Pope Francis speaks with members of the press on the flight from Bahrain to Rome. / Alexey Gotovsky/EWTN
Rome Newsroom, Nov 6, 2022 / 10:25 am (CNA).
While speaking about the gifts of women during an in-flight press conference on Sunday, Pope Francis mentioned the recent appointment of a pro-abortion economist to the Pontifical Academy for Life.
“I have seen that in the Vatican; every time a woman comes in to do work in the Vatican things get better,” the pope said Nov. 6 on the flight to Rome from Bahrain.
He mentioned several positions now filled by women, also citing, by name, pro-abortion economist Mariana Mazzucato.
“And now, I put on the family council Mazzucato, who is a great economist from the United States, to give a little more humanity to this,” he said.
Mazzucato, known for her work promoting the public sector’s role in encouraging innovation, was among seven academics appointed by the pope on Oct. 15 to serve five-year terms with the Pontifical Academy for Life.
In his comments, Pope Francis said the appointment of a woman as vice governor of the Vatican City State and the inclusion of women on the Council for the Economy had been a benefit to the Vatican.
Moving from all men to having five women on the Council for the Economy was “a revolution, because women know how to find a right way, they know how to move forward,” he added.
Mazzucato’s appointment to the life academy drew criticism due to her outspoken advocacy for abortion rights, including the tweeting and re-tweeting of pro-abortion statements concerning the Supreme Court’s decision to return abortion law to the states.
The Pontifical Academy for Life issued a statement defending Mazzucato’s appointment on the grounds that members are chosen to contribute to “fruitful interdisciplinary, intercultural, and interreligious dialogue.”
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Denver, Colo., Jan 27, 2022 / 17:00 pm (CNA).
When Daniel Campbell saw an email in his inbox last spring from Soroti, Uganda, his first thought was: Am I being scammed?Campbell, who directs Denver’s St. John Vianney Se… […]
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.
Yes, to the genius of women…Helena, the mother of Constantine I and who discovered the True Cross; Golda Meir, the fourth prime minister of Israel; Margaret Thatcher, the long-serving prime minister of the British Empire…
and now this: Mazzucato, an economist on the Pontifical Academy for Life (Life!).
But what else can you do for a living member? Margaret Sanger is dead!
The Holy Father often tells us quite directly where he stands on a given issue. On other occasions, we have to read what he does (e.g. his recent appointments to the PAL) and what he fails to do (e.g. condemn the legalization of abortion in Argentina a few years ago) to know where his head and heart are. He simply cannot come right out and tell us in plain language that he favors “a woman’s right to choose” as that might cause some difficulties with even our laid-back hierarchy, so he needs to speak by his actions, while maintaining some maintaining some plausible deniability. By now, I bet he has tired of trotting out the shopworn “abortion is like hiring a hitman” analogy” and wants to go beyond it. He is, and from the beginning has been, trying to send us a message. Are we listening?
Sending us a message?
He is a mime performing in front of a blind audience.
Something fundamental is missing if all PF can do is dance, nod, wink and smile.
He is the seventh pontiff i have had during my lifetime.
Of those who served in the Chair of Saint Peter, all of them preceding PF displayed absolutely no ambiguity in communicating with his global sheepfold.
Bergoglio should hang his head in shame for destroying the PAL. A future Pope should simply disband the institution as it has been corrupted beyond recognition.
This report contains a mass of propositions that were being thrown about already in the 20th Century in local situations. The idea here seems to be that they are truly universal and should be established for the 21st Century, proof of which being (would be) that they are announced by the Pope and sealed in a kind of rapture in joy, brotherhood and unity. Apparently what was blocking them until now is “not going deep into shame”; and this “not going deep” and/or “shame” warrants to be resolved for the 21st Century and to be “more than local”?
In my experience of these things in my local situation, in the late part of the 20th Century, the proponents in the setting were Freemasons and Rosicrucians, who were very concrete, very non-formalist and very nesting. Is this report the answer to these types of problems too?
The headline reads that the abortionista is outwardly upheld and praised; and yes, I have seen such things happen before as well during in the 20th Century. Cardinal Kasper had said something about the rising of “a southern wind” and this makes complete sense when applied to my particular Church and my experience of it in the 20th Century. Again in the 20th Century I witnessed the joining of the issue of “women” to coddling of abortion, as if it must be so and only so.
What was local and isolated in the 20th Century, it seems must become ubiquitous for the 21st?
There is a possibility that the report is not of an actual dialogue with the Pope but the result of written questions answered by a ghost-writer and presented as THE on-flight presser.
I wonder how the report would have read had it included the pro-life position and culture though. It seems to stretch out the Holy Father’s first words to make a picture of someone else’s spectrums.
Taking up with something to give it an importance it does not have, a wrong kind of emphasis, a repacking of obligation – is not faith. Inevitably it carries with it a negation of hope -somewhere, somehow. And in both faith and hope, it is a blocking up of love.
“And now, I put on the family council Mazzucato, who is a great economist from the United States, to give a little more humanity to this,”
Just the thought of Pope Francis, with his “family council”, down at the abortion mill crushing little children’s heads and cutting them to pieces alive, while the children are silently screaming, for the sake of his ‘humanitarianism’, makes me dreadfully ill.
Yes, to the genius of women…Helena, the mother of Constantine I and who discovered the True Cross; Golda Meir, the fourth prime minister of Israel; Margaret Thatcher, the long-serving prime minister of the British Empire…
and now this: Mazzucato, an economist on the Pontifical Academy for Life (Life!).
But what else can you do for a living member? Margaret Sanger is dead!
Don’t think I have the stamina to read this report.
The Holy Father often tells us quite directly where he stands on a given issue. On other occasions, we have to read what he does (e.g. his recent appointments to the PAL) and what he fails to do (e.g. condemn the legalization of abortion in Argentina a few years ago) to know where his head and heart are. He simply cannot come right out and tell us in plain language that he favors “a woman’s right to choose” as that might cause some difficulties with even our laid-back hierarchy, so he needs to speak by his actions, while maintaining some maintaining some plausible deniability. By now, I bet he has tired of trotting out the shopworn “abortion is like hiring a hitman” analogy” and wants to go beyond it. He is, and from the beginning has been, trying to send us a message. Are we listening?
Sending us a message?
He is a mime performing in front of a blind audience.
Something fundamental is missing if all PF can do is dance, nod, wink and smile.
He is the seventh pontiff i have had during my lifetime.
Of those who served in the Chair of Saint Peter, all of them preceding PF displayed absolutely no ambiguity in communicating with his global sheepfold.
What kinship does he have with the church?
Bergoglio should hang his head in shame for destroying the PAL. A future Pope should simply disband the institution as it has been corrupted beyond recognition.
The train wreck pontificate continues unabated.
This report contains a mass of propositions that were being thrown about already in the 20th Century in local situations. The idea here seems to be that they are truly universal and should be established for the 21st Century, proof of which being (would be) that they are announced by the Pope and sealed in a kind of rapture in joy, brotherhood and unity. Apparently what was blocking them until now is “not going deep into shame”; and this “not going deep” and/or “shame” warrants to be resolved for the 21st Century and to be “more than local”?
In my experience of these things in my local situation, in the late part of the 20th Century, the proponents in the setting were Freemasons and Rosicrucians, who were very concrete, very non-formalist and very nesting. Is this report the answer to these types of problems too?
The headline reads that the abortionista is outwardly upheld and praised; and yes, I have seen such things happen before as well during in the 20th Century. Cardinal Kasper had said something about the rising of “a southern wind” and this makes complete sense when applied to my particular Church and my experience of it in the 20th Century. Again in the 20th Century I witnessed the joining of the issue of “women” to coddling of abortion, as if it must be so and only so.
What was local and isolated in the 20th Century, it seems must become ubiquitous for the 21st?
There is a possibility that the report is not of an actual dialogue with the Pope but the result of written questions answered by a ghost-writer and presented as THE on-flight presser.
I wonder how the report would have read had it included the pro-life position and culture though. It seems to stretch out the Holy Father’s first words to make a picture of someone else’s spectrums.
https://www.catholicworldreport.com/2013/03/13/pope-francis-first-words-let-us-pray-for-the-whole-world-that-there-might-be-a-great-sense-of-brotherhood/
Taking up with something to give it an importance it does not have, a wrong kind of emphasis, a repacking of obligation – is not faith. Inevitably it carries with it a negation of hope -somewhere, somehow. And in both faith and hope, it is a blocking up of love.
https://www.vaticannews.va/en/pope/news/2022-11/pope-flight-three-wars-century-pacifist-interview-bahrain.html
“And now, I put on the family council Mazzucato, who is a great economist from the United States, to give a little more humanity to this,”
Just the thought of Pope Francis, with his “family council”, down at the abortion mill crushing little children’s heads and cutting them to pieces alive, while the children are silently screaming, for the sake of his ‘humanitarianism’, makes me dreadfully ill.
What the hell!