Vatican may add ‘spiritual abuse’ to crimes in Church law

Pope Francis greets families in St. Peter’s Square before Mass for the World Meeting of Families 2022 on June 25, 2022 / Daniel Ibanez/CNA

Vatican City, Jun 25, 2022 / 12:00 pm (CNA).

Christ, through his passion and death, has set us free from the slavery of self-centeredness, so that we can better love others, Pope Francis said at Mass for the World Meeting of Families on Saturday.

“Freedom is something we receive. All of us are born with many forms of interior and exterior conditioning, and especially with a tendency to selfishness, to making ourselves the center of everything and being concerned only with our own interests,” the pope said on June 25. “This is the slavery from which Christ has set us free.”

Pope Francis delivered the homily at a Mass celebrated by Cardinal Kevin Farrell, the prefect of the Dicastery for Laity, Family, and Life, the Vatican office which co-organized the 10th edition of the World Meeting of Families with the Diocese of Rome.

The gathering, attended by around 2,000 families, had the theme: “Family Love: A Vocation and a Path to Holiness.”

In his homily, Francis reflected on a passage from St. Paul’s Letter to the Galatians: “Brothers and sisters: For freedom Christ set us free; so stand firm and do not submit again to the yoke of slavery. For you were called for freedom, brothers and sisters. But do not use this freedom as an opportunity for the flesh; rather, serve one another through love.”

“Freedom,” the pope said, “is one of the most cherished ideals and goals of the people of our time. Everyone wants to be free, free of conditioning and limitations, free of every kind of ‘prison,’ cultural prison, social or economic. Yet, how many people lack the greatest freedom of all, which is interior freedom.”

He also noted that the freedom given by God, as St. Paul says, is not the self-indulgent freedom of the world, but freedom “directed to love, so that — as the Apostle tells us again today — ‘through love you may become slaves of one another.’”

“All of you married couples, in building your family, made, with the help of Christ’s grace, a courageous decision: to use freedom not for yourselves, but to love the persons that God has put at your side,” Pope Francis said.

He advised parents “not to shield our children from the slightest hardship and suffering, but to try to communicate to them a passion for life, the passion to arouse in them the desire to discover their vocation and embrace the great mission that God has in mind for them.”

“Nothing,” he said, “can be more encouraging for children than to see their parents experiencing marriage and family life as a mission, demonstrating fidelity and patience despite difficulties, moments of sadness and times of trial.

“Don’t ever forget this: the family is the first place where you learn to love,” he emphasized.

“In praising the beauty of the family, we also feel compelled, today more than ever, to defend the family,” Pope Francis said. “Let us not allow the family to be poisoned by the toxins of selfishness, individualism, today’s culture of indifference and culture of waste, and as a result lose its very DNA, which is the spirit of acceptance and service.”

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Vatican City, Apr 23, 2019 / 10:16 am (CNA).- Pope Francis celebrated the feast of his patron St. George – Jorge in Spanish – by giving away rosaries to 6,000 young people from Milan, asking them to pray for him through Mary’s interce… […]

Vatican City, Dec 13, 2018 / 09:55 am (CNA/EWTN News).- Pope Francis told a Catholic media group Thursday to be avenues of God’s peace, sharing the stories of the poor, the least, and the voiceless.

“In your profession you can be ‘living channels’ of spirituality before God and before all your listeners and viewers,” the pope told collaborators of the Italy-based Catholic broadcasting network Telepace.

“I renew, then, the invitation to ‘promote a journalism of peace,”” he said, quoting his 2018 message for World Communications Day. “A journalism created by people for people, one that is at the service of all, especially those – and they the majority in our world – who have no voice.”

Francis addressed the group Dec. 13, for their 40th anniversary, in the Vatican’s Clementine Hall. Since 1990, at the request of St. John Paul II, the network has broadcast Vatican events such as the general audience, the Angelus, and papal Masses.

Praising the network, the pope said he wanted to urge three commitments in journalism – the first, to be “antennas of spirituality.” The TV antenna has a beautiful symbolism, he said, because of its “dual function of emitting and receiving a signal.”

Broadcast journalism should be a voice for the voiceless, he stressed; above all for the poor, the least, and the excluded. “Never forget them, the poor next door!” he said, praising the network’s program about inmates on death row in Texas. This “is the spirituality of charity!” he said.

Urging journalists to consider how they can teach the Gospel to the young, he stated that he would like the media to “pay more attention to young people, not only by telling their failures but also their dreams and their hopes!”

Doing this, he said, is a matter of being witnesses of God’s Word.

He also warned the media against letting their storytelling ever devolve into gossip, which undermines human community and sows “envy, jealousy, and lust for power.”

“It is important, therefore, to communicate responsibly, also thinking about how much bad you can do with language, with chatter, with rumors,” he said.

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