Extra, extra! News and views for November 30, 2022

Pope Francis greets a child in St. Peter’s Square during the general audience on April 20, 2016. Daniel Ibanez/CNA

Vatican City, May 8, 2021 / 10:30 am (CNA).

Pope Francis and Jane Goodall both offered perspectives on “what it means to be human” on the final day of an online Vatican health conference on Saturday.

In a video message to the virtual conference on May 8, the pope said that Saint Augustine’s words in “The Confessions” are timeless: “Man is himself a great deep.”

“The Scriptures, and philosophical and theological reflection in particular, have employed the concept of ‘soul’ to define our uniqueness as human beings and the specificity of the person, which is irreducible to any other living being and includes our openness to a supernatural dimension and thus to God,” the pope said.

Pope Francis said that “this openness to the transcendent” is fundamental and “bears witness to the infinite value of every human person.”

Anthropologist Jane Goodall, famed for her work with chimpanzees, also spoke at the Vatican conference on “mind, body, and soul,” giving a talk entitled “What does it Mean to be Human?”

“I think where we fit in into the picture of primates is we are the fifth great ape, and our closest relative among the other great apes… Well, there’s two of them, actually, the chimpanzee and the bonobo. We differ from each other genetically by only just over 1%,” Goodall said.

She offered examples of how chimpanzees can be taught sign language, use the computer, and make drawings. During evolution, she said, humans learned to communicate with words, language, and writing that enables people to be distinguished by their ability to make plans for the future and invent rockets.

“But then when you realize how like us chimpanzees are, and yet how we differ with this explosive development of the intellect, this development of the intellect has not given us a reason to label ourselves as Homo sapiens, the wise ape. We’re not wise. We’ve seen what Mars looks like. We don’t want to live there. We’ve only got this one planet, at least in our lifetimes, and we’re destroying it,” Goodall said.

“All the major religions share the golden rule, do to others as you would have them do to you. If we can apply that to animals, as well as to each other, then I think we shall be coming closer to being able to define ourselves as Homo sapiens,” she added.

The Vatican health conference taking place May 6-8 on “Exploring the Mind, Body & Soul: How Innovation and Novel Delivery Systems Improve Human Health,” has featured more than 100 speakers including Dr. Anthony Fauci, chief medical adviser to U.S. President Joe Biden, as well as Clinton Foundation vice chair Chelsea Clinton and New Age guru Deepak Chopra.

It is the fifth conference of its kind organized by the Pontifical Council for Culture and the Cura Foundation, which describes itself as a “nonsectarian, nonpartisan” group “with a mission to improve human health globally.” This year is the first time that the conference is taking place virtually.

“I am pleased that students from various universities throughout the world, Catholic and non-Catholic, are taking part in this event. I encourage you to undertake and pursue interdisciplinary research involving various centers of study, for the sake of a better understanding of ourselves and of our human nature, with all its limits and possibilities, while always keeping in mind the transcendent horizon to which our being tends,” Pope Francis said.

The pope said that when interdisciplinary research is applied to the medical sciences it “translates into more sophisticated research and increasingly suitable and exact strategies of care.”

“We need but think of the vast field of research in genetics, aimed at curing a variety of diseases. Yet this progress has also raised a number of anthropological and ethical issues, such as those dealing with the manipulation of the human genome aimed at controlling or even overcoming the aging process, or at achieving human enhancement,” he said.

Vatican Secretary of State Cardinal Pietro Parolin also addressed the conference via video message on May 8.

The cardinal said that human beings are distinguished from animals by rationality, “a high degree of self-understanding” and reflection on others and the universe.

“Another unique feature is the moral conscience that allows us to act by distinguishing between what is good and what is bad. This fundamental reference causes us to ask ourselves ethical questions about our actions, about society, about the use of the tools that we develop and make socially usable,” Parolin said.

“A strong moral sense pushes us to denounce and take actions that put an end to injustices through philanthropic and solidarity actions that counteract the manifestations of evil.”

He also noted that humans are capable of contemplating beauty and artistic expression in many different forms, as well as possessing “the openness to the transcendent horizon which in the lives of many of us leads to religious experience, but which also prompts us to question ourselves about the ultimate questions.”

“The ancient thinkers encapsulated this specificity and uniqueness of the human being in a single term, humanitas, which from Cicero onwards became the category with which to indicate the objective principle of a complex system of exquisitely human moral values,” Parolin said.

“Now, this day seals the three days full of content, and is also the final moment of a complex itinerary of reflection. However, it is also an openness to a constant search for human natures conducted by the philosophers and men of culture of the past. My wish is, therefore, to continue to deepening the mystery of our being with enthusiasm and determination, to discover and be fascinated by what makes us truly human,” he said.

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Cupola of St. Peter’s Basilica, Vatican City / CNA

Washington D.C., Jun 29, 2021 / 16:01 pm (CNA).

Some Canadian bishops, along with Indigenous leaders, will meet with Pope Francis at the Vatican in December 2021, according to the Canadian bishops’ conference.

The delegations of a “small” group of Canadian bishops, along with Indigenous First Nations, Inuit, and Métis leaders, will be scheduled for papal meetings at the Vatican from Dec. 17-20, 2021, “to foster meaningful encounters of dialogue and healing,” the Canadian bishops’ conference stated on Tuesday.

Pope Francis is inviting each group of Indigenous delegations – First Nations, Métis and Inuit – to a distinct meeting, the bishops said, praising “the Holy Father’s spirit of openness.”

First Nations communities are Indigenous peoples who lived south of the Arctic region in modern-day Canada, while Inuit peoples resided in the Arctic region. Métis communities share both Indigenous and European heritage.

All delegations will share a final audience with Pope Francis on Dec. 20. They will include Indigenous elders, residential school survivors, youth, and a small group of Bishops and Indigenous leaders,” the bishops’ conference said.

“Pope Francis is deeply committed to hearing directly from Indigenous Peoples, expressing his heartfelt closeness, addressing the impact of colonization and the role of the Church in the residential school system, in the hopes of responding to the suffering of Indigenous Peoples and the ongoing effects of intergenerational trauma,” the Canadian bishops’ conference announced in the statement.

“The Bishops of Canada reaffirm their sincere hope that these forthcoming encounters will lead to a shared future of peace and harmony between Indigenous Peoples and the Catholic Church in Canada,” they wrote.

The announcement comes after the recent discovery of unmarked graves of 215 Indigenous children at a former Catholic-run residential school in British Columbia.

That discovery on the weekend of May 22 prompted leaders of the Assembly of First Nations and the Métis National Council to plan a visit to the Vatican, with the Canadian Conference of Catholic Bishops (CCCB), to request a formal papal apology for the Church’s role in the residential school system.

At his June 6 Sunday angelus, Pope Francis expressed “sympathy” over the discovery of children’s remains, urged healing and reconciliation, and called for a “turn away from the colonizing model,” but he did not issue a formal apology. Other Canadian bishops have apologized for the Church’s role in the residential school system, including the bishops of Alberta in 2014 and, recently, the archbishops of Vancouver and Ottawa.

The residential school system was set up by the Canadian federal government, beginning in the 1870s, as a means of forcibly assimilating Indigenous children and stripping them of familial and cultural ties. Catholics and members of other Christian denominations ran the schools, although the Catholic Church or Catholics oversaw more than two-thirds of the schools. The last remaining federally-run residential school closed in 1996.

According to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, a Canadian body set up to investigate abuses in the schools, at least 4,100 children died from “disease or accident” at the schools. One of the commission’s calls was for a formal papal apology for the Church’s role in the residential school system.

At the site of the former Kamloops Indian Residential School in British Columbia, the remains of 215 Indigenous children were discovered on the weekend of May 22 with ground-penetrating radar. It is unclear when or how the children died.

On June 24, Cowesses First Nation leaders announced that 751 unmarked graves had been discovered at the site of the former Marieval Indian Residential School.

One scholar who worked with the Truth and Reconciliation Commission issued a report following the Kamloops discovery, explaining that the schools were historically underfunded and under-regulated by the federal government. More work is needed to accurately document the location of residential school cemeteries amid the recent discovery of unmarked graves, he wrote.

Dr. Scott Hamilton, a professor in the Department of Anthropology at Lakehead University in Thunder Bay, wrote that the federal government for decades did not establish or implement proper health care and cemetery care regulations at the schools.

In at least some cases, the government had a policy of only paying for deceased residential school students to be transported home for funerals when the cost of transportation was less than the cost of a burial at a residential school, he noted. When the government took control of residential schools from religious groups in the late-20^th century, cemeteries and burial grounds were not adequately documented.

As a result, the locations of many cemeteries could fade from memory over time due to lack of regulation and documentation, Hamilton said, and individual grave markers could have been moved or succumbed to the elements.

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Homiletic & Pastoral Review, CWR’s sister publication, has announced that on Thursday, September 1, “a new team will assume leadership of Homiletic & Pastoral Review. HPR welcomes Rev. John P. Cush, STD, as Editor-in-Chief, with […]