God is waiting to hear your prayers, pope says

Vatican City, Mar 9, 2018 / 03:54 pm (CNA/EWTN News).- As the number of civilian victims in Syria’s bloody civil war continues to climb, Cardinal Mario Zenari, apostolic nuncio in Syria, said the situation is “hell on earth,” especially for vulnerable children.

Referring to a statement recently made by the regional director of the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), Zenari said Syria is currently “one of the most dangerous places for children.”

“It’s terrible. I always say, it’s a massacre of the innocents,” he said, and recalled how a few years ago near Damascus, where the nunciature is located, he met a 10-year-old girl who had both of her legs amputated after being hit by shrapnel from a mortar shell.

He recalled another story of a 15-year-old girl who was on her way back from school with a friend when a splinter from an explosion tore through her cheek and up through her head, killing her instantly.

There is “so much suffering,” Zenari said, adding that Pope Francis’ Christmas message for 2017 was “one of the most touching for me,” because it was entirely dedicated to the suffering of children.

From a humanitarian perspective, the situation is “out of control,” he said, and one could write “a book of lamentations” on the Syrian crisis alone.

Zenari, who has served as apostolic nuncio since 2008 and was named a cardinal by Pope Francis in 2016, spoke at a March 9 event for the “Open Hospitals” project, developed by the AVSI organization in 2016 in partnership with the Gemelli Foundation and the pontifical charity branch “Cor Unum.”

The project aims to provide medical care for those living in poverty and supports the activities of four non-profit hospitals in Syria.

Since the beginning of the country’s civil war in 2011, more than 13.5 million Syrians, including 6 million children, have been affected by a dire humanitarian crisis, with the majority of the population living in situations of food insecurity and without access to basic supplies.

According to U.N. estimates, some 11.5 million people, 40 percent of whom are children, do not have access to adequate medical care. Hospitals have routinely been targeted in the fighting, and since the beginning of the war, nearly two-thirds of Syria’s medical staff have fled the country.

With money needed to pay for staff, general management, monthly bills, and the renewal of old facilities, patients increasingly file into the few hospitals that are left with both routine healthcare needs and war injuries, making the financial strain near crippling.

As of November 2017, roughly one million euros (nearly $1.2 million) had already been raised by the Open Hospitals project to support the four hospitals with whom they partner.

In his speech for the March 9 event, Cardinal Zenari showed a 2-minute video portraying images of buildings destroyed by shelling and people injured in bombings, many of them small children with bloody face, covered in dust.

The social fabric of society is being “attacked,” he said, and “the deep wounds, above all in these children, are worse than what is seen.”

The number of civilian victims of the war has drastically increased in recent weeks, after Russian-backed Syrian forces on Feb. 18 launched a series of deadly airstrikes and artillery fire on besieged Easter Ghouta enclave, which sits just northeast of Damascus.

Home to some 400,000 people, Eastern Ghouta is the last rebel-held area east of Damascus and has been a target of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s forces since 2013 in a bid to drive the rebels out.

According to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, some 900 civilians have died so far in the fighting. Although the U.N. Security Council demanded a 30-day ceasefire go into effect Feb. 24, fighting has continued, and efforts to get humanitarian aid into areas where citizens are trapped were recently halted due to fear of chemical attacks.

Cardinal Zenari said that of all the world disasters he’s witnessed, “I have never seen so much violence as in Syria,” and likened the situation to the 1994 Rwandan genocide.

At times, Zenari said he asks himself, “Does the Lord not see this?” However, he said he is consoled when he thinks of the Jesus’ own suffering and death, because “Jesus in his passion sweat blood, from his whole body…(the) blood of the entire Church, the blood of the martyrs.”

“We are in the eighth year of the Passion” in Syria, he said.

He lamented the fact that no agreements have yet been reached to put an end to the violence, saying that so far the discussions either fail to yield a deal, or a deal is made but falls apart.

The cardinal also pointed to the millions who have fled Syria and are now living in other countries, including a high number of youth. Because of this, he said, Syria is rapidly becoming “a society without youth, a Church without youth.”

He closed his hour-long address with an appeal for prayer, asking attendees to pray for “our dear friends, brothers and sisters in Syria.”

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Vatican City, Jul 25, 2017 / 08:53 pm (CNA/EWTN News).- Nuclear disarmament will be the focus of a Vatican conference this Nov. 10-11, following recent progress toward international bans on nuclear weapons.

Archbishop Silvano Maria Tomasi told CNA tha… […]

Vatican City, May 3, 2018 / 08:53 am (CNA/EWTN News).- In his prayer video for the month of May, Pope Francis said laypeople are on the “front lines” of the Church’s life and activities, and asked Catholics of all states and vocations to pray for the laity and their mission.

“Laypeople are on the front line of the life of the Church,” the pope said in the video, published May 3, urging the Church to be thankful for the laity “who take risks, who are not afraid and who offer reasons for hope to the poorest, to the excluded, to the marginalized.”

As Francis speaks in his native Spanish, the video shows lay people in different professional and familial states, including a doctor embracing a patient, a mother holding her child, a newlywed couple leaving a church and rescue workers bringing a boat of migrants ashore.

The video then shows scenes of families, scenes of people jumping up and down and hugging during a sports competition, people hiking and a couple working in a greenhouse.

“Let us pray together this month that the lay faithful may fulfill their specific mission, the mission that they received in Baptism, putting their creativity at the service of the challenges of today’s world,” he said, adding that “we need their testimony regarding the truth of the Gospel and their example of expressing their faith by practicing solidarity.”

An initiative of the Jesuit-run global prayer network Apostleship of Prayer, the pope’s prayer videos are filmed in collaboration with the Vatican Television Center and mark the first time the Roman Pontiff’s monthly prayer intentions have been featured on video.

The Apostleship of Prayer, which produces the monthly videos on the pope’s intentions, was founded by Jesuit seminarians in France in 1884 to encourage Christians to serve God and others through prayer, particularly for the needs of the Church.

Since the late 1800s, the organization has received a monthly, universal intention from the pope. In 1929, an additional missionary intention was added by the Holy Father, aimed at the faithful in particular.

However, as of last year, rather than including a missionary intention, Pope Francis opted to have only one prepared prayer intention – the universal intention featured in the prayer video – and will add a second intention for an urgent or immediate need should one arise.

In comments in a May 3 press release on the video, Fr. Frédéric Fornos, SJ, international director of the Pope’s Worldwide Prayer Network and the Eucharistic Youth Movement, noted that often people think priests are the only ones responsible for carrying forward the Church’s mission.

However, lay people “are the ones who are at the heart of the world, and the ones who have a key role in transforming society,” he said, adding that “it is in families, in classrooms, in offices, in factories, in the fields, in daily life, where we find the opportunity to be salt and light of God’s Kingdom, the flavor of the Gospel.”

Pope Francis himself has been a frequent critic of clericalism, saying that for many, the Church is reduced to just priests and the hierarchy, and encouraging lay Catholics to be more active in evangelizing. He has also made incorporating more space for laity within the ranks of the Curia a goal of his reform.

In an April 2016 letter to the Pontifical Commission for Latin America, Pope Francis called clericalism “one of the greatest distortions” facing the local Church on the continent.

“[We’d] do well to recall that the Church is not an elite [of] priests, of consecrated people, of bishops but all of us make up the faithful and Holy People of God,” he said, noting that everyone begins their life as a layperson.

Clericalism, he said, is the result of “a mistaken way of living out the ecclesiology proposed by the Second Vatican Council,” which “forgets that the visibility and the sacramentality of the Church belong to all the people of God and not just to an illuminated and elected few.”

He discouraged clergy from relying on trite phrases about their flock such as “it’s time for the laity.”

While well-intentioned, the phrase has little meaning when stacked against actions, he said, explaining that clergy should focus on encouraging the laity to be active, but “it is not the job of the pastor to tell the laypeople what they must do and say.”

“It is illogical and even impossible for us as pastors to believe that we have the monopoly on solutions for the numerous challenges thrown up by contemporary life.”

In an interview given to El Sembrador Nueva Evangelización – ESNE TV and Radio station the same year but published in 2017, Francis said he believes laity need to “come out of the caves.”

“Sometimes I think the best business we can do with many Christians, is to sell them mothballs so that they put them in their clothes and in their lives and aren’t eaten by moths,” he said, explaining that in order to fulfill their mission, lay Catholics “have to go out, they have to go and bring the message of Jesus” to others.

Similarly, in a speech to Bangladeshi bishops during his visit to the nation in December 2017, the pope told them to “show ever greater pastoral closeness to the lay faithful, and to “recognize and value the charisms of lay men and women, and encourage them to put their gifts at the service of the Church and of society as a whole.”

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