Vatican City, Apr 12, 2017 / 12:29 am (CNA).- A new initiative in Italy will allow blood donors to receive a free ticket to the Vatican Museums.
“Without blood, there is no life. Without art, life would be empty and sad,” said Barbara Jatta, director of the Vatican Museums.
The initiative is the product of a partnership between Rome’s Gemelli University Hospital and the blood donor group “Francesco Olgiati,” in collaboration with the Vatican Museums.
Seeking to encourage the donation of blood, which can be life-saving for patients who need transfusions, the agreement allows people who donate blood to receive a voucher, which is valid for entrance into the Vatican Museums without waiting in line. The vouchers, which are worth 4 euro each, must be used by the end of 2017.
Gemelli University Hospital distributes more than 17,000 units of blood and blood components, which are used in treating patients with a variety of conditions.
Such initiatives, Jatta said, allow the Vatican Museums to be “a living cultural institution, an integral part of the social fabric…just as Pope Francis has hoped.”
“We hope that many will take advantage of this opportunity: it benefits both themselves and others.”
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Pope Francis at the general audience in the Vatican, Aug. 24, 2022 / Pablo Esparza / CNA
Vatican City, Aug 31, 2022 / 10:45 am (CNA).
Pope Francis has asked Catholics around the world to pray in September for an end to the death penalty.He made… […]
Vatican City, Jun 7, 2018 / 10:10 am (CNA/EWTN News).- Organizers of the international “Share the Journey” campaign are urging Catholics to step up and interact with migrants and refugees through shared meals or other activities as part of a global action week.
“We invite you to sit down together with migrants and refugees in your community, to look into their eyes, listen to their stories and to share your own,” Cardinal Luis Antonio Tagle said in a press release on the initiative.
The cardinal, who serves as archbishop of Manila and is also the president of papal charity organization Caritas Internationalis, said each person’s journey starts “with a moment of sharing which helps us recognize the bonds which bind the whole of humanity together.”
“We are invited to have compassion and courage to open our hearts and minds to the people we don’t yet know and to share the journey with them.”
The Global Action Week will take place June 17-24 and is part of the wider, two-year Share the Journey campaign, which was launched by Caritas Internationalis in September 2017 with the goal of encouraging a “culture of encounter” and bolstering efforts to warmly welcome immigrants and refugees.
The project also aims to shed light on both the challenges and effects of migration at every stage of the journey in order to promote a “shift in thinking” on the issue. It has the support of the ACT Alliance, which is a network of 145 Christian agencies and a variety of other religious congregations and civil society groups worldwide.
As part of the action week, Caritas branches in all regions of the world will organize shared meals with immigrants and refugees, as well as other events aimed at providing opportunities for interaction.
In Rome, the Caritas soup kitchen at Termini, the city’s main train station, will host a meal with migrants and refugees June 19.
They have also promoted other activities, like the “My Mirror” social experiment promoted by Caritas Ambrosiana in Milan, which encourages strangers to look into each other’s eyes as a means of breaking down barriers.
Caritas Cyprus also organized a handbag event for women, giving each woman who came a handbag full of basic toiletries.
In the U.S., the bishops’ conference as well as Caritas organizations like Catholic Relief Services and Catholic Charities USA have promoted the campaign as a way for Catholics to pray for migrants and refugees and make concrete acts to help them.
In one activity, Catholic Relief Services partnered with a local clothing store, which agreed to donate 20 percent of all sock sales to the organization’s work with migrants and refugees.
The official website for the Share the Journey campaign in the U.S. is: www.sharethejourney.org.
Pope Francis’ General Audience in St. Peter’s Square on March 29, 2023. / Daniel Ibanez/CNA
Vatican City, Mar 29, 2023 / 06:00 am (CNA).
Pope Francis on Wednesday spoke against a comfortable Christianity that keeps Jesus at arm’s length, rather than inviting him into the heart to change it.
“If one of us says, ‘Ah, thank you Lord, because I am a good person, I do good things, I do not commit major sins…’ this is not a good path, this is the path of self-sufficiency, it is a path that does not justify you, it makes you turn up your nose,” the pope said during his weekly public audience March 29.
He called this attitude being “an elegant Catholic, but an elegant Catholic is not a holy Catholic, he is elegant.”
“The true Catholic, the true Christian is one who receives Jesus within, which changes your heart,” Pope Francis said in St. Peter’s Square.
Pope Francis’ General Audience in St. Peter’s Square on March 29, 2023. Daniel Ibanez/CNA
“This,” he continued, “is the question I ask you all today: What does Jesus mean for me? Did I let him enter my heart, or do I keep him within reach, but so that he does not really enter within? Have I let myself be changed by him? Or is Jesus just an idea, a theology that goes ahead…”
At his Wednesday general audience, the pope continued his reflections on evangelization and apostolic zeal with a catechesis centered on St. Paul’s transformation from a persecutor of Christians to a great evangelist.
St. Paul “was a man who was zealous about the law of Moses for Judaism, and after his conversion, this zeal continued, but to proclaim, to preach Jesus Christ,” Pope Francis explained. “Paul loved Jesus. Saul — Paul’s first name — was already zealous, but Christ converts his zeal.”
To better explain zeal, the pope referenced St. Thomas Aquinas, who taught that passion, from a moral perspective, is neither good nor bad: it depends on if it is used virtuously or sinfully.
Pope Francis’ General Audience in St. Peter’s Square on March 29, 2023. Daniel Ibanez/CNA
“In Paul’s case, what changed him is not a simple idea or a conviction: it was the encounter, this word, it was the encounter with the risen Lord — do not forget this, it is the encounter with the Lord that changes a life — it was the encounter with the risen Lord that transformed his entire being,” the pope said.
“Paul’s humanity,” he added, “his passion for God and his glory was not annihilated, but transformed, ‘converted’ by the Holy Spirit.”
The pope noted that part of the change that takes place in Paul is his conversion from feeling righteous before God, and thus authorized to persecute, to arrest, and even to kill — to someone who, enlightened by God, recognizes himself to be a “blasphemer and persecutor.”
After recognizing what he had done, Paul becomes truly capable of loving, Francis said.
“If Jesus did not enter your life, it did not change,” he said. “You cannot be Christian only from the outside. No, Jesus must enter and this changes you, and this happened to Paul. It is finding Jesus, and this is why Paul said that Christ’s love drives us, it is what takes you forward.”
Pope Francis’ General Audience in St. Peter’s Square on March 29, 2023. Daniel Ibanez/CNA
“This is zeal, when one finds Jesus and feels the fire, like Paul, and must preach Jesus, must talk about Jesus, must help people, must do good things,” he explained. “When one finds the idea of Jesus, he or she remains an ideologue of Christianity, and this does not justify, only Jesus justifies us. May the Lord help us find Jesus, encounter Jesus, and may this Jesus change our life from within and help us to help others.”
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