Vatican City, Feb 4, 2018 / 04:12 am (CNA/EWTN News).- On Sunday Pope Francis announced that the first Friday of Lent would be a day of prayer and fasting for peace given the many ongoing conflicts throughout the world, particularly those in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and South Sudan.
“Facing the tragic continuation of conflicts in different parts of the world, I invite all the faithful to a special day of prayer and fasting for peace Feb. 23, the Friday of the first week of Lent,” the Pope said Feb. 4.
He asked that the day be offered specifically for the people of the Democratic Republic of the Congo and South Sudan and invited both non-Catholics and non-Christians to join “in the ways they deem most appropriate.”
“Our heavenly Father always listens to his children who cry out to him in pain and anguish,” he said, and made a “heartfelt appeal” for each one of us to “hear this cry and, each one according to their own conscience, before God, ask ourselves: ‘What can I do to make peace?’”
While prayer is always an effective resolution, more can be done, Francis said, explaining that each person “can concretely say no to violence to the extent that it depends on him or herself. Because victories obtained with violence are false victories, while working for peace does good for all!”
The Pope’s appeal, which he made during his Sunday Angelus address, comes just two months after a Nov. 23 prayer vigil for peace in the two countries.
With plans to visit South Sudan and the Democratic Republic of the Congo last year thwarted by ongoing conflict, Pope Francis organized the prayer vigil in order to pray for an end to war in the two countries and to ask for comfort for victims of the violence.
He had planned to visit South Sudan last fall alongside Anglican Primate Archbishop Joseph Welby for an ecumenical trip aimed at promoting peace in the conflict-ridden country. However, due to safety concerns, the visit was postponed until the situation on the ground stabilizes.
South Sudan has been in the middle of a brutal civil war for the past three-and-a-half years, which has divided the young country between those loyal to its President Salva Kiir and those loyal to former vice president Reik Machar. The conflict has also bred various divisions of militia and opposition groups.
Since the beginning of the war, some 4 million citizens have left the violence-stricken country in hopes of finding peace, food and work. In August 2017 Uganda received the one-millionth South Sudanese refugee, highlighting the urgency of the crisis as the world’s fastest growing refugee epidemic.
For those who haven’t fled the nation, many internally displaced persons (IDPs) have sought refuge in churches for protection from violence. Most IDPs are typically women, children and those who have lost their families in the war.
Many are too fearful to stay in their homes because they know they could be killed, tortured, raped or even forced to fight. And despite successful partnerships between the local Church, aid agencies and the government, refugees in many areas still need a proper supply of food.
On Friday the U.S. banned the export of weapons sales in South Sudan and urged other nations to do the same over growing frustration at the country’s inability to put an end to the conflict.
In the Democratic Republic of the Congo, political unrest first erupted in 2015 after a bill was proposed which would potentially delay the presidential and parliamentary elections. The bill was widely seen by the opposition as a power grab on the part of Kabila.
Relations between the government and the opposition deteriorated further when a Kasai chief was killed last August, after calling on the central government to quit meddling in the territory, insisting it be controlled by the local leaders.
Catholic bishops in the country had helped to negotiate an agreement, which hoped to prevent a renewed civil war by securing an election this year for the successor of President Kabila. However, in January of this year, the bishops said the agreement was expected to fail unless both parties were willing to compromise. In March, the bishops withdrew from mediation talks.
With a history of bloody ethnic rivalries and clashes over resources, fears have developed that the violence in Kasai, a hub for political tension, will spread to the rest of the nation and even lead to the involvement of neighboring countries.
In the past year alone, more than 3,300 people have been killed in the Democratic Republic of the Congo’s Kasai region. The death toll includes civilians caught in the crossfire of a brutal fight between the Congolese army and an opposing militia group.
According to the Guardian, violence in the east of the country in recent weeks has increased to the extent that last week alone some 7,000 people fled to neighboring Burundi and another 1,200 into Tanzania.
In terms of a humanitarian crisis, the Food and Agriculture Organization last week pointed to an “alarming food insecurity” in the country, due largely to the fact that violence has now spread into areas that were previously considered stable, such as the Kasai and Tanganyika provinces. In the past six months alone, the number of people experiencing extreme hunger has risen by 2 million, rising to about 7.7 million people, which is roughly 10% of the population.
After reflecting on the day’s Gospel reading from Mark and leading faithful in praying the Angelus, Pope Francis also offered his prayer and closeness to the people of Madagascar, who were recently hit by a massive cyclone which so far has left at least 51 people dead and has caused extensive damage.
Francis assured of his prayer, and asked that the Lord would “comfort and sustain” all those who have died or who have been displaced.
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A supportive side note about this year’s Jubilee of Hope–and the 1700th anniversary of Nicaea….
It’s a good time to recall both our encounter with the irreducible nature of the Trinitarian God and the irreducible nature of ourselves as Man as totally united and embodied souls. So, three incarnational thoughts, and a Question:
FIRST, Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger gave us this several decades ago in “Introduction to Christianity”:
“For the Christian, the interplay of faith and reason is most evident in the doctrine that a Trinitarian God is revealed by a definitive encounter with Christ in human history. The doctrine of the Trinity did not arise out of speculation about God, out of an attempt by philosophical thinking to figure out what the fount of all being was like; it developed out of the effort to digest historical experiences [an event]…”
SECOND, now, 2025 years after that singular event—and 1700 years after Nicaea, the Church is confronted by a secularist, fluid, and Arian-like redefinition of the human person as also no longer including the complementary union of binary man and woman in the vocation of marriage. The discounting of our inborn and universal natural law as also involving receptivity to supernatural grace. (Instead, the informal half-blessing of irregular couples as “couples” of every stripe–a wedge dividing the unity of the Church itself?)
THIRD, providentially today, just as with the writing of St. Athanasius (De Incarnatione Verbi Dei, c. 317) shortly prior to Nicaea (325), in 1993 St. Pope John Paul II already explicitly incorporates the permanence of our inborn natural law and moral absolutes directly into the Magisterium of the unified Church:
“The relationship between faith and morality shines forth with all its brilliance in the unconditional respect due to the insistent demands of the personal dignity of every man, demands protected by those moral norms which prohibit without exception actions which are intrinsically evil [….] The Church is no way the author or the arbiter of this norm [….] This is the first time, in fact, that the Magisterium of the Church [!] has set forth in detail the fundamental elements of this teaching, and presented the principles for the pastoral discernment necessary in practical and cultural situations which are complex and even crucial” (Veritatis Splendor, n. 90, 95, 115).
QUESTION: how will the hopeful conclave choose, as between this living Magisterium versus the hopeless fluidities of invertebrate der synodale weg/synodalism?
Note the photo: Donald Wuerl and Wilton Gregory together again. Lord, spare us from apostate Popes.
The Cardinal Wuerl story quite possibly is not the image many assume…
In the mid-1980s and as a deputized auxiliary bishop, Wuerl was part of the solution (including a formal Visitation) to the ongoing drift in the Archdiocese of Seattle. He was disrespected by the entrenched establishment and by the media. Later, at Pittsburgh, he traveled to Rome to convince higher-ups not to reverse one of his many (I think 18 or 19 in all) disciplinary actions against sexual abuses within his new diocese. (His pragmatic mistake—as I recall—was to not also clean out the closet of historical abuses from before his tenure.)
Wuerl is the author of the excellent handbook: “New Evangelization: Passing on the Catholic Faith Today” (Our Sunday Visitor, 2013). As the American cardinal invited to Rome as relator to launch the 2012 Year of Faith, he summarized well our current moment: “It is as if a tsunami of secular influence has swept across the cultural landscape, taking with it such societal markers as marriage, family, the concept of the common good and objective right and wrong.”
Not bad, for an “apostate.”