Pope Francis at his general audience in the Paul VI Hall at the Vatican, Dec. 15, 2021 / Vatican Media.
Vatican City, Dec 17, 2021 / 01:00 am (CNA).
“There is only one thing that really makes us age, grow old interiorly: not age, but sin,” Pope Francis said in 2017, during a speech about the Virgin Mary.
As Francis turns 85 on Dec. 17, his ninth birthday as pope, here are four things to know about him.
1. Pope Francis uses his birthday to focus on others
During his first birthday as pontiff in 2013, Pope Francis celebrated his usual early morning Mass, and afterward he greeted four homeless men and women who live in the Vatican area.
His 78th birthday in 2014 fell on a Wednesday, when he usually holds his weekly audience with the public. The general audience in St. Peter’s Square went on without much additional fanfare, though he did stop to blow out the candles on a cake given to him by a group of seminarians.
Pope Francis blows out candles on a cake for his 78th birthday in St. Peter’s Square during his Wednesday general audience on Dec. 17, 2014. . ANSA / L’OSSERVATORE ROMANO
In 2016, Pope Francis kicked off his 80th birthday by having breakfast with a group of homeless men and women in the dining room of his residence, and in 2017, he threw a pizza party for sick children.
Pope Francis’ 2018 celebration was also with children: he held a party and ate birthday cake with kids being treated at a free health clinic inside the Vatican.
The pope never lets his birthday get in the way of regular business, though, and in both 2019 and 2020, the day passed in an uneventful way, except for a donation of four ventilators to a children’s hospital in Venezuela on his 84th birthday.
Pope Francis drinks from an Argentina cup at the general audience in St. Peter’s Square on Oct. 7, 2015. . L’Osservatore Romano.
2. Francis has never visited his native country of Argentina as pope
Despite traveling to 55 different countries across 35 international trips, Pope Francis has yet to make a pastoral visit to Argentina, the country where he was born in 1936.
While Francis has never ruled out visiting his native country one day, he has indicated that he intends to end his days in Rome. In an interview for a book published at the beginning of this year, Pope Francis told Argentine journalist and neurologist Nelson Castro that he would not live again in Argentina.
At the end of an interview for his book “The Health of the Popes,” Castro asked Francis, “how do you imagine your death?” to which he replied, “I will be pope, whether in office or emeritus. And in Rome. I won’t return to Argentina.”
3. An unconfirmed report that Pope Francis is dying recently went viral
A report on the website Newsmax earlier this month claimed that a source in the Vatican had revealed that Pope Francis was dying and unlikely to survive past 2022.
The report got a lot of attention — including from the website FactCheck.org — but its claims are unconfirmed.
Pope Francis greets staff at the Gemelli Hospital in Rome, July 11, 2021. Vatican Media
Pope Francis spent 10 days in a Rome hospital in July after undergoing surgery on his colon, which the Vatican said was to treat diverticulitis, a stricture in the large intestine.
Since the hospitalization, there have been unsubstantiated rumors that the state of the pope’s health is worse than the Vatican reported.
A rumor spread on social media in July about Pope Francis resigning the papacy “in the next few hours” was soon proven false.
4. Pope Francis’ doctor is a specialist in aging
After his physician died earlier this year, Pope Francis chose a specialist in aging as his new personal doctor.
Roberto Bernabei, who is from Florence, has many years of experience in geriatric medicine and aging.
Pope Francis visits the elderly priest-residents of Casa San Gaetano in Rome, June 17, 2016. . L’Osservatore Romano.
Pope Francis has often placed a focus on the elderly during his pontificate, speaking frequently about their inherent dignity and the value they bring to society.
In September, Pope Francis wrote a letter to elderly priests in northern Italy, telling them that aging is a privilege because it is the chance to suffer like Jesus Christ.
“You are experiencing a season, old age, which is not a disease but a privilege,” he said. “And even those of you who are sick live, we can say, a privilege: that of resembling Jesus who suffers, carrying the cross just like Him.”
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An artist’s rendering of the affordable apartment complex soon to be built by Our Lady Queen of Angels Housing alliance in Los Angeles. / Courtesy of Our Lady Queen of Angels Housing alliance
St. Louis, Mo., Aug 26, 2024 / 06:30 am (CNA).
Los Angeles is one of the most expensive cities in the United States, with an average home price almost touching a million dollars in 2024 — a landscape that crowds out not only the poor, but also young families with children. The high cost of housing is one of the primary reasons why tens of thousands of people live on the streets of LA, and most of those who are housed are “rent burdened,” which means they spend more than 30% of their income just keeping a roof over their heads.
In the face of such challenges, the Archdiocese of Los Angeles recently announced it will provide land for a new housing development dedicated to serving community college students and young people exiting the foster care system.
Amy Anderson, executive director of Our Lady Queen of Angels Housing alliance and a former chief of housing for the City of Los Angeles, told EWTN News that a group of Catholic lay leaders from the business and philanthropic community reached out to the archdiocese with a vision for creating an independent, nonprofit affordable housing development organization.
“Our vision is to really collaborate with the archdiocese and [use] the resources potentially available from the archdiocese to create homes that are affordable to a wide range of populations and incomes,” Anderson told “EWTN News Nightly” anchor Tracy Sabol.
She said they hope to break ground on the project, known as the Willowbrook development, “about a year from now.”
“The archdiocese is a fantastic partner. They are providing the land for our first development, which is already in process, and we’re working really closely with them to identify additional opportunities.”
The proposed building, which will be located steps from Los Angeles Community College, will feature 74 affordable housing units, as well as “on-site supportive services” for young people transitioning out of foster care — a population that often ends up experiencing homelessness.
The land, located at 4665 Willow Brook Ave just a few miles from the Hollywood Sign, currently hosts a Catholic Charities building, which will move its operations to another site to make way for the apartments.
“Through Catholic Charities and our ministries on Skid Row [an LA street where many unhoused people live] and elsewhere, we have been working for many years to provide shelter and services for our homeless brothers and sisters,” Archbishop Jose Gomez said in a statement to LAist.
“With this new initiative we see exciting possibilities to make more affordable housing available, especially for families and young people.”
Making land work for mission
The Catholic Church is often cited as the largest non-governmental owner of land in the entire world, with an estimated 177 million acres owned by Catholic entities.
Maddy Johnson, program manager for the Church Properties Initiative at the University of Notre Dame’s Fitzgerald Institute for Real Estate (FIRE), noted that the Church as a large landowner is not a new phenomenon, but there is a need today to adapt to modern challenges like regulations, zoning, and the importance of caring for the natural environment.
Many Catholic dioceses and religious orders have properties in their possession that aren’t fulfilling their original purpose, including disused natural land and parking lots, as well as shuttered convents and schools. Sometimes, Johnson said, a diocese or religious order doesn’t even realize the full extent of what they own.
“How can the Church make good strategic decisions, strategic and mission-aligned decisions, if it doesn’t know what properties it’s responsible for?” she said.
The Church of St. Agatha and St. James in Philadelphia, with The Chestnut in the foreground, a housing unit developed on property ground-leased from the church. Courtesy of Maddy Johnson/Church Properties Initiative
Since real estate management is not the Church’s core competency, FIRE aims to “provide a space for peer learning” to educate and equip Church leaders to make better use of their properties in service of the Church’s mission.
To this end, they offer an undergraduate minor at Notre Dame that aims to teach students how to help the Church make strategic real estate decisions that align with the Church’s mission. The Institute also organizes a quarterly networking call with diocesan real estate directors, as well as an annual conference to allow Catholic leaders to convene, share best practices, and learn from each other.
Fr. Patrick Reidy, C.S.C., a professor at Notre Dame Law School and faculty co-director of the Church Properties Initiative, conducts a workshop for diocesan leaders on Notre Dame’s campus in summer 2023. Courtesy of David J. Murphy/Church Properties Initiative
In many cases, Catholic entities that have worked with FIRE have been able to repurpose properties in a way that not only provides income for the church, but also fills a need in the community.
Johnson said the Church is called to respond to the modern problems society faces — one of which is a lack of housing options, especially for the poor.
“Throughout its history, there have been so many different iterations of how the Church expresses its mission…through education, healthcare — those are the ones that we’ve gotten really used to,” Johnson said.
“In our day and age, could it be the need for affordable housing?…that’s a charitable human need in the area that’s not being met.”
Unlocking potential in California
Queen of Angels Housing’s first development, which has been in the works for several years, is being made possible now by a newly-passed state law in California that aims to make it easier for churches to repurpose their land into housing.
California’s SB 4, the Affordable Housing on Faith Lands Act, was signed into law in October 2023. It streamlines some of the trickiest parts of the process of turning church-owned land into housing — the parts most people don’t really think about. These can include permitting and zoning restrictions, which restrict the types of buildings that can be built in a given area and can be difficult and time-consuming to overcome. SB 4 even includes a provision allowing for denser housing on church-owned property than the zoning ordinances would normally allow.
Yes in God’s Backyard
The law coming to fruition in California is part of a larger movement informally dubbed “Yes in God’s Backyard,” or YIGBY — a riff on the term “Not in My Backyard” (NIMBY), a phenomenon whereby neighbors take issue with and oppose new developments.
Several Catholic real estate professionals with ties to California expressed excitement about the possibilities that SB 4 has created in the Golden State.
Steve Cameron, a Catholic real estate developer in Orange County, told CNA that he is currently working with the Diocese of Orange, which abuts the LA archdiocese, to inventory properties that could be repurposed for residential use.
He said their focus is on building apartment buildings and townhomes, primarily for rental rather than for sale, in an attempt to address the severe housing shortage and high costs in Southern California.
Unlike some dioceses, the Orange diocese has an electronic GIS (geographic information system) database showing all the properties it owns. Prepared by a civil engineering firm, the database includes details such as parcel numbers, acreage, title information, and demographic reports, which facilitate the planning and development process.
“Strategically, what we’re doing is we’re inventorying all of the property that the diocese and the parishes own, and trying to understand where there might be underutilized property that would make sense to develop some residential use,” Cameron said.
Cameron said he can’t yet share details about the housing projects they’re working on, but said they are looking to the Archdiocese of Los Angeles and the Queen of Angels housing project as a model for how to take advantage of the new incentives created by SB 4.
“I think it’s great, and it’s exciting that they’re taking the lead and that they are able to find an opportunistic way to repurpose an underutilized property to meet the housing shortage in California,” he said.
“[We] look at them as a role model for what we’re trying to accomplish here in the Diocese of Orange.”
Holy Name Cathedral in Chicago with One Chicago Square in the background, a residential tower constructed on the former cathedral parking lot, which was sold in 2019. Courtesy of Maddy Johnson/Church Properties Initiative
John Meyer, a former president of the California-based Napa Institute who now works in real estate with J2 Development, emphasized the importance of viewing the Church’s vast real estate holdings as an asset rather than a liability.
Meyer said he is currently working with two Catholic entities on the East Coast on ground lease projects, one of which will fund the construction of a new Catholic Student Center at a university. He told CNA he often advises Catholic entities to lease the land they own rather than selling it, allowing the church to maintain ownership of the property while generating income.
Naturally, he noted, any real estate project the Church undertakes ought to align with the Church’s mission of spreading the Gospel, and not merely be a means of making money.
“Any time we look at the Church’s real estate decisions, it’s got to be intertwined with mission and values,” he said.
“We’re not just developing for the sake of developing. What we want to do is we want to create value for the Church, and we also want to create value for the community. So working closely with the municipality to make sure that needs are met, and to be a good neighbor, is important.”
He said Church leaders should strongly consider taking advantage of incentives in various states such as California for projects like affordable housing, which align with the Church’s mission and provide both social and financial benefits.
“Priests and bishops aren’t ordained to do these things, and sometimes they have people in their diocese that have these abilities, and sometimes they don’t,” Meyer said.
“This [new law] in California has created an incentive that we can take advantage of, so we need to take advantage of that incentive…it’s allowing us to unlock potential value in land while at the same time serving a social good that’s part of the mission of the Church.”
Vatican City, Jun 13, 2020 / 04:00 am (CNA).- Pope Francis said Saturday that the coronavirus pandemic has revealed poverty that Catholics cannot ignore.
“The word of God allows for no complacency; it constantly impels us to acts of love,” Pope Francis wrote in his message for the 2020 World Day of the Poor.
“This pandemic arrived suddenly and caught us unprepared, sparking a powerful sense of bewilderment and helplessness,” the pope said. “This has made us all the more aware of the presence of the poor in our midst and their need for help.”
Pope Francis said that “time devoted to prayer can never become an alibi for neglecting our neighbor in need.”
“Prayer to God and solidarity with the poor and suffering are inseparable,” he said.
In his message published June 13, the pope wrote that “generosity that supports the weak, consoles the afflicted, relieves suffering and restores dignity to those stripped of it, is a condition for a fully human life.”
He stressed that the time given in support of the poor cannot be put second to one’s personal interests.
“The decision to care for the poor, for their many different needs, cannot be conditioned by the time available or by private interests, or by impersonal pastoral or social projects,” he said.
“The power of God’s grace cannot be restrained by the selfish tendency to put ourselves always first,” he added.
The pope recognized that the aftermath of the coronavirus pandemic has left many people feeling “poorer and less self- sufficient.”
“The present experience has challenged many of our assumptions,” he said. “The loss of employment, and of opportunities to be close to our loved ones and our regular acquaintances, suddenly opened our eyes to horizons that we had long since taken for granted. Our spiritual and material resources were called into question and we found ourselves experiencing fear.”
Francis pointed to the wisdom found in the Old Testament Book of Sirach. “In page after page, we discover a precious compendium of advice on how to act in the light of a close relationship with God, creator and lover of creation, just and provident towards all his children,” he said.
Quoting Sirach chapter two, the pope said: “‘Do not be alarmed when disaster comes. Cling to him and do not leave him, so that you may be honored at the end of your days. Whatever happens to you, accept it, and in the uncertainties of your humble state, be patient, since gold is tested in the fire, and chosen men in the furnace of humiliation. Trust him and he will uphold you, follow a straight path and hope in him. You who fear the Lord, wait for his mercy; do not turn aside in case you fall.’”
Pope Francis said: “The Church certainly has no comprehensive solutions to propose, but by the grace of Christ she can offer her witness and her gestures of charity.”
“She likewise feels compelled to speak out on behalf of those who lack life’s basic necessities. For the Christian people, to remind everyone of the great value of the common good is a vital commitment, expressed in the effort to ensure that no one whose human dignity is violated in its basic needs will be forgotten,” he added.
The theme for this year’s World Day of the Poor comes from a line in chapter six of the Book of Sirach: “Stretch forth your hand to the poor.”
“This year’s theme – ‘Stretch forth your hand to the poor’ – is thus a summons to responsibility and commitment as men and women who are part of our one human family. It encourages us to bear the burdens of the weakest, in accord with the words of Saint Paul: ‘Through love serve one another. For the whole law is fulfilled in one word: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself,’” he said.
Pope Francis established the World Day of the Poor at the end of the Jubilee Year of Mercy in 2016. It is celebrated each year on the 33rd Sunday of Ordinary Time, one week before the Feast of Christ the King. The 2020 World Day of the Poor will take place on November 15.
“Each year, on the World Day of the Poor, I reiterate this basic truth in the life of the Church, for the poor are and always will be with us to help us welcome Christ’s presence into our daily lives,” the pope said.
“The ‘end’ of all our actions can only be love. This is the ultimate goal of our journey, and nothing should distract us from it.”
Terrassa, Spain, Mar 31, 2022 / 13:36 pm (CNA).
The Saint Joseph Youth charitable association has invited the faithful to join a procession and Mass on May 1, the feast of Saint Joseph the Worker, to honor and ask for … […]
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Excusez-moi if I decline to read beyond the headline. I know enough.
Excusez-moi if I decline to read beyond the headline. I know enough.
Happy Birthday, Jorge.