The president of Lebanon said on Tuesday that Pope Francis will visit the Middle Eastern country in June, as long as a date and program are coordinated by the authorities of Lebanon and the Vatican.
Writing on Twitter on April 5, President Michel Aoun said he was informed of the visit by the papal nuncio to Lebanon.
الرئيس عون تبلغ من السفير البابوي ان البابا فرنسيس سيزور لبنان في حزيران المقبل على ان يحدد موعد الزيارة وبرنامجها بالتنسيق بين لبنان والكرسي الرسولي
“The Lebanese are awaiting the visit of Pope Francis to express their gratitude for His Holiness’ interest in Lebanon and to thank him for the initiatives he took towards their country and the prayers he offered to establish peace and stability in it,” Aoun, a Maronite Catholic, wrote in another post.
Local media reported that a papal visit to Lebanon is expected on June 12.
Pope Francis has expressed his desire to travel to the Middle Eastern country on several occasions.
During an in-flight press conference returning from Malta on April 3, Pope Francis said he would like to meet with Patriarch Kirill of Moscow and that the Middle East was being considered as the location for the encounter.
Plans for a second meeting between Pope Francis and the leader of the Russian Orthodox Church in June or July 2022 have been underway for several months.
Pope Francis received Aoun at the Vatican on March 21, as Lebanon continues to reel from multiple crises.
In recent years, Lebanon has grappled with an influx of refugees from the war in Syria, a devastating financial crisis, a lack of stable governance, and the impact of COVID-19.
The Russian invasion of Ukraine is also threatening to trigger a food crisis in Lebanon, which depends on wheat imports from the East European nation.
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Ukraine’s Minister of Foreign Affairs, Dmytro Kuleba, speaking to journalists, Dec. 9, 2022 / Marcin Mazur
Kyiv, Ukraine, Dec 10, 2022 / 00:00 am (CNA).
Every effort for peace in Ukraine coming from Pope Francis and the Holy See is welcome, Ukraine’s Foreign Minister said Friday, whether it is helping to mediate for the exchange of prisoners or in assisting migrants and refugees.
However, the time for broad negotiations after the Russian aggression has not come yet, Dmytro Kuleba told a small delegation of journalists visiting Ukraine on Dec. 9 that his country has requirements for any such mediation to eventually take place.
The interview lasted about 40 minutes, and the questions dealt with Holy See-Ukraine relations, Holy See efforts for peace, and how Ukraine would welcome this effort.
Though appreciating Pope Francis’ constant mention of the Ukrainian situation and expressing an open invitation to the pope to visit the country, Kuleba also told CNA that some of the pope’s words have been “painful” for Ukrainians.
Pope Francis has often stressed that the Holy See is available to facilitate broad negotiations. Kuleba told journalists that “the protocolar response would be that a negotiation would be more than welcome,” but “the sad truth is that the time for this broad mediation hasn’t come yet and the reason for that is President [Vladimir] Putin.”
If you want peace, Kuleba said, “you do not send 100 missiles every week to destroy infrastructure. You do not send one wave of your soldiers after another into the Donbas. You don’t do all these things when you seek a peaceful solution.”
And so, he concluded, “the day for a big mediation will come, but we are not there yet, to our deepest regret.”
Kuleba told CNA that mediation should have some requirements, as any other commitment the Holy See would undertake. He said he also tackled this issue in the last meeting with the Vatican’s Secretary for Relations with States, Archbishop Paul Richard Gallagher.
Gallagher, whose role is equivalent to that of a foreign minister, spoke with his Ukrainian counterpart on Dec. 2 in Lodz, during the OSCE Ministerial Council.
I met with Secretary for Relations with States of the Holy See Mons. Paul R. Gallagher. I briefed Archbishop on Ukraine’s efforts to alleviate the global food crisis through our #GrainFromUkraine program and details of President @ZelenskyyUa’s Peace formula. pic.twitter.com/SNAc3iGbq4
Kuleba said he told Gallagher that the Vatican could choose which aspect to help with.
The Vatican might help with negotiating an exchange of prisoners, for instance, or the “return of thousands of kids kidnapped from Russia,” or also participating “in the implementation of the peace formula.”
However, Kuleba added that “picking an issue is the first step, while the second step is how you address the issue,” adding that “mistakes” needed to be avoided.
Among such “mistakes,” according to Kuleba, are the notion of a brotherhood between Ukrainian, Russian, and Belarusian people.
“We are not brothers and if you insist on the concept you are misled,” the Ukrainian minister told journalists since Russians “came to Kyiv to rape, to violate all the laws of God on the land of Ukraine.”
Kuleba also said hat one cannot be “neutral in public comments” and should “always remember that Russia is the aggressor and Ukraine is the victim of the aggression.”
Any attempt at making both sides somehow evenly responsible created “a completely wrong message,” the minister warned.
In his Oct. 2 Angelus, Pope Francis appealed to Russia’s President Vladmir Putin to stop the war, and to Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy to be seriously open to the pope’s proposal.
Kuleba explained why he was somewhat critical of such appeals by Pope Francis: While saying President Putin should stop the war made “perfect sense,” calling on President Zelenskyy to be open to serious peace proposals made it sound like Zelenskyy was “not open to peace.”
In other words, Kuleba added, the pope’s words wrongly “create the impression that both sides are guilty: one is guilty because of the attack, and the other is guilty because [it is] not open to peace proposals.”
Ukraine’s Foreign minister called on journalists to be pay attention when writing about a “serious peace proposal” being “based on the territorial integrity of Ukraine”, including Crimea.
“Every time you write or read or say that Ukraine insists on the restoration of Crimea, you send a message that Crimea is a special case. But for us and international law, there is no difference between [the towns of] Sebastopol and Kherson, Yalta and Donetsk.”
Speaking about the role religion can play in helping to reconstruct the country, the Ukrainian foreign minister said that the “Russian aggression caused big fractures” among religions. He also pointed to differences in viewpoints between Muslims in Russia and in Ukraine, and Russian and Ukrainian Jews.
Kuleba said that the “first and foremost expectation from confessions is to console people, to help them spiritually.” Most people turned to God “only in times of hardship,” he added.
“When everything is fine, you forget about God. Now, there is a higher demand for spiritual help, to be consoled by the Church.”
Kuleba also spoke to CNA about sanctions imposed on Dec.1 against some Orthodox clerics and moves to legislate against Russian influence through religious means.
The Ukrainian government will draw up a law banning churches affiliated with Russia under moves described by President Volodymyr Zelenskiy as necessary to prevent Moscow being able to “weaken Ukraine from within,” according to Reuters.
Ukraine’s National Security and Defence Council told the government to draft the law following a series of raids on parishes that Kyiv said might be taking orders from Moscow.
Such moves, Kuleba told CNA, were motivated by “unacceptable” behavior by some clerics, such as the blessing of Russian soldiers for success on the battlefield.
Kuleba, however, praised the role of the churches, especially the presence of chaplains on the front.
Speaking about Pope Francis’ position on the Ukrainian issue, Kuleba said that he saw improvements.
“The truth,” he said, “is that this war shattered many foundations of the global political order.”
A big disappointment, he added, was what Pope Francis had said about NATO “barking” at the gates of Russia.
Kuleba stressed that he understood how and why the pope used the expression, but he noted that this argument was forged in Russia, so even mentioning served to legitimize it.
While it was “painful that the pope said something like that, I have to commend the pope for understanding”, Kuleba added, saying he was grateful to the pontiff for not sticking to “concepts that do not work and do not meet the reality check.”
Ukraine’s foreign minister said he was moved by the public prayer of Pope Francis for Ukraine on Dec. 8 in Rome. “[The] pope’s compassion means a lot to us and goes directly to the heart of Ukrainians,” Kuleba said.
He added that “obviously, we are waiting for his visit. He has many followers in Ukraine”, not only from the Roman Catholic and Greek Catholic communities: “The visit of the pope will be welcomed by a bigger part of Ukrainian society. So we are looking forward to welcoming him.”
Vancouver Archbishop J. Michael Miller is presented with a gift at the Sacred Covenant signing on Sunday, March 31, 2024. / Credit: Archdiocese of Vancouver
CNA Staff, Apr 2, 2024 / 15:45 pm (CNA).
The Archdiocese of Vancouver on Easter Sunday … […]
Pope Francis speaks at the general audience in St. Peter’s Square on May 4, 2022. / Daniel Ibanez/CNA
Vatican City, May 4, 2022 / 07:35 am (CNA).
Pope Francis said on Wednesday that having faith is not something only “for old people,” but an essential element of life.
“In many trends in our society and culture, the practice of faith suffers from a negative portrayal, sometimes in the form of cultural irony, sometimes with covert marginalization,” Pope Francis said at his general audience on May 4.
Speaking in St. Peter’s Square, the pope said that having faith is, instead, something to be proud of because “it has changed our lives, it has purified our minds, it has taught us the worship of God and the love of our neighbor.”
“The practice of faith is not the symbol of our weakness, but rather the sign of its strength,” he said.
The pope spoke at the general audience about the witness that the elderly can offer to younger generations by remaining faithful until the end, like the biblical figure of Eleazar, whose story is described in the Second Book of Maccabees.
Pope Francis encouraged the elderly to be like Eleazar in showing young people a consistent witness to the faith.
“We will show, in all humility and firmness, precisely in our old age, that believing is not something ‘for old people.’ No. It’s a matter of life,” he said at live-streamed audience.
The pope compared the tendency in modern society for people to claim to “have an interior spirituality,” and then do whatever they please, to “the first heresy of the Gnostics.”
The Gnostic heresy, named for the Greek word “gnosis,” meaning “knowledge,” exaggerated the importance of knowledge over faith and considered the body and matter to be evil. The result was a denial of the Incarnation of Christ and a focus more on thinking rather than living a good Christian life.
Pope Francis said: “The practice of faith for these Gnostics, who were already around at the time of Jesus, is regarded as a useless and even harmful external, as an antiquated residue, as a disguised superstition. In short, something for old men.”
“The pressure that this indiscriminate criticism exerts on the younger generations is strong,” he added.
The pope said that the “seductive trap” of Gnosticism is the proposal that “that faith is a spirituality, not a practice.”
“Faithfulness and the honor of faith, according to this heresy, have nothing to do with the behaviors of life, the institutions of the community, the symbols of the body. Nothing to do with it,” he said.
Pope Francis highlighted the commendable example of Eleazar, who “lived the coherence of his faith for a whole lifetime.”
He said: “The biblical story … tells of the episode of the Jews being forced by a king’s decree to eat meat sacrificed to idols. When it’s the turn of Eleazar, an elderly man highly respected by everyone, in his 90s … the king’s officials advised him to resort to a pretense, that is, to pretend to eat the meat without actually doing so. Hypocrisy … These people tell him, ‘Be a little bit of a hypocrite, no one will notice.’”
“It is a little thing, but Eleazar’s calm and firm response is based on an argument that strikes us. The central point is this: dishonoring the faith in old age, in order to gain a handful of days, cannot be compared with the legacy it must leave to the young, for entire generations to come,” the pope said.
Pope Francis remained seated throughout the general audience. He required assistance as he slowly hobbled up a ramp to reach his chair in St. Peter’s Square. The pope is reportedly receiving therapeutic injections for his knee injury this week.
In his greetings to pilgrims from different parts of the world, the pope encouraged people to pray the rosary every day during the month of May. He encouraged Polish pilgrims, in particular, to “entrust the fate of your homeland and peace in Europe to the Holy Virgin.”
Addressing French-speaking pilgrims, he greeted members of La Voie romaine (the Roman Way), an association supporting a group of mothers of priests walking from Paris to Rome to ask the pope to lift restrictions on the Traditional Latin Mass.
The mothers left the French capital on March 6 and arrived in Rome on April 30. They were expected to meet the pope at the end of the general audience, presenting him with thousands of messages from Catholics who say they were adversely affected by the motu proprioTraditionis custodes.
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