Letter from Benedict XVI reveals the ‘central motive’ for his resignation, biographer says

Vatican City, Oct 7, 2018 / 05:05 am (CNA/EWTN News).- A married couple striving to faithfully live out their life-long commitment to each other, need both God’s grace and love that is anchored in self-gift, Pope Francis said Sunday.

“What allows married couples to remain united in marriage is a love of mutual self-giving sustained by the grace of Christ,” the pope said Oct. 7.

“If, on the other hand, individual interest and satisfaction prevail in the spouses, then their union cannot endure.”

He explained that if divorce or separation should happen, however, the Church does not condemn, but “on the contrary, faced with so many painful marital failures, she feels called to live her presence of love, of charity, of mercy, to bring back the wounded and lost hearts to God.”

The same mercy God shows to all his people when they fail through sin, “teaches us that wounded love can be healed by God through mercy and forgiveness,” Francis stated.

In his meditation before the Sunday Angelus, Pope Francis reflected on the day’s Gospel, when Jesus defends the permanency of marriage in the face of questioning by the Pharisees. Jesus explained that Moses allowed divorce, because of “the hardness of your hearts,” but that this does not correspond “to the original intention of the Creator.”

Jesus invokes a passage from the Book of Genesis, where it says, “God made them male and female. For this reason, a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh.”

The pope noted Jesus’ words that “what God has joined together, no human being must separate.”

“This teaching of Jesus is very clear and defends the dignity of marriage, as a union of love that entails fidelity,” he said. In this Gospel passage, Jesus confirms God’s plan for marriage, not allowing for any exceptions to the permanent commitment of marriage.

“He does this to confirm the plan of God, in which the strength and beauty of human relationships stand out,” he said.

“The Church, on the one hand does not tire of confirming the beauty of the family as given to us by Scripture and Tradition; at the same time, she strives to make his maternal closeness felt concretely to those who live the experience of broken relationships or carry on in a painful and tiring way.”

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Bishop Franz Josef Bode of the Diocese of Osnabrück served as vice president of the German bishops’ conference from 2017 to 2023. / Courtesy of Synodaler Weg/Maximilian von Lachner

CNA Newsroom, Mar 25, 2023 / 08:56 am (CNA).

Pope Francis accepted the resignation of a German bishop on Saturday who played a key role in the German Synodal Way and had come under pressure over his handling of clerical sexual abuse in his diocese. 

Bishop Franz Josef Bode had previously refused to step down, despite an abuse report finding he had mishandled cases in his diocese in northwestern Germany. 

The Holy See announced March 25 that Pope Francis had accepted the bishop of Osnabrück’s request to resign, CNA Deutsch, CNA’s German-language news partner, reported. There was no indication prior to Saturday’s announcement that Bode had offered to resign.

The 72-year-old bishop had been vice president of the German bishops’ conference since 2017. 

Reacting to the news, Bishop Georg Bätzing — the conference president — said on Mar. 25: “Today I lose my closest companion on the Synodal Way, which still has many stages ahead of us.”

Only two weeks ago, Bode made headlines when he announced he would implement resolutions passed by the controversial process, including the introduction of liturgical blessings of same-sex unions. He previously publicly supported women deacons. 

In a statement published Saturday, Bode said: “In the almost 32 years of my episcopal ministry, almost 28 of them as bishop of Osnabrück, I have borne responsibility in a church that has not only brought blessings but also guilt.” 

“Especially in dealing with cases of sexualized violence by clergy, for a long time I myself tended to focus more on the perpetrators and the institution than on the victims,” Bode admitted. “I misjudged cases, often acted hesitantly, made many wrong decisions, and failed to live up to my responsibility as a bishop.”

Until two months ago, Bode repeatedly refused to resign, despite an interim abuse report published Sept. 20, 2022, finding he had mishandled abuse cases in the diocese he led since 1995.

The 600-page interim report was titled “Sexual violence against minors and vulnerable by clergy in the Diocese of Osnabrück since 1945.”

The report said in the first decades of his term, Bode “repeatedly” kept people accused of abuse in office or appointed them to other positions, including management tasks in youth pastoral care.

In December, an advisory body of sexual abuse survivors called for canonical procedures against Bode.

The victims’ council said it had filed an official complaint in Rome and referred to the decree Vos estis lux mundi, issued in 2019 by Pope Francis, which is aimed at providing norms and procedures for addressing the handling of clerical sexual abuse. The Vatican on Saturday announced that the pope has approved an updated version of those norms, which are now part of canon law.

In a statement accompanying their complaint, the council called on Archbishop Stefan Heße of Hamburg, head of the metropolitan archdiocese, to take “steps of action” against Bode.

In addition to Bode, several other prominent German bishops have been accused of mishandling cases of sexual abuse. They include Synodal Way initiator Cardinal Reinhard Marx, Synodal Way president Bishop Georg Bätzing — the successor to Marx as president of the bishops’ conference — and Hamburg’s Archbishop Heße.

All of them have so far remained in office.

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Milan, Italy, Mar 25, 2017 / 06:31 am (CNA/EWTN News).- During his daytrip to Milan Saturday, Pope Francis told the diocese’s priests and religious not to fear the challenges that come with their ministry nor the increasing number of empty convents, urging them instead to focus on the core of their mission: bringing Christ to his people.

“Our congregations were not born to be the mass, but a bit of salt and yeast which would have given their own contribution so that the mass grows; so that the People of God have that ‘condiment’ they were missing,” the Pope said March 25.

He noted that for many years in the past, congregations moved forward with the idea that they needed to “occupy spaces” more than launching new processes and projects.

The perception then, he said, was that “ideas (or our impossibility to change) were more important than reality; or that the part (our small part or vision of the world) was superior to the whole Church.”

But today’s reality serves as a challenge, and “invites us to again be a bit of yeast and a bit of salt,” he said, asking “Can you imagine a meal with too much salt? Or a pasta that’s totally fermented? No one would eat it, no one could digest it.”

“I’ve never seen a pizzamaker use a kilo of yeast and a gram of flour” to make the dough, Francis said, and urged religious to “listen to reality, to open ourselves to the ‘mass,’ to the Holy People of God, to the entire Church.”

Pope Francis spoke to priests and religious inside Milan’s cathedral of St. Mary of the Nativity during his March 25 daytrip to the city.

He kicked off the visit by stopping by the “White Houses” high-rise complex in the eastern quarter of the city, an area marked by acute poverty where many migrants, including Muslim families, live. He then headed directly to Milan’s cathedral where he met with the priests and religious.

<blockquote class=”twitter-video” data-lang=”en”><p lang=”en” dir=”ltr”>Up-close view of a papal blessing to some small pilgrims in <a href=”https://twitter.com/hashtag/Milan?src=hash”>#Milan</a> via <a href=”https://twitter.com/andygag”>@andygag</a> <a href=”https://twitter.com/hashtag/PopeFrancis?src=hash”>#PopeFrancis</a> <a href=”https://t.co/lEiFe59PCE”>pic.twitter.com/lEiFe59PCE</a></p>&mdash; Catholic News Agency (@cnalive) <a href=”https://twitter.com/cnalive/status/845563394254082048″>March 25, 2017</a></blockquote>
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The Pope took questions from three members of the audience, including Ursuline sister Mother M. Paola Paganoni, parish priest Fr. Gabriele Gioia and Robert Crespi, one of the diocese’s 143 permanent deacons.

Instead of taking notes and giving an entirely off-the-cuff speech as usual during his Q&A sessions, this time Francis decided to follow a written text due to the day’s full schedule, deviating to add a few lines here and there.

The question on numbers was posed by Sr. Paganoni, who asked the Pope how to be a prophetic sign in modern society, and to which peripheries they should go, given that religious are small in number and constitute a “minority” in the Church.  

In response, the Pope not only told the nun to not fret about numbers, but he also cautioned against the feeling of “resignation,” which he said can frequently creep up when looking at how few they are.

“Without realizing it, each time that we think or see that we are few, or in many cases elderly, we experience the weight, the fragility more than the splendor, and our spirit begins to corrode from resignation,” he said.

In turn, resignation can lead to the spiritual sin – also called a “disease” – of acedia, about which the Fathers of the Church issued sharp warnings since it essentially leads a person into despair, indifference and apathy regarding the faith and one’s vocation.

“Few yes, a minority yes, elderly yes, but resigned no!” he said, explaining that the lines in this regard are fine, are can only be recognized by a process of self-reflection in front of the Lord.

“When resignation takes hold of us,” he said, “we live with the imagination of a glorious past which, far from awakening the original charism, increasingly surrounds us in a spiral of existential heaviness. Everything becomes heavier and difficult to lift up.”

He warned religious to stay away from this attitude, as well as the temptation to use the empty structures to get money by turning them into hotels or looking for other “human solutions” to the problem. Doing this, he said, “hinders or deprives us of joy.”

And while he said he can’t tell them which peripheries to go to, since that’s the job of the Holy Spirit, who inspired their original charism, Pope Francis urged religious to choose them well and reawaken “the hope spent and sapped by a society that has become insensitive to the pain of others.”

“Go and bring the ‘anointing’ of Christ,” he said, telling them never to forget “that when you put Jesus in the midst of your people, they find joy…only this will render our lives fruitful and will keep our hearts alive.”

In response to Crespi’s question on what contribution deacons can give to the Church, the Pope said they have “a lot to give,” specifically when it comes to managing the tensions and blessings of ministry and family life.

However, Francis also cautioned against viewing deacons as “half-priests and half-laity,” because in reality “they are neither here nor there.”

Looking at them in this way “does harm to us and does harm to them” and takes strength away from their vocation in the Church, he said, explaining that the deaconate “is a specific vocation, a family vocation that recalls service as one of the characteristic gifts of the people of God.”

“The deacon is – so to speak – the guardian of service in the Church,” Pope Francis said. Because of this, his specific mission consists of “reminding all of us that faith, in its various expressions – communitarian liturgy, personal prayer, different forms of charity – and in its various states of life – lay, clerical, familial – has an essential dimension of service.”

Speaking directly to the deacons, he said they are “a sacrament of service to God and to your brothers. A vocation which like all vocations is not only individual, but lived inside the family and with the family, inside the People of God and with the People of God.”

Francis also answered Fr. Gioia’s question on what can be done in order not lose the joy of evangelizing in the face of challenges such as secularism and ministering to a multi-cultural, multi-ethnic flock with different religions.

In his response, the Pope said we shouldn’t be afraid of challenges, because they are “a sign of a living faith, of a living community that seeks its Lord and has eyes and hearts opened.”

Rather, what we must fear instead is “a faith without challenges, a faith believed to be complete, as if everything has been said and realized,” because without challenges, there is a danger that our faith becomes “an ideology.”

The Pope also spoke of the importance of recognizing the richness of the differences in the Church throughout its history, explaining that “the Church is one in a multifarious experience.”
 
Although there can also be “horrors” and errors in the ways some interpret religion, he stressed the need to separate and distinguish between the “luminous aspects and the dark aspects” of each.

He also cautioned against confusing unity with uniformity and plurality with pluralism, saying that in both cases “what is being sought is to reduce the tension and remove the conflict or ambivalence to which we are subjected as human being.”

Finally, the Pope in his last point to the priest emphasized the need for pastors to offer better formation in discernment, particularly to youth.

“The culture of abundance to which we are subjected offers a horizon of many possibilities, presenting them as valid and good,” he said, noting that today’s youth are exposed to a constant “zapping” of information.

“Whether we like it or not, it’s a world in which they are inserted and it’s our duty as pastors to help them pass through this world,” he said, explaining that because of this, “it’s good to teach them to discern, so that they have the tools and elements which help them to walk the path of life without extinguishing the Holy Spirit which is in them.”

After his audience with priests and religious, Pope Francis led pilgrims gathered outside the cathedral in praying the Angelus before heading to the city’s Casa Circondariale di San Vittore prison, which in 2012 held 1,700 detainees.

At the prison, the Pope is slated to greet employees and police officers who work at the facility before greeting the inmates themselves. He is then expected to have lunch with 100 of prisoners before heading to Milan’s Parco di Monza to celebrate Mass and meet with youth after.

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