Category: Vatican

Anything which is opposed to the dignity of the human person is opposed to the search for the truth, and can never be regarded as religious freedom, the message says. And continues: “Today, there are many areas of the world in which forms of restrictions and limitations to religious freedom persist, both where communities of believers are a minority, and where communities of believers are not a minority, and where more sophisticated forms of discrimination and marginalization exist, on the cultural level and in the spheres of public, civil and political participation.” In his address to the Assembly of the United Nations on 18 April 2008, Benedict XVI stated: “It is inconceivable that believers should have to suppress a part of themselves – their faith – in order to be active citizens. It should never be necessary to deny God in order to enjoy one’s rights. The rights associated with religion are all the more in need of protection if they are considered to clash with a prevailing secular ideology or with majority religious positions of an exclusive nature.”  

In the Philippines alone, where Blessed Candida’s congregation, the Hijas de Jesus, first arrived in 1932, there are over 10,000 students currently enrolled in nine schools and almost 6,000 children and youth benefiting from catechetical instruction outside the school. All over the world, innumerable individuals and communities likewise benefit from the congregation’s apostolic and pastoral work in 17 countries, mostly in Asia, Latin America and Africa where the need is greatest. “We dedicate ourselves to education in its multiple forms,” says Sr. Emelinda “Lynn” Falsis, FI, directress and principal of Manresa School in Parañaque. “Education is our means of proclaiming to all the Good News, moved by the desire to help people as Jesus did. Mother Foundress’ spirit can be felt in the instructional methods and activities that are always in light of the school’s vision-mission, which is seeing to it that the gospel values are integrated, deepened and lived by the students in their daily life experiences.” One of the most shining examples of God’s astonishing work in her life is in how Blessed Candida was able to establish a congregation of Christian educators when she herself was practically illiterate. She was first known to the world as Juana Josefa Cipitria y Bariola, born in the Basque province of Guipuzoa, Spain, on May 31, 1845. To help support her impoverished family, the young Juanita left home at the age of 17 to work as a domestic helper for a wealthy family in Burgos. Despite her humble stature, Juanita displayed extraordinary piety and compassion for those even more destitute than herself.  On April 2, 1869, while praying in the chapel of Rosarillo, she received an inspired message from the Blessed Virgin to found a religious order of women to be known as the “Hijas de Jesus.” Her spiritual director, a Jesuit named Fr. Miguel Herranz, immediately confirmed her vision, having received a similar message himself. Through his patient mentoring, Juanita learned to read, write and speak Castilian at the age of 24, hurriedly preparing her for her imminent role as foundress of a teaching congregation. The Hijas de Jesus embodied Mother Candida’s vision of using education for uplifting those who were poor and powerless. She was a pioneer of social justice and women’s rights in 19th century Spain, opening schools for girls of all social backgrounds at a time when over 80% of the female population could barely read or write. Mother Candida died in Salamanca, Spain, on August 9, 1912. At the moment of death, she declared: “In my 40 years of religious life, I could not recall a single moment that did not belong to God alone.”  Beatified on May 12, 1996, no less than Pope John Paul II described Blessed Candida as a “visionary” who was “blessed with a prophetic view of the modern world.” And explained: “Her deep experience of God’s love for each of His creatures led her to respond with generosity and dedication. She concretely expressed her love of others by founding the congregation

Melissa Wilde, an associate professor of sociology in the School of Arts and Sciences at the University of Pennsylvania, led a team of researchers that investigated data from the Vatican Secret Archive to determine the critical factors influencing how bishops voted at the Second Vatican Council, a university statement announces. Their findings are outlined in “Religious Economy or Organizational Field? Predicting Bishops’ Votes at the Second Vatican Council,” published in the August issue of American Sociological Review. The researchers found that the relationship between the Church and state, as well as changes in the institution’s situation in relation to other institutions, particularly a loss of dominance and the presence of and relationship with other religious institutions, were crucial factors in predicting whether religious leaders would be open to change and also what kinds of change they would prioritize. They concluded that, in places where the Catholic Church enjoyed a stable monopoly as the state church, religious leaders were almost impervious to outside influence and opposed to most kinds of change. In areas in which Catholicism was not the established faith but where the religious field was stable, however, leaders of other religious institutions were a crucial source of influence on bishops who attended and voted at Vatican II. The article also explores factors that predicted bishops’ votes on two of the most contentious issues dividing the Roman Catholic Church during Vatican II from 1962-1965: the validity of a document titled “On the Sources of Revelation,” which upholds the inerrancy of the Bible, and the importance of the Virgin Mary. “This is the first attempt to subject any Council votes to rigorous quantitative analysis,” said lead author Wilde, who studies the processes and factors that direct religious change. “It was exciting being the first person to gain access to these votes on an event as important as the Council.”  

Reflecting on the Day’s theme, “The building of ecclesial communion is the key to mission,” the Pope recalls the words of the Gospel of John “We want to see Jesus” (Jn 12:21), the claim that some Greek pilgrims who had gone to Jerusalem for Easter, made of the apostle Philip. “It resonates in our hearts,” writes Benedict XVI, and “reminds us of the commitment and the task assigned to the whole of the evangelical Church, ‘missionary by its nature’ (Ad Gentes, 2),” and invites us to become leaders of the newness of life, made of authentic relationships, in communities founded on the Gospel. In a multiethnic society that increasingly experiments with forms of loneliness and worrying indifference, Christians must learn to offer signs of hope and universal brotherhood, cultivating the great ideals that transform history and, without unnecessary fear or false hopes, undertake to make the planet home for all peoples.”  Like the Greek pilgrims of two thousand years ago, the men of our time, perhaps unconsciously, are asking believers not only to ‘talk’ of Jesus, but to ‘show’ Jesus, make the Face of the Redeemer shine in all four corners of the earth before the generations of the new millennium, and especially before young people from every continent, privileged recipients and subjects of the Gospel. They need to feel that Christians bear the word of Christ because He is the Truth, because they have found in Him the way, the truth for their lives.”  But the missionary mandate, continues the Pope, cannot be realized without “a deep personal, community and pastoral conversion. Indeed, awareness of the call to preach the Gospel not only encourages every individual believer, but all diocesan and parish communities to a complete renovation and to open more and more to missionary cooperation among Churches, to promote the proclamation of the Gospel in the heart of every person, every people, culture, race, nationality, in every corner.” Ecclesial communion is therefore “constantly looking” for those dedicated to the mission “so that the phenomenon of interculturation can be integrated into a model of unity, in which the Gospel is the leaven of liberty and progress, the source of brotherhood, humility and peace (cf. Ad Gentes, 8). 

In the text, addressed to the presidents of Bishops’ Conferences and bishops responsible for pastoral care in health, he reminds: “The disease is an ‘ancient’ disease, but not for this is it less devastating physically and often also morally. In all epochs and all civilizations, the fate of people with leprosy has been that of being marginalized, deprived of any kind of social life, condemned to seeing their own bodies disintegrate until death arrives. Unfortunately, still today those who suffer from it or – although they have been cured of it – bear its unmistakable mutilations, are far too often condemned to loneliness and fear, to live as though they were invisible to the eyes of other people, of society and of public opinion.” Msgr. Zygmunt Zimowski notes: “Amongst the factors that favor its perpetuation, there is certainly individual and collective acute poverty which far too often involves a lack of hygiene, the presence of debilitating illnesses, insufficient alimentation if not chronic hunger, and a lack of rapid access to medical care and treatment. At a social level, there persist, at the same time, fears which, usually generated by ignorance, add a heavy stigma to the already terrible burden which leprosy involves, even after a person has been cured of it. I thus appeal to the international community and to the authorities of each individual State and invite them to develop and strengthen the strategies that are needed in the fight against leprosy, making them more effective and capillary, above all, where the number of new cases is still high. All of this should be done without neglecting campaigns of education and sensitization that are able to help the people who are afflicted and their families to move out of exclusion and obtain the treatment that is necessary.”  

After noting that Ricci is still held in high esteem in China today, the Pontiff said that the missionary’s work “must not be separated” from his commitment to “Chinese inculturation of the Gospel message and his introduction of Western culture and science to China.” Indeed, many events celebrating the fourth centenary of his death risked presenting Matteo Ricci as a mere cultural mediator. “Fr. Ricci” – said the Pope – “went to China not to bring science and Western culture, but to bring the Gospel to make God known.” He added: “And as he proclaimed the Gospel, Fr. Ricci found, in his interlocutors, the desire for a wider confrontation, so that an encounter motivated by faith became a dialogue between cultures, a disinterested dialogue free from the ambitions of economic or political power, lived in friendship, which made the work of Fr. Ricci and his disciples one of the highest and happiest points in the relationship between China and the West.”  Benedict XVI also recalled “the role and influence” that his Chinese friends had in the work of Ricci (Xu Guangqi; Zhizao Li, Yang Tingyun, Li Yingshi): “His choices did not depend on an abstract strategy of inculturation of the faith, but from all the events, encounters and experiences that he made so all that he achieved was also, thanks to his encounter with the Chinese, an encounter he lived in many ways, but which was deepened through his relationship with some friends and disciples, especially the four famous converts, ‘pillars of the nascent Chinese Church.’”  The memory of Ricci and his friends, continued Benedict XVI, should be an occasion for prayer for “the Church in China and the entire Chinese people, as we do every year, on May 24, turning to Mary, venerated in famous Shrine of Sheshan in Shanghai, and may they also be an incentive and encouragement to live the Christian faith intensely, in dialogue with different cultures, and in the certainty that, in Christ, true humanism is realized, open to God, full of moral and spiritual values and able to respond to the deepest longings of the human soul.” The Pope concluded expressing his appreciation and greeting to China and the desire for a deeper relationship between it and Christianity: “Like Father Matteo Ricci, today I express my profound respect to the noble Chinese people and its ancient culture, convinced that their renewed encounter with Christianity will bring abundant good fruits, and that, like then, it will favor peaceful coexistence among peoples.”  

Migrants represent 3% of the global population. Put another way, 200 million people live in a different country from the one in which they were born. If put together, this population would be the world’s 10th largest country. Nearly half of all migrants are women – a new phenomenon as more women move independently of their families or male partners. This “feminization of migration” has resulted in other problems, known as the “care drain” where families are left without their womenfolk. The United Nations High Commission for Refugees has 33 million people under its mandate – refugees, asylum seekers, exiles, internally displaced persons and stateless persons. At least 15% of all migrants are estimated to be involved in illegal immigration which is often fed by a parallel market of human trafficking and smuggling, and frequently run by organized criminals. These are some of the stark facts and figures presented in Rome at the Sixth World Congress on the Pastoral Care of Migrants and Refugees. The challenge is put before the Church – how does a body that represents Jesus and continues His mission respond to such an overwhelming need? The response offered at the Congress could be summarized as twofold: to assume a theology of abundance and to engender a culture of solidarity. A theology of abundance says there is more than enough on earth for everyone to live with dignity. We just have to share what God has given us, recognizing that God has given creation for the use of all. A culture of solidarity says that we all belong together as members of the human family, interdependent, each with a place and a part to play. There is no need to feel threatened by newcomers to our patch as there is enough for everyone and we all belong together. So don’t turn migrants and refugees into the bad guys. They have a place and have something to offer just as the rest of us do. Rather, see them as an opportunity for society to be enriched and grow. As they come our way, they are not simply taking from what we have but are potential assets for our societies as they develop. There would be fewer cases like Ms. A’s if we approach the whole question in a different way, as the Church’s Congress hammered home in Rome. The Eternal City itself holds a message. It is a magnet attracting people from around the world to its glories, its treasures, its culture, its history and as a center of faith. There, is a place where everyone can feel that they belong. We don’t have to be exceptional, just human and in touch with our humanity.  

High-quality reproductions of 105 documents, 19 of which have never been seen before in public, have been published in a book. The Vatican Secret Archives features a papal letter to Hitler, an entreaty to Rome written on birch bark by a tribe of North American Indians, and a plea from Mary Queen of Scots.  The book documents the Catholic Church’s often hostile dealings with the world of science and of arts, including documents from the heresy trial against Galileo and correspondence exchanged with Erasmus, Voltaire and Mozart.  In a letter dated 1246 from Grand Khan Güyük to Pope Innocent IV, Genghis Khan’s grandson demands that the pontiff travel to central Asia in person – with all of his “kings” in tow – to “pay service and homage to us” as an act of “submission,” threatening that otherwise “you shall be our enemy.” The book also includes letters written to Hitler by Pope Pius XI in 1934 and one received by his controversial successor, Pius XII, from Japan’s Emperor Hirohito.  “An aura of mystery has always surrounded this important cultural institution of the Holy See due to the allusions to inaccessible secrets,” Cardinal Raffaele Farina, a Vatican archivist, writes in the preface to the book, which was produced by a Belgian publisher. Although scholars have had access to the archives since 1881, they remain closed to the public.