Pope Francis on St. Francis de Sales: He taught that ‘devotion is meant for everyone’

Cardinal Joseph Zen Ze-kiun departs the Pontifical Urbaniana University in Rome, Nov. 18, 2014. / Bohumil Petrik/CNA.

Vatican City, May 11, 2022 / 09:11 am (CNA).
The Vatican said on Wednesday that it was concerned to hear of reports of the arr… […]

Vatican City, Oct 3, 2017 / 12:43 am (CNA/EWTN News).- Technology will be at the heart of an upcoming Vatican conference on accompanying human life in the digital era, particularly with regard to the medical field.

The conference will emphasize both the benefits and limits of new technology, and what those mean for the Church.

New technology has “an increasingly relevant impact on the various aspects, the various moments of human life,” Msgr. Renzo Pegoraro, chancellor of the Pontifical Acedemy for Life, said Oct. 2.

The Pontifical Academy for Life wishes to look at the positive aspects of technology and everything it has achieved “in the field of health, of human life, and the betterment of certain conditions and situations.”

However, while great helpful strides have certainly been made, Pegoraro said it’s also important to discuss “the dangers, the risks that are linked with a technology that is increasingly invasive and powerful, which can condition many aspects of human life.”

Pegoraro spoke at a news briefing on the academy’s upcoming general assembly, which is titled “Accompanying Life: new responsibilities in the technological era,” and will take place Oct. 5-7.

The conference marks the academy’s first general assembly since the renewal of their statutes last year, and will draw new academic members from 37 countries around the world.

Among the members are four honorary members; 45 ordinary members appointed by the Pope; 87 corresponding members named by Board of Directors; and 13 young researchers, a request of the new statutes. All members will serve for a five-year period.

In his comments to journalists, Pegoraro said the academy wants to start the discussion from a “positive perspective,” and stressed that there is “there is no fear of technology or immediate negative judgement” of its uses.

Rather, the goal is to recognize the positive and beneficial contributions of new technologies while also drawing attention to the risks.

The great challenge, he said, is finding an answer to the question: “what is the responsibility? What ethics are at play? What methods are there of managing this power, which has been entrusted to man’s responsibility?”

The program of the conference more or less follows the structure of the new charter for healthcare workers the Vatican published in February, and is divided into three main categories: issues surrounding the beginning of life, healthcare in general, and the themes relevant to the phase of the end of life.

Topics to be discussed include looming modern questions in the areas of reproduction, parenthood, illness, and death, as well as the consequences of what Pope Francis has often called a “throwaway culture.”

Discussion will also bring in elements of Pope Francis’ chapter on technology in his 2015 encyclical Laudato si’, raising questions such as: “Is the spread of technology is creating more justice and reducing certain inequalities? Or are inequalities growing?” Pegoraro said.

“Those who have this technology in hand, are they favoring global growth in various countries, especially in the relationship between the north and south of the world? Or do they run the risk of widening the gap between developed countries and those in the process of developing?”

He stressed the need to more clearly explore where the line should to be drawn between prolonging life and when to accept mortality, incorporating technology to reduce pain and help the person to have a “dignified death.”

Technology can help to keep a person comfortable, he said, but “it doesn’t defeat death.” So the great challenge, then, is “to find the lines that are respected for every person, especially the most weak, vulnerable and suffering.”

In comments to CNA, Archbishop Vincenzo Paglia, president of the academy, said there is an urgent need to reflect on life “not as if it were an abstract idea, but in the concrete reality of people of all ages, in the different conditions in which they live, so that human life rediscovers its meaning, its vocation, and also its responsibility in the entire context of the planet.”

So while beginning of life issues such as abortion or end of life issues such as euthanasia are crucial modern talking points, they aren’t the full picture, he said, explaining that the academy seeks to address “defending life in all its conditions,” including childhood, adolescence, and old age, as well as when it comes to other opics such as the death penalty.

“We interested in accompaniment at every moment, we are interested in making understood the contradiction of choices of new technologies in front of a humanistic vision,” he said, explaining that the recovery of a “humanistic” dimension is required for all “scientific areas that involve human life.”

Also present at the news briefing was Dr. Bernadette Tobin, Director of the Plunkett Centre for Ethics at the Australian Catholic University.

In comments to CNA, Tobin said that “new technologies require us to think out (about) medicines, healing, ethics, and thinking out how that can be provided for people in a way that respects their dignity as human beings.”

New technologies have helped ensure that people suffering from various diseases have cures, “and can now live out what you might call a natural lifespan rather succumbing to some of these terrible diseases.”

However, the reverse side “is that people are often kept alive in circumstances in which they simply would not want that to happen, and they simply feel that they don’t have a duty to accept what kind of healthcare is being offered to them,” Tobin said.

Because of this, “we need to think carefully about that, and help doctors who are looking after people at the end of their lives understand ethically and clinically what their responsibilities are because there is both over-treatement, and under-treatment, and we’ve really got to avoid both.”

New technologies, she said, have “augmented medicine’s ability” to pursue noble objectives such as pain relief, various cures and organ transplantation.

“This is a wonderful new set of technologies,” Tobin said, while cautioning there is always a challenge in ensuring “that what’s now possible is done in ways which respect both the internal ethic of medicine, and respect the dignity of the human being.”

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Dale Recinella (C) accepts the Pontifical Academy for Life’s Guardian of Life Award from Archbishop Vincenzo Paglia (L) and Cardinal Wim Eijk (R), Sept. 28, 2021. / PAL screenshot

Denver Newsroom, Sep 30, 2021 / 13:00 pm (CNA).

Dale Recinella, a Florida lawyer who has ministered to death row inmates for decades, was given an award honoring his service on Tuesday at the Vatican.

The Pontifical Academy for Life bestowed on Recinella its first Guardian of Life Award Sept. 28. In accepting the award, Recinella said he sees the honor as “a profound statement by our Church” about how important the lives of death row inmates are.

“When I have men [on death row] who want to become Catholic, I ask: why? And they say: because that’s the Church that wants me,” Recinella said.

In the mid-’80s, Recinella was working as a high-powered lawyer, first as a partner in a law firm in Miami and then as a supervising attorney at a “very significant law firm” in Tallahassee.

Though Recinella’s family life and career were stellar, by any measure, he began reassing how he had been using his gifts and his skills up to that point. A desire began to stir in both Recinella and his wife; a desire to give back.

So Recinella and his wife Susan got involved in a ministry to the homeless. At that time, one of the biggest problems facing the homeless people Recinella encountered was AIDS, and they ended up taking the state training, through the local AIDS service organization, to get certified to work with people with AIDS.

Eventually, the organizer of the ministry approached Recinella to see if he’d be willing to go even deeper.

“He asked if I would be willing to come to his prison and start seeing men that were terminal with cancer and AIDS,” Recinella recalled, speaking to CNA in May 2020.

“And what I didn’t have the courage to tell him was I’d never been in a prison, I had financed prisons on Wall Street all over the country, huge prisons, but I’d never been in one and had no desire to go in one.”

Recinella’s family helped to convince him that he should take the plunge in the early 1990s.

“It was Susan and the kids quoting Jesus from the Gospel in Matthew 25 that convinced me that if my faith was really guiding my life, that Jesus had said when we visited the least in prison, we visited him, but when we didn’t, we had refused to visit him. And so I figured I’d give it a shot,” he said.

It would be a couple of years before the idea of death row, specifically, really crossed Recinella’s mind, when he and his family ended up moving to the small town of Macclenny, Florida. That town just happened to be the home of the state’s death row prison.

Recinella was shocked at the harsh conditions he encountered when he first set foot in a death row prison.

“The very first thing that struck me, my first experience was, ‘I can’t believe we’re still doing this in the 20th century,’” he recalled, noting that despite the Florida heat, the inmates were not given air conditioning.

Ministering to condemned criminals has not proven easy. Recinella recalls being assigned to a serial killer who had killed young women of a similar age to Recinella’s daughter.

He found the strength to do it through conversations with a trusted priest and through the sacraments, he said.

“I was not ready to handle the spiritual challenges of dealing with the level of human suffering that we’ve experienced in street ministry, AIDS ministry, prison, ministry, and death row ministry,” Recinella said.

“And that’s what we’ve learned is: this is really meant to be done in ‘gangs’ if you will, by ‘gangs of Christians’ doing the gospel. And so we’ve had to make sure that we have a community of accountability that’s calling us to be honest with ourselves, and for me with death row, that is to make sure I’m dealing with the suffering in the way our Church provides for us to do it.”

Once Recinella realized he had a heart for prison ministry, he quickly realized that he could not continue to minister in death row prisons as a practicing lawyer. So, although he kept his law license active, he gave up the practice of law to minister to the death row inmates.

In addition to spending several days a week visiting inmates himself, he has also trained other people to do prison ministry, and has acted as a witness for nearly two dozen executions so far.

Florida, especially the northern part and the panhandle, falls squarely in the Bible belt— which consists mostly of southern states, with Baptist majorities.

Since 1976, nearly 90% of all the executions in the United States have taken place in this region. In fact, Recinella found during his research that just 2% of US counties account for over half of all the executions in the US since 1976. In recent years counties in Texas, Missouri, and Florida have routinely topped the list.

The fact that support for capital punishment remains so strong, especially in parts of the country where it seemed to Recinella that nearly everyone was Christian, troubled him.

So several years ago, Recinella wrote a book identifying 44 requirements of the death penalty when it was the law of the land in Israel— such as a ban on circumstantial evidence, treating all offenders equally, establishing unquestionable guilt, et cetera.

“I identified 44 absolute non-waivable requirements of the biblical death penalty that had to be met before it could even be considered,” Recinella said.

By contrast, he found that the death penalty, in Florida and the US, fulfilled none of those biblical requirements. Last year, Bishop Felipe Estevez of St. Augustine released a pastoral letter calling for an end to the death penalty, quoting extensively from Recinella’s work.

Recinella’s experience over the years has also shown him just how inequitable the death penalty can be— how it disproportionately affects people of minority races, and how those who are poor are less likely to be able to appeal their conviction.

For example, his research found that a prisoner is more than ten times more likely to be executed if it was a black defendant and a white victim, than if it were a white defendant and a black victim. In Florida, nearly 40% of the death row is black, out of a population that is 15% black.

“This is the real death penalty; it’s not the thing that the death penalty supporters think it is,” Recinella commented.

“The real death penalty is a monstrosity, it’s error prone, it’s full of mistakes and human failings, and yes, we get it wrong.”

Recinella says his years of death row ministry have led to many deep friendships, positive relationships with prisoners, and numerous conversions.

“Susan and I, since coming to death row, I think we’ve accumulated about 30 some either godchildren or confirmation godchildren, and those are long-term relationships,” he said.

“The Gospel brings us into long term relationships with the people who are suffering and who the world doesn’t want relationship with.”

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