Vatican City, Mar 15, 2019 / 08:15 am (CNA).- Pope Francis mourned “senseless acts of violence” against innocent life after the New Zealand mosque attacks. On Friday, at least forty-nine people were killed in attacks on two mosques in the c… […]
Munich, Germany, Mar 14, 2019 / 05:27 pm (CNA).- Cardinal Reinhard Marx of Munich and Freising has announced that the Catholic Church in Germany is embarking on a “binding synodal process” to tackle what he says are the three key issues arising from the clerical abuse crisis: priestly celibacy, the Church’s teaching on sexual morality, and a reduction of clerical power.
Speaking at the conclusion of the plenary session of the German bishops’ conference on Thursday, Marx told reporters that the bishops had unanimously decided these three topics would be subject to a process of “synodal progression” that could lead to a binding, but as yet undetermined, outcome.
“The Church needs synodal progress,” the president of the German bishops’ conference asserted. “Pope Francis encourages this.”
The German bishops held their plenary session in the German town of Lingen from March 11 to 14.
Addressing journalists on the final day, Marx said the Church’s teaching on sexual morality has yet to account for significant recent discoveries from theology and the humanities. Also, he said, the significance of sexuality to personhood has not yet received sufficient attention from the Church.
Bishops “feel we often are unable to speak on questions of present-day sexual behavior,” Marx said.
The cardinal also said that the German bishops appreciate priestly celibacy as an “expression of the religious bond to God” and do not simply want to give up on it. But to what extent celibacy should always be an element of priestly witness is a question “we will determine” through the “synodal process,” Marx told the press.
Furthermore, Marx said clerical abuse of power constitutes a betrayal of the trust of people in need of stability and religious orientation. Therefore, the “synodal process” would be charged with identifying what measures must be taken to achieve “the necessary reduction of [clerical] power.”
The establishment of ecclesiastical administrative courts is one such step for which the bishops will in the near future draft a proposal.
As a first step on the proposed synodal path, Marx announced that the German bishops have decided to set up three preparatory working groups. The working group on “clerical power” is headed by Bishop Karl-Heinz Wiesemann of Speyer, the working group on “sexual morality” will be headed by Bishop Franz-Josef Bode of Osnabrück. The working group on “the priest’s way of life,” which will focus on celibacy, will be moderated by Bishop Felix Genn of Münster.
Interim reports are expected from all three by Sept. 13.
Referring to the German bishops’ four year “Würzburg Synod” from 1971 to 1975, which was charged with an implementation of the decisions of the Second Vatican Council, Marx affirmed that the Church in Germany is “not starting at zero” in a synodal process, given the Würzburg experience, and various consultation processes undertaken by the German bishops in recent years.
The “synodal process” will involve consultations with the “Central Committee of German Catholics,” a lay organization that closely cooperates with the bishops’ conference, and will draw on outside experts.
Vatican City, Mar 14, 2019 / 09:16 am (CNA).- Cardinal Godfried Danneels died Thursday at the age of 85 in his native Belgium. Danneels served as Archbishop of Mechelen-Brussels and leader of the Belgian Bishops’ Conference for more than thirty years.
In later life, Danneels was widely recognized as an influential member of the college of cardinals and an at times controversial figure.
“This zealous pastor served the Church with dedication not only in his diocese but also at the national level as President of the Conference of Bishops of Belgium, while being a member of various Roman Dicasteries,” Pope Francis wrote March 14 in a telegram to the bishops of Belgium expressing his condolences.
“Attentive to the challenges of the contemporary Church, Cardinal Danneels took an active part in various Synods of Bishops, including those of 2014 and 2015 on the family. He has just been reminded of God at this time of purification and of walking toward the Resurrection of the Lord,” Francis said.
Considered among the more progressive churchmen of his generation, Danneels was an enthusiastic supporter of the liturgical reforms which followed Vatican Council II. He was also a prominent advocate for decentralized Church governance and interreligious dialogue.
As leader of the Church in Belgium, the cardinal was an established figure in national life, keeping close company with politicians and members of the royal family. He was sometimes criticized for his apparent willingness to embrace secular-liberal politics, once controversially describing same-sex marriage as a “positive development” in Belgium.
In recent years, accusations of mismanagement and cover-up of clerical sexual abuse cast a shadow over his past leadership of the church in Belgium.
Danneels was at the center of a national scandal when the Belgian newspapers De Standaard and Het Nieuwsblad published transcripts of a recording in which he appeared to pressure a victim of sexual abuse to remain silent.
The victim had been abused by his uncle, Belgian Bishop Roger Vangheluwe, beginning at the age of 5. When the victim met with Danneels to report the abuse and insist on his uncle’s removal from office, the cardinal told the man that Vangheluwe would retire in a few months.
“I don’t think you’d do yourself or [your uncle] a favor by shouting this from the rooftops,” Danneels was recorded saying.
The cardinal denied that he intended any cover-up.
Danneels was born June 4, 1933 in Kanegem, diocese of Bruges, and grew up in a family of six in Eastern Flanders.
Ordained in 1957, Danneels went on to teach theology at the Flemish Catholic University of Louvain as a professor for ten years, after earning a doctorate at the Pontifical Gregorian University of Rome.
Danneels was appointed as the bishop of Antwerp by Pope Paul VI in 1977, became archbishop of Mechelen-Brussels in 1980, and created cardinal by Pope John Paul II three years later.
After his retirement in 2010, Danneels would infrequently speak in public.
In 2013, Danneels stood next to the newly elected Pope Francis on the loggia of St. Peter’s Basilica. Pope Francis later invited Danneels to attend the two sessions of the Synod of Bishops on the family as a special delegate.
In a 2015 authorized biography of the cardinal, Danneels was listed as being part of a group of cardinals who coordinated efforts ahead of the conclave that elected Pope Francis.
The funeral for Cardinal Danneels will take place in the Cathedral of St. Rombouts in Mechelen, and will be celebrated by the current Archbishop of Mechelen-Brussels Cardinal Jozef De Kesel.
In a March 14 statement announcing the death, Cardinal Kesel recognized Danneels’ years of service, “We are very grateful to Cardinal Danneels. For many years he has exercised shepherding in the Church in a period of fundamental changes in Church and society.”
“He has experienced trials, and in the end he was greatly weakened and exhausted. We continue to thank him gratefully. May he rest in God’s peace,” he said.
Sixth anniversaries aren’t really a thing. Nobody thinks they are — not really — except insofar as it is a news hook on which to hang editorial copy, like that, which came on the occasion from […]
Vatican City, Mar 13, 2019 / 10:15 am (CNA).- On the sixth anniversary of Pope Francis’ election Wednesday, the Vatican’s chief spokesman said Francis will continue to lead the Church as a synodal “field hospital” in the year ahead.
Pope Francis “has a vision of an ‘outgoing’ Church and a ‘field hospital’ Church,” Alessandro Gisotti, interim director of the Holy See Press Office told Vatican Media March 13.
“The outgoing Church presupposes that you walk … and ‘synodal’ means walking together,” he continued.
Gisotti connected Pope Francis’ vision of the Church, from the beginning of his pontificate, as a field hospital to the Vatican’s recent sex abuse summit on the protection of minors.
“With the meeting on the protection of minors we have seen a Church that has the courage to bind the wounds of women and men of our time,” Gisotti said.
The Vatican spokesman reaffirmed that last month’s Vatican summit necessitated concrete follow-up on the global issue of the protection of minors. This next phase will include the publication of a motu proprio, a handbook from the Congregation on the Doctrine of Faith with a series of regulations, and a task force with experts that can consult bishops’ conferences on the issue of child protection.
“Many had some doubts that it was appropriate to hold this meeting, while the Pope in this regard showed courage and also, in my opinion, a prophetic courage, because for the first time – in the face of a terrible scandal that puts at risk not only the credibility, but in some respects the very mission of the Church – he convoked all the presidents of the episcopates,” Gisotti said.
Vatican Media Editor Andrea Tornielli also said that pope’s sixth year will be “marked at the beginning and the end by two ‘synodal’ events,” the Vatican sex abuse summit and the special Synod on the Amazon respectively.
“But a look at the past year cannot ignore the re-emergence of the abuse scandal and the internal divisions that led the former nuncio Carlo Maria Viganò last August to publicly demand the resignation of the Pope for the management of the McCarrick case, just as Francis celebrated the Eucharist with thousands of families in Dublin proposing the beauty and value of Christian marriage,” Tornielli wrote in an Italian editorial on the eve of the pope’s anniversary.
“The Church, as Pope Francis reminds us today, is not self-sufficient precisely because she too recognizes herself as a beggar asking for healing, in need of mercy and forgiveness from her Lord and she bears witness to the Gospel to many wounded men and women of our time,” he said.
“Perhaps never before as in the troubled year just gone by, the sixth of his pontificate, has the Pope who presents himself as ‘a forgiven sinner,’ testified to this essential and most relevant fact of the Christian faith,” he continued.
The pope spent the sixth anniversary of his election as the 265th successor of St. Peter on a weeklong Lenten retreat with members of the Roman curia, held outside of Vatican City.
At the retreat Wednesday, Cardinal Giovanni Battista Re told Pope Francis and 64 members of the Roman curia that “we are asking that the Lord be your light, support and comfort in your task of confirming your brethren in faith, of being the foundation of unity, and of showing everyone the way that leads to heaven.”
Vatican City, Mar 10, 2019 / 07:04 am (CNA).- Pope Francis said Sunday that the nine Spanish seminarian martyrs beatified this weekend provide a witness to priests and bishops to remain pure and generous.
Blessed Ángel Cuartas Cristóbal … […]
Vatican City, Mar 9, 2019 / 05:37 am (CNA).- It takes courage and boldness to trust in God’s promises and follow the vocation he has set out for you, Pope Francis said in a message for the World Day of Prayer for Vocations, released Saturday.
&l… […]
Vatican City, Mar 8, 2019 / 12:30 pm (CNA).- Vatican officials have said there are no plans to discuss changing the matter of the Eucharist during an upcoming synod for the pan-Amazonian region of South America.
The possibility of changing the… […]
Vatican City, Mar 8, 2019 / 10:25 am (CNA).- Pope Francis said Friday that global development goals need to be supported by ethical objectives stemming from personal conversion and recognition of one’s failures.
“The economic and political objectives must be supported by ethical objectives, which presuppose a change of attitude, the Bible would say a change of heart,” the pope said March 8 at the Vatican’s Clementine Hall.
“Already St. John Paul II spoke about the need to ‘encourage and sustain an ecological conversion,’” he said, referencing a 2001 catechesis of one of his predecessors. “Religions have a key role to play here.”
Francis emphasized that “for a correct transition to a sustainable future, it is necessary to recognize ‘one’s own mistakes, sins, vices or negligence,’ ‘to repent of heart, to change from within,’ to be reconciled with others, with creation and with the Creator,” as he wrote in his 2015 encyclical on the environment, Laudato si’.
“Indeed, we should all commit ourselves to promoting and implementing the development goals that are supported by our deepest religious and ethical values,” he urged. “Human development is not only an economic question or concerns only experts, but is above all a vocation, a call that requires a free and responsible response.”
The pope addressed Vatican officials, religious representatives, and members of international organizations participating in a March 7-9 conference on “Religions and the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs): Listening to the cry of the earth and the poor.”
The conference was hosted by the Dicastery for the Promotion of Integral Human Development and the Pontifical Council for Interreligious Dialogue.
The SDGs are 17 global goals covering social and economic development issues, including poverty, hunger, education, energy, and the environment. The goals were set by the United Nations General Assembly in 2015 as a part of what is called the “2030 Agenda” resolution.
In his speech to conference participants Friday, Pope Francis praised the SDGs and 2030 Agenda as “a great step forward for global dialogue, in the sign of a necessary ‘new universal solidarity.’”
“As my predecessor St. Paul VI highlighted, talking about human development means referring to all people – not just a few – and to the whole human person – not just to the material dimension,” he said.
Urging people to look for concrete answers and commitments, he noted he was pleased conference participants were seeking the input of religious persons in the discussion of the implementation of sustainable development objectives.
“In the case of religious people, we need to open the treasures of our best traditions with regard to a true and respectful dialogue on how to build the future of our planet,” he said.
The pope also underlined the importance of including in the discussion the voices of indigenous people, who he said, though a very small percentage of the world’s overall population, “take care of almost 22 percent of the earth’s surface” and “protect about 80 percent of the planet’s biodiversity.”
“Their voice and their concerns should be at the center of the implementation of the 2030 Agenda and at the center of the search for new roads for a sustainable future,” he stated, adding that he and other bishops will be discussing the topic at the Synod of Bishops on the pan-amazon region, being held in October.
Vatican City, Mar 6, 2019 / 10:03 am (CNA).- Pope Francis sent his prayers and condolences to Alabama Wednesday after devastating tornadoes over the weekend killed 23 people and left dozens of survivors without homes.
“Deeply saddened to learn o… […]
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