Month: April 2025

(OSV News) – As the death toll following the massive earthquake in Myanmar is expected to reach 3,000, humanitarian organizations in the region, like Catholic Relief Services, are working round the clock to get essential supplies to those in need.

Cara Bragg, country manager for CRS Myanmar, said that while it’s “still too early to tell,” the devastation wrought by the 7.7 magnitude quake is “sure to cause some major, long-term impacts for people here.”

“Thousands have lost their homes, so there will be more people in need of temporary housing. Many have lost their businesses, so they won’t have a source of income. We’ve already heard reports of people unable to find anywhere to buy food, so we are worried about hunger,” Bragg said in an email to OSV News April 1.

“And we don’t know yet what the impact has been for farmers, so we could be talking about a long-term, large-scale disruption in crops, and that of course will impact hunger levels,” she said. “It is so critical to provide immediate relief now — providing food, water, medicine, shelter materials and other household items, like mosquito nets, soap and blankets.”

The epicenter of the March 28 earthquake struck Mandalay, the country’s second largest city, destroying roads, buildings and religious sites. While the death toll as of April 2 stood at 2,886 people with another 4,639 injured, according to state television MRTV as cited by The Associated Press, the number is believed to surpass 3,000 as hundreds more are still missing or feared dead, the Reuters news agency reported.

Based in Yangon, the country’s largest city, CRS Myanmar is coordinating relief efforts with local and international partners, including Caritas, which is known locally as the Karuna Mission Social Solidarity, or KMSS. CRS is the official international relief and development agency of the Catholic Church in the U.S.

Bragg told OSV News that due to the devastating “loss of life, the high number of injuries and the wide-scale destruction,” assessing a “clear picture of the impact of the earthquake was challenging at first.”

“Phone networks were down or unreliable. The major highway between Yangon — where the CRS office is — and Mandalay, which is the second-largest city in Myanmar and very close to the earthquake’s epicenter, was damaged, impeding our ability to send teams to support our staff and partners in the most affected areas,” she explained.

However, “connectivity has improved” over the last few days and routes have been cleared “so there has been a way to get information about the critical needs and start moving aid workers and supplies to where they need to be.”

The earthquake hit the country at a time of uncertainty due to the ongoing civil war between resistance groups and Myanmar’s governing military junta, which overthrew the previous democratically elected government in 2021.

Several reports accused the military junta of not prioritizing relief efforts and has continued bombing rebel-controlled areas and hampering relief efforts by aid organizations. The head of Myanmar’s military government, Senior Gen. Min Aung Hlaing, has turned down ceasefire proposals from rebel groups that were aimed at allowing aid to reach regions affected by the deadly earthquake on Friday.

Bragg said that beyond “the initial complications caused by damage to the highways and roads, we haven’t experienced any significant issues in proceeding with the response.”

“Throughout our 80 years, CRS has worked in a number of different, complex scenarios, and thankfully in Myanmar, we have a strong relationship with the local churches and Caritas — KMSS — so we’ve been able to lean on them. They’ve helped us ensure that our work is reaching the most vulnerable in the most effective way possible,” she said.

Bragg told OSV News that several CRS and KMSS staff members in Mandalay are working to provide relief, despite the fact that some have even lost their homes.

“It’s been inspiring to see the resiliency of the people here,” Bragg said. “Despite going through this very traumatic event, they are out there doing whatever they can to help their neighbors.”

“We have a few team members in Mandalay right now. They have been figuring out the immediate needs and trying to determine the best way for us to respond together with our partner staff,” she added. “We are planning for additional team members to travel to Mandalay soon to join them and provide critical technical expertise and operational support to our local church partners. We are bringing emergency supplies to the affected areas and doing our best to reach the people in need as soon as possible.”

Bragg urged prayers and asked that those “who are in a position to donate,” visit the CRS website.

“Catholics across the U.S. are always among the first to stand up and support their sisters and brothers overseas, and we are extremely grateful for their generosity,” she noted.

Despite the fact that “recovery is going to take a long time,” Bragg told OSV News that she remains hopeful that “together, we can help the people of Myanmar rebuild.”

“The resiliency of the Myanmar people is so remarkable, and I know they will persevere through this crisis thanks to local support systems and solidarity from the international community,” she said.

(OSV News) – In 2015, Pope Francis shared an urgent message with the world.

Writing in “Laudato Si’, on Care for Our Common Home,” he said the Earth “cries out to us because of the harm we have inflicted on her by our irresponsible use and abuse of the goods with which God has endowed her.”

With the 10th anniversary of the release of “Laudato Si'” approaching May 24, experts wonder: Have we been listening?

Several Catholic ecological experts and organizations agree that good – even great – work is being done to address climate issues. But, they say, it is not enough.

Pope Francis said so himself in 2023 when he penned “Laudate Deum,” an apostolic exhortation “to all people of good will on the climate crisis,” released eight years after “Laudato Si’.”

“With the passage of time,” said Pope Francis, “I have realized that our responses have not been adequate, while the world in which we live is collapsing and may be nearing the breaking point.”

The pope further forecast a bleak global future, with widespread impacts on human dignity.

“In addition to this possibility, it is indubitable that the impact of climate change will increasingly prejudice the lives and families of many persons,” Pope Francis wrote. “We will feel its effects in the areas of healthcare, sources of employment, access to resources, housing, forced migrations, etc.”

Pope Francis’ concern about such outcomes is rooted in integral ecology — a central tenet of “Laudato Si'” that emphasizes the interconnectivity of the many issues facing humanity, while urging a comprehensive outlook to engage global challenges.

Brother Jacek Orzechowski — a Franciscan friar and associate director of the Laudato Si Center for Integral Ecology at Siena College in Loudonville, New York — echoed the pontiff’s warning.

“The speed and the scale of the progress has not been commensurate with the gravity and urgency of the crisis,” Brother Orzechowski said.

“It’s a consequence of not really embracing the message of an integral ecology, and treating the environmental issues, climate issues, social justice issues, as not on par with other moral issues,” he said. “There’s a bit of a disconnect between the papal pronouncements and some of the laudable efforts of individual parishes or institutions to embrace ‘Laudato Si’,’ and the rather anemic response — including from the hierarchy.”

In 2021, Religion News Service examined thousands of columns written by Catholic bishops from 2014 to 2019. “Of the 12,077 columns we studied,” reported RNS, “only 93 (0.8%) mention climate change, global warming or their equivalent at all.”

“Pope Francis, in ‘Laudate Deum,’ has rightly expressed concern about the pace of progress in addressing climate change,” said Dan Misleh, founder and executive director of the Catholic Climate Covenant, a nonprofit formed with the help of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops that — with 20 national partners — guides the church’s response in the U.S. to climate change.

“The Holy Father has called for not just deeper reflection but concrete action, highlighting the need for a radical shift in our lifestyles to align with a sustainable and finite planet,” Misleh added. “The growing urgency around these issues is something we all must heed.”

Misleh is, however, encouraged by the work of his own partners, as well as the Laudato Si’ Action Platform and the Laudato Si’ Movement, among other organizations.

“Obviously there’s a lot of work to be done,” Misleh said. “And I think we can do it — but there has to be commitments at many levels of the church to make that happen.”

The last decade is the warmest on record, and according to NASA, Earth’s average surface temperature in 2024 was the warmest since recordkeeping began in 1880. The World Meteorological Organization noted in March 2024 that the previous year broke records for ocean heat, sea level rise, Antarctic sea ice loss and glacier retreat. Extreme weather events including floods, droughts and fire are becoming more frequent and destructive.

In America, the new Trump administration has retreated from Biden-era climate and clean energy initiatives. It also withdrew U.S. participation in the Paris Agreement adopted in 2015 at the U.N. Climate Change Conference, also known as COP21, when nearly 200 countries pledged to work together to limit global warming.

“There’s progress — and yet there’s still so much more to do,” said Anna Johnson, North American director for the Laudato Si’ Movement, a global network of over 900 Catholic organizations and over 10,000 trained grassroots leaders.

“Tens of thousands of people, Catholics around the world, have said yes to living out this call to ‘Laudato Si” on personal levels, on community levels — with parishes and dioceses and congregations adopting huge transformations,” she told OSV News.

Nonetheless, Johnson feels efforts are at a crossroads.

“We’re coming to a point of having to really assess whether we stand for the common good and God’s creation in the midst of this economy,” Johnson said, “because these choices are being put in front of us in a very stark way.”

In 2023, the Pew Research Center reported that a 2022 survey found, “Broadly speaking, Catholics are no more likely than Americans overall to view climate change as a serious problem. An identical share in each group say global climate change is either an extremely or very serious problem (57%).”

But the particular dynamics of the American political landscape have seemingly produced a fragmented reception of “Laudato Si’.” The 2022 Pew survey found that among Catholics who were Democrats or leaned Democrat, the view of global climate change as a “extremely/very serious problem” problem climbed to 82%, while among Catholics who were Republican or leaned Republican, that view dropped to 25%.

“There is polarization between political factions that has weakened this response to the call for creation care,” said Sister Damien Marie Savino, a Franciscan Sister of the Eucharist who is dean of science and sustainability at Aquinas College in Grand Rapids, Michigan, and is a visiting fellow at the University of Notre Dame in Indiana.

Sister Damien Marie is encouraged by global efforts to embrace “Laudato Si’,” noting there are an abundance of initiatives large and small — from regenerative agriculture to recycling — that deeply resonate with the pope’s integral ecology emphasis.

“There’s still a lot more that could be done,” she admitted, “but I do think this groundswell is a pretty good testament.”

However, she remains cautious in her outlook.

“It’s up to humans — and their unique creativity — to come up with solutions,” she said. “We wouldn’t have environmental issues if it wasn’t for human action. So we have to recognize that our actions do have a unique effect because of our unique ecological niche.”

At Notre Dame’s Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies, scholars will reflect on “Laudato Si'” in an April 15 panel titled “Ten Years of Laudato Si’: Operationalizing Integral Ecology.”

“I think there are small outcroppings of things that actually wholly align with ‘Laudato Si’,’ but it’s certainly not at any accelerating rate that’ll make a substantive difference,” said Richard Marcantonio, an assistant professor of environment, peace and global affairs at the Kroc Institute.

“There’s been progress that’s been made in some ways,” he said, “but I think one of the big challenges of ‘Laudato Si” that has not been grappled with well, in the United States in particular, is the idea of not needing more.”

It is a tough truth for a consumer-centric society, he noted.

“When you look at the amount of material consumed by any American — regardless of the wild wealth inequality that we have — for most groups of people in the U.S., they’re consuming well above what would be globally sustainable,” Marcantonio said.

“And that’s not just with the stuff in their household, but also all of the metals, minerals and other materials that are used to build the things that they engage with — roads, buildings, other infrastructure. If you look at the amount of material consumed per capita annually, it’s about 42,000 pounds of stuff,” Marcantonio said, citing the U.S. Geological Survey.

While experts see both environmental progress and decline, real change and real stagnation, and much work done with much work still to do, Pope Francis did not want “Laudato Si'” to be a source of despair. Ten years later, he might reiterate the piece of advice with which he concluded ‘Laudato Si”: “May our struggles and our concern for this planet never take away the joy of our hope.”

POZNAN, Poland (OSV News) – As the 20th anniversary of St. John Paul II’s death approached April 2, top world leaders and thinkers gathered in Poznan, Poland, to discuss his legacy.

A common thread of their memories and interventions was that the pope from Poland was a sensation of the times whose steadfast faith brought humanity more freedom and true spiritual leadership — and continues the drive for freedom in today’s world.

Hanna Suchocka, Polish prime minister in early 1990s and ambassador of Poland to the Holy See in the final years of John Paul’s pontificate said in her remarks that speakers at the conference she and her team organized are “the last generation that can point out that papal teaching is not only history” but is rooted in reality.

She said John Paul “became a sign of hope for all of us — those that lived under the communist rule, but also those that lived on ‘a better side’ of the wall.” She pointed out that “we didn’t fight for a free world” under the Iron Curtain of Cold War divisions to become closed “yet again” today, polarized against each other and that all the more now we need to reject “trivializing” John Paul’s teaching and remind the world of “its true meaning.”

If there are two people that immediately come to mind as iconic Poles to anyone in the world, it’s most probably Karol Wojtyla, elected Pope John Paul II, and Lech Walesa.

The leader of the first free trade union in a communist country — Solidarity — a movement that led to first free elections in Poland in June 1989 and eventually the fall of communism throughout Eastern Europe, said that the pope was a believer in the cause of freedom from communism. It was the pope’s faith in the peaceful revolution that kept Solidarity leaders going in times of persecution, Walesa said.

“When a Pole became pope — a year after his election he came to Poland and organized us to pray, not to start a revolution. He allowed us to notice how many of us there are. At the same time the pope said: ‘change the face of the earth.’ We stopped being afraid,” Walesa told a packed auditorium at the Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznan March 26 during the conference titled “John Paul II — to Read History, to Form History.”

Elected pope on Oct. 16, 1978, John Paul visited his country only seven months later, in June 1979. Eleven million people in a nation of 36 million at the time came to see the pope in person.

“Up to that point I was organizing the fight against communism. The pope accelerated those processes and made them bloodless,” said Walesa, who was president of Poland from 1990 to 1995.

Norman Davis, professor of history at Oxford, Cambridge and London universities, said that Solidarity, a movement supported spiritually and organizationally by the pope, was a “sensation of the times.”

John Paul “was a master of conveying information not through harsh words. He never condemned the communist system. He always spoke in a gentle language that was much stronger than harsh words. He didn’t offend anyone, but got his point across,” Davis said.

Hans-Gert Pöttering said that when he was about to meet the pope for the first time in 1981, John Paul was an hour late to that meeting.

“He was on the phone with Lech Walesa,” the German lawyer, historian and conservative politician, said in Poznan, testifying to the ongoing commitment of the pope to support the freedom movement.

“If someone told me then, ‘Poland will be free,’ I wouldn’t believe it,” said Pöttering, who served as president of the European Parliament 2007-2009.

He pointed out that “we wouldn’t be in Poznan today” if it were not for John Paul telling the Polish people, “Don’t be afraid, change the world.”

But this message, he said, has an all the more powerful dimension today when “we are challenged by the dictator in the Kremlin,” he said. Pöttering made the comments as he stood next to the leader of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church, Major Archbishop Sviatoslav Shevchuk of Kyiv-Halych, Ukraine, representing a country that has been fighting a full-scale Russian invasion since Feb. 24, 2022.

Following the teaching of John Paul, “it’s our duty to show solidarity to our friends in Ukraine so that they’re free people,” Pöttering highlighted.

“We in the EU (European Union) — Poland, Germany — we are not just living in an organization, we are living in a EU based on values of the dignity of the human being, the core of the teaching of John Paul II. The person is responsible for himself and for the other,” the European leader said, emphasizing that this task falls on today’s youth, who need to be “engaged” in their societies.

Major Archbishop Shevchuk spoke next, addressing the hundreds of young people in the room, including large groups of Ukrainian students who later stood in the line to take a picture with him.

“For John Paul II,” the prelate said, “young people were more important than meeting with senior political leaders. He knew that it’s the youth that will decide the fate of their countries and of the world.”

Major Archbishop Shevchuk said that John Paul “was not afraid of youth — sometimes bishops are afraid of young people, but it was not a feature of John Paul.”

He said that young people are destined to “build bridges, memory and communion among nations.”

In 2001, he said the Polish pontiff told Ukrainians that “freedom is not only a gift but a challenge” and that young people defending Ukraine today put those words into practice “defending freedom at the price of their own blood,” and that it was the words of John Paul that became for them a “signpost how to build freedom.”

Major Archbishop Shevchuk thanked Walesa, who was on stage, for having a Ukrainian flag pinned to his shirt as a sign of solidarity since the war began.

Papal biographer George Weigel said that the truth about humankind that we meet in Christ is “the truth that we are creatures who long to form authentic community, to live in solidarity with others, creatures made for love, not merely for satisfaction,” and therefore are thinking about freedom “in a distinctive way.”

As a Christian formed by John Paul, “you will think of freedom as tethered to truth and ordered to goodness,” Weigel, distinguished senior fellow of Washington’s Ethics and Public Policy Center, told the conference in a pre-recorded video.

The leading American theologian said that John Paul’s teaching shows a visible difference between “freedom of indifference” and “freedom for excellence.”

The first, he said, “can be summed up by thinking about Frank Sinatra and that famous song of his, ‘I did it my way.’ This is a freedom of self-absorption. It’s a freedom untethered to any notion of truth and goodness. It’s freedom as I want it. I want it now. I want it my way.”

“Freedom for excellence” — a term coined by the Belgian Dominican moral theologian Father Servais Pinckaers, who deeply influenced John Paul, Weigel said — “means choosing the right thing, which we can know by reason, aided by supernatural faith … and doing so as a matter of moral habit.”

He added that John Paul taught about “freedom as choosing the right thing for the right reason, as a matter of moral habit, or what an older vocabulary would call virtue, ‘habitus’ being translated from Latin in some respects as ‘virtue.'”

In the encyclical “Centesimus Annus,” Weigel said, “John Paul II taught that freedom untethered to truth becomes self-destructive. Or, if you will, it cannibalizes itself. And I’m afraid that’s the situation we find in much of the Western world today. If there is only your truth and my truth, and nothing that either one of us recognizes as the truth, then how do we settle the dispute?”

Weigel said “it is up to us to help heal the breach between that freedom of indifference and freedom for excellence, between the dictatorship of relativism and a genuine exercise of freedom in the public space.”

Remarks on John Paul’s legacy by top world leaders and thinkers “really made a mark in our conscience,” said Michal Senk, director of the Center for the Thought of John Paul II, a Warsaw-based think tank. “It left us with conviction that freedom is intertwined with truth and aligned with goodness and that we need to carry that legacy of John Paul II ahead,” he told OSV News.

“In the context of a just peace for Ukraine, this vision of freedom becomes a powerful call to act with moral clarity, pursuing not only political peace but a peace grounded in virtue and truth,” he added.

Ambassador Suchocka, who is a lawyer, concluded: “Maybe it’s my professional twist, but John Paul II is like the constitution — he needs to be interpreted. Interpretation is important. The interpretation for today is probably different than it was 30 years ago, but the text and its message remain constant: Don’t close yourselves off, open yourselves up. And dialogue — without dialogue, and the ability to understand each other, we will perish.”

VATICAN CITY (CNS) – Pope Francis’ condition remains stable, and an X-ray showed there has been a slight improvement regarding his lingering lung infection, the Vatican press office said.

The pope continues to show improvements in his mobility and ability to speak, the press office told reporters April 1. The pope continues to receive supplemental oxygen through a nasal cannula during the day and high-flow oxygen at night when necessary. He can remove the nasal tube for “brief periods” during the day.

A significant portion of his day is spent doing physical therapy to restore the level of movement he had before he was hospitalized Feb. 14 for breathing difficulties. The pope later was diagnosed with double pneumonia, as well as viral and fungal lung infections.

While the pneumonia cleared before his release from the hospital March 23, the 88-year-old pope still has a lingering lung infection, which showed “slight improvement” in a recent X-ray, the press office said.

The pope continues to follow his prescribed drug and respiratory therapies, and, like last week, his voice is showing some improvement after being significantly weakened during his long convalescence. His blood tests this week were also in the normal range.

The pope does not receive any outside visitors, the press office said. He is assisted by his personal secretaries, there are always medical personnel on call, and his doctors visit him regularly.

The pope concelebrates Mass every morning in the small chapel near his rooms on the second floor of his residence, the Domus Sanctae Marthae, and he works during the day at his desk.

The pope is in “a good mood” and welcomes the many signs of affection from the faithful, the press office added.

The Vatican planned to publish the text prepared for the pope’s weekly general audience April 2, the press office said, and the homily he has prepared for a Mass April 6 as part of the Jubilee of the Sick and Health Care Workers will be read by Archbishop Rino Fisichella, who already was scheduled to preside at that Mass.

The press office said it was too soon to know if the pope would appear in some way for the Sunday Angelus April 6 or have a message for the 20th anniversary of the death of St. John Paul II April 2, which was to be marked by a memorial Mass in St. Peter’s Basilica with Cardinal Pietro Parolin presiding.

VATICAN CITY (CNS) – Pope Francis has cleared the way for the canonizations of three blesseds: an Armenian Catholic archbishop martyred during the Armenian genocide, a lay catechist from Papua New Guinea killed during World War II and a Venezuelan religious sister who dedicated her life to education and the poor.

The Vatican announced March 31 that the pope authorized the decrees March 28. Among them were the approval of a miracle attributed to Blessed Carmen Rendíles Martínez and authorization for the canonizations of Blessed Ignatius Maloyan and Blessed Peter To Rot, following a vote by cardinals and bishops.

While the Vatican did not specify whether the decrees were signed during an audience, such decisions are typically formalized during a meeting between the pope and Cardinal Marcello Semeraro, prefect of the Dicastery for the Causes of Saints. Pope Francis, recovering from a respiratory infection, has not been holding meetings since being discharged from the hospital March 23.

Blessed Carmen Rendíles Martínez, born in Caracas in 1903, is poised to become Venezuela’s first female saint. Orphaned by her father’s death at a young age, she grew up helping her mother support the family and became active in her parish apostolate.

She entered religious life in 1927 and eventually founded the Congregation of the Servants of Jesus of Venezuela, serving with humility in parishes and schools, especially among the poor. After a car accident in 1974, she spent her final years in a wheelchair and died in 1977. She was beatified in 2018.

Blessed Ignatius Maloyan was born April 19, 1869, in Mardin, in present-day Turkey. He entered the convent of Bzommar in Lebanon at age 14 and was ordained in 1896. Known for his pastoral care and scholarship, he was appointed archbishop of Mardin in 1911.

During the Armenian genocide, he was arrested with dozens of Christians and brought before a tribunal in 1915. When told his life could be spared in exchange for conversion to Islam, he declared, “We have never been unfaithful to the state… but if you ask us to be unfaithful to our religion, this — never, never, never!” He was tortured and executed shortly afterward. He was beatified by St. John Paul II in 2001.

Blessed Peter To Rot, born in 1912 in Rakunai, Papua New Guinea, was a lay catechist, husband and father known for his deep faith and dedication to the sacraments.

During the Japanese occupation in World War II, he continued his ministry despite growing restrictions and openly opposed polygamy, which had been tolerated by the occupiers. He was arrested in 1945, and later that year was killed by lethal injection while in prison. He was beatified by St. John Paul II during a 1995 visit to Papua New Guinea.

In March 2024, Pope Francis approved a request from the bishops of Papua New Guinea and the Solomon Islands to dispense with the requirement of a miracle for Blessed Peter’s canonization, citing cultural and documentation challenges. His canonization will make him the first saint of Papua New Guinea.

A date for the canonizations of the three blesseds had not yet been announced.

Pope Francis also approved decrees recognizing:

— A miracle attributed to Venerable Carmelo De Palma, a diocesan priest from Bari, Italy, born in 1876 and known for his deep prayer life, devotion to the Eucharist and tireless ministry as a confessor and spiritual director. He died in 1961, and the approved miracle clears the way for his beatification.

— The heroic virtues of Father José Antônio Maria Ibiapina, a 19th-century Brazilian priest known for his transition from a career as a lawyer, judge and congressman to a life of priestly service among the poor. Born in 1806, he was ordained in 1853 and became known as a “pilgrim of charity” for founding churches, hospitals, orphanages and schools across northeastern Brazil. He died in 1883.

VATICAN CITY (CNS) – God’s forgiveness is the source of hope for the faithful, Pope Francis wrote.

“Indeed, with his mercy, God transforms us inwardly, he changes our heart,” he said in a message to priests celebrating the Jubilee of the Missionaries of Mercy in Rome.

“We can always count on him in any situation. God made himself man to reveal to the world that he never abandons us,” the pope’s message said.

The Vatican released the pope’s message to the priests, which was read by Archbishop Rino Fisichella, pro-prefect of the Dicastery for Evangelization’s section for new evangelization and the chief organizer of the Holy Year 2025, during a March 29 meeting and training session.

The Jubilee celebration, March 28-30, had been scheduled to include a meeting with Pope Francis March 29 and Mass the next day. However, the pope was not present at those events since doctors recommended he rest for two months after returning to the Vatican from Gemelli hospital March 23 for double pneumonia.

Pope Francis instituted the “missionaries of mercy” apostolate in 2015 for the special mission of preaching about God’s mercy and, especially, to encourage Catholics to rediscover the grace of the sacrament of reconciliation. More than 1,100 priests were chosen by the Vatican and commissioned during the Holy Year of Mercy, and today there are more than 1,200 missionaries of mercy on all five continents.

In his message, dated March 19, the pope thanked the priests because they “bear witness to the paternal face of God, infinitely great in love, who calls everyone to conversion and renews us always with his forgiveness.”

“Conversion and forgiveness are the two gentle touches with which the Lord dries every tear from our eyes; they are the hands with which the church embraces us sinners; they are the feet on which we walk in our earthly pilgrimage,” the pope wrote.

Pope Francis encouraged the priests in their ministry as confessors to be “attentive in listening, ready to welcome and constant in accompanying those who wish to renew their own lives and return to the Lord.”

About 500 missionaries of mercy registered for the pilgrimage to Rome, which included a penitential liturgy at the Rome Basilica of Sant’Andrea della Valle March 28 and a Mass celebrated there by Archbishop Fisichella on Sunday.

Msgr. Graham Bell, undersecretary of the dicastery’s section for new evangelization, led the liturgy March 28, which was part of the worldwide Lenten prayer and penance initiative, “24 Hours for the Lord.” Begun by the pope in 2014, it invites at least one Catholic church in every diocese to be open all night — or at least for extended hours — for Eucharistic adoration and confession.

In addition to the few wooden confessionals in the 17th-century basilica, more than a dozen areas in different corners and pews were available for confession in several languages. Priests took turns hearing each other’s confessions before dedicating themselves to hearing confessions from other penitents or to silent prayer.

Among the hundreds attending were some missionaries of mercy from the United States who spoke with Catholic News Service March 28.

Father Eloy Rojas, originally from Venezuela, is a hospital chaplain in the Archdiocese of Newark, New Jersey, where, he said, he brings “hope and love to the sick and dying,” especially those nearing the end of their life on earth.

As a missionary of mercy, he is also bringing hope to those seeking “new life” through confession by communicating and connecting with penitents “with empathy, love and compassion,” he said.

Father Bernard Olszewski said their role is to be mediators between the penitent and the merciful face of God.

Instead of a “duel,” he said, that encounter must be “like a duet, a dance that is learned.” They help others “learn the steps, to dance with God, and to rediscover that relationship with God which may have been lost.”

Their mission is to reassure the repentant that they can leave the confessional “a new person,” transformed with the capacity to do good, to be better and to be the person God calls them to be,” he said. “There is nothing more powerful than that.”

While the pope granted the missionaries the faculties to forgive certain sins in cases otherwise reserved to the Holy See, the priest said, “we’re not super confessors.”

They were commissioned “to exemplify that loving attitude, that warm embrace that God offers to us each and every day, but some of us don’t have the opportunity to recognize or to accept it,” he said.

Pope Francis “wants no obstacle between the penitent and the forgiveness,” Father Olszewski said, because very often it is those grave sins that maintain “that wall, which do not allow the penitents to access immediately and definitively the forgiveness of God.”

Msgr. Ted Bertagni said God’s mercy is the path to hope. “You only have hope if you can experience that mercy.”

When someone “comes to reconciliation, they want to be renewed, they want to be restored, they want to get back into the grace with God” to “build up their faith again,” he said. This is why confession is “a very uplifting thing for the priest as well as for the penitents.”

“I think people don’t go to reconciliation that often simply because … they’re afraid that they’ll be judged,” Msgr. Bertagni said.

When the faithful come for reconciliation, he said, the priest is “there to be open arms,” to unconditionally love them “as the father unconditionally loves and forgives you.”

WASHINGTON (OSV News) – A coalition of pro-life groups went to the U.S. Capitol March 27 to urge Congress and President Donald Trump’s administration to eliminate federal funding for Planned Parenthood, shortly before the Supreme Court is set to consider a case concerning that funding.

The high court is scheduled to hear oral argument in Kerr v. Planned Parenthood South Atlantic on April 2, regarding South Carolina’s attempt to prevent Planned Parenthood from participating in its Medicaid health program. The case could be a major test of the nation’s largest abortion provider’s ability to use public funds in states that have restricted abortion.

Supporters of allowing Planned Parenthood to receive Medicaid funds point to that group’s involvement in cancer screening and prevention services — such as pap tests and HPV vaccinations — but critics argue the funds are fungible and could be used to facilitate abortion.

Efforts to strip Planned Parenthood of public funds are sometimes referred to as “defunding.”

At the March 27 event near the Capitol Reflecting Pool, pro-life groups urged lawmakers to eliminate Planned Parenthood’s federal funding through the budget reconciliation process.

“There’s been a lot of conversation since Dobbs — since we together did a historic act in building a movement that would overturn Roe v. Wade — a lot of discussion about whether we were unified as a movement or not,” said Marjorie Dannenfelser, president of Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America, which works to elect pro-life candidates to public office.

“And I can tell you one thing, this movement is completely unified in its first priority, and that is to defund big abortion in this reconciliation bill,” she said.

Reconciliation is a legislative procedure that would allow the Republican majority to bypass the Senate filibuster to pass a budget resolution with a simple majority — instead of needing 60 votes first to end debate — as long as both chambers agree to, or reconcile, their versions of such legislation.

“We have a strong pro-life majority in the Senate; we have a slim, but strong pro-life majority in the House, and we’re ready to do it,” Dannenfelser said.

But a path to doing so was not yet clear. Republicans still face several hurdles on other issues as they aim to pass Trump’s multi-trillion dollar agenda, including still-conflicting versions of the budget framework passed by each chamber.

Multiple members of Congress who spoke at the event argued Trump has frozen federal funding for Planned Parenthood, appearing to reference a report by The Wall Street Journal that the Trump administration plans to freeze $27.5 million in federal family-planning grants to groups including Planned Parenthood as part of its probe into diversity, equity and inclusion programs, sometimes referred to as DEI, within federal agencies.

But those Title X funds would represent just a fraction of the taxpayer funds Planned Parenthood receives annually. The group’s most recent annual report shows it received almost $700 million in taxpayer funds — in the form of government health services reimbursements and grants — for the fiscal year that ended June 30, 2023.

Kristan Hawkins, president of Students for Life of America and Students for Life Action, told OSV News that the frozen Title X grants are “a good sign.”

“I think, for me, it shows us that our messaging is resonating to the administration,” she said.

“So I think it’s a good sign,” Hawkins added. “But it’s a first step – very much still a very first step – and there’s a lot we need to do.”

At the event, Rep. Chris Smith, R-N.J., a Catholic lawmaker and co-chair of the House Pro-Life Caucus, said that reconciliation legislation “offers an important opportunity to stop funding abortion purveyors like Planned Parenthood.”

“This is an opportunity we cannot afford to miss,” he said.

Jennie Bradley Lichter, president of the March for Life, pointed to recent New York Times reporting about botched abortions of unborn children, and inadequately trained staff at some Planned Parenthood clinics. She argued those problems showed the group should not be receiving taxpayer funds.

“It sure seems to me like the gig is finally up,” she said.