Pope Francis prays with journalists on the papal flight en route to South Korea on Aug. 14, 2014. / Alan Holdren/CNA.
Vatican City, May 25, 2022 / 03:08 am (CNA).
Pope Francis said on Wednesday that his heart was broken by the killing of 19 children and two adults at an elementary school in Texas.
Speaking at the end of his general audience in St. Peter’s Square on May 25, he said: “My heart is broken for the massacre at the elementary school in Texas. I am praying for the children and the adults killed and their families.”
“It is time to say enough to the indiscriminate trafficking of weapons. Let us all work hard so that such tragedies can never happen again.”
His words were greeted with applause by pilgrims.
The pope was speaking after a gunman opened fire at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, southwest Texas, on May 24, killing 21 people.
Texas Governor Greg Abbott said that officers were believed to have killed the shooter, a local 18-year-old identified as Salvador Ramos.
The USCCB’s public affairs director Chieko Noguchi said in a statement: “There have been too many school shootings, too much killing of the innocent. Our Catholic faith calls us to pray for those who have died and to bind the wounds of others, and we join our prayers along with the community in Uvalde and Archbishop Gustavo García-Siller.”
“As we do so, each of us also needs to search our souls for ways that we can do more to understand this epidemic of evil and violence and implore our elected officials to help us take action.”
Hours before the general audience, San Antonio Archbishop Gustavo Garcia-Siller appealed to Pope Francis to pray for the victims of the shooting in his archdiocese.
He tweeted: “Holy Father Pope Francis, say some prayers for the souls of our little ones killed today and two teachers. Uvalde is in mourning. The families are having a very dark time. Your prayer will do good to them.”
He added in Spanish: “Gracias por ayudarnos. Queremos ser como Jesús. Cuente con nuestra oración” (“Thank you for helping us. We want to be like Jesus. Count on our prayers”).
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Leonardo Donno and Moreno il Biondo in action during the Charity Soccer Match “Partita del Cuore” on July 15, 2025 in L’Aquila, Italy. / Credit: Antonio Masiello/Getty Images
Vatican City, Jul 16, 2025 / 10:30 am (CNA).
Pope Leo XIV has encouraged encounter and unity in a message to the players and spectators of a soccer game to support sick and injured children from war zones.
“It is still possible — it is always possible — to encounter one another, even in a time of divisions, bombs, and wars,” the pope said in a video played at the July 15 match in L’Aquila, a city in the Italian region of Abruzzo.
A team of music artists beat out a bipartisan group of Italian politicians 8-6 in the friendly “Partita del Cuore” (“Game of the Heart”).
The 34th edition of the event raised funds for significantly ill or injured children from poor and war-torn countries to receive free treatment at one of Europe’s top children’s hospitals, the Vatican-owned Bambino Gesù. The project is also supported by the Catholic charity Caritas Italia.
In his message, played before a sold-out Gran Sasso d’Italia Stadium and two million television viewers, Leo underlined the importance of challenging divisions by coming together to contribute to a good cause.
“Sport — when experienced well by those who practice it and those who cheer them on — has this great thing about it, that it transforms confrontation into encounter, division into inclusion, loneliness into community,” he said.
Tiziano Onesti, the president of the Bambino Gesù Pediatric Hospital, told CNA the hospital is “always on the front lines” of supporting children in need.
“We take in many children who come from all over the world,” he said, especially those with complex illnesses, like leukemia, or serious injuries and mutilation from bombings.
While the children — some of whom come from Ukraine and Gaza — are hospitalized, their families “are welcomed in these reception centers where they don’t spend a penny, they don’t pay anything. The hospital covers all the expenses,” Onesti explained.
In his message, Pope Leo said the charity match recalled for him another famous soccer game, played during the Christmas truce of December 1914 between French, British, and German soldiers, near Ypres, Belgium.
The pontiff also pointed to the politicians participating in the game, saying it shows that “politics can unite rather than divide, if it does not settle for propaganda that feeds on the creation of enemies, but engages in the difficult and necessary art of dialogue, which seeks the common good.”
“In this case, match means encounter. An encounter where even opponents find a cause that unites them,” the pope said.
Players on the winning “singers” team included some of Italy’s most popular artists across the genres of rap, hip-hop, pop, and rock.
Matteo Renzi, a senator and former prime minister of Italy, played on the politicians team alongside other national politicians. Three members of the government also took part: the Italian ministers of economy and finance, of agriculture, and of culture.
“The atmosphere was obviously first and foremost festive, fun, a moment of encounter between opponents, politicians and singers,” Onesti said. “But also within the political sphere, there were people from all sides; it was very bipartisan, both right and left.”
The Bambino Gesù, founded by a wealthy family in Rome in 1869, was Italy’s first pediatric hospital. It became the property of the Holy See in 1924. Today, the “pope’s hospital” is a world-renowned research center and hospital specializing in pediatric medicine.
Father Patrick Hughes shows how to make a traditional St. Brigid’s Cross in County Cavan, Ireland. / Credit; Courtney Mares/CNA
Rome Newsroom, Feb 1, 2024 / 06:00 am (CNA).
Ireland on Thursday is celebrating the 1,500th anniversary of the death of St. Brigid of Kildare, the Emerald Isle’s female patron saint.
St. Brigid (c. 453–524 A.D.) is credited with pioneering female monastic life in Ireland. Her feast is celebrated on Feb. 1, which became an annual public bank holiday across Ireland last year in her honor.
“St. Brigid was a huge figure of authority in the early Church, baptized by St. Patrick, professed by St. Mel, spiritual adviser to St. Conleth,” Bishop Denis Nulty of Kildare and Leighlin said at a Mass ahead of her feast.
Ireland’s Kildare County has organized lectures, pilgrimages, and many activities in its Brigid 1500 Program to mark the anniversary, including a workshop on how to weave a St. Brigid’s Cross — St. Brigid’s most enduring symbol.
A St. Brigid’s cross is traditionally made out of rushes or reeds freshly pulled from the ground.
Father Patrick Joseph Hughes, a country priest in County Cavan, can make a St. Brigid’s cross from rushes in a matter of minutes.
Hughes told CNA that the story that has been handed down over the years is that St. Brigid was trying to explain to the local chieftain, who did not believe in God, that Jesus was his savior and died on a cross for him. The chieftain did not understand, so she made a cross out of rushes from the ground and presented it to him: “‘Look,’ she said, ‘that’s a cross, and Jesus was stretched out on that for the world.’”
On the eve of the Feast of Saint Brigid, it is tradition in Ireland to make a St. Brigid’s Cross out of rushes.
Last year while we were filming in Ireland, Father Patrick Hughes gave us a quick demonstration of how to make one.
St. Brigid’s Catholic Church in Kildare will kick off the feast day on Feb. 1 with a Mass at 9:15 a.m. offered by Bishop Nulty.
The bishop recently installed St. Brigid’s relics in St. Brigid’s Catholic Church on Jan. 29 as part of the 1,500th anniversary celebrations.
The relics were taken from the bone fragment of St. Brigid’s head, which has been kept in St. John the Baptist Church in Lumiar, Portugal, since three Irish knights brought it there in 1273. The Portuguese church gave the relic to the Brigidine Sisters in Tullow, Ireland, in the 1930s, and they recently gifted it to St. Brigid’s in Kildare.
“Today we have brought her home,” Nulty said. “Obtaining the relic of a saint like Brigid is no easy feat. I visited Lumiar in October 2021 with the singular intention of securing a relic for St. Brigid’s Church. I was privileged then to hold the relic of her head, which is contained in a splendid brass casket. Sadly, I couldn’t squeeze it into my Ryan Air flight bag!”
Notably, the Catholic bishop and female Anglican leaders will also come together for an ecumenical service at 11 a.m. on the feast day at the historic St. Brigid’s Cathedral, built on the site of the ancient hilltop where St. Brigid founded her monastery in the year 480 A.D. The previously Catholic cathedral, consecrated in 1230, is now an Anglican cathedral.
The service will be followed by a “pause for peace,” a minute of silent prayer for peace. St. Brigid was known as a peacemaker. Among the many stories told about St. Brigid, local tradition holds that Brigid gave away her father’s sword in exchange for food for a family suffering from hunger.
The fifth-century abbess St. Brigid is one of Ireland’s three patron saints, along with St. Patrick and St. Columba. Most historians place her birth around the year 450, near the end of St. Patrick’s evangelistic mission.
St. Brigid. Credit: Octave 444, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
It is notoriously hard to establish the historical details of Brigid’s life, but according to one of the more credible biographies of Brigid — Hugh de Blacam’s essay in “The Saints of Ireland” — Brigid was born out of wedlock to a pagan chieftain named Dubthach and a Christian slave woman named Broicsech. The chieftain sold the child’s pregnant mother to a new master but contracted for Brigid to be returned to him eventually.
Brigid was likely baptized as an infant and raised as a Catholic by her mother. Thus, she was well formed in the faith before leaving Broicsech’s slave quarters at around age 10 to live with Dubthach and his wife.
After this, Brigid’s faith grew immensely. She gave generously to the poor and tended to the sick. One story says Brigid once gave away her mother’s entire store of butter, which was later replenished after Brigid prayed.
Once she was released from servitude, she was expected to marry. However, Brigid had no interest in marrying. She went so far as to disfigure her own face and prayed that her beauty be taken from her so no one would want to marry her. Because she refused to change her mind about marriage, she received permission to enter religious life.
Brigid, along with seven friends, is credited with organizing communal consecrated religious life for women in Ireland.
In 480, Brigid founded her monastery in Kildare, which was called “Church of the Oak.” The monastery sat on top of a shrine to a Celtic goddess. Throughout the rest of her life, she established several monasteries across Ireland.
Brigid rooted her life as a nun in prayer, but she also performed substantial manual labor: cloth making, dairy farming, and raising sheep. She also spent time traveling across Ireland founding new houses and building up a uniquely Irish form of monasticism. When she was not traveling, pilgrims made their way to Kildare, seeking the advice of the abbess.
“What were the character traits that defined St. Brigid of Kildare? To mention just a few, she was hospitable, she was a peacemaker, she was a strong woman of faith,” Nulty said.
From cradle to coffin life is sacred and a precious gift.