Pope Francis: Pray for a ‘very ill’ Benedict XVI

Vatican City, Dec 9, 2018 / 06:46 am (CNA).- Advent is a time of waiting and expectation, Pope Francis said Sunday, but this season also requires a “journey of conversion.”

“To prepare the way for the Lord who comes, it is necessary … […]

Pope Francis during the weekly general audience at St. Peter’s Square in the Vatican, Sept. 7, 2022. / Daniel Ibáñez / CNA

Rome Newsroom, Sep 7, 2022 / 04:24 am (CNA).

God can speak to us in the unexpected moments of our lives if we learn to listen well to what he is telling us in our hearts, Pope Francis said on Wednesday.

“I will give you a piece of advice: beware of the unexpected,” the pope said Sept. 7 at his weekly public audience.

“Is it life speaking to you, is it the Lord speaking to you, or is it the devil? Someone,” he continued. “But there is something to discern, how I react when faced with the unexpected.”

Francis’ general audience was again in St. Peter’s Square Wednesday after it was held inside the Vatican’s Paul VI auditorium in August to avoid the worst of the summer heat.

The pope opened and closed his encounter with the public by riding the popemobile around the square. The audience marked his second week of catechesis on the theme of “Discernment.”

As part of discernment, the pope encouraged people to reflect on their reactions to even small, unexpected circumstances, such as the surprise arrival of one’s mother-in-law.

“I was quiet at home and ‘Boom!’ — my mother-in-law arrives; and how do you react to your mother-in-law? Is it love or something else inside? You must discern,” he said. “I was working well in the office, and a companion comes along to tell me he needs money: how do you react? See what happens when we experience things we were not expecting, and there we can learn to know our heart as it moves.”

Pope Francis said knowing how to really listen to your heart is an important part of discernment in making a judgment or decision about something.

“We listen to the television, the radio, the mobile phone; we are experts at listening, but I ask you: do you know how to listen to your heart?” he asked. “Do you stop to ask: ‘But how is my heart? Is it satisfied, is it sad, is it searching for something?’ To make good decisions, you need to listen to your heart.”

To illustrate his point, the pope recalled the story of the conversion of Saint Ignatius of Loyola, a soldier enamored with stories of knights and chivalry who was forced to confront his future happiness after he was badly injured in battle.

Bored while his leg was healing, Ignatius read stories of the saints and the life of Jesus when other books were not available to him.

Francis quoted from Ignatius’ autobiography, in which the future saint wrote about himself: “‘When he thought of worldly things’ — and of chivalrous things, one understands — ‘it gave him great pleasure, but afterward he found himself dry and sad. But when he thought of journeying to Jerusalem, and of living only on herbs and practicing austerities, he found pleasure not only while thinking of them, but also when he had ceased.’”

“In this experience we note two aspects, above all,” the pope said. “The first is time: that is, the thoughts of the world are attractive at the beginning, but then they lose their luster and leave emptiness and discontent; they leave you that way, empty. Thoughts of God, on the contrary, rouse first a certain resistance — ‘But I’m not going to read this boring thing about saints’ — but when they are welcomed, they bring an unknown peace that lasts for a long time.”

He emphasized that “discernment is not a sort of oracle or fatalism, or something from a laboratory, like casting one’s lot on two possibilities.”

Francis also said that some of life’s big questions often arise after “we have already traveled a stretch of the road in life.”

Sometimes, we can get stuck on one idea and end up disappointed, he pointed out, adding that doing something good, such as a work of charity, can get us out of that rut by bringing us joy and happiness, feelings which can lead to thoughts of God.

The pope also shared a piece of wisdom from Saint Ignatius: to read the lives of the saints.

“Because they show the style of God in the life of people not very different to us, because the saints were made of flesh and blood like us, in a narrative, comprehensible way. Their actions speak to ours, and they help us to understand their meaning,” he said.

Sometimes, he added, “there is an apparent randomness in the events of life: everything seems to arise from a banal mishap — there were no books about knights, only lives of saints. A mishap that nonetheless holds a possible turning point.”

“God works through unplannable events, and also through mishaps,” he said. “Mishap: What is God saying to you? What is life telling you there?”

At the end of his general audience, Pope Francis expressed his closeness to all mothers, and “in a special way, to those mothers who have children who suffer: those who are sick, those who are marginalized, those who are imprisoned.”

“A special prayer goes to the mothers of young detainees: let hope never be lacking. Unfortunately, in prisons there are many people who take their own life, at times also young people. A mother’s love can save them from this danger. May Our Lady console all mothers distressed by the suffering of their children,” he said.

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Washington, D.C. Newsroom, Jun 25, 2020 / 02:10 pm (CNA).- Catholic columnist Ross Douthat on Wednesday said that the eventual next conclave could produce a leader in the mould of St. John Paul II, and that expectations of a more retiring successor to the charismatic leadership of Francis may shift after months of global upheaval.

“I think the goal of the cardinals should be to find someone who embodies what you might call ‘dynamic orthodoxy’–which is to say what I think is at its best is what Pope John Paul II was able to embody,” Douthat said.

Douthat, who writes for the New York Times, made the remarks while participating in a panel discussion on the publication of “The Next Pope,” a forthcoming book by National Catholic Register reporter Edward Pentin. In addition to Douthat and Pentin, also at the discussion were Crux editor John Allen and historian Roberto de Mattei. The discussion was moderated by journalist Diane Montagna. 

The Next Pope sketches profiles of nineteen cardinals who, according to Pentin, could be contenders to succeed Pope Francis. While there was disagreement among the panelists about the relative viability of the candidates proposed in the book, Douthat said that there is a need to elect someone who “simultaneously doesn’t leave people in serious doubt about what the Church is teaching and what it believes, but also seems to be engaged with where late modernity is going, engaged with where the world is going.”

Douthat said that while the “conventional wisdom” is that some cardinals could favor a less “charismatic leader” after Pope Francis, recent months may have shifted that perception. 

“I think the conventional wisdom is that the Francis pontificate has been such an era of sort of papal activity, intense media coverage of the papacy, and sort of particular pushes for reform or change driven by the Holy Father himself, that there may be a desire among the cardinal electors in the next conclave to sort of take the temperature down a bit,” said Douthat, suggesting that this view would suggest a “more of a retiring figure, or sort of a functional figure.”

But, he said, the coronavirus and other recent global events may have altered that calculus.

“We’ve also had this moment in the Western world, and really the whole world, over the last few months with the coronavirus that’s going to have tremendous repercussions, I think, for the Church going forward. It’s going to probably, at least temporarily, accelerate the decline of the institutional Church in the West and probably therefore accelerate some of the shifts in Catholic power and influence around the world,” he said.

Douthat said that tensions inside the Church over pushes for married clergy and other reforms had largely cooled in recent months.

“In some ways it’s a calmer moment in the Church and a more fraught moment in the world than it was two years ago, and that might arguably push the cardinal electors to look anew for dynamism in certain ways and worry less about the dangers of, you know, too much dynamism, which might have been the big worry a couple of years ago,” he said.

Douthat characterized the next pope as a man willing to do “an impossible job” and model and ability to balance clarity of teaching with an ability “to be engaged with where late modernity is going, engaged with where the developing world is going and not just sort of building a bunker around the Church.”

“I think it’s hard to identify a singular figure who fits that bill,” he said.

Pentin said that the papacy had become more reflective of the Church as a global reality and the role now requires a pope “to be pretty media savvy.” 

Pentin said that “the whole globalized setting” of the Church had become much more pronounced in recent decades and was increasingly reflected in the college of cardinals and would be so in the man elected as pope. “The Church, it’s always been international but that’s the greater emphasis now, and there has to be that greater awareness of the realities of the Church in every part of the world.”

“It can’t be Eurocentric anymore,” he said.

Pentin offered the final observation that predicting who the next pope would be was likely an impossible exercise. Noting that his book profiled 19 likely candidates, he said he was expecting a surprise.

“I’ve been saying that it’s 19 [candidates] but I expect the 20th will be the one that’s picked.” 

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