Pope Francis: Saint Pius V teaches us to seek truth, pray the rosary

Vatican City, Nov 18, 2017 / 05:59 am (CNA/EWTN News).- Pope Francis on Saturday sent a message to health workers and organizations, saying compassion is the heart of what they do, and stressed the need for a more equitable distribution resources and services throughout the world.

“A healthcare organization that is efficient and capable of addressing inequalities cannot forget its raison d’être, which is compassion,” the Pope said Nov. 18.

This includes the compassion of doctors, nurses, support staff volunteers and all others able to “minimize the pain associated with loneliness and anxiety,” he said, and stressed the importance for healthcare workers to focus not just on good organization, but on listening, accompanying and supporting the people they care for.

Compassion, Francis said, is “a privileged way to promote justice,” since empathizing with what others are experiencing allows us to not only understand their struggles, hardships and fears, but also “to discover, in the frailness of every human being, his or her unique worth and dignity.”

“Indeed, human dignity is the basis of justice, while the recognition of every person’s inestimable worth is the force that impels us to work, with enthusiasm and self-sacrifice, to overcome all disparities.”

Pope Francis sent his message to participants in the Nov. 16-18 conference “Addressing Global Health Inequalities,” organized by the Dicastery for Promoting Integral Human Development in collaboration with the International Confederation of Catholic Healthcare Institutions.

The goal of the conference is to launch a network connecting all 116,000 Catholic health organizations around the world through a platform of collaboration and sharing aimed at exchanging information.

Another key goal of the conference is to raise awareness about global disparities in access to healthcare.

In his speech, he quoted from the Vatican’s new Healthcare Charter, released in February, which states that “the fundamental right to the preservation of health pertains to the value of justice, whereby there are no distinctions between peoples and ethnic groups, taking into account their objective living situations and stages of development.”

The Church, he said, continuing the quote, “proposed that the right to health care and the right to justice ought to be reconciled by ensuring a fair distribution of healthcare facilities and financial resources, in accordance with the principles of solidarity and subsidiarity.”

To this end, he praised the participants for establishing the new platform, which he said will concretely address the challenges faced in healthcare in different geographical and social settings.

Francis said this task is something that belongs in particular to healthcare workers and their organizations, since they are committed in a special way to raising awareness among institutions, welfare agencies and the healthcare industry as a whole, “for the sake of ensuring that every individual actually benefits from the right to health care.”

This not only depends on the services provided, but also on the economic, social and cultural factors in decision making processes.

He also stressed the need to eradicate the structural causes of poverty, “because society needs to be cured of a sickness which is weakening and frustrating it, and which can only lead to new crises.”

Welfare projects should only be considered temporary responses, he said, explaining that “as long as the problems of the poor are not radically resolved by rejecting the absolute autonomy of markets and financial speculation and by attacking the structural causes of inequality, no solution will be found for the world’s problems or, for that matter, to any problems.”

Francis also offered a special word to representatives of pharmaceutical companies present, and who were invited to Rome  to address the topic of access to antiretroviral therapies by paediatric patients.

Again quoting from the Vatican’s healthcare charter, he said that while scientific knowledge and research on their part have their own laws to abide to, “ways must be found to combine these adequately with the right of access to basic or necessary treatments, or both.”

He also advocated for healthcare strategies that pursue the common good and that are “economically and ethically sustainable.”

Pope Francis closed his message thanking participants for their “generous commitment,” and gave his blessing.

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Máire Lea-Wilson with her son, Aidan. / Courtesy photo.

CNA Staff, May 20, 2021 / 07:00 am (CNA).
On July 6, Máire Lea-Wilson intends to walk into the imposing Royal Courts of Justice in London to take part in a case that could make history. The… […]

Vatican City, Jun 17, 2017 / 09:22 am (CNA/EWTN News).- Pope Francis on Friday recognized the heroic virtue of six persons on the path to canonization, as well as the martyrdom of an Italian man who died from injuries of a beating he received while imprisoned in a concentration camp for resisting fascism.

The Pope met June 16 with the prefect of the Congregation for the Causes of Saints, Cardinal Angelo Amato, giving his approval for the causes to move forward.

He recognized the martyrdom of Venerable Teresio Olivelli, a layman “killed in hatred of the Faith” Jan. 17, 1945, at the age of 29.

Venerable Olivelli was born in 1916. He graduated with a degree in law and went on to comment in papers on legal and social issues of the time before becoming a volunteer soldier in the Spanish Civil War and in World War II.

During the war, his views towards the Italian fascist regime of Benito Mussolini soured. He founded a newspaper dedicated to promoting the Christian message and tried to infuse a Christian message into the regime.

He later broke from it entirely after seeing the reality of the deportation of Jewish people as per racial laws. He became part of the Italian Resistance movement in Milan.

He was apprehended on April 27, 1944 and taken to a prison where he was tortured and beaten before being moved to another prison. On July 11 his name was added to a list of 70 inmates to be shot, but he fled and hid in a field until he was recaptured.

He was then transferred to a concentration camp in northern Italy before being moved to the Flossenburg and Hersbruck camps in Germany. While there he shared food rations with inmates and treated their injuries.

He died from injuries he received after defending a Ukrainian inmate from being attacked. He was kicked in the stomach and intestines and struck 25 times.

Olivelli’s beatification process began in 1988. Originally sought as a martyrdom, this was rejected because of doubts, though he was found to have lived a life of heroic virtue and was named ‘Venerable’ by Pope Francis in 2015.

Officials of the cause remained adamant that Olivelli was killed in hatred of his faith and therefore re-submitted a “positio” – a collection of documents submitted for sainthood causes – in 2016, hoping it would lead to his beatification without the usual required miracle.

Based on new findings it was approved by the Congregation for the Causes of Saints and now by Pope Francis, affirming that he was killed “in hatred of the faith,” paving the way for his beatification.

Another cause moving forward is that of Sr. Maria degli Angeli, born Giuseppa Margherita Operte in Turin in 1871.

Born into a wealthy family, she experienced loss at the young age of 14 when her father and brother died within three months of each other. Left alone with her mother, they entered more deeply into the Christian life, becoming Third Order lay Carmelites.

When Giuseppa heard that a priest in a neighboring parish was circulating the rumor that she would open an institute for poor young girls, she took it as a sign of her calling and in 1894 opened the Institute of St. Joseph in a palace inherited from her parents.

She began a religious community of Third Order Carmelites who live an active apostolate according to the spirituality of the great reformers of Carmel, which since 1970 is called the Carmelite Sisters of Saint Teresa of Turin, and has two branches, one contemplative and one active.

She died in the monastery of Cascine Vica on Oct. 7, 1949, having lived an active life centered on contemplation.

The other persons declared ‘Venerable’ are: Bishop Antonio Jose de Souza Barroso of Porto (1854-1918); Bishop Jose de Jesus López y González of Aguascalientes, founder of the Congregation of the Maestro Catholic Sisters of the Sacred Heart of Jesus (1872-1950); Bishop Agostino Ernesto Castrillo, OFM, of San Marco and Bisignano, (1904-1955); Fr. Giacomo da Balduina, OFM Cap., (1900-1948); and Sr. Umiltà Patlán Sánchez of the Franciscan Sisters of the Immaculate Conception (1895-1970).

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