Pope Francis praying the Angelus on the feast of the Immaculate Conception, Dec. 8, 2024. / Credit: Daniel Ibáñez/CNA
CNA Newsroom, Dec 8, 2024 / 08:30 am (CNA).
Pope Francis issued a heartfelt plea for peace during the Sunday Angelus on the Solemnity of the Immaculate Conception, urging international leaders to broker ceasefires in conflict zones by Christmas.
“I appeal to governments and the international community that a ceasefire may be reached on all war fronts by the Christmas celebrations,” the pope said on Sunday from the window of the Apostolic Palace, addressing pilgrims and visitors gathered in St. Peter’s Square.
The pontiff specifically called for continued prayers for peace in “tormented Ukraine, in the Middle East — Palestine, Israel, Lebanon, and now Syria — in Myanmar, in Sudan, and wherever people suffer from war and violence.”
A call to reflect on Mary
Pope Francis spoke about the Annunciation during his catechetical reflection on this Marian feast day, describing it as “one of the most important and beautiful moments in the history of humanity.”
Drawing a parallel to sacred art, he explained: “Just as in the scene of the creation of Adam painted by Michelangelo in the Sistine Chapel, where the finger of the heavenly Father touches the finger of man, here too, the human and divine encounter each other.”
The pope encouraged everyone to “open our hearts and minds to the Lord Jesus, born of Mary Immaculate” as the Church prepares for Jubilee 2025, recommending Confession as “the Sacrament that can really help us open our hearts to the Lord who always, always forgives us.”
Christmas spirit at the Vatican
St. Peter’s Square is adorned with its annual Christmas decorations, including a towering, nearly 100-foot spruce tree from Ledro, Italy, and a Nativity scene from the town of Grado that incorporates elements of the Venetian lagoon’s traditional fishermen’s huts.
The Nativity scene and a towering spruce tree adorn St. Peter’s Square for the Christmas season, Dec. 8, 2024. Credit: Daniel Ibáñez/CNA
These symbols of the season were officially illuminated during a ceremony on Saturday evening, presided over by Cardinal Fernando Vérgez Alzaga, president of the Governorate of Vatican City State.
According to recent Vatican custom, the Christmas tree and a large Nativity scene displayed beside it will remain in St. Peter’s Square through Jan. 12, 2025, the feast of the Baptism of the Lord.
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Bishops process into St. Peter’s Basilica for the closing Mass of the first assembly of the Synod on Synodality on Oct. 29, 2023. / Vatican Media
Rome Newsroom, Jul 9, 2024 / 06:00 am (CNA).
The guiding document for the final part of the Synod on Synodality, published Tuesday, focuses on how to implement certain of the synod’s aims, while laying aside some of the more controversial topics from last year’s gathering, like women’s admission to the diaconate.
“Without tangible changes, the vision of a synodal Church will not be credible,” the Instrumentum Laboris, or “working tool,” says.
The six sections of the roughly 30-page document will be the subject of prayer, conversation, and discernment by participants in the second session of the 16th Ordinary General Assembly of the Synod of Bishops, to be held throughout the month of October in Rome.
Instead of focusing on questions and “convergences,” as in last year’s Instrumentum Laboris, “it is now necessary that … a consensus can be reached,” said a FAQ page from synod organizers, also released July 9, answering a question about why the structure was different from last year’s Instrumentum Laboris.
The guiding document for the first session of the Synod on Synodality in 2023 covered such hot-button topics as women deacons, priestly celibacy, and LGBTQ outreach.
By contrast, this year’s text mostly avoids these subjects, while offering concrete proposals for instituting a listening and accompaniment ministry, greater lay involvement in parish economics and finances, and more powerful parish councils.
“It is difficult to imagine a more effective way to promote a synodal Church than the participation of all in decision-making and taking processes,” it states.
The working tool also refers to the 10 study groups formed late last year to tackle different themes deemed “matters of great relevance” by the Synod’s first session in October 2023. These groups will continue to meet through June 2025 but will provide an update on their progress at the second session in October.
The possibility of the admission of women to the diaconate will not be a topic during the upcoming assembly, the Instrumentum Laboris said.
The new document was presented at a July 9 press conference by Cardinals Mario Grech and Jean-Claude Hollerich, together with the special secretaries of the synodal assembly: Jesuit Father Giacomo Costa and Father Riccardo Battocchio.
“The Synod is already changing our way of being and living the Church regardless of the October assembly,” Hollerich said, pointing to testimonies shared in the most recent reports sent by bishops’ conferences.
The Oct. 2-27 gathering of the Synod on Synodality will mark the end of the discernment phase of the Church’s synodal process, which Pope Francis opened in 2021.
Participants in the fall meeting, including Catholic bishops, priests, religious, and laypeople from around the world, will use the Instrumentum Laboris as a guide for their “conversations in the Spirit,” the method of discussion introduced at the 2023 assembly. They will also prepare and vote on the Synod on Synodality’s advisory final document, which will then be given to the pope, who decides the Church’s next steps and if he wishes to adopt the text as a papal document or to write his own.
The third phase of the synod — after “the consultation of the people of God” and “the discernment of the pastors” — will be “implementation,” according to organizers.
Prominent topics
The 2024 Instrumentum Laboris also addresses the need for transparency to restore the Church’s credibility in the face of sexual abuse of adults and minors and financial scandals.
“If the synodal Church wants to be welcoming,” the document reads, “then accountability and transparency must be at the core of its action at all levels, not only at the level of authority.”
It recommends effective lay involvement in pastoral and economic planning, the publication of annual financial statements certified by external auditors, annual summaries of safeguarding initiatives, the promotion of women to positions of authority, and periodic performance evaluations on those exercising a ministry or holding a position in the Church.
“These are points of great importance and urgency for the credibility of the synodal process and its implementation,” the document says.
The greater participation of women in all levels of the Church, a reform of the education of priests, and greater formation for all Catholics are also included in the text.
Bishops’ conferences, it says, noticed an untapped potential for women’s participation in many areas of Church life. “They also call for further exploration of ministerial and pastoral modalities that better express the charisms and gifts the Spirit pours out on women in response to the pastoral needs of our time,” the document states.
Formation in listening is identified as “an essential initial requirement” for Catholics, as well as how to engage in the practice of “conversation in the Spirit,” which was employed in the first session of the Synod on Synodality.
Pope Francis and delegates at the Synod on Synodality at the conclusion of the assembly on Oct. 28, 2023. Credit: Vatican Media
The document says the need for formation has been one of the most universal and strong themes throughout the synodal process. Interreligious dialogue also is identified as an important aspect of the synodal journey.
On the topic of the liturgy, the Instrumentum Laboris says there was “a call for adequately trained lay men and women to contribute to preaching the Word of God, including during the celebration of the Eucharist.”
“It is necessary that the pastoral proposals and liturgical practices preserve and make ever more evident the link between the journey of Christian initiation and the synodal and missionary life of the Church,” the document says. “The appropriate pastoral and liturgical arrangements must be developed in the plurality of situations and cultures in which the local Churches are immersed …”
How it was drafted
Dubbed the “Instrumentum Laboris 2,” the document released Tuesday has been in preparation since early June when approximately 20 experts in theology, ecclesiology, and canon law held a closed-door meeting to analyze around 200 synod reports from bishops’ conferences and religious communities responding to what the Instrumentum Laboris called “the guiding question” of the next stage of the Synod on Synodality: “How to be a synodal Church in mission?”
After the 10-day gathering, “an initial version” of the text was drafted based on those reports and sent to around 70 people — priests, religious, and laypeople — “from all over the world, of various ecclesial sensitivities and from different theological ‘schools,’” for consultation, according to the synod website.
The XVI Ordinary Council of the General Secretariat of the Synod, together with consultants of the synod secretariat, finalized the document.
According to the working tool, soliciting new reports and feedback after the consultation phase ended is “consistent with the circularity characterizing the whole synodal process.”
“In preparation for the Second Session, and during its work, we continue to address this question: how can the identity of the synodal People of God in mission take concrete form in the relationships, paths and places where the everyday life of the Church takes place?” it says.
The document says “other questions that emerged during the journey are the subject of work that continues in other ways, at the level of the local Churches as well as in the ten Study Groups.”
Expectations for final session
According to the guiding document, the second session of the Synod on Synodality can “expect a further deepening of the shared understanding of synodality, a better focus on the practices of a synodal Church, and the proposal of some changes in canon law (there may be yet more significant and profound developments as the basic proposal is further assimilated and lived.)”
“Nonetheless,” it continues, “we cannot expect the answer to every question. In addition, other proposals will emerge along the way, on the path of conversion and reform that the Second Session will invite the whole Church to undertake.”
The Instrumentum Laboris says, “Synodality is not an end in itself … If the Second Session is to focus on certain aspects of synodal life, it does so with a view to greater effectiveness in mission.”
In its brief conclusion, the text states: “The questions that the Instrumentum Laboris asks are: how to be a synodal Church in mission; how to engage in deep listening and dialogue; how to be co-responsible in the light of the dynamism of our personal and communal baptismal vocation; how to transform structures and processes so that all may participate and share the charisms that the Spirit pours out on each for the common good; how to exercise power and authority as service. Each of these questions is a service to the Church and, through its action, to the possibility of healing the deepest wounds of our time.”
Pope Francis shared a free lunch with nearly 1,500 poor people invited to dine at the Vatican for the 3rd annual World Day of the Poor on Nov. 17, 2019 / / Daniel Ibanez/CNA
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In the 21st Century, we’re living through the real Dark Ages…
Dating from a Church council in France in 975, the Truce of God restricted warfare with holidays assigned to several dates and seasons of the year having Christian religious significance. In 1139 the Second Council of the Lateran imposed the penalty of excommunication for breaking the truce.
These historic religious interventions to violence are echoed only rarely in modern times. Although, in the trenches of the First World War the guns fell silent on Christmas Eve of 1914. The combatants, themselves (not the world leaders), found themselves singing Christmas carols and sharing camaraderie, first among themselves and then together across the cratered No Man’s Land that separated members and leaders of the opposing armies.
While the medieval Truce was to be applied only between Christian combatants, it surfaced even in crusader history in the Holy Land. The opposing armies often found interludes for gift exchanges and tournaments. Western armies often cared for and returned Muslim children captured in battle, and of the Muslims, Oliverisu Scholasticus, a member of a defeated Frankish army, offers this striking report:
“Who could doubt that such goodness, friendship and charity came from God. Men whose parents, sons and daughters, brothers and sisters had died in agony at our hands, whose lands we took, whom we drove naked from their homes, revived us with their own food when we were dying of hunger, and showered us with kindness even while we were in their power” (Friedrich Heer, The Medieval World, 1963, p. 144).
SUMMARY: Prior to and deeper than the nation-state idiom/structure invented at Westphalia (1648), there’s a religious (horrors!) lesson here on how to find real peace without faking it as at Munich in 1938.
In the 21st Century, we’re living through the real Dark Ages…
Dating from a Church council in France in 975, the Truce of God restricted warfare with holidays assigned to several dates and seasons of the year having Christian religious significance. In 1139 the Second Council of the Lateran imposed the penalty of excommunication for breaking the truce.
These historic religious interventions to violence are echoed only rarely in modern times. Although, in the trenches of the First World War the guns fell silent on Christmas Eve of 1914. The combatants, themselves (not the world leaders), found themselves singing Christmas carols and sharing camaraderie, first among themselves and then together across the cratered No Man’s Land that separated members and leaders of the opposing armies.
While the medieval Truce was to be applied only between Christian combatants, it surfaced even in crusader history in the Holy Land. The opposing armies often found interludes for gift exchanges and tournaments. Western armies often cared for and returned Muslim children captured in battle, and of the Muslims, Oliverisu Scholasticus, a member of a defeated Frankish army, offers this striking report:
“Who could doubt that such goodness, friendship and charity came from God. Men whose parents, sons and daughters, brothers and sisters had died in agony at our hands, whose lands we took, whom we drove naked from their homes, revived us with their own food when we were dying of hunger, and showered us with kindness even while we were in their power” (Friedrich Heer, The Medieval World, 1963, p. 144).
SUMMARY: Prior to and deeper than the nation-state idiom/structure invented at Westphalia (1648), there’s a religious (horrors!) lesson here on how to find real peace without faking it as at Munich in 1938.
Peace is a precious resource. Humankind is thirsting for peace.