Pope Francis accepts resignation of Knoxville Bishop Rick Stika

Pope Francis gives his message during the weekly general audience in the Vatican’s Paul VI Hall on Jan. 4, 2023 / Daniel Ibanez/CNA

Vatican City, Jan 4, 2023 / 02:30 am (CNA).

Benedict XVI “always wanted to accompany us in the encounter with Jesus,” Pope Francis said at the start of his weekly public audience on Wednesday.

The pope began his message Jan. 4 with a reference to his predecessor, Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI, who died on Dec. 31 at the age of 95. The body of Benedict XVI is lying in state in St. Peter’s Basilica Jan. 2-4, before his funeral on Jan. 5.

“Before beginning this catechesis,” Francis said in the Vatican’s Paul VI Hall, “I would like us to join with those here beside us who are paying their respects to Benedict XVI, and to turn my thoughts to him, a great master of catechesis.”

Catechesis means religious instruction or teaching.

“His acute and gentle thought was not self-referential, but ecclesial, because he always wanted to accompany us in the encounter with Jesus,” he said.

“Jesus, Crucified and Risen, the Living One and the Lord, was the destination to which Pope Benedict led us, taking us by the hand,” the pope added. “May he help us rediscover in Christ the joy of believing and the hope of living.”

Pope Francis’ message on Wednesday was the final instruction in a series on the theme of discernment.

One of the important tools to support discernment, he said, is spiritual accompaniment, also called spiritual direction.

“It’s very important not to walk alone,” he underlined, encouraging Catholics to find a spiritual director, a lay person or a priest, who can help to “unmask misunderstandings, even grave ones, in our consideration of ourselves and our relationship with the Lord.”

The pope compared the experience of discernment without accompaniment to looking at yourself alone in a mirror: you can imagine things that are not there or see things in a distorted way.

“God’s grace in us always works on our nature. Thinking of a Gospel parable, we can always compare grace to the good seed and nature to the soil,” Francis said. “First of all, it is important to make ourselves known, without fear of sharing the most fragile aspects, where we find ourselves to be more sensitive, weak, or afraid of being judged.”

He emphasized that the person who accompanies us in our spiritual journey does not replace or substitute the Lord, but “walks alongside him or her, encouraging them to interpret what is stirring in their heart, the quintessential place where the Lord speaks.”

The Church commonly calls someone in this role a “spiritual director,” but Pope Francis said he prefers the name “spiritual companion.”

“Discernment is an art, an art that can be learned and which has its own rules,” he said. “If learned well, it enables spiritual experience to be lived in an ever more beautiful and orderly manner. Above all, discernment is a gift from God, which must always be asked for, without ever presuming to be expert and self-sufficient.”

The pope said the act of recounting our life, experiences, and spiritual searching in front of someone else can bring clarity.

It can also, he added, bring to light “the many thoughts that dwell within us, and which often unsettle us with their insistent refrains — how often, in dark times, have these thoughts come to us: ‘I have done everything wrong, I am worthless, no-one understands me, I will never succeed, I am destined for failure,’ and so on.”

“False and poisonous thoughts, that the exchange with another helps to unmask, so we can feel we are loved and valued by the Lord for what we are, capable of doing good things for him,” he said.

Let us pray, Francis concluded: “Lord, give me the grace to discern. In life’s moments, help me to know what I should do. And send me the people who can help me discern.”

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Vatican City, Sep 30, 2018 / 08:19 am (CNA/EWTN News).- Pope Francis advised Sunday that we be open to the good, regardless of whether it comes from someone outside our own “circle”.

The pope reflected Sept. 30 on the day’s Gospel, in which Christ taught his disciples humility and to avoid scandal. He was delivering the Angelus address in St. Peter’s Square.

When the disciples objected to someone outside their group casting out a demon, Pope Francis said they “demonstrate a closed attitude before an event that does not fit into their schemes, in this case the action, though good, of a person ‘external’ to the circle of followers.”

“Instead Jesus appears very free, fully open to the freedom of the Spirit of God, who in his action is not limited by any boundary and by any enclosure. Jesus wants to educate his disciples, even today, to this interior freedom.”

Pope Francis commended an examination of conscience in relation to this episode, saying, “the attitude of the disciples of Jesus is very human, very common, and we can find it in the Christian communities of all time, probably also in ourselves.”

“In good faith, indeed, with zeal, one would like to protect the authenticity of a certain experience, protecting the founder or the leader from false imitators,” he said. “But at the same time there is the fear of ‘competition’ – and this is bad: the fear of competition – that someone can steal new followers, and then you can not appreciate the good that others do: not good because ‘it’s not ours’, they say. It is a form of self-referentiality.”

He said this is “the root of proselytism”, and that the Church “does not grow by proselytism, it grows by attraction, that is, it grows by the testimony given to others by the power of the Holy Spirit.”

Christ “calls us not to think according to the categories of ‘friend / enemy’, ‘us / them’, ‘who is inside / who is outside’, ‘mine / yours’, but to go further, to open the heart to recognize his presence and the action of God even in unusual and unpredictable areas and in people who are not part of our circle,” Pope Francis said.

“It is a matter of being more attentive to the genuineness of the good, the beautiful and the true that is accomplished, than to the name and provenance of those who do it.”

Rather than judging others, the pope said, “we must examine ourselves, and ‘cut’ without compromise everything that can scandalize the weaker people in the faith.”

Francis concluded, saying the Virgin Mary, “model of docile reception of the surprises of God, helps us to recognize the signs of the presence of the Lord in our midst, discovering him wherever he manifests himself, even in the most unthinkable and unusual situations.”

“May she teach us to love our community without jealousy and closures, always open to the vast horizon of the action of the Holy Spirit.”

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Pilgrims gather in St. Peter’s Square for a Mass and canonization of 14 new saints on Sunday, Oct. 20, 2024. / Credit: Daniel Ibáñez/CNA

Vatican City, Mar 31, 2025 / 13:17 pm (CNA).

Pope Francis has advanced five people’s paths to sainthood after approving decrees promulgated by the Vatican’s Dicastery for the Causes of Saints on March 28.

Blessed Peter To Rot of Papua New Guinea, Blessed Ignatius Shoukrallah Maloyan of Turkey, and Blessed María Carmen of Venezuela will be proclaimed saints of the Church. 

The pope also approved the beatification of Italian diocesan priest Carmelo De Palma and declared Brazilian priest José Antônio de Maria Ibiapina a “venerable” of the Church. 

The canonization ceremonies of both To Rot and Maloyan are to be discussed in a future customary consistory, according to a Holy See Press Office announcement.   

To Rot, a lay catechist born on March 5, 1912, and martyred for his faith during World War II, will be the first canonized saint from Papua New Guinea. 

Beatified by St. John Paul II during his apostolic journey to the Oceania nation on Jan. 17, 1995, To Rot is recognized by the Church as a defender of Christian marriage and a faithful catechist who continued his ministry until his death in prison.

Fame of To Rot’s sanctity spread throughout Papua New Guinea and to other countries in the Pacific Ocean — including the Solomon Islands and Australia — following his 1995 beatification.

Maloyan was born on April 19, 1869, and died a martyr in Turkey in 1915 after refusing to convert to Islam. He was beatified by St. John Paul II on Oct. 7, 2001, alongside six other servants of God.

Ordained in Lebanon in 1883, Maloyan was known as an intelligent and exemplary priest with a deep understanding of Scripture. He was later elected archbishop of Mardine during the Synod of Armenian Bishops held in Rome in 1911. 

Following the great persecution of Armenians in the country with the outbreak of World War I, Maloyan alongside other priests and Christian faithful were executed by Turkish officers in June 1915 after refusing to convert to Islam.

Blessed María Carmen (née Carmen Elena Rendíles Martínez) will become the first canonized saint of Venezuela after the Holy Father approved the miracle — the healing of a woman diagnosed with idiopathic triventricular hydrocephalus — attributed to her intercession.

Born in the country’s capital, Caracas, on Aug. 11, 1903, she became a religious sister of the Congregation of the Servants of Jesus of the Blessed Sacrament in 1927 and later became one of the founders of the Congregation of the Servants of Jesus in Venezuela in 1946.

Serving the Catholic faithful in schools and parishes alongside her sisters who founded the new Latin American congregation, Blessed María Carmen was known for her love for Jesus in the Eucharist.

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