Rome Newsroom, Jul 7, 2024 / 10:41 am (CNA).
In the face of a sometimes “anesthetized,” consumerist society, we must recall the “scandal” of our Christian faith — that God became man and dwells in each of us, especially the weakest, Pope Francis said in the northern Italian city of Trieste on Sunday.
“We need the scandal of faith,” the pontiff said at a Mass July 7. “A faith rooted in the God who became man and, therefore, [is] a human faith, a faith of flesh, which enters history, which touches people’s lives, which heals broken hearts, which becomes a leaven of hope and the seed of a new world.”
At the Mass for approximately 8,500 people in Unità d’Italia Square, next to the Port of Trieste, Francis said Catholics need “a faith that awakens consciences from slumber, that puts its finger in the wounds, in the wounds of society … a restless faith that helps overcome mediocrity and sloth of the heart, [a faith] which becomes a thorn in the flesh of a society often anesthetized and stunned by consumerism.”
📹 HIGHLIGHTS | Pope Francis made a pastoral visit to the Italian city of Trieste to mark the conclusion of the 50th Italian Catholic Social Week. He presided at Holy Mass and prayed the Angelus. pic.twitter.com/nlJIajZxc2
— EWTN Vatican (@EWTNVatican) July 7, 2024
Pope Francis celebrated the Mass during a half-day visit to Trieste for the closing of the 50th Social Week of Catholics, an annual event organized by the Catholic Church in Italy, dedicated to promoting Catholic social doctrine. The theme of this year’s meeting, which had around 1,200 participants, was democracy.
After addressing attendees of the July 3-7 congress at a nearby conference center, the pope rode a golf cart to a sunny Unità d’Italia for the Mass, which he concelebrated with almost 100 bishops and 260 priests.
Before Mass, he greeted a 111-year-old resident of Trieste named Maria, according to the Holy See Press Office.
Reflecting on God’s humanity in his homily, the pope said, “[God’s] presence is revealed precisely in the faces hollowed out by suffering where degradation seems to triumph. The infinity of God is hidden in human misery, the Lord stirs and makes himself a friendly presence precisely in the wounded flesh of the least, the forgotten, the discarded. There the Lord manifests himself.”
“And we, who are sometimes unnecessarily scandalized by so many small things, would do well instead to ask ourselves: why, in the face of evil that is rampant, life that is humiliated, the problems of labor, the sufferings of migrants, do we not become scandalized?” he said.
The Social Week of Catholics was held in Trieste, a port city located on a narrow strip of Italian territory in the country’s far northeastern point, nestled between the Adriatic Sea and Slovenia, with Croatia’s border nearby.
The position of the city has made it a common arrival point for migrants coming to Europe through the Balkan migratory route.
In its annual report, an aid group noted a worrying rise in migrant children arriving in the city.
According to the International Rescue Committee, around 3,000 unaccompanied children arrived as migrants in Trieste in 2023, a 112% increase from the previous year.
The group says in 2023, they met and provided aid to a total of 16,052 people who arrived at the Trieste train station through the Balkan migratory route. Roughly 68% of the migrants were from Afghanistan.
“Continue to commit yourselves to the front lines to spread the Gospel of hope, especially to those coming from the Balkan route and to all those who, in body or spirit, need encouragement and consolation,” Pope Francis said in his homily July 7.
Earlier in the morning, Francis met briefly with a group of around 150 migrants and people with disabilities.
The pope also remembered prisoners in his reflection. Trieste made headlines earlier this year due to dire over-crowding in the city’s main prison.
“Why do we remain apathetic and indifferent to the injustices of the world?” the pontiff said. “Why do we not take to heart the plight of prisoners, which even from this city of Trieste rises as a cry of anguish? Why do we not contemplate the miseries, the pain, the discard of so many people in the city? We are afraid, we are afraid to find Christ there.”
At the end of Mass, the pope led those present in praying the Angelus, as he does every Sunday. Before reciting the Marian prayer, he referenced Trieste’s welcome of immigrants.
Trieste “is an open door to migrants — and to all those who struggle the most,” he said.
“Trieste is one of those cities that have the vocation of bringing together different people: first of all because it is a port, it is an important port, and then because it is located at the crossroads between Italy, Central Europe, and the Balkans,” Francis noted. “In these situations, the challenge for the ecclesial and civil communities is to know how to combine openness and stability, welcome and identity.”
After Mass and the Angelus, Pope Francis boarded a helicopter for the Vatican from the nearby Audace Pier. He arrived at the Vatican just before 2:00pm, according to the Holy See Press Office.
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Pope Francis did not appear to celebrate the Mass as reported by CNA. The X film shows another cleric actually raising the Holy Eucharist while Francis sat away from the altar as he has been doing [unless he concelebrated, although the recording doesn’t show him extending his hand as a co-celebrant. He would not as such be the main celebrant]. He offered the opening words, and the blessing, which is not offering Mass.
From what the recording shows it indicates Pope Francis has continued his reluctance to offer the sacred sacrifice [if wrong I stand corrected]. That may be due to a change of theological focus away from the traditional penitential emphasis on repentance for the forgiveness of sins, to a less [presumed] legalistic form.
Vatican focus has been on the poor, the suffering migrant, good causes although to the neglect of the Gospel demand for personal moral sanctification. The latter not a hidden mystery.
And as others here suggest Pope Francis’ open border policy creates the conditions for child trafficking, the suffering migrant, criminals sent to prison, exploitation of the poor.
Lax border security enriches & enables the same cartels who are murdering priests & creating so much bloodshed in Latin America.
Cutting through all bloated and bureaucratic verbiage (really, do you have to take special courses to write such atrocious speeches?), Francis wants us to keep the borders wide open and to free the murderers and rapists. He also wants taxpayers to fork over large sums of money to set the oppressed up into comfortable lifestyles. The face of Christ is not so much to be found in the faces of victims of crime and those who are having their countries taken away from them. As an aside, Francis should consider the carbon footprint of his helicopter rides to and from Trieste before lecturing us again on “climate change.”
Holy Father, how about some recognition of the dignity those who disagree with you deserve?
Holy Father, how about some recognition of the dignity those who disagree with you deserve???
Open support for unfettered illegal immigration and turning convicted criminals into a protected victim class seem to be the twin hills Francis is willing to die on. Hopefully the next Pope will disgard this atrocious SJW ideology.
Just wondering about the agreed need for “a faith that awakens consciences from slumber….” What are the multiple causes of this sleeping sickness?
Having pondered this question for a whole several hours(!)–“what are the multiple causes of this sleeping sickness”–yours truly notices anesthetics dispensed from within the Church itself.
Four Points:
FIRST, in the 13th Century, the debated between Aquinas (certitudes about natural reality) and Duns Scotus (instead, analysis of cerebral ideas) was never fully resolved, leading centuries later to the continuing fallacy that faith and science are opposed. Rather than working together, the Dominican school and the Franciscan school left the field to the disintegrative Nominalism of Ockham. There are ONLY special cases and singulars (or maybe “irregular couples”)!
SECOND, the 20th-century lay philosopher, Etienne Gilson, calls the 14th-century turf contest—between two religious orders (Dominican and Franciscan)—a circular distraction to “PHILOSOPHIZE ABOUT PHILOSOPHY.” Now wondering, here, whether any of the expert synodal “study groups” for later this October have examined the similarity with a third religious order, the Jesuits against all backwardists, and the equally-circular “SYNOD ON SYNODALITY”?
THIRD, now back to the “slumber” thingy. Yours truly recently dialogued with a high cleric over the complex influence of Teilhard do Chardin. Said the cleric, that one way to awaken the sleepers might be more focus on how we are drawn forward toward the “Omega Point” at the end of universal history. Really?
Or is THIS optic the anesthetic for those in the pews? Why did the incarnate Christ—fully divine and fully human—identify already as BOTH the “Alpha and the Omega”? The sacramental Real Presence. Hopefully a dialogue in progress…
FOURTH: what many see as double-speak on Vatican letterhead…is this another effort, this time from another religious order, the Jesuits, to construct a real via media between the so-called abstractness (and backwardness?) of the formal Magisterium and the so-called concreteness and pastoral urgency of modernday global situations?
SUMMARY: Knee-deep in the swamp of Gradualism? What does it mean, “time is greater than space” (Evangelii Gaudium, 2013), and what does it NOT mean? Early in the wake of the Second Vatican Council, the lay Thomist Jacques Maritain already had second thoughts about our Munich-moment of “kneeling before the world” (“The Peasant of the Garonne,”1968).
When I was a stranger, you welcomed me – says the Lord.