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Herald Malaysia
05-05-2025
- Politics
- Herald Malaysia
Cardinals discuss need for hope this Jubilee at ninth General Congregation
The 177 Cardinals present in Rome hold their ninth General Congregation in the Vatican on May 3, Saturday morning, and discuss the Church's need for hope during the ongoing Jubilee. May 05, 2025 Cardinals pray in the chapel at the ninth General Congregation in the Vatican (@VATICAN MEDIA) VATICAN: The Director of the Holy See Press Office, Matteo Bruni, told reporters on Saturday morning that 177 Cardinals were present at the ninth General Congregation in preparation for the upcoming conclave. The Congregation began at 9:00 AM with prayer. Of the 177 Cardinals present, 127 of them were electors. There were 26 speeches made during the Congregation. They discussed subjects including: - A dual task: communion within the Church and fraternity in the world - Gratitude was expressed for Pope Francis, often citing his Apostolic Exhortation Evangelii gaudium , and the processes he initiated, which must be carried forward - Collaboration and solidarity among Churches - The role of the Roman Curia in relation to the Pope - The service of the Church and the Pope in promoting peace - The value of education - The hope that the next Pope will be prophetic, that the Church will not shut itself in the upper room, but go out and bring light to a world desperately in need of hope (citing this year's Jubilee) Among the recurring themes that have emerged in recent days, Mr. Bruni mentioned synodality and collegiality, as well as: - The Jubilee and the theme of hope - A look at the world, and the thirst and interest it shows toward the Church - A Church that lives in the world, not in its own world, to avoid becoming insignificant - Ecumenical dialogue and mission The Cardinals drawn by lot to assist the Cardinal Camerlengo, Cardinal Kevin Farrell, in the Particular Congregations for the handling of ordinary affairs were announced: Cardinals Francis Prevost and Marcello Semeraro. The third member of the Commission remains Cardinal Reinhard Marx in his role as coordinator of the Council for the Economy. Cardinal Giovanni Battista Re, the Dean of the College of Cardinals, reminded everyone that St. Peter's Basilica is organizing the Rosary every Saturday evening at 9:00 PM during the month of May. It was also noted that on Sunday, any Cardinals who wish may celebrate Mass in their titular churches. Responding to journalists' questions, Mr. Bruni noted that work at the Casa Santa Marta to accommodate the Cardinals has reached an advanced stage and will be completed by Monday, May 5. He added that the Cardinals will enter the Casa Santa Marta starting from Tuesday evening, May 6, through Wednesday morning, May 7, but that they must move in before the Mass Pro Eligendo Romani Pontifice. On Tuesday, May 6, the Cardinals will meet in a General Congregation at 9:00 AM and will hold an afternoon session, if necessary. On Monday, May 5, the press briefing to update journalists on the Congregations may take place only in the evening, after the second session of the General Congregation ends at 7 PM.--Vatican News
Herald Malaysia
26-04-2025
- Politics
- Herald Malaysia
Those who are 'last' will be the last to say goodbye
Vatican News Editorial Director, Andrea Tornielli, reflects on the initiative for several people from the margins of society to welcome Pope Francis' mortal remains to their permanent resting place at the Basilica of St. Mary Major. Apr 26, 2025 By Andrea TornielliThe 'last' will be the last to welcome him, as they wait on the threshold of the Basilica of St. Mary Major, where Pope Francis will be buried under the maternal gaze of the icon of the Salus Populi Romani . The final stretch of the earthly path of the Bishop of Rome, who came almost from the "ends of the earth," will be crowned not by the powerful but by those poor, migrants, homeless, and marginalized, in short, those who have been the focus of so many pages of his magisterium and who are at the centre of every page of the Gospel. Already on Easter Monday, the Monday of the Angel, the words pronounced by Cardinal Camerlengo Kevin Joseph Farrell to announce the unexpected death of Pope Francis had underlined this cornerstone of his teaching: 'He taught us to live the values of the Gospel with fidelity, courage, and universal love, especially in favour of the poorest and most marginalized.' 'How I would like a Church which is poor and for the poor!' Pope Francis said at the beginning of his pontificate in 2013. 'For the Church, the option for the poor is primarily a theological category rather than a cultural, sociological, political, or philosophical one. God shows the poor 'His first mercy.' This divine preference has consequences for the faith life of all Christians, since we are called to have 'this mind… which was in Jesus Christ',' he wrote in the apostolic exhortation Evangelii gaudium , a document that we have yet to fully appreciate and that marked the trajectory of his ministry as Successor of Peter. Pope Francis' words were always accompanied by concrete actions and choices. The first Pope to choose the name of the saint of Assisi followed in the wake of the teachings of his predecessors, such as those of Pope St. John XXIII, who, a month before opening the Second Vatican Ecumenical Council, had said, 'The Church presents herself as she is and wants to be, as the Church of all, and particularly the Church of the poor.' For the first South American Pope, his magisterium of words and actions had its origin in the Gospel and the teachings of the early Church Fathers—like Saint Ambrose, who had said, 'It is not of your possessions that you make a gift to the poor; you do no more than render to him what belongs to him. For it is that which is given in common for the use of all, that which you annex. The earth is given to all, and not only to the rich.' With these words, Pope St. Paul VI was able to affirm in his encyclical Populorum progressio that private property does not constitute an unconditional and absolute right for anyone, and that no one is authorized to reserve for his own exclusive use what exceeds his need when others lack the necessities. His teachings also recalled St. John Chrysostom, who said in a famous homily, 'Do you want to honour the body of Christ? Do not allow it to be an object of contempt in its members, that is, in the poor, deprived of clothes to cover themselves. Do not honour Christ here in church with silk cloths, while outside you neglect Him when he suffers from cold and nakedness. He who said: This is My Body, said also: 'You saw Me hungry and did not give Me food'." Far from ideological readings, the Church has no political interests to defend when it calls for overcoming what Pope Francis called 'the globalization of indifference.' Moved only by the words of the Gospel, sustained by the tradition of the Fathers of the Church, the late Pope invited us to turn our gaze to those who are 'last,' those favoured by Jesus—those 'last ones' who will accompany him on Saturday with their embrace on the final stage of his journey.--Vatican News
New Statesman
21-04-2025
- Politics
- New Statesman
Pope Francis's illusions
Photo by Vatican Media viaWhen the cardinal electors made him Pope, Jorge Mario Bergoglio later said, they gave Rome a bishop from the very ends of the Earth. They chose him because he spoke of a place even further away than that. In March 2013, in the final meetings before the doors shut on the conclave to select the 226th successor to Saint Peter, Jorge Bergoglio talked about the moon. Born in Buenos Aires in 1936, the man who would become Pope Francis told his fellow cardinals about the Mysterium lunae. The first Christians looked into the night sky 20 centuries ago, and saw, in a world shrouded by darkness, a great light. Look at the moon, they said, and you see the Church. It's only by her illumination – her teachings, her sacraments, her holiness – that we can see at all. But like the moon, none of her beauty belongs to her. It's borrowed grace, reflected light. It's an illusion. Without God, it would be nothing at all. In all the years since, the Church remained; the mystery and the light. And at the heart of it sits the figure of the pope: remote, untouchable, as enigmatic and inhuman as the surface of the moon. His powers and responsibilities are so vast, wrote one theologian in 1986, that it is a job it is humanly impossible to succeed in. A quarter-century later, that theologian had confirmed in practice what he'd predicted in theory, and Benedict XVI became the first pope in eight centuries to resign. Adrift before the Church's internal corruption, helpless before her steady decline, Benedict's papacy ended in defeat. His successor made it clear he intended his own would end differently. Francis's speech about the Mysterium lunae told the story of a Church cleansed and renewed, restored to the light from which it had come. It was a return to first principles, summarised as 'a poor church for the poor'; expressed, first and most clearly, in gestures: Francis took a hostel room over the apostolic palace; a wooden chair over a throne; a silver cross over the traditional one of gold. Modelling a different kind of leadership to that of his predecessors, Francis intended to break the cycle of decay. What unfolded next was very different. The story of the Francis papacy – from his election on 13 March 2013 to his death, aged 88, on 21 April 2025 – was a story of illusions. The first revealed was Francis's own. In November 2013, he released Evangelii gaudium, 'The joy of the gospel', the founding charter of his papacy. It was a lengthy reiteration of the speech that, eight months before, had made him Pope. The Church exists to evangelise, Francis wrote. Every aspect of Catholic life, from the curia downwards, had to be recentred around this task. The temptation to retreat into subcultures must be resisted, he said: Christians are called not to avoid the world, but to convert it. Francis hoped his leadership might augur an age of renewal for the Church. He presided instead over an era of decline. Over his time in office, the secular West grew ever more secular. In Latin America, the church's long retreat before evangelical Protestantism turned into a rout. In 2010, nearly four out of every five of the Pope's fellow Argentinians identified as Catholic; by 2020, that figure had dropped below 50 per cent. The future of Catholicism now looks like her distant past, the Church of the third century: strong in Africa, weak almost everywhere else. Francis did not instigate the decline; his papacy was defined by it nevertheless. And as Francis subverted the hopes of others, history subverted his. The Pope called Catholics to go to the margins just as believers were, across much of the West, marginalised themselves; strengthened ties with Christians outside the Church as her internal divisions deepened; expounded an optimistic, missionary vision of the Church to a shrinking, embattled flock. Hannah Arendt eulogised John XXIII as a Pope who was also a Christian. Francis was, at his best, an even stranger prodigy: a pope who was also a human being. But whether this was a good thing depended on who you asked. Subscribe to The New Statesman today from only £8.99 per month Subscribe Catholic conservatives had long believed the Church did not change; under John Paul II and Benedict XVI, they convinced themselves that popes didn't either. To theological supremacy they augmented a kind of personal cult: the bishop of Rome as universal friend, seer and epistemic authority, a correct-answer-machine on Vatican hill. Then came Francis: loose-lipped, imprecise, concerned more with the failure of Christians than the errors of the secular world. And men who'd turned the Pope into an idol were horrified to glimpse, beneath a white cassock, feet of clay. The existential crisis which ensued poisoned Catholic internal life: imbued even the smallest reform with apocalyptic import. But Francis's method of advancing reform – through footnotes, private letters, proxy and diktat – played its own role in turning inevitable clashes into unbridgeable divides. If the Roman fiat could no longer preclude Church teaching being challenged, neither could it single-handedly change it. In the vertical, clericalised Church the Pope had grown up in, dictatorial methods were par for the course. But the Church Francis led was different: less deferential, often lay-led, decentralised, fractious. In such a context even a pope has to convince his enemies, not just defeat them. And if Francis believed opposition to his reforms was confined to a tiny, unrepresentative elite, he was, like his opponents, the victim of an illusion. The traditional pattern of ecclesial conflict – liberalising laity, conservative pope – had been established in the aftermath of the 1962-65 Second Vatican Council. (Vatican II was a controversial meeting of more than 2,000 bishops and thousands of observers, auditors, sisters, laymen and laywomen to discuss the future of the church. It may have laid the foundations for the modern papacy, but it also set in motion the conflict that will define Pope Francis's legacy: should the church modernise in tandem with the world, or stick to its inherent conservatism?) Under Francis, the council's legacy was again contested; across the world, the two tendencies renewed their struggle. But some time in the half-century since, their positions had quietly reversed. A string of episcopal and lay rebellions had, in the late 1960s, rendered Paul VI's reiteration of the Church's prohibition of artificial birth control a dead letter. In 2023, recalcitrant bishops from the Global South rendered Francis's proposed form for blessing same-sex couples moot. In other respects, the Franciscan papacy saw the patterns of conflict set in the past half-century break down entirely. As the true scope of the abuse crisis in the reign of Francis's predecessors became clear, trust disintegrated between clergy and bishops; laity and hierarchs. The ensuing divide cut deeper than any dispute over doctrinal or liturgical reform. It was a challenge Francis only ever partially met. Under his aegis, reforms which had seemed impossible with his predecessors – notably, the centralised complaints system Vox Estis – were gradually introduced. In his public apologies, his meetings with survivors, in public and in private, over many years, Francis initiated a cultural change which is likely to prove more significant still. But where his achievements were landmarks, his failures were perverse. The man who spent endless hours listening to survivors was the same one who repeatedly pulled strings to keep perpetrators from justice. When the American cardinal Ted McCarrick was found guilty in a Vatican trial for sexual crimes against adults and minors, Francis demurred to hold McCarrick's closest collaborators to account: then, he promoted them. The man from the ends of the Earth had gone further than any Pope before him to tackle the abuse crisis. It was, too often, not far enough. The problem with Francis, however, ultimately reached far beyond him. Across a half-century of cover-ups, the list of those responsible is implausibly vast. The roll call of the complicit, both clerical and lay, by omission, inaction or silence, is longer still. Under the weight of that failure, the institutional trust underpinning Catholic life began to collapse. In some ways, the ensuing vacuum was filled by an universe of online influencers; a magisterium in every mobile phone. In what remains of Catholic Europe, the symbols of the faith – if not the substance – decorate the banners of the post-fascist and populist right. Across Latin America the Church staggers backwards into its authoritarian past. And in the United States, the marriage of convenience between Catholic conservatives and republicans deepened, under Trump, to a spiritual union. And it was in America, the wealthiest part of the Church, that offered the bleakest vision of the faith's decay. Over Francis's penultimate year in office, President Joe Biden, a Catholic of 80 years practice, presided over the destruction in Gaza of some of the oldest Christian communities in the world. Biden's support for gay marriage, abortion and IVF may have read as rather uncatholic, at least to traditionalists. But adding to that, Donald Trump's vice-president JD Vance offered the equally a-doctrinal racial demagoguery and libertarian agenda of Silicon Valley. (Vance and the Pope met the day before Francis's death.) Both Biden and Vance made political capital of their faith. But in a post-Christian nation, what they gained from their Catholicism was conditional: their faith could be public, but never lived. They represented in their persons the fantasies Catholics had fed on for decades: delusions of permanence and plasticity, of relevance, power, popularity, control. And the two men bear out the truth of the saviour's warning; that those who love the things which perish will one day perish themselves. In this sense, the Pope's lack of influence over his flock was a token of the greatest gift he leaves Catholics: he had taken their illusions away. But against such a backdrop, Francis' most admirable commitments – his stubborn, lonely solidarity with the marginalised and forgotten – seem amongst his most futile. A Pope who asked for refugees and migrants to be welcomed with an open heart dies as hearts are hardened towards outsiders across the west. A Pope who reversed a century of compromise with capitalism, restating a choice laid down two millennia before – to serve Mammon, or to serve God – dies at a time when the ultra-wealthy enjoy unprecedented power and prestige. A Pope who spoke incessantly of peacemaking dies as the world descends into war. If Francis was defeated in his efforts to shape the world; defeated in his attempts even to direct his Church, it was because popes can preach, appeal, convict – but not compel. The power of the papacy is, in this sense, like the light of the moon: a beautiful illusion. Saint Peter's throne is also his prison cell. Some considered Francis's gestures – the wooden chair, the hostel room, the cross – as hollow: power playing at humility; an image, not a truth. This was less a mistake over Francis than about his office. The life of a Pope, like the life of any Christian, is directed towards realities which cannot be seen. Every act he takes is a gesture; images which illume truths; a hand pointing to somewhere past the limits of our sight. Not long before Francis's death, it was revealed that he had called the Catholic parish in Gaza every evening since the bombardment. It was an action that seemed, somehow, out of place in the world as we know it. As the news reports and the negotiations and the bombs continued, the calls did too; a kindness and a mystery. Like a light falling on us from somewhere else, very far away. In the suffering of the Church in Gaza – a suffering Catholics had sponsored, supplied, justified, blessed – Francis encountered the defeat of his hopes for the world, and the only hope for the future of his Church. It was an antidote to illusion: 'A poor church, for the poor'. It could never be administered. It could only be lived. To be poor, in the world as humans have made it, is to be weak; to suffer; to die. It is to share in the passion of Jesus Christ, the crucified God. It is to be defeated. And yet, somehow, not to fail. In 1971, a young theologian gave a lecture on the crisis in the Church. Joseph Ratzinger talked – as Pope Francis would decades later – about the moon. For millennia we contemplated the Mysterium lunae, Ratzinger said. In the 20th century we arrived there. We walked on the moon. And on the other side of mystery all we found was dust. That's painful, the man who would become Pope Benedict XVI said: losing our illusions always is. But God speaks through everything; our defeats, perhaps, most of all. A lesson, if we look for it, is written in the dust: in the end, only the light is real. [See more: The myth of progressive Catholicism] Related
