Caritas Internationalis elected Alistair Dutton as its new secretary general on May 15, 2023, in Rome. He has been the chief executive of Caritas Scotland. / Daniel Ibanez/CNA
Rome Newsroom, May 16, 2023 / 09:45 am (CNA).
Six months after Pope … […]
Archbishop Tarcisius Isao Kikuchi of Tokyo was elected president of Caritas Internationalis during the Vatican-based confederation of national charities’ General Assembly on May 11-16, 2023. / Courtesy of Caritas Internationalis
Rome Newsroom, May 15, 2023 / 10:45 am (CNA).
Archbishop Tarcisius Isao Kikuchi has been elected as the new president of Caritas Internationalis, the second-largest humanitarian aid organization in the world after the Red Cross.
The Catholic archbishop of Tokyo was Japan’s first missionary priest in Africa, where he first volunteered at a Caritas refugee camp, the start of 30 years of service with the Catholic charitable organization.
More than 400 delegates taking part in Caritas Internationalis’ 22nd General Assembly in Rome May 11-16 elected Kikuchi to serve a four-year term. The body must still elect a secretary general.
“Caritas must be on the front lines to welcome, accompany, serve and defend the poor and vulnerable,” Kikuchi, 64, said in his speech to the assembly.
“This mission must be sustained and be the focus of the members of the Confederation, and I would like to be the one, together with the secretary general, to lead the entire organization to fulfill this important mission of the Church. We are all invited to walk together.”
As president of Caritas Internationalis, Kikuchi will lead a confederation of more than 160 Catholic charities operating in 200 countries and territories. He succeeds Cardinal Luis Antonio Tagle, who has served as Caritas’ president since 2019.
After he was ordained a priest in 1986 with the Society of the Divine Word, also known as the Divine Word Missionaries, Kikuchi was sent to serve as a missionary priest in rural Ghana for eight years.
“I was sent to a ‘bush’ parish, deep in the bush, without electricity, without water. … And that was really an important experience for me and that helped create my identity, I suppose,” Kikuchi said in an interview with Vatican Radio on May 14.
He witnessed extreme poverty with “many people … dying without proper medication” and the spread of HIV-AIDS, but he was struck by how people supported each other and how that created hope.
After his work in Ghana, Kikuchi returned to Africa in 1995 as a Caritas volunteer at a refugee camp in Bukavu, Zaire, which took in hundreds of thousands of refugees during the Rwandan genocide.
Kikuchi recalls that the Rwandan refugees “had no food, no clothing, no shelter, and people were in need of everything.”
He said: “The second time I went to the camp, I met some of the leaders and asked them what they needed. And I was expecting the leader to tell me that ‘we need food, we need education, we need medication, we need shelter’ — or something like that. … But rather than that, he said, ‘Father, you come from Japan. So, when you go back to Japan, tell them that we are still here: We are all forgotten.’ And that really shocked me.”
“After that experience, I met so many people in different areas, in different countries struck by disaster, or people in war-torn or conflict areas. I heard the same story and the same cry again and again, that ‘we are forgotten; we are forgotten’. So, this is the real mission of Caritas: to help people know they are not forgotten. We want to be with them.”
Kikuchi became the executive director of Caritas Japan in 1999 and was appointed as a bishop by John Paul II in 2004.
He went on to serve as the president of Caritas Japan from 2007 to 2022, also participating as a member of the Caritas Internationalis Executive Committee from 1999 to 2004 and leading Caritas Asia as its president from 2011 to 2019.
Pope Francis appointed Kikuchi as archbishop of Tokyo in 2017 and he currently serves as the president of the Japanese bishops’ conference and the secretary general of the Federation of Asian Bishops’ Conferences.
The Japanese archbishop takes the helm of the Church’s charitable arm as it is going through a critical period of reform, six months after Pope Francis dismissed its top leaders.
Pope Francis issued a decree in November that removed the organization’s administration and stated that Caritas would undergo a review “to improve its management rules and procedures — even if financial matters were managed well and fundraising objectives regularly achieved — and thereby better serve its member charities around the world.”
A press release issued at the time said there was no finding of any misappropriation of funds or sexual abuse but cited deficiencies in Caritas’ “management and procedures, seriously prejudicing team spirit and staff morale.”
A provisional administration, led by a former Bain Capital management expert, has run the global organization ever since.
“It is not only that we are an NGO, but we are much more than that. We are a Catholic Church organization, and the institute of the service of the Church,” Kikuchi said.
“So, that means that Caritas is supposed to be a witness of the love of God. What we do is not only provide food or materials or any kind of assistance, but rather we want to be witnesses of the love of God to show people that this is how God loves all people.”
Pope Francis greets the crowd at his Regina Caeli address on May 14, 2023. / Vatican Media
Vatican City, May 14, 2023 / 06:00 am (CNA).
Pope Francis prayed Sunday that the recently signed cease-fire between Israelis and Palestinians will be mai… […]
Pope Francis arrives at the Paul VI Hall for his weekly general audience on Ash Wednesday Feb. 22, 2023. / Daniel Ibanez/CNA
Vatican City, May 13, 2023 / 11:55 am (CNA).
Pope Francis on Saturday issued a new constitution of the Vatican City Sta… […]
Pope Francis met Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy at the Vatican on May 13, 2023, their first meeting since the start of the full-scale war with Russia. / Vatican Media.
Vatican City, May 13, 2023 / 09:52 am (CNA).
Pope Francis and the president of Ukraine, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, met at the Vatican on Saturday.
The May 13 encounter — their first since Russia initiated a full-scale war in Ukraine over 14 months ago — was around 40 minutes long.
The two met in a small office off of the Paul VI Hall, which is close to Pope Francis’ Vatican residence.
Pope Francis greeted Zelenskyy at the door of the building. The two shook hands and the Ukrainian president placed his hand on his heart and said, in English, “great honor.”
The Holy See Press Office said Francis and Zelenskyy spoke about the humanitarian and political situation in Ukraine amid the conflict.
“The pope assured of his constant prayers, evidenced by his many public appeals and continuous invocations to the Lord for peace since February last year,” the press office said. “The pope particularly stressed the urgent need for ‘gestures of humanity’ toward the most fragile people, the innocent victims of the conflict.”
Zelenskyy’s gifts to Francis were a painting of the Virgin Mary and Child titled “Loss 2022-58,” about the death of children in the conflict, and a collage made of bulletproof plate, wood, and paint from a series called “Protect the Defender.” The collage also features an image of the Virgin Mary.
The Ukrainian president spent in total about one hour at the Vatican.
He also spoke with the Vatican’s foreign minister, Archbishop Richard Gallagher. They conversed in English in the presence of Ukraine’s Ambassador to the Holy See, Andrii Yurash.
On Saturday morning, Zelenskyy met with Italian President Sergio Mattarella, and later, with Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni.
Meloni and Zelenskyy gave a nearly 30-minute joint press conference in the afternoon before the Ukrainian president proceeded to the Vatican for his meeting with Pope Francis.
“We are betting on Ukraine’s victory,” Meloni said at the press conference. “We will continue to provide support, including military support, so that Ukraine can arrive at the negotiations with a solid position.”
Zelenskyy thanked Meloni for welcoming him to Italy and for giving shelter to Ukrainian citizens during the war.
Meloni said Italy was Zelenskyy’s first stop in a tour of Europe this month.
The Ukrainian president is scheduled to appear live on one of Italy’s state television channels, Rai1, during a special edition of the program “Porta a Porta” on Saturday evening.
Pope Francis at the Wednesday general audience on Dec. 28, 2022. / Credit: Vatican Media.
Vatican City, May 13, 2023 / 07:40 am (CNA).
Pope Francis on Saturday expressed his sorrow over the legalization of euthanasia in Portugal.“Today when we … […]
Aidan Gallagher, director of EWTN Ireland, receives a blessing for the film “Faith of Our Fathers” from Pope Francis after the pope’s general audience May 3, 2023. / Credit: Courtesy of EWTN News Nightly
Denver Newsroom, May 13, 2023 / 06:00 am… […]
Pope Francis shared a stage with Italy’s Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni on May 12, 2023, to speak at a two-day conference on “The General State of the Birth Rate,” held at Conciliazione Auditorium close to the Vatican. / Daniel Ibanez/CNA
Rome Newsroom, May 12, 2023 / 07:00 am (CNA).
Pope Francis said Friday a society’s birth rate is a key indicator of the hope people have in the future.
The pope shared the stage on May 12 with Italy’s Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni during a two-day conference on “The General State of the Birth Rate,” held at Conciliazione Auditorium close to the Vatican.
“The birth of children, in fact, is the main indicator for measuring the hope of a people,” Pope Francis said. “If few are born it means there is little hope. And this not only has repercussions from an economic and social point of view but also undermines confidence in the future.”
“The General State of the Birth Rate” is a conference for Italian political, business, and organization leaders to reflect on Italy’s demographic crisis, caused by one of the lowest birth rates in Europe: 1.25 births per woman.
The event was organized by the Foundation for Births and the Family Associations Forum and supported by the Italian Ministry for Family, Birth, and Equal Opportunity.
This was the third annual conference and the second time Pope Francis attended. In 2022, he sent a message to be read at the event.
Italy hit a historic low number of births in 2022, with only about 393,000 children born in the country.
The same year, the country saw 700,000 deaths, marking a dangerous decline in population.
The low number of births, Pope Francis said, “is a figure that reveals a great concern for tomorrow.”
He lamented that childbearing and rearing is seen as the burden of families only, and the pressure this puts on young adults today, “who grow up in uncertainty, if not disillusionment and fear.”
Young people “experience a social climate in which starting a family has turned into a titanic effort, instead of being a shared value that everyone recognizes and supports,” he said.
The decline in communal living, together with an increasing self-reliance creates loneliness, Pope Francis said, and one consequence is that only the wealthy have the freedom to live the life they want.
“This is unfair, as well as demeaning,” he added.
The pope also criticized a culture that places pets before human children.
He said at a recent audience, he went to greet a woman of around 50 years old — “like me,” he joked — but was surprised to be asked to bless her dog, which she called, “my baby.”
“I had no patience and scolded the lady,” he said, pointing out the great number of hungry children in the world.
Pope Francis used a walker to move on stage on Friday, referencing the pain he experiences while standing.
At the beginning of his speech, the pope said: “I’m sorry for not standing up while speaking, but I cannot tolerate the pain when I am standing.”
In what appeared to be a reference not only to welcoming the birth of children but also to welcoming migrants, Pope Francis said “a happy community naturally develops desires to generate and integrate, to welcome, while an unhappy society is reduced to a sum of individuals trying to defend what they have at all costs.”
He emphasized again that “the birth rate challenge is a matter of hope,” though, he underlined, hope is not the same as optimism or “a vague positive feeling about the future.”
Hope, he said, “is not an illusion or an emotion that you feel, no; it is a concrete virtue, a life attitude. And it has to do with concrete choices. Hope is nourished by each person’s commitment to the good, it grows when we feel we are participating and involved in making meaning of our own and others’ lives.”
“Hope generates change and improves the future. It is the smallest of virtues — Péguy said — it is the smallest, but it is the one that takes you the furthest. And hope does not disappoint,” Francis said.
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