Pope Francis attends Vatican funeral of his personal physician

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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Vatican City, Sep 27, 2020 / 06:30 am (CNA).- Pope Francis said Sunday that the Christian life requires concrete commitments and spiritual combat in order to grow in holiness.

“There is no path to holiness without some renunciation and without spiritual combat,” Pope Francis said in his Angelus address Sept. 27.

This battle for personal sanctity requires grace “to fight for the good, to fight not to fall into temptation, to do what we can on our part, to come to live in the peace and joy of the Beatitudes,” the pope added.

In the Catholic tradition, spiritual combat involves an internal “battle of prayer” in which a Christian must fight temptation, distraction, discouragement, or dryness. Spiritual combat also entails cultivating virtues to make better life choices and exercise charity towards one’s neighbor.

The pope acknowledged that conversion can be a painful process because it is a process of moral purification, which he likened to removing encrustations from one’s heart.

“Conversion is a grace for which we must always ask for: ‘Lord, give me the grace to improve. Give me the grace to be a good Christian,’” Pope Francis said from the window of the Vatican’s Apostolic Palace.

Reflecting on Sunday’s Gospel, the pope said that “living a Christian life is not made up of dreams or beautiful aspirations, but of concrete commitments, in order to open ourselves ever more to God’s will and to love for our brothers and sisters.”

“Faith in God asks us to renew every day the choice of good over evil, the choice of the truth rather than lies, the choice of love for our neighbor over selfishness,” Pope Francis said.

The pope pointed to one of Jesus’ parables in chapter 21 in the Gospel of Matthew in which a father asks two sons to go and work in his vineyard.

“To the father’s invitation to go and work in the vineyard, the first son impulsively responds ‘no, no I will not go,’ but then he repents and goes; instead the second son, who immediately replies ‘yes, yes father,’ does not actually do so,” he said.

“Obedience does not consist of saying ‘yes’ or ‘no’, but of acting, of cultivating the vineyard, of bringing about the Kingdom of God, in doing good.”

Pope Francis explained that Jesus used this parable to call people to an understanding that religion should affect one’s life and attitudes.

“With His preaching on the Kingdom of God, Jesus opposes a religiosity that does not involve human life, that does not question the conscience and its responsibility in the face of good and evil,” he said. “Jesus wants to go beyond a religion understood only as external and habitual practice, which does not affect people’s lives and attitudes.”

While acknowledging that the Christian life demands conversion, Pope Francis emphasized that “God is patient with each one of us.”

“He [God] does not tire, He does not desist after our ‘no’; He leaves us free even to distance ourselves from Him and to make mistakes … But He anxiously awaits our ‘yes’, so as to welcome us anew in His fatherly arms and to fill us with His boundless mercy,” the pope said.

After praying the Angelus with the pilgrims gathered under umbrellas in a rainy St. Peter’s Square, the pope asked people to pray for peace in the Caucasus region, where Russia staged joint military exercises with China, Belarus, Iran, Myanmar, Pakistan, and Armenia last week.

“I ask the parties to the conflict to make concrete gestures of goodwill and brotherhood, which can lead to solving problems not with the use of force and arms, but through dialogue and negotiation,” Pope Francis said.

Pope Francis also greeted the migrants and refugees present at the Angelus as the Church celebrates the World Day of Migrants and Refugees and said that he was praying for small businesses affected by the coronavirus pandemic.

“May Mary Most Holy help us to be docile to the action of the Holy Spirit. He is the One who melts the hardness of hearts and disposes them to repentance, so we may obtain the life and salvation promised by Jesus,” the pope said.

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