “perinatal hospice.” 

Calhoun’s research has found that allowing parents of newborns with a terminal prenatal diagnosis the chance to be parents can result in less distress for the mother than pregnancy termination. 

Other speeches from the conference are also published in Italian and Spanish, such Sister Giustina Olha Holubets’ Italian presentation. The Ukrainian religious sister, who works as a geneticist at the University of Lviv, helped to found “Imprint of Life,” a perinatal palliative care center in Ukraine.

“Imprint of Life” offers grief accompaniment, individualized birth plans, the sacrament of baptism, and burial, as well as respectful photos, footprints, and memory books to help families cherish their brief moments with their child. Their motto is “I cannot give more days to your life, but I can give more life to your days.”

There are now more than 300 hospitals, hospices, and ministries providing perinatal palliative care around the world.

Many families facing these diagnoses have to decide if they will seek extraordinary or disproportionate medical care for their child after birth.

According to the Catechism of the Catholic Church, “Discontinuing medical procedures that are burdensome, dangerous, extraordinary, or disproportionate to the expected outcome can be legitimate; it is the refusal of ‘overzealous’ treatment. Here one does not will to cause death; one’s inability to impede it is merely accepted.”

Ministries like Alexandra’s House, a perinatal hospice in Kansas City, Missouri, provide counsel and grief support to parents as they face these difficult medical decisions. They also connect families with a network of other parents who have had a terminal prenatal diagnosis.

“Most of the families stay in contact indefinitely,” said MaryCarroll Sullivan, nurse and bioethics adviser for the ministry.

The book, published by the Vatican’s Publishing House, includes Pope Francis’ speech from his meeting with the conference participants in the Vatican’s Apostolic Palace.

In this speech, Pope Francis said that selective abortion of the disabled is the “expression of an inhumane eugenic mentality that deprives families of the chance to accept, embrace and love the weakest of their children.”

“Fear and hostility towards disability often lead to the choice of abortion, presenting it as a practice of ‘prevention,’” the pope said on May 25, 2019.

Pope Francis also thanked the perinatal hospice providers for creating “networks of love” to which couples can turn to receive accompaniment with the undeniable practical, human, and spiritual difficulties they face.

“Your witness of love is a gift to the world,” he said.

“Caring for these children helps parents to process their mourning and to understand it not only as loss, but also as a stage in a journey travelled together. They will have had the opportunity to love their child, and that child will remain in their memory forever,” Pope Francis said.

“Those few hours in which a mother can cradle her child in her arms leave an unforgettable trace in her heart.”

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Vatican City, Jan 26, 2020 / 06:30 am (CNA).- Pope Francis prayed Sunday for people infected by the coronavirus, which has killed 56 people in China.

“May the Lord welcome the deceased in his peace, comfort families and support the great commitment of the Chinese community, already put in place to fight the epidemic,” Pope Francis said in his Angelus address Jan. 26.

Originating in the Chinese city of Wuhan, the virus has spread to nine countries with 1,975 confirmed cases.

The World Health Organization’s latest report Jan. 25 stated that among the confirmed cases, 237 people have been reported as severely ill.

The number of people with coronavirus has increased by 655 cases in the 24-hours since the WHO report’s release, the Chinese government reported Jan. 26, one day after Lunar New Year. Hundreds of millions of people travel for the holiday, which is the biggest celebration of the year in China.

Wuhan, a city around the size of London, has been on lockdown since Jan. 23 with restrictions on travel by trains, planes, ferries, and cars. The United States Embassy is working to evacuate all American citizens in Wuhan.

A third U.S. case of coronavirus was confirmed in California on Jan. 26.

Outside of China, coronavirus cases have been confirmed in Thailand, Japan, Singapore, Australia, France, South Korea, Vietnam, Nepal, and the United States in Chicago, Seattle, and Orange Country. There are currently suspected cases among recent travelers from China in Canada, Portugal, and the Ivory Coast.

Before his Angelus prayer, Pope Francis gave thanks for the Church’s first Sunday of the Word of God being celebrated throughout the world on the Third Sunday of Ordinary Time.

“It is this – the Word of Jesus … the Gospel – which changes the world and hearts! We are therefore called to trust the word of Christ, to open ourselves to the Father’s mercy and allow ourselves to be transformed by the grace of the Holy Spirit,” he said.

The pope also prayed for people affected by Hansen’s disease, also known as leprosy, and spent a moment in silence in remembrance of the 75th anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp. He invited everyone to spend time in prayer on the anniversary, Jan. 27, and to repeat in their hearts: “Never again!”

The coronavirus was first reported to the World Health Organization on Dec. 31. Bishops in the Philippines have urged residents to be vigilant and to quickly check into a hospital if they believe they have been infected with the illness.

Bishop Ruperto Santos of Balanga released a special prayer for the prevention of a global outbreak:

“We pray that you control and prevent a global epidemic of coronavirus. We fervently ask that you display your power and stop the rapid spread of this deadly virus. Manifest your presence to those who have already been infected. Give them hope and courage and may your miraculous healing hands be upon them.”

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Pope Francis shared a stage with Italy’s Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni on May 12, 2023, to speak at a two-day conference on “The General State of the Birth Rate,” held at Conciliazione Auditorium close to the Vatican. / Daniel Ibanez/CNA

Rome Newsroom, May 12, 2023 / 07:00 am (CNA).

Pope Francis said Friday a society’s birth rate is a key indicator of the hope people have in the future.

The pope shared the stage on May 12 with Italy’s Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni during a two-day conference on “The General State of the Birth Rate,” held at Conciliazione Auditorium close to the Vatican.

“The birth of children, in fact, is the main indicator for measuring the hope of a people,” Pope Francis said. “If few are born it means there is little hope. And this not only has repercussions from an economic and social point of view but also undermines confidence in the future.”

“The General State of the Birth Rate” is a conference for Italian political, business, and organization leaders to reflect on Italy’s demographic crisis, caused by one of the lowest birth rates in Europe: 1.25 births per woman.

The event was organized by the Foundation for Births and the Family Associations Forum and supported by the Italian Ministry for Family, Birth, and Equal Opportunity.

This was the third annual conference and the second time Pope Francis attended. In 2022, he sent a message to be read at the event.

Italy hit a historic low number of births in 2022, with only about 393,000 children born in the country.

The same year, the country saw 700,000 deaths, marking a dangerous decline in population.

The low number of births, Pope Francis said, “is a figure that reveals a great concern for tomorrow.”

He lamented that childbearing and rearing is seen as the burden of families only, and the pressure this puts on young adults today, “who grow up in uncertainty, if not disillusionment and fear.”

Young people “experience a social climate in which starting a family has turned into a titanic effort, instead of being a shared value that everyone recognizes and supports,” he said.

The decline in communal living, together with an increasing self-reliance creates loneliness, Pope Francis said, and one consequence is that only the wealthy have the freedom to live the life they want.

“This is unfair, as well as demeaning,” he added.

The pope also criticized a culture that places pets before human children.

He said at a recent audience, he went to greet a woman of around 50 years old — “like me,” he joked — but was surprised to be asked to bless her dog, which she called, “my baby.”

“I had no patience and scolded the lady,” he said, pointing out the great number of hungry children in the world.

Pope Francis used a walker to move on stage on Friday, referencing the pain he experiences while standing.

At the beginning of his speech, the pope said: “I’m sorry for not standing up while speaking, but I cannot tolerate the pain when I am standing.”

In what appeared to be a reference not only to welcoming the birth of children but also to welcoming migrants, Pope Francis said “a happy community naturally develops desires to generate and integrate, to welcome, while an unhappy society is reduced to a sum of individuals trying to defend what they have at all costs.”

He emphasized again that “the birth rate challenge is a matter of hope,” though, he underlined, hope is not the same as optimism or “a vague positive feeling about the future.”

Hope, he said, “is not an illusion or an emotion that you feel, no; it is a concrete virtue, a life attitude. And it has to do with concrete choices. Hope is nourished by each person’s commitment to the good, it grows when we feel we are participating and involved in making meaning of our own and others’ lives.”

“Hope generates change and improves the future. It is the smallest of virtues — Péguy said — it is the smallest, but it is the one that takes you the furthest. And hope does not disappoint,” Francis said.

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