Pope Francis

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Pope Francis: Governments must act urgently against child pornography

November 12, 2021 Catholic News Agency 0
Pope Francis greets pilgrims in St. Peter’s Square after the Wednesday general audience, June 1, 2016. / Daniel Ibáñez/CNA.

Vatican City, Nov 12, 2021 / 13:00 pm (CNA).

Pope Francis has called on governments to take urgent action against the production of child pornography in an interview with the French magazine Paris Match.

“I believe that governments should act against this delinquency as soon as possible. The groups responsible behave like mafias who hide and defend themselves,” the pope said.

“Their victims are children and minors who are used for filming; so many people, so many young people, sometimes even minors, watch these things.”

The publication of the pope’s condemnation of pornography on Nov. 11 came days after a Catholic priest in the Diocese of Cleveland, Ohio, was sentenced to life in prison on convictions of sex trafficking of youths under 18, child pornography, and sexual exploitation of children.

In the interview with the French publication, the pope also responded to a landmark report published last month which estimated that hundreds of thousands of children were abused in the Catholic Church in France over the past 70 years.

Pope Francis underlined his sense of “shame” in response to the report — a word he also used when he spoke the day after its publication at a general audience.

“To the victims, I wish to express my sadness and my pain for the traumas they have endured and my shame, our shame, my shame that for so long the Church has been incapable of putting this at the center of its concerns, assuring them of my prayers,” he said Oct. 6.

The pope said that when speaking of this shame, he recalled “the Prophet’s words, ‘To Thee, O Lord, be the glory, to me be the shame.’”

Pope Francis has repeatedly called this year for the legal protection of human dignity online.

In an audience with the International Catholic Legislators Network, the pope urged the use of public policy to combat child pornography, data breaches, and cyber attacks.

“In our age particularly, one of the greatest challenges confronting us is the administration of technology for the common good,” the pope said on Aug. 27.

“By means of policies and regulations, lawmakers can protect human dignity from whatever may threaten it. I think, for example, of the scourge of child pornography, the misuse of personal data, attacks on critical infrastructures such as hospitals, and the spread of false information on social media and so on,” he said.

The full interview with the pope will be published in a book in French, “Pourquoi eux: Ils ont fait notre époque” (“Why them: They made our epoch”), by Caroline Pigozzi on Nov. 18.

When asked in the interview about his health after the pope’s colon surgery last July, Francis responded: “I am doing well. I lead a normal life and can work at the same pace as before.”

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Pope Francis fields Vatican soccer team in friendly match against Roma minority

November 11, 2021 Catholic News Agency 0
Pope Francis holds a soccer ball in St. Peter’s Square during the Wednesday general audience on Aug. 26, 2015. L’Osservatore Romano. / null

Vatican City, Nov 11, 2021 / 09:00 am (CNA).

Pope Francis will field a soccer team from the Vatican in a friendly match against a team of Roma people later this month.

The soccer match, which is intended to counter racism and discrimination, will be played on Nov. 21, in the town of Formello, 45 minutes north of Italy’s capital.

The match will also raise funds for a Roma inclusion project organized by the Diocese of Rome.

The pope’s team has been named “Fratelli Tutti,” after his 2020 encyclical, and includes members of the Swiss Guard, Vatican employees and their children, priests working in the Roman Curia, three young immigrants, and a young man with Down syndrome.

The team of the Roma (or Romani) minority has been assembled by the World Roma Organization, which has its headquarters in Zagreb, Croatia, and runs inclusive sporting events with special attention to minorities and people with disabilities.

The day before the match, Nov. 20, Pope Francis will meet both teams at the Vatican.

According to recent estimates by police, just over 4,000 Romani people live in Italy’s capital city, in both authorized and illegal camps. This is a 35-40% decrease from 2017, the police said, adding that this shows that attempts to integrate the ethnic minority into wider Italian society are working.

The Nov. 21 soccer match, organized by the Pontifical Council for Culture, is an initiative of Pope Francis, who has often emphasized the benefits of sports for enriching people’s lives.

In a Feb. 19 meeting with an Italian soccer team, the pope said that “sports, and also soccer, are a path of life, of maturity, and of holiness.”

Pope Francis also met with impoverished Roma people when he visited a ghetto during his trip to Slovakia in September.

During the Sept. 14 meeting, he told the Roma people that the Catholic Church is their home and they should never “worry about whether you will be at home there.”

“Nobody ought ever to keep you or anyone else away from the Church,” the pope emphasized.

The gathering took place in the Luník IX district of the Slovakian city of Košice, where an estimated 7,500 Roma people live in buildings built to hold just 2,500.

In his address, Pope Francis said: “Dear brothers and sisters, all too often you have been the object of prejudice and harsh judgments, discriminatory stereotypes, defamatory words and gestures. As a result, we are all poorer, poorer in humanity.”

“Restoring dignity means passing from prejudice to dialogue, from introspection to integration,” he continued, explaining that this can be carried out through concern, pastoral care, patience, and concrete efforts.”

“All these things will bear fruit,” he underlined. “Not immediately, but in due time those fruits will be seen.”

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