VATICAN CITY (CNS) – The wounds of Christ, still visible after his resurrection, are the greatest sign of God’s love and mercy, Pope Francis said on Divine Mercy Sunday.
“Let us ask ourselves, however, if in the name of this love, in the name of Jesus’ wounds, whether we are willing to open our arms to those who are wounded by life, excluding no one from God’s mercy, but welcoming everyone – each person like a brother, like a sister, like God welcomes everyone. God welcomes everyone,” he said April 16.
Pope Francis greets an estimated 20,000 visitors and pilgrims who joined him for the recitation of the “Regina Coeli” prayer April 16, 2023, in St. Peter’s Square at the Vatican. (CNS photo/Vatican Media)
After reciting the midday “Regina Coeli” prayer with about 20,000 people gathered in St. Peter’s Square, Pope Francis wished a happy Easter to Eastern Catholic and Orthodox Christians who follow the Julian calendar and were celebrating the Resurrection that day.
He also expressed concern about Sudan where fighting between forces loyal to two different generals has led to the deaths of hundreds of civilians since April 13. “I am close to the Sudanese people, already so tried,” the pope said, “and I invite you to pray so that they might lay down their arms and take up the path of peace and harmony.”
In his main address, Pope Francis spoke about the day’s Gospel reading, John 20:19-31, which recounts the story of St. Thomas doubting the other disciples’ claim that they had seen the risen Lord.
In his hesitation to believe the others, “he represents all of us a little bit,” the pope said. “Indeed, it is not always easy to believe, especially when, as in his case, he had suffered a tremendous disappointment” after following Jesus, believing in him, and then watching him die on the cross.
St. Thomas was not with the other disciples when Jesus appeared to them the evening after the resurrection, the pope noted.
“He had gone away from the community,” he said, and the only way he could have a chance of encountering Jesus was by going back, “returning to that family he had left behind, scared and sad.”
“Thomas wants an extraordinary sign — to touch the wounds. Jesus shows them to him, but in an ordinary way, coming in front of everyone, in the community, not outside,” the pope said. “It’s as if he said to him: ‘If you want to meet me, do not look far away, remain in the community, with the others. Don’t go away. Pray with them. Break bread with them.”
Jesus says the same to his disciples today, Pope Francis said. The community of the church “is where you will find me; that is where I will show you the signs of the wounds impressed on my body: the signs of the love that overcomes hatred, of the pardon that disarms revenge, the signs of the life that conquers death.”
Christians should ask themselves where they look for Jesus, the pope said. Is it “in some special event, in some spectacular or amazing religious manifestation, solely at the emotional or sensational level?”
Or, he said, do they look for the Lord “in the community, in the church, accepting the challenge of staying there, even though it is not perfect?”
“Despite all its limitations and failures – which are our limitations and failings – our mother church is the body of Christ,” the pope said. “It is there, in the body of Christ, that, now and forever, the greatest signs of his love can be found impressed.”
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VATICAN CITY (CNS) – Easter is the time “to roll away the stone of the tombs in which we often imprison our hope and to look with confidence to the future, for Christ is risen and has changed the direction of history,” Pope Francis said as he celebrated the Easter Vigil Mass.
“The power of Easter summons you to roll away every stone of disappointment and mistrust,’ the pope said in his homily at the Mass April 8. “The Lord is an expert in rolling back the stones of sin and fear.”
Pope Francis inscribes a cross on the Paschal candle at the beginning of the Easter Vigil Mass in St. Peter’s Basilica at the Vatican April 8, 2023. (CNS photo/Vatican Media)
The liturgy began in the back of St. Peter’s Basilica, rather than in the atrium as usual, with the blessing of the fire and the lighting of the Easter candle.
As the procession further into the darkened basilica and candles were lighted from the Paschal candle, Deacon Zane Langenbrunner chanted, “Lumen Christi” (“the light of Christ”) three times. The deacon, a seminarian at the Pontifical North American College, is preparing for ordination to the priesthood for the Diocese of Fort Wayne-South Bend, Indiana.
Despite the glow of cellphone screens, the basilica became increasingly brighter as the 8,000 people in the congregation lighted their candles as well.
Once Pope Francis in his wheelchair, all the concelebrants, the altar servers and two Swiss Guards were in place, Deacon Langenbrunner chanted the solemn Easter proclamation, the Exsultet.
During the Mass, Pope Francis baptized eight people: three people from Albania, two from the United States – Auriea Harvey and Francis X. Phi – and one each from Nigeria, Italy and Venezuela.
Pope Francis baptizes Auriea Harvey, a woman from the United States, during the Easter Vigil Mass in St. Peter’s Basilica at the Vatican April 8, 2023. (CNS photo/Vatican Media)
Two deacons carried the baptismal font to the pope and held it in front of him during the rite so that he could baptize the men and women without having to walk or stand, something he does with difficulty.
Pope Francis also confirmed the eight adults and gave them their first Communion during the Easter Vigil.
While Pope Francis presided over the two-and-a-half-hour Mass, Cardinal Arthur Roche, prefect of the Dicastery Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments, was the main concelebrant at the altar.
In his homily, the pope focused on the Gospel story of the women going to Jesus’ tomb, “bewildered and dismayed, their hearts overwhelmed with grief at the death that took away their beloved.”
In the life of faith, he said, “sometimes we too may think that the joy of our encounter with Jesus is something belonging to the past, whereas the present consists mostly of sealed tombs: tombs of disappointment, bitterness and distrust” or of thinking “things will never change.”
People get weary or feel helpless when confronted with evil, or they see relationships torn apart, injustice or corruption go unchecked, he said. “Then too, we may have come face to face with death, because it robbed us of the presence of our loved ones or because we brushed up against it in illness or a serious setback.”
“In these or similar situations, our paths come to a halt before a row of tombs, and we stand there, filled with sorrow and regret, alone and powerless, repeating the question, ‘Why?'” the pope said.
But the Gospel says Jesus’ women disciples did not stand frozen before the tomb. Rather, he said, they run to the disciples “to proclaim a change of course: Jesus is risen and awaits them in Galilee.”
Pope Francis often speaks of the post-Resurrection call to go to Galilee. At the Easter Vigil, he said it is a call to leave the “upper room” where the disciples were hiding in fear and to set out on a mission.
But, he said, it is also a call back to the origins of their relationship with Jesus because they met him in Galilee and began following him there.
The call to go back to Galilee, he said, “asks us to relive that moment, that situation, that experience in which we met the Lord, experienced his love and received a radiantly new way of seeing ourselves, the world around us and the mystery of life itself.”
For each person, he said, Galilee “is the ‘place’ where you came to know Jesus personally, where he stopped being just another personage from a distant past, but a living person: not some distant God but the God who is at your side, who more than anyone else knows you and loves you.”
As an Easter exercise, Pope Francis asked people to think back to a time when they experienced the love of Jesus, when they heard God’s word speak directly to them or when they felt “the great joy” of forgiveness after going to confession.
“Each of us knows the place of his or her interior resurrection, that beginning and foundation, the place where things changed,” the pope said. “We cannot leave this in the past; the Risen Lord invites us to return there to celebrate Easter. Remember your Galilee. Remind yourself.”
“Remember the emotions and sensations,” he suggested; “see the colors and savor the taste of it.”
Rolling away “every stone of disappointment and mistrust,” the pope said, “let each of us return to his or her own Galilee, to the place where we first encountered him. Let us rise to new life.”
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VATICAN CITY (CNS) – During Lent this year, residents of the Domus Sanctae Marthae, where Pope Francis lives, decided to clean out their closets and give away things other people could use. “You can’t imagine how much stuff there was,” the pope said.
Leading his weekly general audience April 5, the pope said Holy Week is the perfect time to simplify one’s life and let go of things, especially of wounds, sin and past offenses that keep one from living in hope.
“Look at the wardrobe of your soul: How many useless things do you have, how many silly illusions?” he asked.
Pope Francis said that in his “other diocese,” Buenos Aires, when he would go around the city — “now I can’t do that because they won’t let me” — he would look at people’s faces and always was struck by how many seemed sad or completely distracted, “without peace, without hope.”
Pope Francis greets a young woman as he rides in the popemobile in St. Peter’s Square at the Vatican during his weekly general audience April 5, 2023. (CNS photo/Vatican Media)
So, he said, the sadness and disappointment of Jesus’ disciples after his arrest and death are completely understandable to most people.
People wonder, “Why is there so much evil in the world – look, there is evil in the world. Why do inequalities continue to increase and why is that long-awaited peace not arriving? Why are we so attached to war, to hurting one another?” the pope said. “And there is the feeling that times gone by were better and that in the world, perhaps even in the church, things are not going the way they once were.”
Such thoughts, he said, are signs that “hope sometimes seems to be sealed behind the stone of mistrust” just as Jesus was sealed behind the stone of his tomb.
For Jesus’ disciples, then and now, the cross is the key to restoring hope.
The cross, “the most terrible instrument of torture,” is the greatest sign of God’s love, he said. “Having become the tree of life, that wood of death reminds us that God’s beginnings often begin with our ends.”
“In the black holes of our disappointed expectations,” the pope said, God’s love fills believers with a hope that never disappoints.
With the hope born of the cross, he said, people can be “healed of the sadness with which we are sick, be healed of the bitterness with which we pollute the church and the world.”
Through Jesus’ wounds God heals sinful humanity, Pope Francis said.
“We, too, are wounded; who isn’t wounded in life?” he said. “Who does not bear the scars of past choices, of misunderstandings, of hurts that stay inside and that we struggle to overcome?”
“God does not hide from our eyes the wounds that have pierced his body and soul. He shows them to show us that a new passage can be opened at Easter: to make of one’s wounds holes of light,” the pope said, before imagining someone responding, “But, Your Holiness, don’t exaggerate.”
Pope Francis told the crowd it was not an exaggeration.
“I ask you, what do you do with your wounds, the ones that only you know? You can let them fester in resentment, in sadness, or I can unite them with Jesus’ wounds, so that my wounds also become bright,” he said.
“Yes, our wounds can become springs of hope when, instead of feeling sorry for ourselves or hiding them, we dry the tears shed by others,” the pope said.
The choice, he said, is either to “lick my own wounds” or to reach out “to heal, to help others.”
At the end of the audience, Pope Francis asked people to spend time in Holy Week praying for the conversion of those who foment war.
And, thinking of Mary standing at the foot of the cross, he prayed for “the mothers of Ukrainian and Russian soldiers who have fallen in the war. They are mothers of dead sons. Let us pray for these mothers.”
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VATICAN CITY (CNS) – The unborn, migrants, the elderly and the disabled are “living icons” of Jesus that call Christians to draw close to those who feel abandoned just as Christ did on the cross, Pope Francis said.
In his homily for Palm Sunday Mass in St. Peter’s Square April 2, the pope reflected on the phrase Jesus uttered on the cross in St. Matthew’s Gospel, and which echoed through the square when sung in the responsorial psalm: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”
Pope Francis gives his homily at Palm Sunday Mass in St. Peter’s Square at the Vatican April 2, 2023. (CNS photo/Chris Warde-Jones)
“Christ, in his abandonment, stirs us to seek him and to love him and those who are themselves abandoned, for in them we see not only people in need, but Jesus himself,” he said.
According to the Vatican gendarmes, some 60,000 people were present in St. Peter’s Square for the Mass.
Fighting off coughs as he began his homily but otherwise speaking without difficulty, Pope Francis said that in his Passion, Jesus experienced the distance of God so he could be “completely and definitively one” with humanity.
The pope was released from the hospital April 1 after a four-day stay for treatment of bronchitis. He processed into St. Peter’s Square on the popemobile wearing his winter coat on an early spring day in Rome.
In his homily, Pope Francis highlighted the many “abandoned Christs” that exist in society: “the poor who live on our streets and that we don’t have the courage to look at, migrants who are no longer faces but numbers.”
He also recalled those who are “discarded with white gloves: unborn children, the elderly left alone, who could be your mom or dad,” as well as the “sick whom no one visits, the disabled who are ignored, and the young burdened by great interior emptiness with no one prepared to listen to their cry of pain and who don’t find another path but suicide.”
Putting his prepared text aside, Pope Francis remembered Burkhard Scheffler, a German homeless man who died in November “alone and abandoned” under the colonnade that surrounds St. Peter’s Square.
“He is Jesus to each one of us,” said the pope.
“So many are in need of our watch, so many are abandoned,” he said. “I also need Jesus to caress me, to come close to me, and that’s why I go to find him in the abandoned, in those who are alone.”
At the beginning of the celebration, Pope Francis stood at the obelisk in the center of St. Peter’s Square to bless the palms carried there by some 400 people. He then proceeded to the altar by car.
The pope delivered the homily after listening to the account of Jesus’ Passion from St. Matthew’s Gospel, but Cardinal Leonardo Sandri, vice dean of the College of Cardinals, was the main celebrant at the altar.
After Mass, the pope prayed the Angelus with the faithful in St. Peter’s Square and thanked them for their prayers that “have intensified in the past days.”
“Thank you, truly,” he said.
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VATICAN CITY (CNS) – To evangelize well, the faithful need to dialogue with God, let the Holy Spirit renew their hearts and lives, and then dialogue with today’s world, Pope Francis said.
The Holy Spirit is “the protagonist of evangelization. Without the Holy Spirit we will only be advertising the church,” he said during his weekly general audience in St. Peter’s Square March 22.
Pope Francis prays during his general audience in St. Peter’s Square at the Vatican March 22, 2023. (CNS photo/Vatican Media)
The church, too, always must be “evangelizing herself” or else “it remains a museum piece,” he said.
The pope continued his series of talks about “the passion for evangelization: the apostolic zeal of the believer” by reflecting on St. Paul VI’s apostolic exhortation “Evangelii Nuntiandi” (On Evangelization in the Modern World) and its emphasis on witnessing to Christ.
“You cannot evangelize without witness — the witness of the personal encounter with Jesus Christ, the incarnate Word in which salvation is fulfilled,” he said.
“Witness also includes professed faith, that is, convinced and manifest adherence to God the father, son and Holy Spirit, who created and redeemed us out of love,” he said.
And, he said, it is a faith “that transforms us, that transforms our relationships, the criteria and the values that determine our choices. Witness, therefore, cannot be separated from consistency between what one believes and what one proclaims.”
“A person is credible if there is harmony between what they believe and live, how they believe and live,” the pope said. Anything else is hypocrisy.
“Every one of us is required to respond to three fundamental questions, posed in this way by St. Paul VI: ‘Do you believe what you are proclaiming? Do you live what you believe? Do you preach what you live?'” the pope said.
“We cannot be satisfied with easy, pre-packaged answers,” he said. “We are called upon to accept the risk, albeit destabilized, of the search, trusting fully in the action of the Holy Spirit who works in each one of us, driving us ever further: beyond our boundaries, beyond our barriers, beyond our limits, of any type.”
St. Paul VI, he said, “teaches that the zeal for evangelization springs from holiness which springs from a heart filled with God. Nourished by prayer and, above all, by love for the Eucharist, evangelization in turn increases holiness in the people who carry it out.”
“Without holiness, the word of the evangelizer ‘will have difficulty in touching the heart of modern man’ and ‘risks being vain and sterile'” because it is just a string of empty words, he said, quoting St. Paul’s exhortation.
Evangelization is addressed not only to others “but also ourselves, believers in Christ and active members of the people of God,” Pope Francis said. “We have to convert every day, receive the word of God and change our life each day, this is how you evangelize the heart.”
The Catholic Church, “which is the people of God immersed in the world,” is often tempted by many idols, therefore, “she always needs to hear the proclamation of the mighty works of God,” to pray and feel the power of the Holy Spirit, which changes people’s hearts, he said.
“A church that evangelizes herself in order to evangelize is a church that, guided by the Holy Spirit, is required to walk a demanding path of conversion and renewal,” he said.
This includes “the ability to change the ways of understanding and living its evangelizing presence in history, avoiding taking refuge in the protected zones of the logic of ‘it has always been done this way’ (which) are shelters that make the church fall ill,” he said.
“The church must always go forward, it must continually grow,” he added. “This way it stays young.”
At the end of the audience, the pope underlined the sanctity of all human life. He greeted the faithful from Poland, which celebrates the Day for the Sanctity of Life March 25.
“As a sign of the need to protect human life from conception to its natural end, the Yes to Life Foundation is giving to Zambia the ‘Voice of the Unborn’ bell, which I blessed this morning,” he said.
“May its sound carry the message that every life is sacred and inviolable,” he added.
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VATICAN CITY (CNS) – Pope Francis has invited Catholics worldwide to renew the act of consecrating the church and all humanity, especially Russia and Ukraine, to Mary every March 25, the feast of the Annunciation.
At the end of his general audience in St. Peter’s Square March 22, the pope recalled last year’s service “when, in union with all the bishops of the world, the church and humanity, especially Russia and Ukraine, were consecrated to the Immaculate Heart of Mary.”
Pope Francis burns incense in front of a Marian statue after consecrating the world and, in particular, Ukraine and Russia to the Immaculate Heart of Mary during a Lenten penance service in St. Peter’s Basilica at the Vatican March 25, 2022. A year later, he asked Catholics worldwide to renew the consecration and pray for peace. (CNS photo/Vatican Media)
“Let us not tire of entrusting the cause of peace to the Queen of Peace,” he said, asking that people not forget “troubled Ukraine, which is suffering so much.”
The pope invited “every believer and community, especially prayer groups, to renew every March 25 the Act of Consecration to Our Lady, so that she, who is mother, may preserve us all in unity and peace.”
As Russia’s violent invasion of Ukraine entered its second month Pope Francis pronounced the Act of Consecration after leading a Lenten penance service in St. Peter’s Basilica March 25, 2022. He had asked bishops around the world to join him the same day in consecrating Ukraine and Russia to the Immaculate Heart of Mary.
In his homily during the Lenten penance service, Pope Francis had said the Act of Consecration was “no magic formula but a spiritual act” of trust by “children who, amid the tribulation of this cruel and senseless war that threatens our world, turn to their mother, reposing all their fears and pain in her heart and abandoning themselves to her.”
“It means placing in that pure and undefiled heart, where God is mirrored, the inestimable goods of fraternity and peace, all that we have and are, so that she, the mother whom the Lord has given us, may protect us and watch over us,” the pope had said.
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VATICAN CITY (CNS) – For a decade, even when discussing the internal workings of the Vatican, Pope Francis has insisted the church is not the church of Christ if it does not reach out, sharing the “joy of the Gospel” and placing the poor at the center of its attention.
Signals that his papacy would be different started the moment he stepped out on the balcony of St. Peter’s Basilica the evening of March 13, 2013: He was not wearing a red, ermine-trimmed cape, and he bowed as he asked the crowd to pray that God would bless him.
His decision not to live in the Apostolic Palace, his invitations to Vatican trash collectors and gardeners and other employees to join him for his daily morning Mass, his insistence on going to the Italian island of Lampedusa to celebrate Mass and pray for migrants who had drowned in the Mediterranean captivated the attention of the media.
Pope Francis blesses a prisoner as he visits he Curran-Fromhold Correctional Facility in Philadelphia in this Sept. 27, 2015, file photo. In Washington the pope visited the White House and made history as the first pope to address Congress; in New York he spoke at the U.N. and visited ground zero; in Philadelphia he led the World Meeting of Families. (CNS photo/Paul Haring)
But not everyone was pleased with the seeming ease with which he set aside pomp and protocol. And tensions within the Catholic community grew as he expressed openness to LGBTQ Catholics and to those living in what the church considers irregular marriage situations and when he said in an interview in 2013 that the church cannot talk only about abortion, gay marriage and contraception.
One kind of summary of his first 10 years as pope can be found in numbers: He has made 40 trips abroad, visiting 60 countries; in eight consistories he created 95 cardinals under the age of 80 and eligible to vote in a conclave and paid tribute to 26 churchmen over the age of 80; and he has presided over the canonizations of 911 new saints, including a group of more than 800 martyrs, but also Sts. John Paul II, John XXIII and Paul VI.
In his first major document, the apostolic exhortation “The Joy of the Gospel,” he laid out a program for his papacy, looking inside the church and outside at the world to see what needed to be done to “encourage and guide the whole church in a new phase of evangelization, one marked by enthusiasm and vitality.”
The document included a discussion of the need to reform church institutions to highlight their missionary role; to encourage pastoral workers to listen to and stand with the people they were ministering to – his famous line about having “the smell of the sheep”; to deepen an understanding of the church as “the entire people of God” and not as an institution or, worse, a club of the elect; to integrate the poor into the church and society, rather than simply see them as objects of assistance; and to promote peace and dialogue.
For Canadian Cardinal Michael Czerny, prefect of the Dicastery for Promoting Integral Human Development, the agenda of Pope Francis is the original agenda of the Second Vatican Council.
Unlike St. John Paul II and the late Pope Benedict XVI, Pope Francis did not attend any of the council sessions. And, in fact, because he was ordained to the priesthood Dec. 13, 1969, he is the first pope to be ordained a priest after Vatican II.
“After Scripture and tradition, the council is the significant foundation, and I would say, characteristic orientation of this papacy,” the cardinal told Catholic News Service. “He has taken the council not from a collection of decrees, but from the lived experience of the council as implemented, as lived, as tested, as developed, you might say, in the church of Latin America.”
St. John XXIII launched the council with a pastoral focus on what it means to be the church in the modern world, he said. The papacies of St. John Paul and Pope Benedict, he said, “reverted to a more doctrinal understanding of the council” with “some very good results and with some massive, unfinished business.”
While the work of Pope Francis’ predecessors was important, he said, “I don’t think it picked up the primary agenda (of the council), which was implementing a new understanding of church in the modern world, a new way of evangelizing because the world is so different from how it was, let’s say, at the end of World War II.”
Emilce Cuda, an Argentine theologian and secretary of the Pontifical Commission for Latin America, agreed that a key to understanding Pope Francis’ pontificate is knowing how Vatican II was lived in Latin America with respect for popular piety and culture, and trust in the “sensus fidei,” the notion that the baptized together have a “sense of faith” and an ability “to understand what God says to us, to his people, in every moment.”
“There in the popular culture, in the peripheries, and in all the people of God, we can hear what God wants from us, or what God tells us to do in response to social problems and in the church in each moment,” she said. “We are in history and history is a movement, and the situation is not the same (as) in the 20th century or in the 21st century.”
As for disagreements with or even controversies about the papacy of Pope Francis, Cardinal Czerny warned against confusing “loud with representative or loud with majority. Loud doesn’t mean any of those things; it means loud.”
But, he said, “the patience of Pope Francis” leads him and encourages others to recognize that the pope’s critics “are not 100% off beam,” or off track; there usually is a grain of truth in what they say or an important value they hold dear that is being overlooked.
Cardinal Joseph W. Tobin of Newark, New Jersey, told CNS he believes the first 10 years of Pope Francis’ pontificate have been preparation for “what’s happening right now, and that’s the synodal conversation.”
The Second Vatican Council called Catholics to read the “signs of the times” and respond. And, the cardinal said, “this notion that we don’t have automatically prepared prescriptions for every challenge that faces us leads us to a fundamental tenet of our belief,” which is belief “in the Holy Spirit, the lord and giver of life.”
The synod process, which began with listening to people around the globe and will move toward two assemblies mainly of bishops, is about listening to the Holy Spirit.
While the synod involves meetings, Cardinal Tobin said, “synodality is a way of being church. It’s an ancient way of being church that is being recovered and lived in the circumstances in which we face ourselves today. And so, to my mind, that’s sort of the capstone of what Pope Francis has been working for over the last decade.”
“I’ve called synodality his long game,” the cardinal said. “He’s convinced that the changed circumstances of our world and our world going forward demand a new appreciation for the role of the Holy Spirit and a way to access that gift that is given to all of us by virtue of our baptism.”
Pope Francis has been laying the foundation for the new synod process since the beginning of his pontificate, said Cardinal Blase J. Cupich of Chicago. “There’s an organic whole to all of this.”
“I just wonder if, from the very beginning, he had in his mind that this would be the trajectory of his pontificate, and the synod on synodality I think is, in some way, the opportunity for him to pull everything together,” he said. “There are people who want him to go faster, but he wants things to be held together and the church to be held together.”
Asked what he thought was the most significant aspect of Pope Francis’ pontificate, the cardinal cited his predecessor, the late Cardinal Francis E. George, who participated in the 2013 conclave, and said the best description of Pope Francis was “He’s free.”
“He’s free in the sense of wanting to listen to different voices in the life of the church,” Cardinal Cupich said. “He’s free in being imaginative, but also he has the kind of freedom that really allows him to be joyful in this ministry.”
“John Paul II told us what we should do. Benedict told us why we should do it. And Francis is saying, ‘Do it,'” the cardinal said. Pope Francis is leading by example in how he cares for the poor, sees God at work in people’s real lives and reaches out to people often overlooked by the church.
“I think history will look back on this pontificate as historic, as pivotal in the life of the church,” Cardinal Cupich said.
Here is a timeline of some significant events in Pope Francis’ pontificate. (OSV News illustration/Chelsa Alt, OSV News)
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SCRANTON – As hundreds of people gathered to begin the Lenten season at the Cathedral of Saint Peter on Ash Wednesday, they were reminded of their need for God and encouraged to trust more deeply in God’s merciful presence.
“Saint Matthew, in today’s Gospel, reinforces the words of the prophet Joel and sets forth in practical terms the lifestyle that we are called to embrace as authentic disciples of the Lord Jesus,” the Most Rev. Joseph C. Bambera, Bishop of Scranton, said during his homily. “Pray, fast, and give alms in support of the poor. But do so not because such behavior will make us appear to be righteous. Do so because such acts for a Christian are the consequence of faithful lives rooted in Jesus, who teaches us how best to live.”
Bishop Bambera told those who had gathered for the rite of the imposition of ashes that the Lenten journey draws each one of us to the very heart of what it means to be a Christian.
The faithful receive ashes during the 12:10 p.m. Daily Mass at the Cathedral of Saint Peter in Scranton on Feb. 22, 2023. (Photos/Mike Melisky)
“Through baptism, we are brought into the life, death and resurrection of Jesus, which, in turn, invites us to trust in the power of God more deeply and equips us for mission – the proclamation of the “Good News” of Jesus – and the service of our sisters and brothers,” the bishop explained.
As Pope Francis marked the beginning of Lent at Rome’s Basilica of Santa Sabina, he told the faithful that Lent is the time to let go of the frivolous.
Lent is the time, Pope Francis said, “to proclaim that God alone is Lord, to drop the pretense of being self-sufficient and the need to put ourselves at the center of things, to be the top of the class, to think that by our own abilities we can succeed in life and transform the world around us.”
“How many distractions and trifles distract us from the things that really count? How often do we get caught up in our own wants and needs, lose sight of the heart of the matter, and fail to embrace the true meaning of our lives in this world!” he added.
The faithful receive ashes during the 12:10 p.m. Daily Mass at the Cathedral of Saint Peter in Scranton on Feb. 22, 2023. (Photos/Mike Melisky)
“Lent is a time of truth, a time to drop the masks we put on each day to appear perfect in the eyes of the world,” he said, and to “reject lies and hypocrisy. Not the lies and hypocrisies of others, but our own.”
Pope Francis also asked that the faithful use the 40 days of Lent to: “rediscover the joy, not of accumulating material goods, but of caring for those who are poor and afflicted”; to put God at the center of one’s life and pray and dialogue with him from the heart; and to become free “from the dictatorship of full schedules, crowded agendas and superficial needs, and choose the things that truly matter.”
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VATICAN CITY (CNS) – A year after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Pope Francis asked, “Can the Lord forgive so many crimes and so much violence? He is the God of peace.”
At the end of his weekly general audience Feb. 22 and with a group of Ukrainian parliamentarians seated in the front row, the pope noted that Feb. 24 would mark “one year since the invasion of Ukraine, a year since this absurd and cruel war – a sad anniversary.”
“The record of deaths, injuries, refugees and displaced people, destruction and economic and social damage speaks for itself,” he said.
Pope Francis signs a Ukrainian flag for a Ukrainian child at the end of his weekly general audience Feb. 22, 2023, in the Vatican audience hall. During the audience, the pope noted that the anniversary of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is Feb. 24 and prayed for an end to the war. (CNS photo/Vatican Media
At every general audience and public recitation of the Angelus prayer for the past year, Pope Francis has asked people to join him in praying for peace and in offering concrete assistance to the millions of Ukrainians who have sought safety abroad and for the millions of others displaced within Ukraine or struggling to survive because of the fighting.
But, with the anniversary of Russia’s invasion just two days away, the pope’s appeal Feb. 22 was even more intense.
Promising that Catholics continue to be close to the “martyred Ukrainian people who continue to suffer,” the pope asked, “Has everything possible been done to stop the war?”
“I appeal to all those who have authority over nations to commit themselves concretely to ending the conflict, to reaching a cease-fire and to starting peace negotiations,” the pope said. “That which is built on ruins will never be a true victory.”
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VATICAN CITY (CNS) – The way individual Catholics and their parishes care for the sick offers a precise measure of just how much they either are part of or are fighting the “throwaway culture” that ignores or discards anyone seen as flawed or weak, Pope Francis said in his message for the World Day of the Sick.
The care of those who are ill shows “whether we are truly companions on the journey or merely individuals on the same path, looking after our own interests and leaving others to ‘make do,'” the pope said in the message, which was released by the Vatican Jan. 10.
The Catholic Church celebrates the world day Feb. 11, the feast of Our Lady of Lourdes.
Pope Francis greets a child as he visits poor, sick people at a center run by the CasAmica Onlus organization on the outskirts of Rome in this Dec. 7, 2018, file photo. In his message for the 2023 World Day of the Sick, the pope said the way we treat those who are ill shows exactly what kind of a community we are. (CNS photo/Vatican Media)
“Experiences of bewilderment, sickness and weakness are part of the human journey,” the 86-year-old pope wrote.
But, he said, the Bible makes clear that “far from excluding us from God’s people,” those situations of vulnerability “bring us to the center of the Lord’s attention, for he is our Father and does not want to lose even one of his children along the way.”
Those who profess belief in God, he said, should do likewise, placing the sick at the center of their attention.
To illustrate his point, Pope Francis used the parable of the good Samaritan, a story he often cites to illustrate the importance of community and fraternity in contrast to cruelty and self-absorption.
“The fact that the man, beaten and robbed, is abandoned on the side of the road” in the parable “represents the condition in which all too many of our brothers and sisters are left at a time when they most need help,” the pope said.
In addition, he said, in too many cases it is not easy “to distinguish the assaults on human life and dignity that arise from natural causes from those caused by injustice and violence. In fact, increasing levels of inequality and the prevailing interests of the few now affect every human environment to the extent that it is difficult to consider any experience as having solely ‘natural’ causes.”
The problem is not only illness, the pope said, but also loneliness and the feeling of abandonment, both of which “can be overcome more easily than any other injustice, because – as the parable tells us – it only takes a moment of our attention, of being moved to compassion within us, in order to eliminate it.”
In the parable, he said, “two travelers, considered pious and religious, see the wounded man, yet fail to stop. The third passerby, however, a Samaritan, a scorned foreigner, is moved with compassion and takes care of that stranger on the road, treating him as a brother. In doing so, without even thinking about it, he makes a difference, he makes the world more fraternal.”
People need the love and support of others as they age and especially when they are ill, he said.
Usually, people are not prepared to fall sick, he said, and, often, “we fail even to admit that we are getting older.”
“Our vulnerability frightens us, and the pervasive culture of efficiency pushes us to sweep it under the carpet, leaving no room for our human frailty,” he said. And even when people do not turn away, sometimes those who are sick think they should distance themselves from loved ones so they don’t become “a burden.”
But, Pope Francis said, “this is how loneliness sets in, and we can become poisoned by a bitter sense of injustice, as if God himself had abandoned us. Indeed, we may find it hard to remain at peace with the Lord when our relationship with others and with ourselves is damaged.”
If the Catholic Church is truly to be a “field hospital,” the pope said, then its members must act.
The church’s mission, he said, “is manifested in acts of care, particularly in the historical circumstances of our time. We are all fragile and vulnerable, and need that compassion which knows how to pause, approach, heal and raise up.”
“The plight of the sick is a call that cuts through indifference and slows the pace of those who go on their way as if they had no sisters and brothers,” Pope Francis insisted.
Those who are sick, he said, “are at the center of God’s people, and the church advances together with them as a sign of a humanity in which everyone is precious and no one should be discarded or left behind.”
