Rome, Italy, Sep 27, 2018 / 10:42 am (CNA/EWTN News).- Pope Francis has stressed the need for ongoing formation for couples, before and after marriage, saying that even the basic teachings of the Church “could not be taken for granted.” The pope spoke in an address to participants in a recent course on marriage and family life held in Rome.
Speaking Sept. 27 in the Archbasilica of St. John Lateran to an audience of priests, deacons, and lay people, Francis renewed his call for a “permanent catechumenate for the sacrament of marriage,” saying it was essential for couples to receive ongoing formation both before and after their wedding.
The course, which ran Sept. 24-26, was sponsored by the Diocese of Rome and the Roman Rota, the Church’s highest appellate court which handles marriage nullity cases.
Francis has previously insisted on the need for better, longer, more comprehensive instruction for couples in his annual addresses to the Rota.
“The greater effectiveness of pastoral care is realized where the accompaniment does not end with the celebration of the wedding, but escorts them at least for the first years of married life” the pope said.
Francis told the attendees that marriage was “a vast, complex and delicate apostolic field” which required the full energy and enthusiasm of the Church.
Praising the “courageous” witness of St. John Paul II on the family in the modern world, Francis said he sought to build upon the legacy of his “farsighted” predecessors through his reform of canon law in marriage nullity cases and in the pastoral application of his post-synodal apostolic exhortation Amoris laetitia. The Pope said the aim of both of these efforts was to address the “urgent” need for comprehensive marriage formation.
“Marriage is not just a ‘social’ event, but a true sacrament that involves an adequate preparation and a conscious celebration,” the pope said. “The marriage bond, in fact, requires an engaged choice on the part of the engaged couple, which focuses on the will to build together something that must never be betrayed or abandoned.”
The work of marriage preparation is, according to the pope, best achieved through joint efforts by priests and married couples, though he stressed the importance and pre-eminence of the role of the parish priest.
“Priests, especially parish priests, are the first interlocutors of young people who wish to form a new family and get married in the sacrament of marriage. The accompaniment of the ordained minister will help the newlyweds to understand that marriage between a man and a woman is a sign of the spousal union between Christ and the Church, making them aware of the profound meaning of the step they are about to make.”
The pope’s comments were heard by some as a corrective to recent remarks by Cardinal Kevin Farrell, prefect of the Dicastery for Laity, Family and Life. In July, Cardinal Farrell said that “priests are not the best people to train others for marriage” and that “they have no credibility.”
Pope Francis emphasised that the work of preparing couples for marriage needed to include basic formation in the faith, noting that in many cases marriages broke down not because of any inherent problem with the couple, but simply because they lacked the depth of faith needed to live the sacrament fully.
“So many times the ultimate root of the problems that come to light after the celebration of the sacrament of marriage is to be found not only in a hidden and remote immaturity suddenly exploded, but above all in the weakness of the Christian faith” Francis told the attendees.
“The more the journey of preparation is deepened and extended in time, the sooner the couples will learn to correspond to the grace and strength of God and will also develop the “antibodies” to face the inevitable moments of difficulty and fatigue of married and family life.”
The pope noted that those preparing couples for marriage could make no assumptions about the level of formation in the faith couples might have. Many, he said, “have remained stuck to some elementary notion of the catechism of the first Communion and, if all goes well, of Confirmation.” Because of this “it is essential to resume the catechesis of Christian initiation to the faith, whose contents are not to be taken for granted or as if they were already acquired by the engaged couple.”
Addressing these common gaps in couples’ understanding of the faith would, Francis explained, both help them understand the faith and instil “a filial sense of the Church.”
Above all, the pope stressed, priests and lay formators alike should welcome the opportunity to form couples over a period of years, not weeks, calling it an essential expression of the Church’s maternal concern.
“It is an experience of joyful motherhood, when newlyweds are the object of the attentive care of the Church which, in the footsteps of her Master, is a caring mother who does not abandon, does not discard, but approaches with tenderness, embraces and encourages.”
The pope also discussed the difficulties faced by couples whose unions did break down, noting that the first priority should be to revive their faith and help them “rediscover the grace of the sacrament,” though in some cases the Church needed offer equal support through the nullity process which was also pointed toward the salus animarum.
Francis finished by noting that he was pleased to see that his reforms of the nullity process had been widely adopted into practice. These, he said, were meant as an aid to bishops and judicial vicars in dioceses whose work in tribunals is to seek the truth and “to comfort the peace of consciences, especially the poorest and far from our ecclesial communities.”
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Jack Traynor (next to child on first row) as a pilgrim to Lourdes in 1925, two years after his healing. / Credit: Catholic Bishops’ Conference of England and Wales
In the book he recounts how, during a 10-hour train ride to Lourdes on Friday, Sept. 10, 1937, Royal Navy seaman Jack Traynor told him firsthand how he was healed in 1923 at the Lourdes Shrine from the crippling wounds he had suffered from his participation in World War I.
Over a century later, on Dec. 8 of this year, the archbishop of Liverpool in the United Kingdom, Malcolm McMahon, announced that Traynor’s healing has been recognized as the 71st miracle attributed to the intercession of Our Lady of Lourdes.
O’Connor described Traynor as a “heavy-set man, 5’5”, with a strong, ruddy face” who, according to his biography, “should have been, if he were alive, paralyzed, epileptic, covered in sores, shrunken, with a wrinkled and useless right arm and a gaping hole in his skull.”
Traynor was, in the missionary’s view, a man “with his manly faith and piety,” unassuming, “but obviously a fearless, militant Catholic.” Despite having received only a primary education, he had “a clear mind enriched by faith and preserved by great honesty of life.”
This enabled him to tell “with simplicity, sobriety, exactness” how he was healed at the place where the Immaculate Conception appeared to St. Bernadette Soubirous in 1858.
O’Connor wrote down the account and sent it to Traynor, who revised it and added new details. He read the official report of the doctors who examined him and searched the newspaper archives of the time to corroborate the account.
Front page of the December 1926 Journal de la Grotte, reporting on the miraculous cure of Jack Traynor. Credit: Lourdes Shrine
How Traynor came to be considered incurable
Traynor was born in Liverpool, according to some sources, in 1883. His mother was an Irish Catholic who died when Traynor was still young. “But his faith, his devotion to the Mass and holy Communion — he went daily when very few others did — and his trust in the Virgin remained with him as a fruitful memory and example,” O’Connor recalled.
Mobilized at the outbreak of World War I, he was hit by shrapnel, which left him unconscious for five weeks. Sent in 1915 to the expeditionary force to Egypt and the Dardanelles Strait, between Turkey and Greece, he took part in the landing at Gallipoli.
Jack Traynor. Credit: Courtesy of Hospitality of Our Lady of Lourdes
During a bayonet charge on May 8, he was hit with 14 machine gun bullets in the head, chest, and arm. Sent to Alexandria, Egypt, he was operated on three times in the following months to try to stitch together the nerves in his right arm. They offered him amputation, but he refused. The epileptic seizures began, and there was a fourth operation, also unsuccessful, in 1916.
He was discharged with a 100% pension “for permanent and total disability,” the missionary priest related, and in 1920 he underwent surgery on his skull to try to cure the epilepsy. From that operation he was left with an open hole “about two centimeters wide” that was covered with a silver plate.
By then he was suffering three seizures a day and his legs were partially paralyzed. Back in Liverpool he was given a wheelchair and had to be helped out of bed.
Eight years had passed since the landing at Gallipoli. Traynor was treated by 10 doctors who could only attest “that he was completely and incurably incapacitated.”
Unable to walk, with epileptic seizures, a useless arm, three open wounds, “he was truly a human wreck. Someone arranged for him to be admitted to the Mossley Hill Hospital for Incurables on July 24, 1923. But by that date Jack Traynor was already in Lourdes,” O’Connor recounted.
Traynor tells about his pilgrimage to Lourdes
According to the first-person account originally written by O’Connor and corrected and adapted by Traynor, the veteran sailor had always felt great devotion to Mary that he got from his mother.
“I felt that if the shrine of Our Lady of Lourdes were in England, I would go there often. But it seemed to me a distant place that I could never reach,” Traynor said.
When he heard that a pilgrimage was being organized to the shrine, he decided to do everything he could to go. He used money set aside “for some special emergency” and they even sold belongings. “My wife even pawned her own jewelry.”
The Lourdes Grotto in France. Credit: Courtney Mares/CNA
When they learned of his determination, many tried to dissuade him: “You’ll die on the way, you’ll be a problem and a pain for everyone,” a priest told him.
“Everyone, except my wife and one or two relatives, told me I was crazy,” he recalled.
The experience of the trip was “very hard,” confessed Traynor, who felt very ill on the way. So much so that they tried to get him off three times to take him to a hospital in France, but at the place where they stopped there was no hospital.
On arrival at Lourdes, there was ‘no hope’ for Traynor
On Sunday, July 22, 1923, they arrived at the Lourdes Shrine in the foothills of the French Pyrenees. There he was cared for by two Protestant sisters who knew him from Liverpool and who happened to be there providentially.
The pilgrimage of more than 1,200 people was led by the archbishop of Liverpool, Frederick William Keating.
On arrival, Traynor felt “desperately ill,” to the point that “a woman took it upon herself to write to my wife telling her that there was no hope for me and that I would be buried at Lourdes.”
Despite this, “I managed to get lowered into the baths nine times in the water from the spring in the grotto and they took me to the different devotions that the sick could join in.”
On the second day, he suffered a strong epileptic seizure. The volunteers refused to put him in the pools in this state, but his insistence could not be overcome. “Since then I have not had another epileptic seizure,” he recalled.
Paralyzed legs healed
On Tuesday, July 24, Traynor was examined for the first time by doctors at the shrine, who testified to what had happened during the trip to Lourdes and detailed his ailments.
On Wednesday, July 25, “he seemed to be as bad as ever” and, thinking about the return trip planned for Friday, July 27, he bought some religious souvenirs for his wife and children with the last shillings he had left.
He returned to the baths. “When I was in the bath, my paralyzed legs shook violently,” he related, causing alarm among the volunteers who attended to the pilgrims at the shrine, believing it was another epileptic seizure. “I struggled to stand up, feeling that I could do so easily,” he explained.
Arm healed as Blessed Sacrament passes by
He was again placed in his wheelchair and taken to the procession of the Blessed Sacrament. The archbishop of Reims, Cardinal Louis Henri Joseph Luçon, carried the monstrance.
“He blessed the two who were in front of me, came up to me, made the sign of the cross with the monstrance, and moved on to the next one. He just passed when I realized that a great change had taken place in me. My right arm, which had been dead since 1915, shook violently. I tore off its bandages and crossed myself, for the first time in years,” Traynor himself testified.
“As far as I can remember, I felt no sudden pain and certainly I did not have a vision. I simply realized that something momentous had happened,” Traynor recounted.
Back at the asylum, the former hospital that today houses the offices of the Hospitality of Our Lady of Lourdes, he proved that he could walk seven steps. The doctors examined him again and concluded in their report that “he had recovered the voluntary use of his legs” and that “the patient can walk with difficulty.”
Traynor makes it to the grotto
That night, he could hardly sleep. As there was already a certain commotion around him, several volunteers stood guard at his door. Early in the morning, it seemed that he would fall asleep again, but “with a last breath, I opened my eyes and jumped out of bed. First I knelt on the floor to finish the rosary I had been saying, then I ran to the door.”
Making his way, he arrived barefoot and in his pajamas at the grotto of Massabielle, where the volunteers followed him: “When they reached the grotto, I was on my knees, still in my nightclothes, praying to the Virgin and thanking her. I only knew that I had to thank her and that the grotto was the right place to do so.”
He prayed for 20 minutes. When he got up, a crowd surrounded him, and they made way to let him return to the asylum.
A sacrifice made for the Virgin in gratitude
“At the end of the Rosary Square stands the statue of Our Lady Crowned. My mother had always taught me that when you ask the Virgin for a favor or want to show her some special veneration, you have to make a sacrifice. I had no money to offer, having spent my last shillings on rosaries and medals for my wife and children, but kneeling there before the Virgin, I made the only sacrifice I could think of. I decided to give up smoking,” Traynor explained with tremendous simplicity.
“During all this time, although I knew I had received a great favor from Our Lady, I didn’t clearly remember all the illness I previously had,” he noted in his account.
As he finished getting himself ready, a priest, Father Gray, who knew nothing of his cure, asked for someone to serve Mass for him, which Traynor did: “I didn’t think it strange that I could do it, after eight years of not being able to get up or walk,” he said.
Traynor received word that the priest who had strongly opposed his joining the pilgrimage wanted to see him at his hotel, located in the town of Lourdes, outside the shrine. He asked him if he was well. “I told him I was well, thank you, and that I hoped he was too. He burst into tears.”
Early on Friday, July 27, the doctors examined Traynor again. They found that he was able to walk perfectly, that his right arm and legs had fully recovered. The opening in his skull resulting from the operation had been considerably reduced, and he had not suffered any further epileptic seizures. His sores had also healed by the time he returned from the grotto, when he had removed his bandages the previous day.
Weeping ‘like two children’ with Archbishop Keating
At nine o’clock in the morning the train back to Liverpool was ready to leave the Lourdes station, situated in the upper part of the town. He had been given a seat in first class, which, despite his protests, he had to accept.
Halfway through the journey, Keating came to see him in his passenger car. “I knelt down for his blessing. He raised me up saying, ‘Jack, I think I should have your blessing.’ I didn’t understand why he was saying that. Then he raised me up and we both sat on the bed. Looking at me, he said, ‘Jack, do you realize how ill you have been and that you have been miraculously cured by the Blessed Virgin?’”
“Then,” Traynor continued, “it all came back to me, the memory of my years of illness and the sufferings on the trip to Lourdes and how ill I had been at Lourdes. I began to cry, and so did the archbishop, and we both sat there crying like two children. After talking to him for a while, I calmed down. I now fully understood what had happened.”
A telegram to his wife: ‘I am better’
Since news of the events had already reached Liverpool, Traynor was advised to write a telegram to his wife. “I didn’t want to make a fuss with a telegram, so I sent her this message: ‘I am better — Jack,’” he explained.
This message and the letter announcing that her husband was going to die in Lourdes were all the information his wife had, as she had not seen the newspapers. She assumed that he had recovered from his serious condition but that he was still in his “ruinous” state.
The reception in Liverpool was the culmination. The archbishop had to address the crowd to disperse at the mere sight of Traynor getting off the train. “But when I appeared on the platform, there was a stampede” and the police had to intervene. “We returned home and I cannot describe the joy of my wife and children,” he said in his account.
A daughter named Bernadette
Taynor concluded his account by explaining that in the following years he worked transporting coal, lifting 200-pound sacks without difficulty. Thanks to providence, he was able to provide well for his family.
Three of his children were born after his cure in 1923. A girl was named Bernadette, in honor of the visionary of Lourdes.
He also related the conversion of the two Protestant sisters who cared for him, along with his family and the Anglican pastor of his community.
From then on, Jack volunteered to go to Lourdes on a regular basis until he died in 1943, on the eve of the solemnity of the Immaculate Conception.
Paradoxically, and despite the factual evidence of his recovery, the Ministry of War Pensions never revoked the disability pension that was granted to him for life.
This story was first published by ACI Prensa, CNA’s Spanish-language news partner. It has been translated and adapted by CNA.
CNA Staff, Mar 16, 2021 / 04:00 am (CNA).- “The Catechism must not be turned into an instrument to shorten theological discussion and forestall magisterial decision.” That is the conviction of Stephan Kampowski, professor of philosophical a… […]
CNA Staff, Sep 6, 2020 / 01:00 pm (CNA).- Only 18 children with Down syndrome were born in Denmark in 2019, the lowest number on record in the Scandinavian country, according to a new report from the Danish Central Cytogenetic Registry (DCCR).
The DCCR, whose statistics date back to 1970, is a national registry of people who have undergone prenatal or postnatal chromosomal tests, molecular genetic tests, or biochemical tests.
The 18 babies born with Down syndrome in Denmark last year represent 0.029% of total births. The CDC estimates that about 1 in 700 (0.14%) children in the U.S. is born with Down syndrome, or about 6,000 babies annually.
In Denmark, “the low number is probably an expression of a random fluctuation in numbers that are already quite small. But it should be followed by an important debate on society’s approach to children with disabilities,” said Olav Bjørn Petersen, chief physician and professor of fetal medicine at Rigshospitalet and the University of Copenhagen
Denmark was the first country in the world to implement national free prenatal Down syndrome screening for all pregnant women.
With the introduction of free prenatal screening in 2004, the number of children born with Down syndrome decreased significantly, but subsequently stabilized at 23 to 35 live births per year.
In 2018, 22 babies were born with Down syndrome, but in 2019 number plummeted even further.
According to the Danish National Board of Health, “95% of pregnant women whose fetus is found to have a chromosomal abnormality opt for an abortion.”
In Iceland, “nearly 100 percent” of pregnancies that tested positive for Down syndrome were aborted, according to a 2017 CBS News report.
Denmark allows abortion on demand within the first 12 weeks of pregnancy. After that period, abortion is only allowed if a medical council considers there to be a physical and mental risk to the health of the mother or risk of birth defects in the unborn child. Minors under 18 need parental consent to get an abortion.
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