Rome Newsroom, Mar 4, 2021 / 12:00 pm (CNA).- On the eve of his departure for a three-day trip to Iraq, Pope Francis visited a Rome basilica to ask for the Virgin Mary’s intercession and protection on his travels.
According to the Holy See press office, Pope Francis went to the Basilica of St. Mary Major March 4 “for a moment of prayer” before the Byzantine icon of Salus Populi Romani, Mary, Protection of the Roman People.
It has been Pope Francis’ custom to visit the icon before his international trips to ask for the Virgin Mary’s protection.
He also typically visits the icon upon returning to Rome and before re-entering the Vatican.
Pope Francis is visiting Iraq on March 5-8 in a trip intended to strengthen the hope of the country’s persecuted Christian minority and to foster fraternity and interreligious dialogue.
In just over three days, Francis is scheduled to travel 900 miles within Iraq, meeting with political leaders, prominent Muslim clerics, and Christian communities. He will be the first pope in history to visit the Middle Eastern country.
This afternoon, on the eve of his departure for #Iraq, #PopeFrancis went to the Basilica of St Mary Major for a moment of prayer before the icon of the Virgin Salus Populi Romani, entrusting his coming apostolic journey to her protection. pic.twitter.com/O9H6atO4Le
— Holy See Press Office (@HolySeePress) March 4, 2021
The icon of Salus Populi Romani has been revered by the people of Rome for centuries and is considered a symbol of the city and its people.
In March 2020, Pope Francis visited the icon as part of a short walking prayer pilgrimage he made during Italy’s coronavirus lockdown.
At the end of his general audience on March 3, Pope Francis asked people to accompany him with their prayers during his trip to Iraq, “so that it may unfold in the best possible way and bear the hoped-for fruits.”
“The Iraqi people are waiting for us; they awaited St. John Paul II, who was not permitted to go. One cannot disappoint a people for the second time. Let us pray that this journey will be a good one,” he said.
Custos Fr. Francesco Patton, O.F.M., wrote March 4 to the Franciscan friars of the Custody of the Holy Land, asking them to accompany the pope’s trip to Iraq with “a special and intense prayer.”
He included a schedule of specific ways to pray each day of the pope’s trip, including fasting and meditation on the Stations of the Cross on Friday, March 5, and praying a rosary and reading chapter eight of the encyclical “Fratelli tutti” on Saturday.
Patton said that the community’s Mass at Calvary on Sunday, March 7, would be offered for the eternal repose of the victims of the war in Iraq and the gift of peace in the entire Middle East.
On the day of the pope’s return, Monday, March 8, he invited the friars to offer their personal prayers.
“Let’s live this moment with faith, in union with the Holy Father and with our brothers in Iraq,” he said.
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Madrid, Spain, Nov 4, 2017 / 06:01 am (ACI Prensa).- Next Saturday 60 members of the Vincentian Order who were martyred during the Spanish Civil War will be beatified at a Mass in Madrid, a “celebration of hope, faith and forgiveness.”
“The grace experienced by these martyrs is impossible to understand without faith,” said Sister Angeles Infante, a Daughter of Charity who is postulator of the cause for beatification. She praised the martyrs’ “faithfulness to the Vincentian charism, giving their lives, the greatest treasure they had, for Christ.”
The Nov. 11 Mass of Beatification at the Palacio Vistalegre will be a celebration of hope because “these martyrs believed in the beatitudes and their martyrdom summed them all up.”
“It ‘s not a violent death that makes you a martyr, but the cause you die for, which is Christ. They gave their lives for God, embodying the faith through their witness, forgiving and asking their families to forgive,” the postulator said.
Cardinal Carlos Osoro Sierra of Madrid, who will celebrate the Mass, said that “these 60 martyrs gave their lives out of love. They died loving and forgiving, demonstrating a wisdom which comes from above, not taking sides in the conflict or getting involved in the civil unrest, but having a wisdom which came from Jesus Christ.”
“A human being’s weapons are not hatred or rancor but those of Jesus Christ: the love which engenders life and not death.”
He also emphasized that these 60 martyrs are a model “more timely than ever because they led the life of God which is always relevant,” especially during “times in history when it seems hard for us to forgive. That’s why it’s good to remember people like these, people who don’t destroy but forgive instead, who give their lives not for an idea, but for a person: Jesus Christ.”
Those being beatified are Vicente Queralt Lloret and 20 companions, and José Maria Fernández Sanchez and 38 companions. They were killed in 1936 and 1937 by Republican forces.
Thousands of priests and religious, accompanied by laity, were martyred during Spain’s civil war. More than 1,800 have already been beatified, and several have been canonized.
This article was originally published by our sister agency, ACI Prensa. It has been translated and adapted by CNA
Archbishop Zbigņevs Stankevičs of Riga, Latvia (left), speaking during a Catholic conference in Warsaw in May 2022 on the natural law legacy of John Paul II (right.) / Photos by Lisa Johnston and L’Osservatore Romano
Warsaw, Poland, Jun 9, 2022 / 09:17 am (CNA).
Constant cooperation and dialogue among Catholic, Lutherans, Orthodox, and other Christian denominations have been crucial to protect life and family in the Baltic nation of Latvia, Archbishop Zbigņevs Stankevičs of Riga, Latvia, said during a recent Catholic conference in Warsaw.
In his speech, Stankevičs shared his personal ecumenical experience in Latvia as an example of how the concept of natural law proposed by St. John Paul II can serve as the basis for ecumenical cooperation in defending human values.
The metropolitan archbishop, based in Latvia’s capital, is no stranger to ecumenical work and thought. In 2001, he became the first bishop consecrated in a Lutheran church since the split from Protestantism in the 1500s. The unusual move, which occurred in the church of Evangelical Lutheran Cathedral in Riga, formerly the Catholic Cathedral of St. Mary, signaled the beginning of Stankevičs’ cooperation with the Lutheran church in Latvia, a cooperation that would ultimately become a partnership in the cause of life and the family. Since 2012, the archbishop has served on the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity.
“I would like to present this ecumenical cooperation in three experiences in my country: the abortion debate, the civil unions discussion, and the so-called Istanbul convention,” Stankevičs began.
Entering the abortion debate
Ordained as a priest in 1996, Stankevičs struggled to find proper consultation for Catholic couples on natural family planning. It was then that he decided to create a small center that provided natural family planning under the motto “let us protect the miracle [of fertility].”
This involvement in the world of natural family planning would lead him into the heart of the abortion debate in Latvian society, and, ultimately, to the conclusion that moral discussions in the public square benefit from a basis in natural law, something emphasized in the teachings of John Paul II.
“I knew that theological arguments would not work for a secular audience, so I wanted to show that Catholic arguments are not opposed to legal, scientific, and universal arguments, but rather are in harmony with them,” Stankevičs said.
“[A] few years later our parliament introduced the discussion to legalize abortion. No one was doing anything so I decided to do something. I consulted some experts and presented a proposal that was published in the most important secular newspaper in Latvia,” the archbishop said.
Stankevičs’ article, “Why I was Lucky,” used both biological and theological arguments to defend human life. He noted that his own mother, when pregnant with him, was under pressure to get an abortion; “but she was a believer, a Catholic, so she refused the pressure.”
After the Latvian parliament legalized abortion in 2002, the different Christian confessions decided to start working together to protect the right to life and the family.
In Latvia, Catholics comprise 25% of the population, Lutherans 34.2%, and Russian Orthodox 17%, with other smaller, mostly Christian denominations making up the remainder.
“We started to work together by the initiative of a businessman in Riga, a non-believer who wanted to promote awareness about the humanity of the unborn,” the archbishop recalled.
“Bringing all Christians together in a truly ecumenical effort ended up bearing good fruits because we worked together in promoting a culture of life: From more than 7,000 abortions per year in 2002, we were able to bring it down to 2,000 by 2020,” he said.
Ecumenical defense of marriage, family
Regarding the legislation on civil unions, another area where Stankevičs has rallied ecumenical groups around natural law defense of marriage, the archbishop said that he has seen the tension surrounding LGBT issues mount in Latvian society as increased pressure is brought to bear to legalize same-sex unions.
Invited to a debate on a popular Latvian television show called “One vs. One” after Pope Francis’ remark “who am I to judge?” was widely interpreted in Latvian society as approving homosexual unions, Stankevičs “had the opportunity to explain the teachings of the Catholic Church and what was the real meaning of the Holy Father’s words.”
After that episode, in dialogue with other Christian leaders, Stankevičs proposed a law aimed at reducing political tensions in the country without jeopardizing the traditional concept of the family.
The legislation proposed by the ecumenical group of Christians would have created binding regulations aimed at protecting any kind of common household; “for example, two old persons living together to help one another, or one old and one young person who decide to live together.”
“The law would benefit any household, including homosexual couples, but would not affect the concept of [the] natural family,” Stankevičs explained. “Unfortunately the media manipulated my proposal, and the Agency France Presse presented me internationally as if I was in favor of gay marriage.”
In 2020, the Constitutional Court in Latvia decided a case in favor of legalizing homosexual couples and ordered the parliament to pass legislation according to this decision.
In response, the Latvian Men’s Association started a campaign to introduce an amendment to the Latvian constitution, to clarify the concept of family. The Latvian constitution in 2005 proclaimed that marriage is only between a man and a woman, but left a legal void regarding the definition of family, which the court wanted to interpret to include homosexual unions.
The Latvian bishops’ conference supported the amendment presented by the Men’s Association, “but most importantly,” Stankevičs explained, “we put together an ecumenical statement signed by the leaders of 10 different Christian denominations supporting the idea that the family should be based on the marriage between a man and a woman. The president of the Latvian Jewish community, a good friend, also joined the statement.”
According to Stankevičs, something strange happened next. “The Minister of Justice created a committee to discuss the demand of the constitutional court, and it included several Christian representatives, including three from the Catholic Church, which worked for a year.” But ignoring all the discussions and proposals, the Minister of Justice ended up sending a proposal to parliament that was a full recognition of homosexual couples as marriage.
The response was also ecumenical: Christian leaders sent a letter encouraging the parliament to ignore the government’s proposal.
According to Stankevičs, the proposal has already passed one round of votes “and it is very likely that it will be approved in a second round of votes, with the support of the New Conservative party. But we Christians continue to work together.”
Preventing gender ideology
The third field of ecumenical cooperation mentioned by Stankevičs concerned the Istanbul Convention, a European treaty which the Latvian government signed but ultimately did not ratify.
The treaty was introduced as an international legal instrument that recognizes violence against women as a violation of human rights and a form of discrimination against women.
The convention claims to cover various forms of gender-based violence against women, but Christian communities in Latvia have criticized the heavy use of gender ideology in both the framing and the language of the document.
The word “gender,” for instance, is defined as “the socially constructed roles, behaviors, activities, and attributes that a given society considers appropriate for women and men,” a definition that allows gender to be defined independent of biological sex and therefore opens the document to the question of whether it really is aimed at the protection of women.
Christian communities also question the biased nature of the committee designated to enforce the convention.
The governments of Slovakia and Bulgaria refused to ratify the convention, while Poland, Lithuania, and Croatia expressed reservations about the convention though it was ultimately ratified in those countries, a move the government of Poland is attempting to reverse.
“When we found out that the Latvian parliament was going to ratify it, I went to the parliament and presented the common Christian position,” Stankevičs explained. As a consequence of that visit, the Latvian parliament decided not to ratify the convention, Stankevičs said, crediting the appeal to the unity provided by the common Christian position argued via natural law.
“In conclusion,” the archbishop said, “I can say that in Latvia we continue to defend the true nature of life and family. But if we Catholics would act alone, we would not have the impact that we have as one Christian majority. That unity is the reason why the government takes us seriously.”
Cali, Colombia, Mar 31, 2022 / 14:24 pm (CNA).
A Colombian priest has called on Catholics to be consistent with their religious convictions and the teaching of the Church when voting for their political representativ… […]
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