Vatican City, Nov 25, 2019 / 10:15 am (CNA).- The personal secretary to Pope Francis will leave his position in December, after nearly seven years of service to the pope.
Msgr. Fabian Pedacchio, an Argentine priest, will return to duties at the Vatican’s Congregation for Bishops, where he had been working at the time of Pope Francis’ election, papal spokesman Matteo Bruni confirmed Nov. 25.
Pedacchio, a canon lawyer, had continued part-time duties at the Congregation for Bishops even while serving as an assistant to the pope.
Bruni said that the Pedacchio’s departure from the pope’s office is an ordinary administrative decision, and not personal, according to Argentine newspaper La Nacion.
The job, Bruni said, was “a temporary service, at the end of which another begins, neither a prize nor punishment, but the ordinary rotation of functions.”
Pedacchio, 55, is a priest of the Buenos Aires archdiocese, and was sent to Rome in 2007 to work at the Congregation for Bishops by then-Cardinal Bergoglio. The pope asked Pedacchio to serve as his personal secretary shortly after his 2013 election.
In recent pontificates, popes have maintained personal secretaries for longer periods of time: Now-Cardinal Stanislaus Dziwisz was secretary to Pope St. John Paul II for forty years, and Archbishop George Ganswein was personal secretary for Pope emeritus Benedict XVI for the entirety of the former pope’s tenure in office.
Pedacchio has reportedly lived at the Casa Santa Marta, the Vatican hotel in which Pope Francis resides, during his term of service. He is expected to return to the priests’ residence outside the Vatican where he had previously lived.
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Pope Francis waves to pilgrims gathered in St. Peter’s Square for his Angelus address on Aug. 4, 2024. / Credit: Vatican Media
Vatican City, Aug 11, 2024 / 08:45 am (CNA).
Pope Francis urged people to truly listen to God’s voice rather than looking to the Lord for a confirmation of their own ideas in his Angelus address on Sunday.
“Brothers and sisters, when faith and prayer are true, they open the mind and the heart; they do not close them,” Pope Francis said on Aug. 11.
Speaking from the window of the Vatican’s Apostolic Palace, the pope asked people to be aware of the temptation of looking to God “for a confirmation of what we think” rather than “truly listening to what the Lord has to say to us.”
“This way of addressing God does not help us to truly encounter him, nor to open ourselves up to the gift of his light and his grace, in order to grow in goodness, to do his will and to overcome failings and difficulties,” he said.
“Let us ask ourselves, then: In my life of faith, am I capable of being truly silent within myself and listening to God? Am I willing to welcome his voice beyond my own mindset and also with his help to overcome my fears?”
Pope Francis asked the Virgin Mary for her intercession to help Christians to listen with faith to the Lord’s voice and “to do his will courageously.”
The pope offered this reflection in his meditation on Sunday’s Gospel, in which the Judeans murmured about Jesus because he said, “I am the bread that came down from heaven.”
Francis said: “They are convinced that Jesus cannot have come from heaven, because he is the son of a carpenter and because his mother and his relatives are common people, familiar, normal people, like many others.”
“They are obstructed in their faith by their preconception of his humble origins and the presumption, therefore, that they have nothing to learn from him. … Beware of preconceptions and presumption,” he warned.
After leading the crowd gathered in St. Peter’s Square in the Angelus prayer in Latin, the pope offered his greetings to a group of students who walked more than 100 miles from the Italian town of Assisi in pilgrimage to the Vatican.
Pope Francis asked people to pray especially for the victims of a plane crash in Brazil on Friday that left 62 people dead.
The pope also marked this week’s 79th anniversary of the atomic bombing of Nagasaki and Hiroshima, which killed 70,000 people and 140,000 people respectively and brought an end to World War II.
“As we continue to commend to the Lord the victims of these events and of all wars, we renew our intense prayer for peace, especially for the tormented Ukraine, the Middle East, Palestine, Israel, Sudan, and Myanmar,” Pope Francis said.
Vatican City, Mar 22, 2017 / 10:57 am (CNA).- A cute moment was captured on camera Wednesday, as a 3-year-old girl “stole” Pope Francis’ zucchetto – or skull cap – at the papal general audience.
Little Estella lives in Georgia. She was in Rome with her godfather, Mountain Butorac. Waiting in St. Peter’s Square at the general audience, she was invited by a member of the papal security team to go greet the Pope as he came by.
Pope Francis offered the young girl a kiss on the cheek, and she reached up and grabbed his zucchetto. A moment later, she returned the hat to a laughing pontiff.
<blockquote class=”twitter-tweet” data-lang=”en”><p lang=”en” dir=”ltr”>Took my Goddaughter to meet the pope. She stole his hat! <a href=”https://t.co/SdSorop3uN”>pic.twitter.com/SdSorop3uN</a></p>— Mountain Butorac (@MountainButorac) <a href=”https://twitter.com/MountainButorac/status/844505243538931714″>March 22, 2017</a></blockquote>
<script async src=”//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js” charset=”utf-8″></script>
Meanwhile, Butorac captured the incident on his phone camera, and posted it to Twitter, where it quickly received more than 8,000 likes.
“It’s exciting!” Butorac told BuzzFeed News. “I’m sure every godparent would love for their godchild to meet the Holy Father. Mine just did and it was not only a special holy moment, but hilarious too!”
Pope Francis waves from a window of the Apostolic Palace at the crowds gathered in St. Peter’s Square for his weekly Angelus address on Sunday, Sept. 22, 2024. / Credit: Vatican Media
Vatican City, Sep 22, 2024 / 09:25 am (CNA).
On Sunday, Pope Francis recalled Jesus’ teaching that true power is found by taking care of others, not by exploiting them or using them.
“With a word as simple as it is decisive, Jesus renews our way of living. He teaches us that true power does not lie in the dominion of the strongest but in care for the weakest,” the pope said in his weekly Angelus address Sept. 22.
“True power,” Francis emphasized, “is taking care of the weakest; that makes you great.”
The pontiff delivered his brief reflection on the day’s Gospel from a window of the Apostolic Palace, which overlooks St. Peter’s Square, where thousands had gathered to see the pope and to pray with him.
After leading the Angelus prayer in Latin, Pope Francis remembered a Catholic man who dedicated his life to serving the weak: Juan Antonio López, a Catholic environmental activist who was killed after leaving his church in Tocoa in northeastern Honduras on Sept. 14.
In addition to his work in defense of the environment, López was a delegate of the Word of God in the Diocese of Trujillo, where, with the permission of the local bishop, he would lead celebrations of the Word of God, which include the proclamation of the Gospel and the distribution of Eucharistic hosts previously consecrated by priests. Delegates of the Word of God serve in places where priests visit infrequently.
López was also his diocese’s social justice coordinator, a founding member of the integral ecology council, and a member of the Municipal Committee for the Defense of Common and Public Goods of Tocoa. The Catholic husband and father was known for his defense of creation and the rights of the poor and Indigenous in the face of environmental exploitation in Honduras.
“I join in the mourning of the Church and the condemnation of all forms of violence,” the pontiff said. “I am close to those who see their elementary rights trampled upon and those who work for the common good in response to the cry of the poor and the earth.”
In St. Peter’s Square, pilgrims waved and held flags from their countries, including a large flag from Guatemala, during Pope Francis’ Sunday Angelus Sept. 22, 2024. Credit: Vatican Media
“How many people, how many, suffer and die because of power struggles,” Pope Francis said in his reflection before the Angelus. “Theirs are lives that the world rejects, as it rejected Jesus… When [Jesus] was delivered into the hands of men, he found not an embrace but a cross. Nevertheless, the Gospel remains a living and hopeful word: He who was rejected is risen; he is Lord!”
In his message, Pope Francis described the scene in the day’s Gospel passage: “Today the Gospel of the liturgy (Mark 9:30-37) tells us about Jesus who announces what will happen at the culmination of his life: ‘The Son of man will be delivered into the hands of men, and they will kill him; and when he is killed, after three days he will rise.’”
“The disciples, however, while they are following the Master, have other things in their mind and on their lips,” the pope pointed out. “When Jesus asks them what they were talking about, they do not answer.”
This silence, Francis noted, is telling. “The disciples are silent because they were discussing who was the greatest. What a contrast with the words of the Lord! While Jesus confided in them the meaning of his very life, they were talking about power.”
The pope noted the words of Jesus to his disciples: “If anyone wishes to be first, he shall be the last of all and the servant of all.”
Then Jesus, Pope Francis explained, illustrated his point by embracing a child, telling his disciples: “Whoever receives one such child in my name receives me.”
“The child has no power; he has needs,” he said. “We, all of us, are alive because we have been welcomed, but power makes us forget this truth. Then we become people who dominate, not servants, and the first to suffer as a result are the last: the little ones, the weak, the poor.”
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