Vatican City, Oct 28, 2019 / 12:15 pm (CNA).- Leaders of Christianity, Judaism, and Islam presented a signed declaration to Pope Francis Monday expressing their total opposition to euthanasia and any form of physician-assisted suicide, as well as voici… […]
Vatican City, Oct 28, 2019 / 06:15 am (CNA).- Pope Francis declared Monday that the Vatican Secret Archive be changed to the title of Vatican Apostolic Archive, to avoid the negative associations which accompany modern interpretations of the word &ldqu… […]
Vatican City, Oct 27, 2019 / 12:00 pm (CNA).- Pope Francis Sunday encouraged protesters in Lebanon who have taken to the streets to challenge government corruption and mismanagement of finances. The pope’s message coincided with a series of protests taking place in countries around the world.
“I address a special thought to the beloved Lebanese people, in particular to the young people, who in recent days have made their cry heard in the face of challenges and the social and economic problems of the country,” Pope Francis said in his Angelus address Oct. 27.
Protests in Lebanon began Oct. 17 after the government announced a new tax on internet-based calls made over WhatsApp. Lebanon has high levels of public debt and low employment.
The peaceful protestors’ chants include “Revolution! Revolution!” and “All of them means all of them!” calling for the removal of all corrupt government officials.
Hezbollah supporters have attacked and injured the nonsectarian protestors, according to local Lebanese media, causing government riot police to intervene on Oct. 24 and 25.
“I urge everyone to seek the right solutions in the way of dialogue,” Pope Francis said.
“I pray, Virgin Mary, Queen of Lebanon, so that, with the support of the international community, that country will continue to be a space of peaceful coexistence and respect for the dignity and freedom of every person, for the benefit of the entire Middle East Region,” he said.
Protests also took place this week in Hong Kong, Iraq, Chile, Egypt, Ethiopia, Zimbabwe, and India.
Pope Francis spoke out about the protests in Lebanon 11 days after they began.
In Hong Kong, pro-democracy and free speech demonstrations have now entered their seventh month, drawing hundreds of thousands of people, and support from the local Catholic community, though the pope has yet to comment on the situation there.
At least 63 people have been killed in Iraq in the past two days of anti-government protests, according to the Iraq High Commission for Human Rights. In the first wave of protests earlier in October more than 150 people protesting corruption and unemployment died in protests.
In Chile, officials said at least 18 people have died as protests against the country’s increasing cost of living and economic inequality turned violent, causing the Chilean president to declare a state of emergency on Oct. 19.
Protests across Ethiopia killed 16 people this week. In Egypt, more than 4,300 people have been arrested by government authorities since protests calling for the removal of President Abdel Fattah Al Sisi began in September.
On Sunday, Pope Francis called for Catholics to continue to pray the rosary for peace, recalling that October is the month of the rosary and an extraordinary missionary month for the Church.
“I renew the invitation to pray the Rosary for the mission of the Church today, especially for missionaries who encounter great difficulties,” Pope Francis said.
The pope expressed his gratitude for the conclusion of the Oct. 6-27 Synod of Bishops on the Pan-Amazonian region, and said the Church must not remain indifferent to the difficulties in the region.
“The voices of the poor, together with those of many others inside and outside the synod assembly – pastors, young people, scientists – urge us not to remain indifferent,” he said.
“The cry of the poor, together with that of the earth, came to us from the Amazon. After these three weeks we can’t pretend not to have heard it,” Pope Francis said.
Vatican City, Oct 27, 2019 / 04:55 am (CNA).- Pope Francis denounced exploitation and “predatory models of development” that plunder the poor and wound “sister earth” in the Amazon Synod closing Mass Sunday.
“In thi… […]
Vatican City, Oct 26, 2019 / 03:45 pm (CNA).- The Amazon synod final document, published Saturday, laid out the need to define “ecological sins” while calling the Church to walk new paths of “integral conversion.”
“We propose to define ecological sins of commission or omission against God, one’s neighbor, the community and the environment,” paragraph 82 of the final document states. “They are sins against future generations and are manifest in acts and habits of pollution and destruction of the harmony of the environment.”
“No believer, no Catholic can live their life of faith without listening to the voice of the earth,” Bishop David Martínez de Aguirre Guinea, apostolic vicar of Puerto Maldonado, Peru explained at a press conference to present the final document Oct. 26.
“If we are going to face the problem, then we have to change,” Cardinal Michael Czerny, special secretary for the synod, added.
Czerny, who also serves as under-secretary of the Migrants and Refugees Section of the Dicastery for Promoting Integral Human Development, warned that the “good news” will not necessarily reach people in the Amazon “if we continue doing what we have been doing.”
The final document for the Synod of Bishops on the Pan-Amazon region calls for a new four-fold expression of “integral conversion” for the Church in the Amazon: pastoral, cultural, synodal, and ecological. These are framed in terms of “new paths of conversion” in the chapter titles for each of the subjects.
“New paths” are a way of saying “change,” Czerny said. “Without conversions, we are repeating what we have done before …but there is no real change.”
“We have brought our tradition into play so that we can find a way forward,” he said. For the pope, the most important necessary change is “pastoral change.”
The 33-page document, was approved article by article by a two-thirds majority vote on Oct. 26. It is the result of a three-week meeting in Rome during which the synod’s 181 voting members, together with representatives from indigenous communities, religious orders, lay groups and charities, discussed a range of issues concerning the region, spread across nine countries.
In ordinary sessions of the Synod of Bishops, delegates are elected by the world’s bishops conferences. In the special session for the pan-Amazonian region, all attendees were by special invitation.
The document was drafted by a committee of experts and special secretaries, assisted by a drafting committee elected from among the synod fathers. The draft text was presented to the assembly on Friday night, and various amendments were proposed and debated during the approval process.
The final synodal document has no teaching or binding authority of its own.
Pope Francis said in his closing remarks in the synod hall on Saturday that he will write a post-synodal exhortation, to hopefully be published before the end of the year.
Ecological Conversion
In addition to the synod document’s proposal to change universal Church discipline on clerical celibacy and create new roles for women, it also contains strong exhortations on environmental issues and the rights of indigenous peoples.
On the topic of integral ecology and the environment, the document references the threat of exploitation of the Amazon and its peoples.
It also criticizes as “scandalous” the criminalization of Amazonian ethnic communities whose rights are threatened, it says, by public policies favoring the exploitation of natural resources.
These projects “exert pressure on ancestral indigenous territories” and are accompanied by “widespread impunity throughout regarding human rights violations.”
The document notes the Church’s teaching on the inviolability of the human person, which is created in the image and likeness of God.
The synod fathers propose giving support to “fair” sustainable development initiatives, though it does not name specific initiatives.
“The Amazon is in the hands of us all, but it depends mainly on immediately abandoning the current model that is destroying the forest, not bringing well-being and endangering this immense natural treasure and its guardians,” the report states.
It goes on to say it is “incumbent” on the Church to help protect the Amazon by being an “ally” of the local communities, “who know how to take care of the Amazon, how to love and protect it.”
The indigenous peoples are “asking the church to become their ally and the answer of the church is yes,” Czerny said.
“With the Amazon burning, many more people are realizing that things have to change. We cannot keep repeating old responses to urgent problems,” Czerny said. “The ecological crisis is so deep that if we don’t change we won’t make it.”
Czerny said that environmental scientists and other experts who audited the synod helped the bishops to understand “the planet suffering” because “they drove scientific facts home in a way that we can feel them.”
The Canadian cardinal said that people want “a plastic solution” that is not going to affect their lives and not require them to change, but he stressed that it does not exist and conversion is required.
The synod document also condemns the theft of the “traditional wisdom” of the Amazonian peoples as “biopiracy” and a “form of violence.”
“The Church chooses to defend life, the land and the native Amazon cultures,” including in the Amazon peoples’ “registration, processing and dissemination of data and information about their territories and their legal status,” it states.
The report says the Church must guard itself against “the power of neo-colonialism” and “unlearn, learn and relearn” in order to overcome any tendency toward “colonizing models.”
The synod reaffirms a “commitment to defend life seamlessly from conception to natural death and the dignity of each and every person.”
Pastoral service to the indigenous, it says, “obliges us to proclaim Jesus Christ and the Good News of the Kingdom of God.”
Pope Francis announced in his closing speech to the synod that he would create a new section in the Dicastery for the Promotion of Integral Human Development dedicated to the Church in the Amazon.
The synod final document also called for a “socio-environmental and pastoral office” to work in alliance with the Latin American church organizations REPAM, CELAM, CLAR, and other non-ecclesial actors representing indigenous peoples.
Cultural Conversion
The synod document states that “inculturation is the incarnation of the Gospel in indigenous cultures… and at the same time the introduction of these cultures into the life of the Church.”
The Amazon culture and spirituality already have a rich “indigenous theology, Amazonian face of theology and popular piety,” it says, adding that they “reject a colonial style of evangelization.”
“The evangelization that we propose today for the Amazon is the inculturated proclamation that generates processes of interculturality, processes that promote the life of the Church with an Amazon identity and face,” the report states.
Czerny said that it is very important for the Church to learn how to be “interculturally respectful.”
“Not to assume that the way I am or the way we are is definitive, is the norm, is the way it has to be … differences have to be embraced,” he said.
“The church is not an inflexible structure in which your cultures and traditions will find no place … it is the opposite,” Bishop Guinea said.
“A Church with an Amazonian face,” the document states, “needs its communities to be infused with a synodal spirit, supported by organizational structures of this dynamic, as authentic organisms of ‘communion.’”
“The Church’s research and pastoral centres, in alliance with the indigenous peoples, should study, compile and systematize the traditions of the Amazon’s ethnic groups in order to favor an educational effort that starts from their identity and culture…”
Synodal Conversion
The synod document also calls for “new paths for synodal conversion.”
Cardinal Czerny said that this process involved “an unprecedented process of listening” before the Amazon synod.
“You know that synodality is working when you find yourself voting for something that you knew before the synod that you disagreed with,” Czerny said.
When asked what was the working definition of “synodality” understood among the synod fathers, Czerny replied, “Everyone had a sense of what it meant because we were doing it. Could we explain that in words … does it matter?”
A synod is a consultative assembly, convened by the pope or a bishop, to advise on a particular topic of interest to the local, regional, or universal Church.
The Synod of Bishops for the Pan-Amazonian region will conclude Oct. 27 with a closing Mass in St. Peter’s Basilica.
Vatican City, Oct 26, 2019 / 01:10 pm (CNA).- In his closing remarks for the Amazon synod Saturday, Pope Francis urged the media not to give undue attention to aspects of the assembly’s final report addressing Church discipline while ignoring the assembly’s “diagnoses” of cultural, social, pastoral and ecological issues in the Pan-Amazonian region.
It’s “in small disciplinary things, which have their significance but that would not do the good that this synod has to do,” he said Oct. 26, “that society takes care of the diagnosis we have made in the four dimensions.”
“There is always a group of elite Christians who like to take up this kind of diagnosis as if they were universal,” he continued, “however small, or in this kind of more inter-ecclesiastical disciplinary resolutions.”
There is a danger, the pope said Oct. 26, of only looking to see “what they decided on this disciplinary issue, what they decided on another, making of the world who won this game, lost this…”
“No, we all win with the diagnoses we made and as far as we arrive in the pastoral and inter-ecclesiastical issues, but don’t get locked in on that.”
“Thinking today about these Catholic and Christian elites sometimes, but especially Catholics who want to go to the little things and forget the big things, I remembered a phrase from Péguy and went to look for it, I try to translate it well, I think it can help when describing these groups that want the little thing and forget about the thing: ‘Because they don’t have the courage to be with the world, they believe they are with God. Because they don’t have the courage to compromise on man’s options, on man’s life options, they believe they are fighting for God. Because they don’t love anyone, they believe they love God,’” said the Holy Father.
The Vatican synod hall responded to the pope’s remark with long applause.
Pope Francis spoke inside the synod hall at the end of the final session of the Synod of Bishops on the Pan-Amazonian Region, which will officially end with a closing Mass Oct. 27.
During the session, the Amazon synod’s final report was presented, and voted on paragraph by paragraph by the 185 synod members.
In his remarks, Pope Francis said, based on a request in the final report, he will re-open the Church’s study of the possibility of women deacons.
He said he will re-open his 2016 commission on the study of the possibility of having a female diaconate, possibly adding new members and having it operate within the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith.
He noted that the commission ended its work without a consensus on the topic, but he had heard the request by some on this topic and would “pick up the gauntlet.”
In May, the pope said the commission he opened in August 2016 to study the possibility of a female diaconate, with or without the sacrament of ordination, had been unable to reach a consensus, though further study would continue to take place.
In his speech, Francis noted that there were three issues which are ideas for the “next synod” and received a majority of votes, one of which is synodality.
“I do not know if that will be chosen or not, I have not yet decided, I am reflecting and thinking,” he said. “But I can certainly say that we have walked a lot and we have to walk more on this path of synodality. Thank you very must for this company.”
He said he would like to write a post-synodal exhortation on the Amazon synod “before the end of the year so that not much time passes,” adding that “it all depends on the time you have to think.”
Francis praised tradition as not a “museum of old things,” but “safeguarding the future.”
In his speech, he also praised another proposal he had received, that young priests who are studying to enter the Holy See’s diplomatic corps could first spend one year serving alongside a bishop in a mission territory.
The creation of an “Amazonian rite” of liturgy, the pope said, would fall under the competency of the Congregation for Divine Worship.
He proposed the creation of a regional bishops’ group for the Amazon and said he would ask Cardinal Peter Turkson, the head of the Dicastery for the Promotion of Integral Human Development, to open a new section on the Amazon within his Vatican department.
He said the main dimension of the synod, which includes everyone, is the proclamation of the Gospel. This is the “pastoral dimension,” he said. “But that is understood, that is assimilated, that is understood by those cultures.”
“And there was talk of how lay people, priests, permanent deacons, religious men and women have to point to that point, and they talked about what they do and to strengthen that.”
Vatican City, Oct 25, 2019 / 10:20 am (CNA).- A Brazilian bishop has called for the ordination of women to the diaconate for service in the Amazon region. The bishop said that 2009 revisions to canon law could allow for the ordination of women deacons, but a leading canon lawyer in the Vatican has disputed that idea.
Bishop Evaristo Pascoal Spengler, OFM leads the territorial prelature of Marajó in Brazil and is participating as a member of the Synod on the Pan-Amazonian region in Rome.
During a press conference on Oct. 25, Spengler said that “there is a path that is open for the ordination of women,” citing a 2009 document from Pope Benedict XVI.
While referencing the role of women leaders, saints, and teachers in the history of the Church in making, Spengler did not account for the theological and sacramental impediments to such a development.
“We know that in the history of the Church there are women deacons. A role that should be expanded on.”
Spengler said a canonical possibility for the ordination of women was created by Pope Benedict in 2009.
“In 2009 the pope made a change in canon law according to which the bishop, the priest and the deacon receive their mission and the faculty to act in the name of Christ. But this was changed by Pope Benedict, who changed this paragraph [which] said that, from that moment onward, that deacons were no longer linked to Christ but be able to serve the people of God in the diaconate in the liturgy of the word and in charity,” Spengler said.
“So, we realize that there is a path that is open for the ordination of women.”
The bishop was referencing Benedict’s 2009 motu proprio Omnium in mentem, which revised canons 1008 and 1009 of the Code of Canon Law.
Benedict’s document noted that some language in canon law did not fully reflect the teaching of Vatican Council II on the nature of the diaconate, and that Pope John Paul II had already updated the Catechism of the Catholic Church to address the same issue. Benedict’s document revised the law to emphasize the distinction between diaconal and priestly ministry.
“Those who are constituted in the order of the episcopate or the presbyterate receive the mission and capacity to act in the person of Christ the Head, whereas deacons are empowered to serve the People of God in the ministries of the liturgy, the word and charity,” the revised canon 1009 says.
While the new wording reflects that deacons do not act in the person of Christ through the celebration of Mass, Benedict left intact canonical wording which reflects the unity of the sacrament of orders at all three grades of deacon, priest and bishop.
Canon 1008 states that “By divine institution, some of the Christian faithful are marked with an indelible character and constituted as sacred ministers by the sacrament of holy orders. They are thus consecrated and deputed so that, each according to his own grade, they may serve the People of God by a new and specific title.”
Benedict’s reforms left intact the essential provision of canon 1024, which states that “A baptized male alone receives sacred ordination validly.”
Bishop Juan Ignacio Arrieta Ochoa, secretary of the Pontifical Council for Legislative Texts, told CNA that Benedict made revisions to canon law to “better distinguish the ministry of priests and deacons.”
“The canon was changed to reflect the Catechism,” he added.
“Nothing is said or mentioned regarding women,” Arietta said.
Arrieta mentioned that Pope Francis established in 2016 a commission to study the female diaconate which has thus far reached no definitive conclusion Earlier this year, the pope said that while there is no consensus on questions related to the issue, the matter will continue to be studied.
Spengler also said that “we know that in the history of the Church there are women deacons. A role that should be expanded on – deaconess – and how to include this in the Church.”
In May, the pope said that the deaconesses described by St. Paul in the New Testament, and referenced by Spengler on Friday, can not be understood as equivalent to the modern sacramental notion of the diaconate.
A 2002 document published by the International Theological Commission concluded that female deacons in the early Church did not have the same functions as male deacons, and had “no liturgical function,” nor a sacramental one. It also said that even in the fourth century “the way of life of deaconesses was very similar to that of nuns.”
“The formulas of female deacons’ ‘ordination’ found until now, according to the commission, are not the same for the ordination of a male deacon and are more similar to what today would be the abbatial blessing of an abbess,” Francis said May 7 during an in-flight press conference returning from North Macedonia and Bulgaria.
“For the female diaconate, there is a way to imagine it with a different view from the male diaconate,” said the pope while insisting that the issue needed further study.
Bishop Spengler did not mention either Pope Francis or the commission for the study of women deacons on Friday.
During the press conference, several journalists groaned when Spengler was asked about the Church’s sacramental theology and its restriction of ordination to men alone.
Earlier in the session, applause broke out among some journalists after Paulo Ruffini, Prefect for the Vatican Dicastery of Communications, intervened to correct a question from veteran Vatican correspondent Sandro Magister.
Magister had made reference to an earlier event held in the Vatican gardens, during which a group of participants knelt in a circle around several carved items arranged around a controversial statue, variously identified as an earth mother figure or fertility symbol.
Ruffini insisted that the event was not an “official” synod event, and that questions about such events did not have to be answered. He also said that “there was no ritual” and “no prostration,” to applause from several journalists present at the press conference.
Rome, Italy, Oct 24, 2019 / 11:00 am (CNA).- As the pastor of a parish in which many families lost a mother, father, or child in a bombing on Easter Sunday, Fr. Jude Raj Fernando has seen how healing from loss can be a long, difficult journey of faith.
Fr. Fernando is the rector of St. Anthony’s shrine in Colombo, Sri Lanka — one of the churches bombed during the Easter attacks by a group affiliated with Islamic State that killed 258 people in April. He spoke of his painful pastoral experience Oct. 24 at an Aid to the Church in Need event in Rome on the ongoing persecution of Christians.
“I had never heard a sound like that. My first words after the blast were ‘Father forgive them, they know not what they do,’” Fernando said, beginning to weep as he remembered the parishioners at Mass the day of the bombing.
“There was a young couple married eight months before together at Easter Sunday Mass … and a man who had given an older lady his seat … a pregnant mother who lost her husband.” He noted that this woman gave birth to a healthy baby last week and she is now a single mother.
Along with offering trauma counseling at the parish, Fernando said that the local Church remains committed to aiding the religious education of the children who lost parents and occupational training for households that lost their breadwinner.
People at the parish are still asking, “Why did God allow this to happen to us?” he said. A young child asked him ‘why did God take my mother from me at church?’
“We priests walked this difficult journey with our victims,” Fernando said. “It is a long journey of faith.”
“Please continue to pray for us … we can overcome evil with the love in our hearts,” he said. “Our faith is stronger than their bomb.”
Fr. Fernando spoke in the Basilica of St. Bartholomew on Tiber Island, a basilica devoted to the Church’s modern martyrs and home to 120 relics of persecuted Christian communities around the world.
The Sri Lankan priest presented the basilica with items from St. Anthony’s church in Colombo that survived the bombing during the Aid to the Church in Need event “Persecuted more than ever.”
“This place, the Basilica of St. Bartholomew on Tiber Island, is a testimony,” said Cardinal Leonardo Sandri, Prefect of the Congregation of Oriental Churches, “to this dimension of the Church’s today … surrounded by innumerable signs, coming from the various continents, men and women who gave their lives for the Lord Jesus.”
“They make us sure that the passion of Christ continues in the children of the Church, as He tells us in the Gospel ‘If they persecuted me, they will persecute you too,’ but they also ask us to purify our heart and our eyes, learning to live all these experiences in faith,” the cardinal said.
The Aid to the Church in Need report on Christian persecution 2017-2019 defined Iraq, Syria, Iran, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Nigeria, Cameroon, Burkina Faso, Central African Republic, Sudan, Eritrea, North Korea, China, Indonesia, Sri Lanka, Philippines, Pakistan, India and Myanmar as countries with the most severe persecution of Christians.
Cardinal Sandri said that an awareness of this ongoing persecution should also always be framed by the victory of Christ, who tells us “take courage, I have conquered the world.”
The cardinal said that he learned during his diplomatic service to the Holy See to look for and recognize the signs of victory that the Lord grants over time. He pointed to the example of a Eucharistic procession that took place in Zocalo Square in Mexico City after Cardinal Posadas Ocampo was assassinated.
“It was a historic fact after the prohibition of public acts of faith that had lasted since the time of the anticlerical and anti-religious persecutions that gave the country many glorious martyrs and witnesses to the faith, Christ returned to physically tread the streets of the city in the Blessed Sacrament,” he said.
Sandri stressed that, while circumstances were growing more difficult for Christians in different ways across the globe, the whole Church was rediscovering the early Church’s understanding of bearing witness to the faith.
“In different geographical and social contexts, witnessing will take on a different meaning,” Sandri said.
“In some places it will be giving life, even physically, in blood; in others it will require the courage of parresia; in others, isolation, misunderstanding or derision.”
“In any case,” the cardinal said, “it will require a willingness to pay a high and true price, as happened in the first centuries.”
“Being a Christian cost life, but this did not prevent the Gospel from spreading. Modern times have given us back the ancient meaning of the word witness.”
Vatican City, Oct 24, 2019 / 10:18 am (CNA).- An indigenous Peruvian who is participating in the Amazon synod said Thursday that if Catholics in the region are to have their own rite, then without question Christ must be at its center.
"The cente… […]
Vatican City, Oct 24, 2019 / 05:10 am (CNA).- The head of the Vatican’s Christian unity office says inculturation of the Gospel is a necessary part of evangelization, but also requires discernment of what in that culture may need “purification.”
“Evangelization always needs inculturation, so that the Gospel will be understood in different cultures,” Cardinal Kurt Koch told EWTN News Oct. 23.
“But I think we must see two things,” he continued, “first of all, inculturation, and on the other side purification of the culture, because not all things in other cultures are good.”
“We have different challenges and different problems and we must have a clear discernment of spirit of what we can accept and receive from these cultures for the better understanding of the Gospel; and on the other hand we must purify something in this culture.”
The Swiss cardinal previously served as bishop of Basel from 1996 to 2010, when he was appointed president of the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity, the Vatican’s office dedicated to ecumenism.
Koch is participating in this month’s Synod of Bishops on the Pan-Amazonian region because of his position as head of a Vatican dicastery. The Amazon synod, a three-week long meeting on the Church’s life and mission in the region, will end Oct. 27.
Koch said he has had the impression during the Amazon synod that “bishops speak above all about inculturation and not much about purification.”
The cardinal added that he has asked the group what are the elements of the native Amazonian cultures which need purified but “I haven’t received a clear answer.”
The need for inculturation has been one of the prominent topics of the Amazon synod.
The Catechism of the Catholic Church states that inculturation is a necessary step on the Church’s mission of evangelizing the world.
“Missionary endeavor requires patience. It begins with the proclamation of the Gospel to peoples and groups who do not yet believe in Christ, continues with the establishment of Christian communities that are ‘a sign of God’s presence in the world,’ and leads to the foundation of local churches. It must involve a process of inculturation if the Gospel is to take flesh in each people’s culture,” paragraph 854 states.
In paragraph 1207, the Catechism explains that “it is fitting that liturgical celebration tends to express itself in the culture of the people where the Church finds herself, though without being submissive to it.”
“Enculturation,” or “inculturation” when in reference to Christianity, means having a deference in Church practice, specifically in the liturgy, to the local circumstances of a culture.
The Catechism also says, in paragraph 1149, that “the liturgy of the Church presupposes, integrates and sanctifies elements from creation and human culture, conferring on them the dignity of signs of grace, of the new creation in Jesus Christ.”
Fr. Mark Morozowich, the dean of the School of Theology and Religious Studies at the Catholic University of America, explained to CNA in March the principles that govern such “inculturation.”
“The Church has always enculturated the liturgy,” he said.
“This is something we’ve done through the centuries in every single place from the very beginning.”
Starting with the first ministry of the apostles, he said, “the Church lived Jesus Christ, proclaimed his cross, death, and resurrection. The Church proclaimed Jesus Christ being present body and soul in the elements of the Eucharist.”
He said that there have been, and continue to be, some regional differences in the matter used in the celebration of the Eucharist, but those differences are limited by the Church’s doctrinal teaching.
The Mass is not, Morozowich said, about enacting an exact historical recreation of the last supper, “but at the same time the Church has said there are some core elements of this reality of the presence of this way the [Christian] community has celebrated throughout its lifetime.”
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