Cardinal Martini was a ‘prophet,’ says Vatican cardinal

Pope Francis delivers the homily at the funeral Mass for Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI in St. Peter’s Square on Jan. 5, 2023. / Daniel Ibañez/CNA

Vatican City, Jan 5, 2023 / 03:46 am (CNA).

At 9:30 a.m. this morning Pope Francis presided over the funeral Mass of Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI. This is the full text of his homily:

“Father, into your hands I commend my spirit” (Lk 23:46). These were the final words spoken by the Lord on the cross; his last breath, as it were, which summed up what had been his entire life: a ceaseless self-entrustment into the hands of his Father. His were hands of forgiveness and compassion, healing and mercy, anointing and blessing, which led him also to entrust himself into the hands of his brothers and sisters. The Lord, open to the individuals and their stories that he encountered along the way, allowed himself to be shaped by the Father’s will. He shouldered all the consequences and hardships entailed by the Gospel, even to seeing his hands pierced for love. “See my hands,” he says to Thomas (Jn 20:27), and to each of us: “See my hands.” Pierced hands that constantly reach out to us, inviting us to recognize the love that God has for us and to believe in it (cf. 1 Jn 4:16).

“Father into your hands I commend my spirit.” This is the invitation and the programme of life that he quietly inspires in us. Like a potter (cf. Is 29:16), he wishes to shape the heart of every pastor, until it is attuned to the heart of Christ Jesus (cf. Phil 2:5). Attuned in grateful devotion, in service to the Lord and to his people, a service born of thanksgiving for a completely gracious gift: “You belong to me… you belong to them,” the Lord whispers, “you are under the protection of my hands. You are under the protection of my heart. Stay in my hands and give me yours.” Here we see the “condescension” and closeness of God, who is ready to entrust himself to the frail hands of his disciples, so that they can feed his people and say with him: Take and eat, take and drink, for this is my body which is given up for you (cf. Lk 22:19). The total synkatabasis of God.

Attuned in prayerful devotion, a devotion silently shaped and refined amid the challenges and resistance that every pastor must face (cf. 1 Pet 1:6-7) in trusting obedience to the Lord’s command to feed his flock (cf. Jn 21:17 ). Like the Master, a shepherd bears the burden of interceding and the strain of anointing his people, especially in situations where goodness must struggle to prevail and the dignity of our brothers and sisters is threatened (cf. Heb 5:7-9). In the course of this intercession, the Lord quietly bestows the spirit of meekness that is ready to understand, accept, hope and risk, notwithstanding any misunderstandings that might result. It is the source of an unseen and elusive fruitfulness, born of his knowing the One in whom he has placed his trust (cf. 2 Tim 1:12). A trust itself born of prayer and adoration, capable of discerning what is expected of a pastor and shaping his heart and his decisions in accord with God’s good time (cf. Jn 21:18): “Feeding means loving, and loving also means being ready to suffer. Loving means giving the sheep what is truly good, the nourishment of God’s truth, of God’s word, the nourishment of his presence.”

Attuned also in devotion sustained by the consolation of the Spirit, who always precedes the pastor in his mission. In his passionate effort to communicate the beauty and the joy of the Gospel (cf. Gaudete et Exsultate, 57). In the fruitful witness of all those who, like Mary, in so many ways stand at the foot of the cross. In the painful yet steadfast serenity that neither attacks nor coerces. In the stubborn but patient hope that the Lord will be faithful to his promise, the promise he made to our fathers and to their descendants forever (cf. Lk 1:54-55).

Holding fast to the Lord’s last words and to the witness of his entire life, we too, as an ecclesial community, want to follow in his steps and to commend our brother into the hands of the Father. May those merciful hands find his lamp alight with the oil of the Gospel that he spread and testified to for his entire life (cf. Mt 25:6-7).

At the end of his Pastoral Rule, Saint Gregory the Great urged a friend to offer him this spiritual accompaniment: “Amid the shipwreck of the present life, sustain me, I beseech you, by the plank of your prayer, that, since my own weight sinks me down, the hand of your merit will raise me up.” Here we see the awareness of a pastor who cannot carry alone what in truth he could never carry alone, and can thus commend himself to the prayers and the care of the people entrusted to him. God’s faithful people, gathered here, now accompanies and entrusts to him the life of the one who was their pastor. Like the women at the tomb, we too have come with the fragrance of gratitude and the balm of hope, in order to show him once more the love that is undying. We want to do this with the same wisdom, tenderness, and devotion that he bestowed upon us over the years. Together, we want to say: “Father, into your hands we commend his spirit.”

Benedict, faithful friend of the Bridegroom, may your joy be complete as you hear his voice, now and forever!

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Rome, Italy, Oct 12, 2017 / 10:20 am (CNA/EWTN News).- As interreligious tensions and a migration crisis continue in the Middle East, key Church leaders in the region have said Christians largely feel abandoned by the international community, which has done little to help resolve the situation.

According to Syriac Catholic Patriarch of Antioch Ignatius Joseph III Younan, Christians in the Middle East “feel that we have been abandoned, even betrayed, because we were hoping that the international community would defend our rights and provide us with the equal chance to live in our homeland, but that wasn’t the case.”

“It’s not easy to endure that violent upheaval in those two countries, in Iraq and Syria,” he said, explaining that both faithful and Church leaders in the region share this sense of abandonment and betrayal by Western countries in particular, which he said are more “opportunistic” than helpful.

“We, the heads of Churches, along with some other prominent lay people who have been caring for their communities, we try to send our voice, our rights, like St. John the Baptist, but it seems that we are shouting in the desert,” he said.

Younan cited “opportunistic geopolitics” as one of the main reasons Christians have either been left homeless with no funding to rebuild their cities, or left lingering in refugee camps for years due to a backlog in visa requests while being denied official refugee status.

“We don’t have the interest regarding our faith among the politicians that govern the Western countries. We don’t have the numbers, we don’t have the oil, we don’t pose any terrorist threat to the civilized world, and therefore we have been put aside and neglected,” he said.

The patriarch is in Rome for the Oct. 9-12 plenary assembly marking the centenary of the Congregation for the Oriental Churches and the Pontifical Oriental Institute, founded by Benedict XV.

Christians from Iraq and Syria who have fled to neighboring countries such as Lebanon, Turkey, and Jordan are still living “in a kind of limbo. They don’t know what to do for their children,” he said.

In terms of numbers, Younan said that so far more than 50 percent of Christians in Iraq have already left the country, while a third of the remaining Christian population is internally displaced.

As far as the Christian presence in Syria, “we can easily talk about a third” of the Christian population having left, with many still waiting to be admitted to new countries.

The main needs of refugees and displaced persons is first of all humanitarian assistance, Younan said, explaining that the Church tries to provide for their basic needs, “but surely its not enough,” since most have already been displaced for several years.

“We still suffer with them in our souls because we don’t know what to do for them. We can’t seek refugee visas for them, because otherwise the Christian community would be empty in their homelands and for us this is a great loss,” he said. “But we try to respond to their basic needs.”

In terms of dialogue between Christianity and Islam, the patriarch said at times it’s difficult to speak of such a dialogue in the current cultural context, but it must happen at the level of “the believers of each religion.”

At the present moment, dialogue is focused on how the two can mutually and peacefully coexist, he said, with an emphasis on the fact that “we live in the 21 st century, that we have to respect each other, to accept each other and not discriminate because of religion.”

“This is also the mission, the task of the countries who have a word to say on the international scene,” he said. “We sit together at the United Nations…and we talk about human rights and therefore we have to uphold those rights for all, not only for the ones who believe in our religion, but for all people.”

While the Holy See, and Pope Francis in particular, understand and are doing their best to help in the plight of Christians in the Middle East, Younan said that in the broader community “the geopolitical strategy of the mighty countries is still in, let’s say, the ‘winning’ part in the world.”

“To follow the ethics of the Gospel, the real defense of human rights is for those who are the weakest and for the forgotten ones among the minorities in the Middle East,” he said, but “that’s not the case, we are not the point of their interest.”

The first right that needs to be promoted for Christians in the Middle East is to be able “to live in freedom as equal citizens,” rather than second-class citizens who face harsh discrimination which frequently goes unpunished by the law, the patriarch said.

Another key right is the ability “to choose our creed, our religion, and the right also to announce our creed, our religion to others,” he said.

However, currently “it’s forbidden” to evangelize in Muslim countries apart from Lebanon. Because of this, “we’ve been always, along the centuries, reduced to minorities because we’ve been forbidden to be missionaries in our own country.”

Issuing an appeal to the international community, Younan asked that Western nations not look at Christian and other minorities in the Middle East “as numbers, but as people, as persons, being persecuted along the centuries.”

“We’ve been reduced to minorities not because we had to leave our countries, but because we are not considered equal citizens with the Muslim majority,” he said, and called on “this so-called civilized world not just to look for their own political, economic interest,” but to protect “the rights of those who are persecuted because of their religion and their creed.”

“This is the way to deal with our problems, our very critical situation,” he said. And if the world fails to do defend the “human and religious” rights of everyone, “the Middle East will be emptied of their Christian communities and it would be a very great loss.”

Material from EWTN News Nightly was used in this report.

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St. Mary’s Cathedral in Valencia, Spain. / Credit: Pere López, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Madrid, Spain, Sep 3, 2025 / 05:15 am (CNA).

The Observatory for Religious Freedom and Conscience (OLRC by its Spanish acronym) in Spain decried that it was “a black August” with seven cases of vandalism and desecration against Catholic churches reported in recent weeks.

On Aug. 11, black paint was spilled on a set of  steps at St. Catherine parish in the town of Rute in Cordoba province, just days before the patron saint’s feast day.

The following day, the perpetual adoration chapel at St. Martin parish in Valencia was desecrated when a person who identifies as “trans” burst in the chapel shouting in front of the altar and then “broke the monstrance, while insulting the faithful,” according to the OLRC.

On Aug 13, Our Lady of Mount Carmel parish in Palma de Mallorca was desecrated with offensive graffiti accusing the Catholic Church of corruption.

A day later, a sacristan and several parishioners were attacked in the Valencia cathedral by an apparently intoxicated man during the celebration of the Eucharist.

On Aug. 17, a man broke into St. James the Apostle parish in Albuñol in Granada province, where he attacked several statues before starting a fire that took firefighters two hours to extinguish.

On Aug. 24, the Assumption of Our Lady in Yeles in Toledo province was vandalized by a woman apparently suffering from psychiatric problems who attacked several statues such as the Child of Remedies and the Virgin of Solitude, causing extensive damage.

Last Sunday, Aug. 31, two activists from the environmental group Futuro Vegetal (Plant Future) threw dye at the façade of the Sagrada Familia Basilica  in Barcelona in an attempt to protest the large number of forest fires in Spain in recent weeks that the group blamed on ranching activities.

For the OLRC, these events “confirm the rise of Christianophobia and the vulnerability of religious freedom in our country” and warned against such events becoming normalized.

The organization’s president, María García, demanded “a firm response” from the authorities “and resources for the protection of the religious heritage” of the country.

“August has been a dark month for religious freedom in our country. The succession of attacks on churches and places of worship demonstrates that violence and hatred against Christians are far from isolated cases,” García pointed out in a statement, emphasizing that “according to data from the Reports on Attacks on Religious Freedom in Spain, Christians are always the most attacked religion.”

Greater protection for churches

The OLRC warned that many parish priests are reporting that they are “having to install cameras or close churches due to the increase in vandalism and anti-Christian hatred” and called on the authorities “for greater protection for churches.”

“These events represent a worrying trend of religious intolerance. We demand that agencies of the central government and municipalities develop specific prevention plans against attacks on churches and rigorous application of the penal code against hate crimes and crimes that deride religious sentiments,” García emphasized.

The Observatory for Religious Freedom urged civil society and institutions not to look the other way and to report any act of religious hatred. “Only by bringing these attacks out in the open and reacting firmly can we guarantee coexistence and respect for the freedom of all,” García emphasized.

This story was first published by ACI Prensa, CNA’s Spanish-language news partner. It has been translated and adapted by CNA.

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