Pope Francis joins international community in mourning after New Zealand attacks

Pope Francis leads a prayer vigil at the Vatican, Oct. 3, 2015. / Mazur/catholicnews.org.uk.

CNA Staff, May 6, 2021 / 09:00 am (CNA).
Pope Francis said Thursday that he is praying for the people of India as they face a devastating coronavirus ou… […]

Vatican City, Aug 2, 2017 / 09:32 am (CNA/EWTN News).- After hosting a discussion earlier this summer, the Vatican office for justice has outlined several goals and action points in their plan to fight corruption, which will be a central focus for the upcoming year.

On June 15 the International Consultation Group for justice, corruption, organized crime and mafias, part of the Vatican dicastery for Promoting Integral Human Development, organized an “International Debate on Corruption.”

The event, hosted in collaboration with the Pontifical Academy for Social Sciences, drew some 50 participants from all over the world, including anti-mafia and anti-corruption magistrates, bishops, Vatican officials, representatives from the U.N. and various States, heads of movements, victims and ambassadors.

As a result of that meeting, the consultation group has issued a joint text July 31 highlighting their priorities and providing 21 goals and actions points they hope to accomplish in the coming year.

In the text, the group noted that among Pope Francis’ monthly prayer intentions for 2018 is the petition “that those who have material, political or spiritual power may resist any lure of corruption,” to which the month of February will be dedicated.

“Corruption, prior to being an act, is a condition,” they said. “Hence the need for culture, education, training, institutional action, citizen participation.”

To encourage this, the group said that from September of this year on, they will place a special focus on anti-corruption efforts, and plan to formulate different definitions of “corruption,” which was mentioned in a book-length interview with Cardinal Peter Turkson titiled “Corrosione,” or “Corrosion.”

Published the same day as the June 15 debate on corruption, the book was presented during the event and features a forward by Pope Francis, who called corruption a “form of blasphemy” and a “cancer that weighs our lives.”

According to the text, the group “will not just come up with virtuous exhortations, because concrete gestures are needed.” To educate means having credible teachers, they said, “even in the Church.”

As an international network, the group and the Church itself will work “with courage, resolution, transparency, spirit of collaboration and creativity.”

The group insisted that “anyone seeking alliances to obtain privileges, exemptions, preferential or even illegal pathways, is not credible.”

“If we decide to follow this behavior, we can all run the risk of becoming unsuitable, harmful and dangerous,” they said, adding that those “taking advantage of their position to recommend people who are often not recommendable – both in terms of value and honesty – are not credible.”

“Thus, the action of the Consultation Group will be educational and informative, and will address public opinion and many institutions to create a mentality of freedom and justice, in view of the common good.”

Consequences arising as a result of corruption are not often recognized, they said, noting that “one is unaware that an act of corruption is often at the base of a crime.”

Because of this, the group aims to intervene and “fill this gap, especially wherever, in the world, corruption is the dominant social system.”

With the help of bishops’ conferences and local churches, members will also dedicate themselves to investigating a global response to the “excommunication of the mafia” and other similar criminal groups, as well as “the prospect of excommunication for corruption.”

Pope Francis himself said in a June 2014 visit to Calabria, a region plagued by mafia activity, called the local criminal branch, known as the ‘Ndrangheta, “adorers of evil” and said that those who have chosen this path “not in communion with God. They are ‘excommunicated,’” as an invitation to conversion.

Another objective the group will pursue is to “develop the almost-lost relationship between justice and beauty,” since “our extraordinary historical, artistic and architectural heritage will be a formidable element supporting educational and social actions against all forms of corruption and organized crime.”

They will also seek to promote a political mindset which, in their words, is capable of “enlightening actions towards civil institutions, to ensure that international treaties are effectively enforced and laws are standardized to best pursue the tentacles of crime, which go well beyond state borders.”

To this end, the principals of both the Palermo and Merida Conventions against transnational organized crime and corruption will be studied.

Peace and the relationship between peace processes and various forms of corruption will be another area of study, since corruption “also causes a lack of peace.”

“A movement, an awakening of consciences, is necessary,” the group said. “This is our primary motivation, which we perceive as a moral obligation. Laws are necessary but not sufficient.”

Key areas of focus, then, will be education, culture and citizenship, they said, stressing that “we need to act with courage to stir and provoke consciences, shifting from widespread indifference to the perception of the severity of these phenomena, in order to fight them.”

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The statue of St. Peter holding the keys, outside St. Peter’s Basilica. / Daniel Ibanez/CNA.

Vatican City, Apr 14, 2021 / 06:10 am (CNA).

The Vatican’s Congregation for the Causes of the Saints has denied an accusation that an official asked for money to advance the beatification cause of an Italian statesman murdered in 1978.

“What was said is not true,” Fr. Bogusław Turek, undersecretary of the saints congregation, wrote in an April 9 letter to the journalists of an Italian investigative news program which aired April 12.

In the episode, a postulator, whose work is to guide a diocese through the canonization process in Rome, accused the undersecretary of asking him for a bribe in June 2018 to advance the beatification cause of former Italian Prime Minister Aldo Moro.

“I have never been concerned with, nor dealt with, Aldo Moro’s cause because it has not yet been presented in the Dicastery,” Turek said in the letter shared by the Vatican’s press office April 13.

In a separate note, dated April 9, the Congregation for the Causes of the Saints said it had received notice in April 2018 that the promoters of Moro’s cause had revoked the mandate of postulator Nicola Giampaolo, and assigned someone new.

“It should therefore be noted that the alleged financial request could not have been made to Mr. Giampaolo in June 2018, as he asserts, as he was no longer a postulator,” the saints office stated.

The postulator, Giampaolo, made the accusation in an interview on the program “Report,” which airs on the state-owned channel Rai3. Giampaolo is a journalist and author, who has also worked in local politics.

Undersecretary Turek said that he had met with Giampaolo in the offices of the saints congregation for another reason: to explain to him that he had not been approved by the dicastery as postulator of two other beatification causes “due to the lack of the requisites required by the canonical norms.”

Aldo Moro was a prominent Catholic politician and jurist. He was a founding member of Italy’s center-left Christian Democracy party and is said to be one of the most popular leaders in the history of the Italian Republic.

Moro was also one of Italy’s longest-serving prime ministers in the post-war era, holding the office from 1963 to 1968 and again from 1974 to 1976.

He was assassinated by the far-left terrorist group Red Brigades on May 9, 1978, after having been kidnapped and held in captivity for 55 days.

Moro’s cause for beatification was opened by the Diocese of Rome for investigation in September 2012. In 2015, controversies emerged around the statesman, held by some to have been killed in “hatred of the faith.” Moro’s then-postulator, Giampaolo, said the beatification process would possibly be put on hold.

At the time, Moro’s oldest daughter, Senator Maria Fida Moro, called the controversies “completely unjustified,” and described her father as “persecuted in life, in death, and after.”

On “Report,” Giampaolo said “unfortunately the cause was temporarily suspended, because I saw strong pressure from the outside towards the cause and at the same time, the supreme interests of the Church were at risk.”

“There were probably too many interests behind a beatification and canonization process,” he said.

The undersecretary of the Congregation for the Causes of the Saints, Fr. Bogusław Turek, told the journalists of “Report” last week that the Vicariate of Rome had not been authorized by the congregation to open Moro’s beatification cause.

And in its April 9 note, the saints office said Nicola Giampaolo had never been ratified as postulator of Moro’s cause and the congregation does not offer any form of “accreditation of postulators” as Giampaolo claims to have on his curriculum vitae.

[…]