Here are the cardinals offering Masses for the 9 days of mourning for Pope Francis

Vatican City, Aug 30, 2017 / 04:44 am (CNA/EWTN News).- On Wednesday Pope Francis told pilgrims to ignore gloomy people that drag others down, and stressed the need to maintain a healthy dose of the joy experienced in our first encounter with Christ, which he said must serve as a constant motivation to spread the good news.

“Do not listen to deluded and unhappy people; don’t listen to those who cynically recommend not to cultivate hope in life,” the Pope said Aug. 30.

“Let us not entrust ourselves to those who extinguish every enthusiasm saying that no business is worth the sacrifice of an entire life, don’t listen to the ‘elderly’ of heart who suffocate youthful euphoria,” he said.

Rather, Francis told pilgrims to instead “cultivate healthy utopias.” God, he said, “wants us to be able to dream like him and with him, while we walk well aware of reality,” and if a dream goes out, “go back and dream it again, drawing with hope on the memory of its beginnings.”

Pope Francis spoke to pilgrims gathered in St. Peter’s Square for his weekly general audience. In his address, the Pope continued his catechesis on Christian hope, focusing on the specific relationship between hope and memory.

The “icon” for this relation is the calling of the first disciples, John and Andrew, he said, noting that “their memory was totally impressed by this experience.”

So strong was the impact of this moment that in the first chapter of his Gospel, John recalls the exact time they met Jesus, saying “it was around four in the afternoon.” John, the Pope said, tells the story “as a clear memory youth, which remains intact in his aged memory.”  

Noting how the two had chosen John the Baptist as their spiritual guide, Francis pointed to the moment when, as Jesus passed by, the Baptist tells the then-young men that “this is the Lamb of God.”

For John and Andrew this meeting is “the spark,” he said, noting that they then leave their first master and follow Jesus, who after some time turns and asks a key question: “what are you looking for?”

In the Gospels, Jesus “appears as an expert of the human heart,” Francis said, explaining that in this moment he met two youth who were “healthily iniquitous.”

“What youth is a satisfied youth, without a search for meaning?” the Pope asked, adding that “young people who do not search for anything are not youth, (but) they have aged before their time.”

In off-the-cuff remarks, Francis addressed the youth in the square and those watching the audience through the media, asking them “what are you looking for? What are you searching for in your heart?”

In the day’s the Gospel, Jesus appears as “an arsonist of hearts,” who with his question to John and Andrew brings out “the desire for life and happiness that every young person carries inside.”

The vocation of the two disciples begins with a friendship with Jesus “strong enough to impose a commonality of life and passion with him,” he said. In fact, they barely begin their time with Jesus and “immediately they are transformed into missionaries.”

This, Francis said, is evidenced by the fact that their respective brothers – Simon Peter and James – also begin to follow Jesus. “It was an encounter so moving, so happy, that the disciples will forever remember that day which illuminated and oriented their youth.”

Asking those present how to find one’s vocation in modern society, Pope Francis said it can happen in many ways, but, as shown in the Gospel, a first indicator is “the joy of the encounter with Jesus.”

Every vocation – whether to marriage, consecrated life or the priesthood – begins “with an encounter with Jesus who gives us new joy and hope,” he said. The Lord then brings us, even amid trials and hardship, to “an increasingly full encounter with him and to the fullness of joy.”

“Jesus wants people who have experienced that being with him gives immense happiness, which can be renewed every day of life,” he said, adding that a disciple who is not joyful “does not evangelize this world,” and is ultimately “a sad” disciple.

“You become a preacher of Jesus not by refining the weapons of rhetoric,” Francis said, noting that “you can talk and talk and talk,” but if there is no joy, it won’t be effective.

Because of this, Christians, like Mary, must “guard the flame of their ‘falling in love’: in love with Jesus.”

“Of course there are trials in life, there are moments in which we need to go forward despite the opposing cold and wind,” the Pope said. But as Christians, “we know the path which leads to that sacred fire that he has lit once and for all.”

After his address, the Pope greeted pilgrims present from various countries around the world and issued an appeal for the World Day of Prayer for the Care of Creation, celebrated September 1 to coincide with the event on the Orthodox calendar.

The event was instituted by Pope Francis in 2015, and in honor of the shared day of prayer, he and Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew of Constantinople wrote a joint-statement calling for a merciful approach to caring for creation.

In his comments, Francis noted that in their statement both he and Bartholomew “invite everyone to assume a respectful and reasonable and attitude toward creation.”

“We also make an appeal to those who have an influential role, to listen to the cry of the earth and the cry of the poor, who suffer the most from ecological imbalances.”

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Eucharistic adoration following the pope’s Corpus Christi Mass June 14, 2020. / Vatican Media/CNA.

Vatican City, Aug 25, 2023 / 05:57 am (CNA).

Jesus’ healing presence in the Eucharist can “fill with tenderness” the voids and wounds produced by sin in individual lives and in society, Pope Francis said on Friday.

In a meeting at the Vatican with a pilgrimage group led by the Sister Disciples of Jesus in the Eucharist on Aug. 25, the pope noted that in the eyes of the world, it might appear “absurd” to begin confronting societal problems by prayers on one’s knees of “adoration and reparation,” but that it is always effective.

Pope Francis pointed out that the story behind the founding of the sisters’ religious order and the revival it sparked gives witness to this reality. The Sister Disciples of Jesus in the Eucharist were founded in one of the poorest dioceses in southern Italy by Servant of God Bishop Raffaello Delle Nocche in the wake of World War I and the devastating Spanish flu pandemic.

The sisters were to be “poor servants of a poor people.” Pope Francis explained: “At the center of their lives was the Eucharist, ‘a sacrament of love, a sign of unity, a bond of charity,’ as the Second Vatican Council teaches us (Sacrosanctum Concilium, 47).”

“Love, unity, and charity. What does this mean? To adore, to serve, and to repair, that is, to fill with tenderness … to fill with tenderness the wounds and voids produced by sin in man and society, beginning by kneeling before Jesus in the Consecrated Host, and remaining there for a long time,” he said.

Bishop Nocche recommended that the sisters remain in prayer before the Eucharist “even when we seem to feel nothing, in quiet and trusting abandonment, because ‘Magister adest,’ (‘the Master is here’ (Jn. 11:28).”

“By the world’s standards this strategy of action seemed absurd: in the face of immense needs and with almost no resources available, what sense could there be in telling the sisters to get down on their knees for ‘adoration and reparation’? Yet, as always, the way of faith and self-offering worked in this case too,” Pope Francis said.

“The prayers of those courageous women indeed generated a contagious force, which soon led them to undertake and promote works of material, cultural, and spiritual redemption far exceeding all expectations.”

“They awakened the faith and commitment of parish communities and families, founded schools of various levels and grades, and rekindled devotion and a sense of their own dignity in so many people, men and women, young people, adults and the elderly, who were too often and for too long oppressed by inhumane living conditions and the contempt and indifference of the surrounding world, which saw in them nothing but rejects of society. … They unleashed a different ‘war’ — that against poverty and injustice, and they spread a different ‘epidemic’ — that of love.”

Today, the Sister Disciples of Jesus in the Eucharist have about 400 professed sisters, as well as postulants in houses of formation in Brazil, the Philippines, Rwanda, and Italy. The congregation continues to have a strong presence in southern Italy with 38 communities.

“Dear sisters, you are the witnesses and heirs of all this … with your presence in the five continents, with the Eucharistic Centers, schools, missions, and all the services you carry out,” Pope Francis said.

“Therefore, starting from pausing before Jesus in the Eucharist, the Bread broken and the Master who washes the disciples’ feet (cf. Jn. 13:3-15), may you also learn to look at your brothers and sisters through the magnifying glass of the consecrated Host.”

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Vatican City, Dec 17, 2019 / 01:50 pm (CNA).- Two investment funds used by Vatican dicasteries were also used by a major Italian bank to conceal illegal investments for which the bank was eventually closed.

On Friday, Matlese media reported that the IOR, or Vatican Bank, is suing Optimum Asset Management over 230 million euros in losses through a fund under its management. The IOR is being sued in turn by Optimum for breach of contract; the firm claims the Vatican’s bank owes an additional 24 million euros as an already agreed-upon investment in another of its funds.

Optimum was in 2015 identified by Italian authorities, as a fund manager through which Banca Popolare di Vincenza fraudulently funneled money meant for outside investments back into investment in the bank itself.

While the bank was required by European law to maintain a diversified investment portfolio as a hedge against risk, it was found to have used Optimum to fraudulently invest in itself instead, leaving the accounts and investments of customers at a high degree of risk.

The bank used the same tactic, channeling investment funds back into itself, through the Athena Global Fund, run by Raffaele Mincione.

Italian media have estimated that the fraud involved hundreds of millions of euros in bank funds.

Mincione’s Athena Global Fund was also used by the Holy See’s Secretariat of State to invest hundreds of millions of Church funds, most notably through the purchase of a luxury property development in London from his own holding company, Time & Life SA.

Through dedicated funds created by Athena in which the Vatican and Banca Popolare were the exclusive investors, Mincione also used funds from both to buy unrated, non-recourse bonds in Time & Life – essentially using investor funds to make no-strings-attached loans to his own holding company.

Time & Life used some of the money raised this way to buy shares in Banca Popolare – meaning that Mincione was returning bank invested funds to the bank through the back door.

By using its own investment funds to purchase its own shares indirectly through Optimum and Mincione’s holding company, Banca Popolare secretly consolidated its ownership and evaded regulatory requirements to raise additional equity capital. The scheme inflated the bank’s financial returns and concealed its portfolio’s exposure to risk at the same time.

When the scheme was discovered by Italian authorities, Banca Popolare was fined, and then closed by a forced sale to Intesa San Paolo, one of Italy’s largest lenders, in 2017. 

Mincione and Optimum were paid millions of euros in management fees for redirecting the bank’s investment back into itself, while also benefiting by directing the remainder of the bank’s investment funds.

According to filings made on the Irish Stock Exchange in 2012 and 2013, Mincione also borrowed tens of millions of euros from his own company Time & Life, in which the Vatican’s Secretariat of State was heavily invested, through low-interest loans made to a trust, of which he was the beneficiary, based in the Isle of Jersey – a well-known European tax haven. 
 
These funds were in turn used by Mincione for other investments in high-risk ventures.

In 2015, Mincione bought a 5% stake in EZTD Ltd, an Israeli-based company providing an online options trading platform to American investors. That investment lost 90% of its value after a 2016 SEC finding that the company had misled investors and violated both the Securities Act and the Securities and Exchanges Act. The SEC found that fewer than three percent of the company’s 4,000 U.S. account holders made a profit investing through the company.

While the Vatican spent hundreds of millions buying control of the London property development from Mincione, he also cleared an additional 60 million euros in management and transaction fees, on top of his profits from actually selling shares of the building to the Secretariat of State.

The Holy See’s Secretary of State, Cardinal Pietro Parolin, has said that the Vatican’s London investment must be investigated, but has not yet indicated what parties are responsible for the investment, or whether internal investment policies have been violated. Pope Francis said last month that some involved in the investment have done things that seem, to him, “not clean.”

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