Reports: Cdl Müller out at the CDF [UPDATED]

Vatican City, May 14, 2017 / 06:07 am (CNA/EWTN News).- On Sunday Pope Francis reflected on the May 13 canonization of the child visionaries St. Francisco and Jacinta Marto, saying that their faithfulness, despite their young age, reminds us to pay special attention to children in the ministry of the Church.

“In Fatima the Virgin chose the innocent heart and the simplicity of little Francisco, Jacinta and Lucia, as guardians of her message. These children received it worthily, so to be recognized as reliable witnesses to the apparitions, and to become models of Christian life.”

“With the canonization of Francisco and Jacinta, I wanted to propose to the whole Church their example of adherence to Christ and of evangelical witness, and I also wanted to propose to the whole Church to take care of children,” he said May 14.

The holiness of these children is not a consequence of the apparitions they received, he said, but of the “fidelity and ardor with which they returned the privilege they received of being able to see the Virgin Mary.”

“After the encounter with the ‘beautiful lady,’ as they called her, they frequently recited the Rosary, they did penance and offered sacrifices for the end of the war and for the most needy souls of divine mercy.”

This is what made them saints, he said.

Pope Francis addressed around 25,000 people in St. Peter’s Square Sunday afternoon before praying the Regina Coeli.

In his greeting, he expressed his gratefulness to God for the opportunity to make a pilgrimage to Fatima May 12-13 for the centenary of the apparitions, going “to the feet of the Virgin Mother as a pilgrim of hope and peace.”

He also thanked the bishops of Portugal, and in particular the Bishop of Leiria-Fátima, António Augusto dos Santos Marto, as well as the local authorities and everyone who helped to organize the visit.

“Last night I returned from the pilgrimage to Fatima,” he said, pausing to add a greeting to “the Madonna of Fatima!” followed by cheers from those present.

“In Fatima, I was immersed in the prayer of the holy faithful people, a prayer that flows there for a hundred years as a river, to beg Mary’s maternal protection on the whole world,” he went on.

“From the very beginning, when in the Chapel of the Apparitions I stayed for a long time in silence, accompanied by the prayerful silence of all the pilgrims, a together and contemplative climate was created where the various moments of prayer took place.”

And at the center of all of this, he said, was the Risen Lord present in the Eucharist.

Even 100 years after the first appearance of Our Lady of Fatima there is still a great need for prayer and penance for the grace of conversion, Francis said. We also need prayers “to implore the end of so many wars that are everywhere in the world… and which disfigure the face of humanity.”

“Let us be guided by the light coming from Fatima. The Immaculate Heart of Mary is always our shelter, our consolation, and the way that leads us to Christ,” he said.

Following the prayer, the Pope spoke with sympathy for the people affected by wars and conflicts in the Middle East, both Christians and Muslims, who suffer from violence and discrimination.

“My solidarity accompanies the memory of prayer,” he said, thanking all those who provide humanitarian aid and encouraging “the various communities to follow the path of dialogue and reconciliation to build a future of respect, security and peace.”

He also mentioned the beatification in Dublin May 13 of Jesuit priest John Sullivan, who lived during the 19thh and 20thh centuries in Ireland. He was devoted to the teaching and training of young people, the Pope said, “and was loved and respected as a father to the poor and the suffering.”

Pope Francis concluded his address by mentioning the celebration of Mother’s Day in several countries. “Let us remember with gratitude and affection all moms, even our moms in heaven, trusting them to Mary, the mother of Jesus,” he said, concluding with a moment of silent prayer for mothers.

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Vatican City, Feb 14, 2019 / 11:13 am (CNA/EWTN News).- The liturgy, Pope Francis said Thursday, cannot be reduced to a matter of taste, becoming the subject of ideological polarization, because it is a primary way Catholics encounter the Lord.

There is a risk with the liturgy of falling into a “past that no longer exists or of escaping into a presumed future,” the pope told members of the Congregation for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments Feb. 14.

“The starting point is instead to recognize the reality of the sacred liturgy, a living treasure that cannot be reduced to styles, recipes and trends, but should be welcomed with docility and promoted with love, as irreplaceable nourishment for the organic growth of the People of God,” he continued.

Francis also emphasized that the liturgy is not a “do-it-yourself” zone and urged the Vatican officials, “as in other areas of ecclesial life,” to avoid “ideological polarizations” and an attitude of “perpetual dialectics” against those with differing ideas about the liturgy.

He also recalled his statement in Evangelii gaudium “that reality is more important than the idea.”

“When we look back to nostalgic past tendencies or wish to impose them again, there is the risk of placing the part before the whole, the ‘I’ before the People of God, the abstract before the concrete, ideology before communion and, fundamentally, the worldly before the spiritual,” Francis asserted.

Meeting the congregation during their Feb. 12-15 plenary assembly, Pope Francis addressed the importance of the Church’s liturgy, of having good collaboration between the Vatican congregation and bishops’ conferences, and of developing a proper liturgical sense in Catholics.

“The liturgy is in fact the main road through which Christian life passes through every phase of its growth,” Francis said. “You therefore have before you a great and beautiful task: to work so that the People of God rediscovers the beauty of meeting the Lord in the celebration of his mysteries.”

The pope noted that the plenary falls 50 years since St. Paul VI reorganized Congregation for the Discipline of the Sacraments “in order to give shape to the renewal desired by the Second Vatican Council. It was a matter of publishing the liturgical books according to the criteria and decisions of the Council Fathers, with a view to fostering, in the People of God, ‘active, conscious and pious’ participation in the mysteries of Christ.”

He asserted that “the praying tradition of the Church needed renewed expressions, without losing anything of its millennial wealth, even rediscovering the treasures of its origins,” and noted that it was also in 1969 that the General Roman Calendar was changed and the new Roman Missal was promulgated, calling them “the first steps of a journey, to be continued with wise constancy.”

Francis added that “it it is not enough to change the liturgical books to improve the quality of the liturgy.”

He argued that proper liturgical formation of both clergy and laity is fundamental, and quoted from Sacrosanctum Concilium, the Second Vatican Council’s 1963 constitution on the sacred liturgy.

Though necessary, just providing information about liturgical books is not an adequate liturgical education, he continued, even with a view toward preserving the dutiful fulfillment of the ritual disciplines.

“In order for the liturgy to fulfill its formative and transforming function, it is necessary that pastors and the laity be brought to grasp its meaning and symbolic language, including art, song and music at the service of the celebrated mystery, even silence,” he stated.

He pointed to mystagogy as a suitable way to enter into the mystery of the liturgy, “in the living encounter with the crucified and risen Lord”; he pointed to the Catechism of the Catholic Church as an example of a book that illustrates the liturgy in this manner.

Referencing the title of the congregation’s plenary assembly, “the liturgical formation of the People of God,” he said the task awaiting them is “essentially that of spreading the splendor of the living mystery of the Lord, manifested in the liturgy, in the People of God.”

“To speak of the liturgical formation of the People of God means first of all to become aware of the irreplaceable role that the liturgy plays in the Church and for the Church,” he stated.

“And then concretely help the People of God to better internalize the prayer of the Church, to love it as an experience of meeting with the Lord and with the brothers and, in light of this, to rediscover its contents and observe its rites.”

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Vatican City, Apr 6, 2020 / 11:21 am (CNA).- In an Easter letter to confessors on Saturday, the head of the Apostolic Penitentiary wrote that while ‘social distancing’ is necessary amid the coronavirus, ‘mercy does not cease’.

Despite the restrictions placed by many civil and ecclesial governors, “Mercy does not cease and God does not distance himself,” Cardinal Mauro Piacenza, the Major Penitentiary, wrote April 4.

“The social distancing required for health reasons, while necessary, cannot and must never turn into ecclesial distancing, let alone theological-sacramental distancing,” he added.

The Apostolic Penitentiary is the Holy See’s tribunal with responsibility for the internal forum and indulgences.

Cardinal Piacenza recalled his March 19 decree granting plenary indulgences to those suffering from Covid-19, asd well as health-care workers, their family, and those who care for them in any capacity; as well as an attached note on the sacrament of confession calling for reflection on its “urgency and centrality.”

In his letter to confessors, the Major Penitentiary wrote: “Mercy does not cease because where ordinary celebration of the sacrament is impossible, we are committed to pray, to console, to present souls to divine Mercy, fulfilling that priestly role of intercessors, which was conferred on us on the day of ordination.”

“Mercy does not cease because we all need the closeness and the ‘caress’ of Jesus, which also materializes in a moment of listening and dialogue, capable of opening a perspective of hope and light, in this circumstance of trial.”

Mercy “is expressed in the pastoral creativity of so many confreres,” he said, “who try in every way to make themselves close to the people entrusted to them, giving testimony of faith, courage, fatherhood, fully living their priesthood.”

Nor does mercy cease “because the sacrifice of the Holy Mass does not cease, even if celebrated without the physical presence of the people, from which every grace flows for the Church and for the world.”

Cardinal Piacenza wrote that “from the Cross, the bloody sacrifice of Christ, the possibility of salvation and reconciliation is given to all men; salvation also flows from the Eucharistic celebration, the bloodless sacrifice of Christ, the current re-presentation of the bloody one. In this sense, despite today’s dramatic circumstances, we are called to rediscover the centrality of the priestly ministry and, above all, what is essential in it: the work of Christ more than ours, the sacramental implementation of salvation, of which we are ministers, that is, servants.”

“Mercy does not cease but is expressed in every consideration to which the pandemic pushes us, in the rediscovery of the values for which it is worth living and dying, in the rediscovery of silence, of adoration and of prayer, in the rediscovery of the closeness of the other and, above all, of God.”

Neither does mercy cease, he said, “at the celebration of the sacred liturgy, which faithfully actualizes the mysteries of salvation, but becomes lived charity, which extends a helping hand to those who suffer,  and through the priestly ministry God’s forgiveness is offered.”

“Mercy does not cease even towards those who have been called to eternity because each of them is reached by the prayers of suffrage in the paschal certainty that with death, relationships are not broken but are transformed, strengthened, in the communion of saints.”

Cardinal Piacenza concluded urging that confessors “entrust this time, our ministry of Reconciliation, and this Easter so anomalous, to the protection of the Holy Virgin, Mother of Mercy in the certainty of her intercession so that each and every one may be given that new life, which is the yearning of every believer and of every man.”

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