What Pope Francis did when guards tried to stop these Chinese pilgrims

Pope Francis kisses prisoners’ feet at Rome’s Regina Coeli Prison. March 29, 2018. / Vatican Media.

Vatican City, Apr 13, 2022 / 10:15 am (CNA).
On Holy Thursday, Pope Francis will celebrate Mass at a prison outside of Rome, where he will wash … […]

Vatican City, Jun 7, 2017 / 04:43 am (CNA/EWTN News).- On Wednesday Pope Francis said that one of the greatest mysteries of the Christian faith is that we have a God we are taught to call ‘Father’ – a father who never leaves us and who we can call on in prayer at any moment.

“The entire mystery of Christian prayer is summed up here, in this word: to have the courage to call God by the name of Father,” the Pope said June 7.

He pointed to Chapter 11 of the Gospel of Luke, in which the evangelist provides a somewhat shortened version of the “Our Father” prayer Jesus taught his disciples to pray, and which begins with the simple invocation: “Father.”

The fatherhood of God, which Francis called “the source of our hope,” formed the basis of his general audience catechesis. Addressing crowds gathered in St. Peter’s Square, the Pope  immediately recalled the parable of the “merciful father,” also known as the Prodigal Son.

The father in this story, he said, does not punish his son for his arrogance, but still gives him his share of the inheritance, later welcoming him back home even after he had squandered it.

“The father does not apply the criteria of human justice,” the Pope said, “but first he feels the need to forgive, and with his embrace makes the child understand that in all that long absence he missed him; he is painfully missed by his father’s love.”

“God is Father, Jesus says, but not in the human way, because there is no father in this world who would behave like the protagonist of this parable,” the Pope said, adding “What an unfathomable mystery is a God that nourishes this kind of love towards his children!”

However, despite this familiarity, to call God by the name of “Father” is not necessarily something we merit or understand, he said. In fact, sometimes it seems like we should use only the highest titles to address God, because it would be more respectful of his divinity.

“Instead, invoking him as ‘Father’ puts us in a relationship of trust with Him, as a child who turns to his dad, knowing he is loved and cared for by him,” Francis said, adding that despite the grand mystery and greatness of God, which can often make us feel small, we are not afraid.

This concept isn’t easy “to welcome in our human soul,” he said, noting that even the women who after the Resurrection first found the angel and the empty tomb of Jesus ran away, “because they were filled with fright and astonishment.”

“But Jesus reveals to us that God is a good Father, and He tells us, ‘Do not be afraid,’” Francis said, adding that perhaps this is the reason the Apostle Paul doesn’t translate into Greek the Aramaic word, “abba.”  

This phrase, he said, is “a term more intimate than ‘father,’” and is sometimes translated as “papa” or “daddy.”

Going on, Pope Francis said the Gospel reveals to us that no matter what, God the Father is there for us. When we need help, Jesus tells us to turn to the Father with confidence, never closing ourselves off, or becoming resigned, he said.

“All of our necessities, from the most obvious and every day – such as food, health and work, to being forgiven and sustained in temptations – are not the mirror of our solitude: there is a Father who is always there looking with love, and who surely does not abandon us,” he said.

The Pope concluded by making a proposal to the crowd before leading them in praying the ‘Our Father.’

“Each of us has so many problems and needs,” he said. “Let us think a little, in silence, about these problems and these needs. And all together, with confidence and hope, we pray, Our Father…”

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Vatican City, Feb 22, 2018 / 01:48 pm (CNA/EWTN News).- The authentic development of doctrine is about making more explicit the revealed truths of faith, not changing, or “shifting,” Church teaching – and to use this idea to defend an agenda is wrong, Cardinal Gerhard Müller has said.

In an essay published Feb. 20 in First Things, the prefect emeritus of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith said there can be no such thing as a “paradigm shift” in the interpretation of Catholic doctrine, and to push for one is to contradict God’s commandments.

Anyone who calls a major shift in the Church’s teaching in moral theology a “praiseworthy decision of conscience… speaks against the Catholic faith,” wrote the 70-year-old prelate.

The idea of a “paradigm shift” – a “fundamental change in theoretical forms of thought and social behavior” – with respect to “the form of the Church’s being and of her presence in the world” is not possible,” Müller wrote, simply because “Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, today, and forever,” as it says in Hebrews 13:8.

“This is, in contrast, our paradigm, which we will not exchange for any other,” Müller stated.

He also explained that the Pope and his fellow bishops have a duty to preserve the unity of faith and to prevent polarization and partisan mentalities. Therefore, it is also a duty of conscience to speak up in opposition when the term “pastoral change” is used by some to “express their agenda to sweep aside the Church’s teaching as if doctrine were an obstacle to pastoral care.”

In his essay, he explained the concept of the “development of doctrine” in the Church as taught by Blessed John Henry Newman, and how it relates to debates on the interpretation of Pope Francis’ 2016 apostolic exhortation on love in the family, Amoris laetitia.

Chapter eight of Amoris laetitia “has been the object of contradictory interpretations,” he said, stating that when a “paradigm shift” is spoken of in this context, it seems to be “a relapse into a modernist and subjectivist way of interpreting the Catholic faith.”

According to Blessed Newman, a way to identify an authentic development of doctrine is to see if the surrounding cultural environment is growing in conformity with Christianity, not the other way around.

“Thus, a paradigm shift, by which the Church takes on the criteria of modern society to be assimilated by it, constitutes not a development, but a corruption.”

The formal principle is a category within Christian theology which distinguishes the source of the theological teaching from the teaching itself.

In the Catholic Church, Müller said, the “proper method for interpreting revelation requires the joint workings of three principles, which are: Holy Scripture, Apostolic Tradition, and the Apostolic Succession of Catholic bishops.”

He pointed out that the Protestant Reformation is an example in history of when a new formal principle was introduced, in this case, Scripture alone.

“This new principle subjected the Catholic doctrine of the faith, as it had developed up to the sixteenth century, to a radical change,” he said. “The fundamental understanding of Christianity turned into something completely different.”

Regarding debates surrounding the interpretation of Amoris laetitia, Müller noted that groups of bishops or individual bishops’ conferences have issued directives recently on the reception of the Eucharist by divorced-and-civilly-remarried people.

He pointed out the teaching of St. John Paul II in Familiaris consortio, which says that “the divorced living in a new union must resolve to live in continence or else refrain from approaching the sacraments.”

“Is there any logical continuity between John Paul II’s Familiaris Consortio n. 84 … and the change of this selfsame discipline that some are proposing? There are only two options,” he said.

“One could explicitly deny the validity of Familiaris Consortio n. 84, thus denying by the same token Newman’s sixth note, ‘Conservative Action upon the Past.’ Or one could attempt to show that Familiaris Consortio n. 84 implicitly anticipated the reversal of the discipline that it explicitly set out to teach. On any honest reading of John Paul II’s text, however, such a procedure would have to violate the basic rules of logic, such as the principle of non-contradiction.”

Cardinal Müller added that “when cardinals, bishops, priests, and laity ask the pope for clarity on these matters, what they request is not a clarification of the pope’s opinion. What they seek is clarity regarding the continuity of the pope’s teaching in Amoris Laetitia with the rest of tradition.”

For the statements of bishops to be orthodox, “it is not enough that they declare their conformity with the pope’s presumed intentions” in Amoris laetitia, he said.

“They are orthodox only if they agree with the words of Christ preserved in the deposit of faith.”

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