Vatican City, Nov 6, 2019 / 08:15 am (CNA).- St. Paul announced Jesus Christ to “idol worshippers” in Athens without attacking them, but by building bridges, Pope Francis said Wednesday.
“We also ask the Holy Spirit today to teach us… […]
It is a rare enough book which calls attention to a set of facts which are crucial to an accurate understanding of a given period of history and yet widely overlooked. Giuliana Chamedes’ A Twentieth-Century Crusade: […]
Vatican City, Nov 5, 2019 / 03:01 pm (CNA).- It was a dark autumn night in Rome, which was suffering under the occupation of Nazi Germany and was the target of bombing raids by Allied and Axis forces.
The Vatican City State was a neutral territory in … […]
Vatican City, Nov 5, 2019 / 02:01 pm (CNA).- Every American diocesan bishop will travel to Rome over the next four months for meetings with Pope Francis assessing the state of the Church in the U.S.
The U.S. ad limina visit will be not only the first with Pope Francis, but the first since the Church in the US was shaken by a crisis of mistrust in episcopal leadership due to mishandling of sexual abuse allegations against Theodore McCarrick and others.
An “ad limina apostolorum” visit is a papal meeting required for every diocesan bishop in the world to provide an update on the state of one’s diocese. The trip to Rome, usually made together with all the bishops from a country or region, also serves as a pilgrimage to “the threshold of the apostles,” giving the bishops, who are the successors of the apostles, the opportunity to pray at the tomb of St. Peter and St. Paul.
Ad limina visits typically take place every five years, as the world’s more than 5,300 bishops rotate through Rome. However, some countries have gone 10 years without an ad limina visit, as was the case with Taiwan. During Benedict XVI’s pontificate, bishops from nearly every diocese in the world visited within seven years.
The last U.S. ad limina was with Benedict XVI in 2011-2012. Since then much has changed in the American landscape, from the Obergefell U.S. Supreme Court decision legalizing gay marriage in 2015 to the heightened tension over immigration debates under President Donald Trump.
The Catholic environment in the US has itself undergone considerable transformation since Pope Francis’ trip to the United States in the fall of 2015.
In the last two years alone, Catholics in the US have reeled from the public revelations of McCarrick’s sexual abuse, the Pennsylvania grand jury report, letters from Archbishop Carlo Vigano, Bishop Michael Bransfield’s serious financial misconduct, and the resulting crisis of mistrust in episcopal leadership.
The first rounds of U.S. bishops to come to Rome come from dioceses in the northeast U.S., the hardest hit by these scandals.
The American ad limina visits are divided into 15 regions. Pope Francis will meet with bishops from New England Nov. 4-8, New York Nov. 11-15, and New Jersey and Pennsylvania Nov. 25-29.
Bishops from New England began the first round of visits Nov. 4 with a Mass in Santa Maria Maggiore. They are also celebrating a Mass Nov. 5 in the Basilica of St. Paul Outside the Walls, and Nov. 7 in St. Peter’s Basilica.
“We feel very keenly today, all of us, the weight of human sinfulness, of infidelity, of scandal, of the sin that weighs down the Church,” Archbishop Leonard Blair of Hartford said in his homily during the Mass in Santa Maria Maggiore.
Before meeting the pope, bishops on an ad limina trip also typically visit all of the Vatican dicasteries and can schedule personal meetings with the head of each dicastery to discuss particular matters.
During such visits, bishops’ conferences deliver exhaustive reports, called Quinquennial Reports, describing the status of the Church in their country.
Previous to Francis’ pontificate, the meeting of the bishops with the pope included an exchange of speeches from both the president of the bishops’ conference and pope, who delivered a speech providing pastoral recommendations and priorities. After the exchange of speeches, the pope then held a short conversation with each bishop individually.
Pope Francis changed the format of these visits to an open group conversation among the visiting bishops, who are allowed to ask questions of the pope for up to two hours. He also added an additional meeting presided over by himself with the bishops and the heads of some of the dicasteries. In past visits, this has included representatives from the Secretariat of State, the Congregation for Clergy, the Pontifical Council for the Promotion of the New Evangelization, and the Dicastery for Laity, Family and Life.
The American ad limina visits coincide with the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops’ General Assembly and election Nov. 10-13. Bishops from the state of New York will therefore be absent from the General Assembly and will vote remotely from the North American College in Rome.
Before the end of 2019, Pope Francis will meet with bishops from Washington, D.C., Delaware, Maryland, Virginia, the U.S. Virgin Islands, West Virginia, and the U.S. Military Archdiocese, in addition to New England, New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania.
After a short hiatus for Christmas, the Latin rite bishops of the remainder of the territory of the US, and the country’s Eastern Catholic bishops, will make their ad limina pilgrimages in 2020, from mid-January through the end of February.
Vatican City, Nov 5, 2019 / 11:12 am (CNA).- A 50 million euro loan request to secure the purchase of a bankrupt hospital was vetoed by Cardinal George Pell and financial authorities at the Institute for Works of Religion, commonly called the Vatican Bank, before it was approved by the Holy See’s central bank, APSA, where the loan breached international regulatory agreements.
According to several Vatican officials, in late 2014 two cardinals requested that the IOR, the Vatican’s commercial bank, grant a 50 million euro loan to a for-profit partnership between the Holy See’s Secretariat of State and a religious order, which intended to purchase a bankrupt Italian hospital, then in government-administered bankruptcy.
Cardinal Angelo Becciu, then an archbishop, and Cardinal Giuseppe Versaldi were both involved in the plan, and requested the loan from the IOR, several Vatican officials told CNA.
Their loan proposal was rejected in 2015, when the IOR board determined that the IDI would never be able to repay the loan, senior sources at two Vatican financial agencies told CNA.
Officials at APSA and the Prefecture for the Economy told CNA that Pell was vocally opposed to the loan proposal. The cardinal was at that time charged by Pope Francis with reforming Vatican finances.
It was clear the proposal would have “been a case of throwing good money after bad. There was no question of a return to stability, let alone profit,” one official told CNA.
After the proposal was rejected at the IOR, a request for a 50 million euro loan was made at APSA, the Vatican’s central bank. The loan likely violated APSA’s international regulatory agreements.
“They were desperate,” a senior source at the Prefecture for the Economy told CNA. “There was simply no other way to make it work.”
While the IDI loan was being considered at APSA, Pell’s office, which had been given oversight of the central bank’s portfolio, refused to sign off on the transaction, Vatican sources told CNA.
But Pell’s resistance was apparently not enough to stop the loan.
A senior source at APSA told CNA that “there was no taking ‘no’ for an answer,” and that the deal was “passionately” insisted on by Versaldi and Becciu. “It was never not going to happen,” the source told CNA, “the prefecture tried to block the agreement but it went ahead anyway.”
Vatican officials told CNA that Becciu, and Cardinal Versaldi, went to APSA for the loan because the central bank had already shown itself resistant to financial reforms at the Vatican. The Secretariat of State, where Becciu was the second-ranking official, was also reportedly resistant to Pell’s efforts at financial transparency and reform.
“The was a basic, point blank, refusal to share information, to collaborate, or to open the books to the Prefecture and the Council for the Economy,” one senior source at the Prefecture for the Economy told CNA. “This has been a consistent attitude from both State and APSA.”
After conflict over the loan, Pope Francis withdrew oversight authority over APSA’s investment decisions from Pell’s office. Multiple Vatican sources told CNA that decision was strongly influenced by lobbying from Becciu.
Cardinal Becciu was also responsible for the cancellation of a proposed external audit by PricewaterhouseCooper of all Vatican finances, and opposed to Cardinal Pell’s intention to end the practice of keeping some Holy See assets and funds “off books.”
Becciu and other officials at the Secretariat of State have explained that they objected to the external audit because of the confidentiality required to conduct their work. Recent reporting has also revealed that the Secretariat was then making unauthorized real estate investments with money borrowed from Swiss banks; a fact likely to have been revealed during an external audit.
Senior sources at the Prefecture for the Economy and APSA told CNA that the cancellation of the audit was also explained, in part, by promises that an independent audit of APSA was already planned.
But sources at both APSA and the Prefecture for the Economy said that no external or independent audit of APSA has actually been conducted, and that there has instead been a “good faith undertaking” between APSA and the Vatican’s Financial Information Authority (AIF).
Senior sources at the Prefecture for the Economy and APSA also told CNA that efforts to enforce transparency at the Vatican’s central bank and Secretariat of State played a decisive part in the ouster of the first Auditor General, Libero Milone, in 2017.
Milone has stated that he was forced to resign under threat of prosecution because he was pressing for information about the hundreds of millions of euros held off-books by curial bodies.
“Some people got worried that I was about to uncover something I shouldn’t see,” Milone told the Financial Times on November 2. “We were getting too close to information that they wanted to be secret, and they fabricated a situation for me to be thrown out.”
At the time of Milone’s forced departure, Cardinal Becciu defended his role in removing the auditor, saying that he had exceeded his mandate.
“He went against all the rules and was spying on the private lives of his superiors and staff, including me,” Becciu said in 2017. “If he had not agreed to resign, we would have prosecuted him.”
CNA asked Cardinal Becciu for comment on his role in seeking an IOR loan for the purchase of the IDI. The cardinal declined to comment.
Vatican City, Nov 4, 2019 / 07:30 am (CNA).- Pope Francis urged Catholics to meditate on the final judgement at a Mass offered Monday for the souls of cardinals and bishops who died within the past year.
“Saint Ignatius suggests, before making a… […]
Vatican City, Nov 3, 2019 / 07:00 am (CNA).- Pope Francis Sunday asked for prayer for persecuted Orthodox Christians in Ethiopia, who have been targeted in ongoing ethnic clashes that have left 78 people dead.
“I am saddened by the violence of w… […]
Rome, Italy, Nov 2, 2019 / 10:38 am (CNA).- Pope Francis celebrated Mass Saturday for the souls of the dead in Rome’s Catacombs of Priscilla, saying the place of a Christian is in the safety of the hands of God, whatever the outside circumstances might be.
“The souls of the just are in the hands of God, the hands of God, which are wounded…” he said Nov. 2.
“The place of the Christian,” he continued, “is in the intercession of Jesus before the Father. In the hands of God. And we are safe. Whatever happens, happens – it is the cross. In this identity we are blessed. If they persecute us, if they say anything against us, if we are in the hands of God, [which are] wounded by love, we are safe. This is our place.”
“Where am I most safe? In the hands of God or with other things, other securities?” he asked.
The Catacombs of Priscilla were one of the prominent catacombs of the early Church in Rome and is referred to in early Christian texts as “regina catacumbarum,” meaning “the queen of the catacombs” because of the many martyrs who were buried there.
The catacombs were lost for several hundred years, after the entrances were blocked to keep out thieves. They were rediscovered in the 16th-century, though many of the remains of the martyrs were subsequently removed.
In his homily at Mass, Pope Francis said the martyrs of the Church in the first centuries, those who came to the catacombs to celebrate the Eucharist in safety, many of whom were killed for the faith, have the same identity as the many Christians who are persecuted around the world today.
“Also today there are Christians who are persecuted, more than in the first centuries, more,” he said.
He told the story of an Albanian religious sister who was imprisoned in a re-education camp during Communism, who would baptize children in secret, because the priests were forbidden from giving sacraments. There were no cups, so the sister used a shoe with river water to baptize the children, he said.
In his homily, Pope Francis also reflected on the beatitudes as the identity of a Christian. “There is no other [identity],” he said. “If you do this, if you live like this, you are a Christian.”
Belonging to a Catholic movement or group is valid too, he said, but “your identity card” is the beatitudes. “If you do not have this, movements, memberships serve no purpose.”
“Either you live like this or you are not a Christian,” he said, adding that “without this, there is no identity. there is a pretense of being a Christian, but no identity.”
The pope noted that it was his first time ever visiting the catacombs. After Mass, upon returning to the Vatican, he visited the crypt of St. Peter’s Basilica to spend a moment in prayer for the souls of the deceased popes who are buried there.
It had recently been tradition for popes to say Mass for All Souls’ Day at Rome’s Campo Verano cemetery, founded in the 19th century.
Pope Francis did the same for the first three years of his pontificate, though in 2016 he chose to say the All Souls’ Day Mass at Rome’s Prima Porta Cemetery instead.
In 2017, he celebrated the feast day Mass in the Sicily-Rome American Cemetery and Memorial in Nettuno, an Italian cemetery for American personnel killed in World War II.
Dedicated in 1956, the Sicily-Rome American Cemetery covers 77 acres, with 7,860 servicemen buried there. A chapel on the grounds holds the names of an additional 3,095 servicemen who went missing in action.
Last year, the pope said Mass in a cemetery for deceased children and unborn babies called the “Garden of Angels,” located in the Laurentino Cemetery on the outskirts of Rome.
Vatican City, Nov 1, 2019 / 05:45 am (CNA).- The saints were real people whose strength to face daily challenges came from the grace of Jesus Christ, showing that everyone can be holy, Pope Francis said Friday on the Feast of All Saints Day.
“Th… […]
Vatican City, Oct 31, 2019 / 04:21 pm (CNA).- It is fitting for Catholics to go to confession on All Saints Day and All Souls Day, and to pray for the dead, the head of the Apostolic Penitentiary said in a letter published Oct. 29.
“Therefore, l… […]
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