Pope Francis’ prayer intention for the month of May is for ecclesial movements and groups.
“Ecclesial movements are a gift; they are a treasure in the Church,” the Holy Father said in a video released by the Vatican on May 2.
“These movements renew the Church with their capacity for dialogue at the service of her evangelizing mission,” he said. “Each day, they rediscover in their charism new ways of showing the attractiveness and the newness of the Gospel.”
“How do they do this? Speaking different languages, they seem different, but it is their creativity that creates these differences. But always understanding themselves and making themselves understood.”
He added: “Always be on the move, responding to the impulse of the Holy Spirit to the challenges, to the changes in today’s world.”
Pope Francis encouraged members of ecclesial groups to “remain in harmony with the Church, since harmony is a gift of the Holy Spirit.”
The pope concluded his message with a prayer: “Let us pray that ecclesial movements and groups may daily rediscover their mission, an evangelizing mission, and that they place their own charisms at the service of the world’s needs.”
Pope Francis’ prayer video is promoted by the Pope’s Worldwide Prayer Network, which raises awareness of monthly papal prayer intentions.
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Five priests, a nun, and three lay people were abducted Sept. 16, 2022, after gunmen attacked their parish in Mamfe Diocese, Cameroon. / Credit: Mamfe Diocese
ACI Africa, Oct 19, 2022 / 16:00 pm (CNA).
A video has emerged on social media that s… […]
Students participating in the CEDE workshop for St. John’s College High School gather for a group photo at the basilica at Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C., in November 2022. / Credit: Photo courtesy of CUA
CNA Staff, Apr 20, 2024 / 06:00 am (CNA).
When Luke Burgis moved to Silicon Valley to start a business, he never expected he would become a seminarian and then go on to launch entrepreneurship programs for Catholic students.
Burgis had attended NYU, worked on Wall Street, started several businesses in Silicon Valley, and moved to Las Vegas before deciding he wanted more meaning in his life. With the encouragement of a friend, he rekindled his Catholic faith. After five years in seminary, he ultimately discerned he would not become a priest, but he still found himself in need of deeper meaning in his work.
So he founded Catholic Entrepreneurship and Design Experience (CEDE, pronounced “seed”) in 2020 to help students across the country connect their working lives with their faith.
Four years later, CEDE is a thriving organization based at Catholic University of America (CUA) in Washington, D.C., with programs and educational materials across the world. Burgis is the entrepreneur-in-residence and assistant clinical professor of business at CUA. He has developed educational materials shared with Catholic schools and home-school communities in addition to teaching business classes at CUA.
“I didn’t understand how I could actually live out my values and be a Catholic in the business world that I was in, even after I’d had that reconversion experience,” Burgis said when asked what inspired him to found CEDE.
“But I knew that there was some gap that we had to close in Catholic education between the theoretical or the principles of Catholic social teaching and the way that it actually plays out on the ground, if you’re trying to start something,” he explained. “We launched CEDE to try to reintegrate these disciplines.”
This year, Burgis is launching a new project for CEDE — a summer entrepreneurship program for high school students. The 10-week virtual Startup Venture Challenge will teach high schoolers how to start a business.
“CEDE introduces students to basic principles of entrepreneurship within the context of Catholic social teaching and helps them understand that ultimately they are the entrepreneurs of their own lives, whether they ever start a business or not,” Burgis said.
“We’re trying to train young Catholics to think more like an entrepreneur, which means finding creative ways to solve problems or to see solutions where other people only see problems,” he said. “We think that that’s really important for all Catholics, period, and that if we had a more entrepreneurial Church, we would have a more adaptive and creative Church.”
But being a “Catholic entrepreneur” isn’t necessarily about starting a business, Burgis noted.
“Our goal here is not really to create more business owners,” he explained. “Our goal is to help more young Catholics in Catholic schools be equipped and confident to go out into the world, whatever their vocation is.”
Burgis wanted to connect what he learned about business with Catholic teaching.
“[At NYU] I just learned: ‘Here’s what profit is. Profit is good. Pursue it,’” he recalled. “Most of my classmates simply wanted to make as much money as they could.”
“When I left seminary, I realized that there was a real disintegration or gap between what I had learned at my Catholic schools … and what things actually look like in practice when you’re actually out there in the world trying to do things,” he explained.
CEDE’s model of education is about “experiential learning,” “creative problem-solving,” and independence and “differs” from the rules-based form of education many American students are accustomed to, Burgis said.
“That’s much of what being an entrepreneur feels like,” he said of the model. “You’re not given a roadmap, you’re not told what to do, you have to figure things out, and you have to make decisions and take responsibility for those decisions.”
Burgis said it will feel like “a challenge.”
“You’re being challenged, being given this mission,” he said. “We want to empower the students to accomplish that mission by working together and finding creative ways to solve problems on their own without being told how to do it. We actually want to make them a little uncomfortable.”
Students don’t need to have business ideas to join, as the first three weeks will be spent building up an idea. The full schedule involves a discernment stage, launching, testing, and then a resources and community stage.
“We want them to feel what it feels like to have a fire ignited within themselves, to exercise their own creativity, to take ownership of it, to take total responsibility, and to be proud of that, and to be able to serve others through their gifts and talents,” Burgis said.
The program runs from June 10 to Aug. 12 and is fully virtual and amenable to the students’ work schedules. The cost is $250, with scholarships available. Applications are open for teenagers ages 14–18.
Supporters of former US President and 2024 presidential hopeful Donald Trump attend the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in National Harbor, Maryland, on February 24, 2024. / Credit: Mandel NGAN/AFP via Getty Images)
We read: Pope Francis encouraged members of ecclesial groups to ‘remain in harmony with the Church, since harmony is a gift of the Holy Spirit.’” YES, “harmony with the Church…” But also been thinkin’ ’bout the Holy Spirit and the polyglot Synodal Casserole!
Two straight questions, plus an x-ray of shallow-dish Synodal Casserole:
QUESTION: Are we to expect the Synodal Casserole to have the same flat flavor as the transplanted policy of “patience” from Casaroli in Eastern Europe, and now the sinicized Church? Same policy, same concessions, probably “provisional,” and same outcome?
QUESTION: Wondering, however, if the novelty of lay members of the Synod on Synodality in October 2023 might actually introduce the clerics to the parental notion of “tough love”? The long-awaited, real, and growth-enabling “gift of the Holy Spirit”?
X-RAY: A quarter of a century ago, FR. STANLEY L. JAKI (1924-2009) anticipated the margarine-spread “patience” atop our polyglot Synodal Casserole:
“Those theologians, almost to a man latter-day modernist critics of papal infallibility, seem to overlook a very curious difference between Newman and themselves. While Newman humbly confessed that he had never sinned against the Holy Spirit, they boldly speak in the name of that Spirit. But as all too often in the past, the step from Heiliger Gest (Holy Spirit) to Zeitgeist (spirit of the times) is a very short step. And what if that spirit is merely the Geist to which Hegel paid supreme homage, but which turned out to be his own sadly fallible mind trapped in the labyrinths not so much of its own evolution as of its endless convolutions” (“And on this Rock,” Christendom Press, 1997, p. 118).
Maybe the Synod will give a harmonious ear to the adults in the room–whether seasoned lay people or even shepherd-clerics! The ingredient virtue of “patience,” but also salted with the needed governance of “tough love”?
G.K. CHESTERTON — “Merely having an open mind is nothing. The object of opening the mind, as of opening the mouth, is to shut it again on something solid.”
The Pilgrim Church is a healthy movement forward. Ecclesial movements are expressions of vitality and dynamism. Moving on is far healthier than embracing “stuckedness.”
“Forward?” And then there are those who say that a fixation on change is the most rigid and “stucked” rut of all. The tired world awaits a truly balanced dialogue (!) inclusive (!) of this insight. T.S. Eliot gives us at least a non-ideological starting point about both “stucknesses”:
“We are always faced both with the question ‘what must be destroyed?’ and with the question ‘what must be preserved?’ and neither Liberalism nor Conservatism, which are not philosophies and may be merely habits, is enough to guide us” (“The Idea of a Christian Society,” 1940).
We read: Pope Francis encouraged members of ecclesial groups to ‘remain in harmony with the Church, since harmony is a gift of the Holy Spirit.’” YES, “harmony with the Church…” But also been thinkin’ ’bout the Holy Spirit and the polyglot Synodal Casserole!
The Vatican keyed its external and provisional agreement with China to the example of “patience” lifted from former Secretary of State Cardinal Casaroli (instructive coincidence of terms, this!). https://www.pillarcatholic.com/p/pope-francis-said-cardinal-casaroli-is-his-diplomatic-model-so-who-was-cardinal-casaroli
Two straight questions, plus an x-ray of shallow-dish Synodal Casserole:
QUESTION: Are we to expect the Synodal Casserole to have the same flat flavor as the transplanted policy of “patience” from Casaroli in Eastern Europe, and now the sinicized Church? Same policy, same concessions, probably “provisional,” and same outcome?
QUESTION: Wondering, however, if the novelty of lay members of the Synod on Synodality in October 2023 might actually introduce the clerics to the parental notion of “tough love”? The long-awaited, real, and growth-enabling “gift of the Holy Spirit”?
X-RAY: A quarter of a century ago, FR. STANLEY L. JAKI (1924-2009) anticipated the margarine-spread “patience” atop our polyglot Synodal Casserole:
“Those theologians, almost to a man latter-day modernist critics of papal infallibility, seem to overlook a very curious difference between Newman and themselves. While Newman humbly confessed that he had never sinned against the Holy Spirit, they boldly speak in the name of that Spirit. But as all too often in the past, the step from Heiliger Gest (Holy Spirit) to Zeitgeist (spirit of the times) is a very short step. And what if that spirit is merely the Geist to which Hegel paid supreme homage, but which turned out to be his own sadly fallible mind trapped in the labyrinths not so much of its own evolution as of its endless convolutions” (“And on this Rock,” Christendom Press, 1997, p. 118).
Maybe the Synod will give a harmonious ear to the adults in the room–whether seasoned lay people or even shepherd-clerics! The ingredient virtue of “patience,” but also salted with the needed governance of “tough love”?
G.K. CHESTERTON — “Merely having an open mind is nothing. The object of opening the mind, as of opening the mouth, is to shut it again on something solid.”
The Pilgrim Church is a healthy movement forward. Ecclesial movements are expressions of vitality and dynamism. Moving on is far healthier than embracing “stuckedness.”
“Forward?” And then there are those who say that a fixation on change is the most rigid and “stucked” rut of all. The tired world awaits a truly balanced dialogue (!) inclusive (!) of this insight. T.S. Eliot gives us at least a non-ideological starting point about both “stucknesses”:
“We are always faced both with the question ‘what must be destroyed?’ and with the question ‘what must be preserved?’ and neither Liberalism nor Conservatism, which are not philosophies and may be merely habits, is enough to guide us” (“The Idea of a Christian Society,” 1940).