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Pope Francis: ‘It is good to adore in silence before the Most Blessed Sacrament’

October 22, 2022 Catholic News Agency 6
Eucharistic adoration following Pope Francis’ Corpus Christi Mass on June 14, 2020. / Vatican Media.

Vatican City, Oct 22, 2022 / 08:45 am (CNA).

It is good to “waste time adoring” Christ present in the Holy Eucharist, Pope Francis said on Saturday.

“I urge you to especially devote yourselves to the prayer of adoration — this is important,” he told a group of religious sisters at the Vatican Oct. 22.

“It is good to adore in silence before the Most Blessed Sacrament,” he said, “to be in the consoling presence of Jesus and there to draw the apostolic impetus to be instruments of goodness, tenderness and welcome in the community, the Church, and the world.”

Francis said the world today has lost the sense of what it means to engage in the form of prayer known as adoration or worship; “to waste time adoring.”

“This prayer is not often done: I ask you to do it. Adore, immerse yourself in divine love and give it with full hands to those you meet on your path,” he urged.

Pope Francis met Saturday religious women belonging to two communities: The Comboni Missionary Sisters and the Order of the Most Holy Savior, also known as the Bridgettines.

He said the sisters’ mission of hospitality is improved with time spent contemplating Christ.

“Welcoming, one of the characteristic aspects of your mission, will be more fruitful to the extent in which the prayer of contemplation will make you come out of yourself and focus your life on Jesus Christ, letting him do things in you, letting him act in you,” he said.

“This inner movement,” Francis added, “will make possible a service to others that is not philanthropy or welfarism, but openness to the other, closeness, sharing; in a word: charity.”

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Vatican invites Protestant, Orthodox theologians to debate Petrine primacy at St. Peter’s

October 20, 2022 Catholic News Agency 3
Sculpture of St. Peter outside of St. Peter’s Basilica at the Vatican / Credit: Unsplash

Vatican City, Oct 20, 2022 / 09:05 am (CNA).

The Vatican will host a discussion inside St. Peter’s Basilica next month between a Catholic, a Protestant, and an Orthodox theologian on the primacy of Peter.

Cardinal Gianfranco Ravasi, the president emeritus of the Pontifical Council for Culture, announced Oct. 20 that the Petrine primacy dialogue will take place in the basilica on Nov. 22 with the theme “On this rock, I will build my Church.”

The theological discussion is part of a new lecture series on the apostle Peter in history, art, and culture that will take place in the basilica starting Oct. 25 and running through March 2023.

The Catholic Church holds that Jesus gave St. Peter a special place or primacy among the apostles, citing the Gospel of Matthew 16:18–19.

The primacy of the bishop of Rome, as a successor of Peter, is one of the major issues of disagreement that has kept Orthodox Christians apart from the Catholic Church. Last year, Pope Francis told Orthodox theologians that it is his “conviction that in a synodal Church, greater light can be shed on the exercise of the Petrine primacy.”

At a Vatican press conference, Ravasi underlined that the new lecture series is not only for believers who want to find the reason for the hope that is in them but also aims to reach non-Catholics as well.

The cardinal said that Gian Lorenzo Bernini, the chief architect of St. Peter’s Basilica, envisioned the basilica’s colonnade as “two arms that could embrace not only Catholics from all over the world but also those who were heretics or of other faiths.”

Ravasi founded the Courtyard of the Gentiles foundation within the Vatican Dicastery for Culture and Education to promote dialogue between believers and nonbelievers through events, debates, and research.

Courtyard of the Gentiles is co-hosting the new lecture series along with the Fratelli Tutti Foundation, founded by Pope Francis in December 2021.

Ravasi will be the featured speaker at the first lecture in the basilica on Oct. 25 on the topic of St. Peter’s life and martyrdom, which will feature a string quartet performance of Mozart’s Ave Verum Corpus and Handel’s Cantate Domino.

The Vatican has not released the names of the theologians who will be speaking at the Petrine primacy discussion in November in the basilica, whose foundation is built on the tomb of St. Peter.

The two lectures scheduled for 2023 will focus on a more “cultural dimension” of the apostle Peter, Ravasi said. A lecture on Jan. 17 will analyze the figure of St. Peter in history and culture and a March 7 event titled “Quo vadis” will look at how Peter has been portrayed in art, literature, music, and film.

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Vatican to return three pre-Columbian mummies to Peru 

October 19, 2022 Catholic News Agency 1
Pope Francis meets with Cesar Landa, Peru’s foreign minister, at the Vatican, Oct. 17, 2022. / Vatican Media

Denver Newsroom, Oct 19, 2022 / 17:00 pm (CNA).

The Vatican on Monday returned three pre-Columbian mummies to Peru, which had been loaned for the 1925 Universal Vatican Exposition and have since been kept in its Anima Mundi Ethnological Museum.

The repatriation of the remains was made official through the signing of an agreement Oct. 17 by the president of the Governorate of Vatican City State, Cardinal Fernando Vergéz, and the minister of foreign affairs of Peru, César Landa.

“Thanks to the good disposition of the Vatican and Pope Francis, it has been possible to carry out the return, as is appropriate. I came to sign that document. In the coming weeks they will arrive in Lima,” the Peruvian foreign minister told the local press.

According to Vatican News, the Vatican Museums will study the skeletal remains to determine their period of origin. 

The mummies were found at an altitude of 9,800 feet in the Peruvian Andes.

“The feeling shared with Pope Francis is that these mummies, more than objects, are human beings. Human remains that must be buried with dignity in the place where they come from, that is, in Peru,”Landa said.

At the Vatican, the Peruvian foreign minister met with Pope Francis and then with Secretary of State of the Holy See Cardinal Pietro Parolin and with Cardinal Paul Richard Gallagher, the secretary for relations with states.

The Anima Mundi Ethnological Museum has more than 80,000 objects and works of art.

According to the museum’s website, the collection holds “thousands of prehistoric artifacts from all over the world and dating from over two million years ago, to the gifts given to the current pontiff; from evidence of the great Asian spiritual traditions, to those of the pre-Columbian and Islamic civilizations; from the work of African populations to that of the inhabitants of Oceania and Australia, and the indigenous peoples of America.”

This story was first published by ACI Prensa, CNA’s Spanish-language news partner. It has been translated and adapted by CNA.

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