Pope Francis: Prepare to meet the Lord with good deeds inspired by His love

November 8, 2020 CNA Daily News News Briefs 2 Print

Vatican City, Nov 8, 2020 / 08:40 am (CNA).- Pope Francis said Sunday that it is important not to forget that at the end of one’s life there will be “a definitive appointment with God.”

“If we want to be ready for the final encounter with the Lord, we must cooperate with Him now and perform good deeds inspired by His love,” Pope Francis said in his Angelus address Nov. 8.

“Being wise and prudent means not waiting until the last moment to correspond to God’s grace, but to do so actively and immediately, starting right now,” he told pilgrims gathered in St. Peter’s Square.

The pope reflected on Sunday’s Gospel from chapter 25 of the Gospel of Matthew in which Jesus tells a parable of ten virgins invited to a wedding feast. Pope Francis said that in this parable the wedding feast is a symbol of the Kingdom of heaven, and that at Jesus’ time it was customary for weddings to be celebrated at night, which is why the virgins needed to remember to bring oil for their lamps.

“It is clear that with this parable, Jesus wants to tell us that we must be prepared for His coming,” the pope said.

“Not only the final coming, but also for the everyday encounters, great and small, with a view to that encounter, for which the lamp of faith is not enough; we also need the oil of charity and good works. As the apostle Paul says, the faith that truly unites us to Jesus is, ‘faith working through love.’”

Pope Francis said that people unfortunately often forget “the purpose of our lives, that is, the definitive appointment with God,” and thus lose a sense of expectation and make the present absolute.

“When one makes the present absolute, he or she looks only to the present, losing the sense of expectation, which is so good, and so necessary,” he said.

“If, on the other hand, we are vigilant and correspond to God’s grace by doing good, we can serenely await the bridegroom’s coming. The Lord will be able to come even while we are sleeping: this will not worry us, because we have the reserve of oil accumulated through our daily good works, accumulated with that expectation of the Lord, that He may come as soon as possible and that He may come to take us with Him,” Pope Francis said.

After praying the Angelus, Pope Francis said that has been thinking of the people in Central America affected by the recent hurricane. Hurricane Eta, a category 4 hurricane, killed at least 100 people and left thousands more displaced in Honduras and Nicaragua. Catholic Relief Services has been working to provide shelters and food to the displaced.

“May the Lord welcome the deceased, comfort their families and sustain those most in need, as well as all those who are doing all they can to help them,” the pope prayed.

Pope Francis also appealed for peace in Ethiopia and Libya. He asked for prayers for the “Libyan Political Dialogue Forum” taking place in Tunisia.

“Given the importance of the event, I very much hope that at this delicate time a solution to the long suffering of the Libyan people will be found, and that the recent agreement for a permanent ceasefire be respected and implemented. Let us pray for the delegates of the Forum, for peace and stability in Libya,” he said.

The pope also asked for a celebratory round of applause for Blessed Joan Roig Diggle, who was beatified at a Mass at the Sagrada Familia in Barcelona on Nov. 7.

Blessed Joan Roig was a 19-year-old Spanish martyr who gave his life while protecting the Eucharist during the Spanish Civil War.

“May his example arouse in everyone, especially the young, the desire to live the Christian vocation to the full. A round of applause to this young Blessed, so brave,” Pope Francis said.

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Does ‘Fratelli tutti’ change Church teaching on the death penalty?

October 6, 2020 CNA Daily News 3

Washington, D.C. Newsroom, Oct 6, 2020 / 06:00 am (CNA).- In his new encyclical, Pope Francis reiterated that the death penalty is “inadmissible.”  Did the pope change centuries of Church teaching with that statement? A leading theologian told CNA that the pope’s teaching was a development, not a rupture with the Church’s past.

In Fratelli Tutti, released on Sunday, Pope Francis cited both Pope St. John Paul II and new language added to the Catechism of the Catholic Church on the death penalty, calling the practice “inadmissible” and urging for its abolition worldwide.

“Saint John Paul II stated clearly and firmly that the death penalty is inadequate from a moral standpoint and no longer necessary from that of penal justice. There can be no stepping back from this position,” Pope Francis wrote in paragraph 263 of the encyclical.

“Today we state clearly that ‘the death penalty is inadmissible’ and the Church is firmly committed to calling for its abolition worldwide,” he said.

Some Catholic commenters have claimed that Pope Francis’ statement constituted a “definitive change” in Church teaching.

But the pope’s teaching was a development in line with statements of recent popes, not a rupture from doctrine, theologian Fr. Thomas Petri told CNA.

Fr. Petri is dean and acting president of the Pontifical Faculty of the Immaculate Conception at the Dominican House of Studies in Washington, D.C.  

“When you talk about the development of teaching, you’re always talking about growing from what has come before, and never sort of a rupture,” he said.

“I definitely think it’s in the line of what previous popes have taught,” Fr. Petri told CNA, pointing to Popes St. John Paul II and St. Paul VI as examples. “There has been an increasing hesitation about the use of the death penalty by the state.”

The Church’s position on the death penalty has always been part of the ordinary magisterium, Petri said, the teaching that “states have the right to inflict the penalty of death.” St. Paul admonished Christians about the legitimate power of the state to “bear the sword,” in chapter 13 of his letter to the Romans, which Pope Francis cites in Fratelli Tutti.

Many saints and popes have upheld this right of the state to punish justly, Petri said, and “no pope can somehow come out and contradict that”—an act which would indeed be a “rupture” in Church teaching, the theologian said.

Pope Francis, he said, did not contradict Catholic teaching. In the 2018 revision to the Catechism, the pope referred to the death penalty as “inadmissible” but did not call it “intrinsically evil”—and this was a significant choice in words.

“There was a clear message of not using that word [intrinsically evil], when I think a lot of people would have liked him to use that word,” Petri said.

Petri told CNA that Pope Francis is speaking in continuity with recent popes including Pope St. John Paul II, who issued “a very strong statement” about capital punishment in his 1995 encyclical Evangelium Vitae; he said that the death penalty should only be used “when it would not be possible otherwise to defend society,” but added that because of improved security in prisons, “such cases are very rare, if not practically non-existent.”

Popes John Paul II and Francis have worked with the “prudential application” of the Church’s magisterial teaching on the authority of the state, Fr. Petri said, and not reversed it.

The Church has historically taught that the “primary reason for punishment” is “retribution,” he said, which is not revenge but “the idea that the punishment has to fit the gravity of the crime.” Secondary reasons for punishment included the rehabilitation of the criminal and the protection of society.

John Paul II put “protecting society” at the “front and center” of the Church’s teaching on punishment, Petri said, and Pope Francis has continued this teaching in his magisterium, which reflects a new understanding of punishment. 

Many in society view the death penalty now “simply about protecting society from killers and people who are dangerous, being a deterrent, and maybe rehabilitation,” Petri said, and supporters of the death penalty’s continued use should consider if “it cultivates or curries in them emotions of revenge,” which “is not retribution.”

While Popes Francis and John Paul II are making prudential applications of the Church’s teaching in areas of faith and morals, the level of assent required to their teaching is not just “prudential,” Petri explained.

When a cleric takes a profession of faith before becoming a pastor or a dean of a seminary, he said, he must assent to not only divine revelation and definitive propositions of Church teaching on faith and morals, he said, but also the teaching of the pope and bishops exercising the authentic magisterium.

“That’s more than just giving it the benefit of the doubt, it’s basically saying ‘I’m going to subscribe my intellect and will to what you’re teaching even if I don’t understand it, I’m going to try to understand it.’”

For a teaching that has been repeated frequently in statements and high-level documents, including in the Catechism, it’s hard to dismiss assent as merely a matter of prudence, Petri said.

“You can probably disagree with whether or not there should be life prison terms, but not this. I don’t think you can say this about the death penalty issue.”


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