Pope Francis to sign a new encyclical on human fraternity on Oct. 3

Vatican City, Sep 23, 2019 / 10:18 am (CNA).- When it comes to spreading the Word of God through media, no investment is too big, Pope Francis told officials and consultors of the Dicastery for Communication Monday.

In a prepared text given to participants in the Vatican’s Sala Regia Sept. 23, the pope spoke about communication as a mission of the Church. “No investment is too high for the diffusion of the Word of God,” he said. “At the same time, every ‘talent’ should be well spent, taken advantage of.”

Pope Francis went on to say that “in reality, our strength alone is not enough,” and referenced an address of St. Paul VI in 1964, in which he told the Vatican’s then-social communications department that “a thought of faith must therefore support the smallness of our humble efforts.”

“The more we make ourselves instruments in the hands of God, that is, small and generous, and the more the probability of our efficiency will grow,” Paul VI said.

“We know,” Pope Francis said, “that since then [1964] the challenges in this area have grown exponentially and our forces are never enough. The challenge to which you are called, as Christians and communicators, is really high. And that is why it is beautiful.”

The pope addressed the group of bishops and media professionals at the start of the plenary assembly of the Dicastery for Communications, being held at the Vatican Sept. 23-25.

This is the first plenary assembly of the dicastery since its institution in 2015. In attendance are the officials of the dicastery together with consultors from the international media realm, among whom is EWTN Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Michael P. Warsaw. Catholic News Agency is a service of EWTN.

The pope commented, “I therefore rejoice that the theme chosen for this Assembly is ‘We are members of one another’. Your, our strength lies in unity, in being members of one another. Only so we can better respond to the needs of the Church’s mission.”

In addition to his prepared speech, which was dispersed in written form, Pope Francis gave lengthy impromptu remarks to the assembly, counseling them to have the “signature of testimony” in everything they do.

“If you want to communicate only the truth without goodness and beauty, stop yourselves, do not do it. If you want to communicate a kind of truth, but without involving yourselves, without giving witness to that truth with your very lives, with your very flesh, stop yourselves, do not do it,” the pope said.

He also warned them against falling into an attitude of resignation when confronted by the worldliness of society.

Worldliness is not new to this century, he said, “it was always a danger, it was always a temptation, it was always the enemy”

In this vein, the pope said he has heard people think the Church should close itself off a little, “be a tiny, but authentic Church.”

“That word that gives me an allergy,” he stated. “If something is, it is not necessary to say ‘authentic.’”

The Church should be small “like leaven, small like salt,” he urged. “This is the Christian vocation!”

To think the Church of the future will be a “Church of the elect” is to risk falling into “the heresy of the Essenes,” he said, which is how “Christian authenticity is lost.”

Francis added that “the resignation to cultural defeat… comes from the bad spirit, it does not come from God.”

“Do not be afraid,” he encouraged. “We are few? Yes, but with the desire to ‘missionize,’ to show others who we are. With witness.”

He said he also is a “little allergic” to when people say something is “truly Christian.” “We have fallen into the culture of adjectives and adverbs, and we have forgotten the strength of nouns,” he argued.

“This is the mission of communication: to communicate the reality, without sweetening it with adjectives or adverbs.”

Just say something is “a Christian thing,” he said. It is unnecessary to say something is “authentically Christian.”

The communicator must show the “true, the right, the good, and the beautiful,” he said, and he does this with “the soul and with the body; he communicates with the mind, with the heart, with the hands; you communicate with everything.”

“And it is true that the greatest communication is love: in love there is the fullness of communication: love for God and among us.”

Something those working in Catholic communications should not do is proselytism, the pope said, adding that as “Benedict XVI said with great clarity: ‘The Church does not grow because of proselytism, but because of attraction,’ that is, testimony.”

“And our communication should be testimony.”

Pope Francis concluded by thanking the members of the dicastery for their work, telling them to “communicate the joy of the Gospel: This is what the Lord asks of you today.”

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Vatican City, Feb 22, 2018 / 01:48 pm (CNA/EWTN News).- The authentic development of doctrine is about making more explicit the revealed truths of faith, not changing, or “shifting,” Church teaching – and to use this idea to defend an agenda is wrong, Cardinal Gerhard Müller has said.

In an essay published Feb. 20 in First Things, the prefect emeritus of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith said there can be no such thing as a “paradigm shift” in the interpretation of Catholic doctrine, and to push for one is to contradict God’s commandments.

Anyone who calls a major shift in the Church’s teaching in moral theology a “praiseworthy decision of conscience… speaks against the Catholic faith,” wrote the 70-year-old prelate.

The idea of a “paradigm shift” – a “fundamental change in theoretical forms of thought and social behavior” – with respect to “the form of the Church’s being and of her presence in the world” is not possible,” Müller wrote, simply because “Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, today, and forever,” as it says in Hebrews 13:8.

“This is, in contrast, our paradigm, which we will not exchange for any other,” Müller stated.

He also explained that the Pope and his fellow bishops have a duty to preserve the unity of faith and to prevent polarization and partisan mentalities. Therefore, it is also a duty of conscience to speak up in opposition when the term “pastoral change” is used by some to “express their agenda to sweep aside the Church’s teaching as if doctrine were an obstacle to pastoral care.”

In his essay, he explained the concept of the “development of doctrine” in the Church as taught by Blessed John Henry Newman, and how it relates to debates on the interpretation of Pope Francis’ 2016 apostolic exhortation on love in the family, Amoris laetitia.

Chapter eight of Amoris laetitia “has been the object of contradictory interpretations,” he said, stating that when a “paradigm shift” is spoken of in this context, it seems to be “a relapse into a modernist and subjectivist way of interpreting the Catholic faith.”

According to Blessed Newman, a way to identify an authentic development of doctrine is to see if the surrounding cultural environment is growing in conformity with Christianity, not the other way around.

“Thus, a paradigm shift, by which the Church takes on the criteria of modern society to be assimilated by it, constitutes not a development, but a corruption.”

The formal principle is a category within Christian theology which distinguishes the source of the theological teaching from the teaching itself.

In the Catholic Church, Müller said, the “proper method for interpreting revelation requires the joint workings of three principles, which are: Holy Scripture, Apostolic Tradition, and the Apostolic Succession of Catholic bishops.”

He pointed out that the Protestant Reformation is an example in history of when a new formal principle was introduced, in this case, Scripture alone.

“This new principle subjected the Catholic doctrine of the faith, as it had developed up to the sixteenth century, to a radical change,” he said. “The fundamental understanding of Christianity turned into something completely different.”

Regarding debates surrounding the interpretation of Amoris laetitia, Müller noted that groups of bishops or individual bishops’ conferences have issued directives recently on the reception of the Eucharist by divorced-and-civilly-remarried people.

He pointed out the teaching of St. John Paul II in Familiaris consortio, which says that “the divorced living in a new union must resolve to live in continence or else refrain from approaching the sacraments.”

“Is there any logical continuity between John Paul II’s Familiaris Consortio n. 84 … and the change of this selfsame discipline that some are proposing? There are only two options,” he said.

“One could explicitly deny the validity of Familiaris Consortio n. 84, thus denying by the same token Newman’s sixth note, ‘Conservative Action upon the Past.’ Or one could attempt to show that Familiaris Consortio n. 84 implicitly anticipated the reversal of the discipline that it explicitly set out to teach. On any honest reading of John Paul II’s text, however, such a procedure would have to violate the basic rules of logic, such as the principle of non-contradiction.”

Cardinal Müller added that “when cardinals, bishops, priests, and laity ask the pope for clarity on these matters, what they request is not a clarification of the pope’s opinion. What they seek is clarity regarding the continuity of the pope’s teaching in Amoris Laetitia with the rest of tradition.”

For the statements of bishops to be orthodox, “it is not enough that they declare their conformity with the pope’s presumed intentions” in Amoris laetitia, he said.

“They are orthodox only if they agree with the words of Christ preserved in the deposit of faith.”

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Vatican City, May 10, 2020 / 03:30 am (CNA).- Church leaders must put prayer before all other things, Pope Francis said at his morning Mass Sunday.

Speaking in the chapel at Casa Santa Marta, his Vatican residence, the pope said May 10 that praying must be a bishop’s first priority.

He said: “The bishop’s prayer, the first task: to pray. And the people, seeing the bishop pray, learn to pray. Because the Holy Spirit teaches us that it is God who ‘does things’.” 

“We do a little, but it is He who ‘does the things’ of the Church, and it is through prayer that the Church advances. And that is why the leaders of the Church, so to say, the bishops, must go ahead with prayer.”

In his homily, the pope reflected on Sunday’s Gospel reading, John 14:1-14, in which Jesus tells his disciples that he is the way, the truth and the life and that no one comes to the Father except through him.

He described the passage as Jesus’ “declaration of access to the Father.” It was, he suggested, as if Christ “opened the doors of the omnipotence of prayer.”

Believers should pray with trust and courage, he said. He gave the examples of Abraham “haggling” with God to save Sodom in Genesis 18:20-33, and Moses asking the Lord to spare his people in Exodus 32:1-35. Therefore Christians should not pray timidly.

“To pray is to go with Jesus to the Father who will give you everything,” he said. “Courage in prayer, frankness in prayer.” 

The pope then turned to the day’s second reading, Acts 6:1-7, in which the apostles respond to complaints about food distribution in the early Christian community. 

He noted that, in order to focus on prayer and preaching, the apostles “enlightened by the Holy Spirit, ‘invented’, so to speak, the deacons,” selecting seven men of good reputation to oversee food allocation.

He said: “This is the bishop’s task: to pray and preach. With this strength that we have heard in the Gospel: the bishop is the first one who goes to the Father, with the trust that Jesus gave, with courage, with parrhesia [bold speech], to fight for his people. The first task of a bishop is to pray.”

The pope recalled “a holy parish priest” who whenever he met a bishop would ask him how many hours a day he prayed. 

Prayer is a bishop’s primary task, he said, “Because it is the prayer of the head of the community for the community, the intercession to the Father so that he might guard the people.”

He concluded: “It is sad to see good bishops, good people, good people, but busy with many things, the economy, and this and that… Prayer in first place. Then the other things. But when the other things take space away from prayer, something doesn’t work…”

“This is how the Church goes forward, with prayer, the courage of prayer, because the Church knows that without this access to the Father she cannot survive.”

The pope ended the celebration with adoration and benediction of the Blessed Sacrament. The congregation then sang the Easter Marian antiphon “Regina caeli.”

At the start of Mass, the pope recalled two recent commemorations. May 8 marked the 75th anniversary of the end of the Second World War. May 9 was the 70th anniversary of the Schuman Declaration, which proposed the creation of a European Coal and Steel Community, leading to the foundation of the European Union.

He said: “Let us ask the Lord for Europe today to grow united in this unity of brotherhood which makes all peoples grow in unity in diversity.”

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