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Pope Francis flew out of Philadelphia yesterday evening, after a grueling week that took him to three cities in Cuba and three in America, an itinerary that would have exhausted a man half his age. He pretty much accomplished what everyone expected that he would: charming crowds young and old – left, right, and center – and all points in between. He also raised more than a few controversies and caused many people to ask, yet again: what does this obviously good and holy man mean to tell us? That, two-and-a-half years into his papacy, despite his considerable ability to touch people in incredible ways, remains unclear. For not a few, the whole subject raises deep anxiety.
He went first yesterday to St. Charles Borromeo Seminary to talk to his bishops assembled from all over the world for the World Meeting of Families. (He had spoken to the American bishops separately in Washington Wednesday). In what was probably one of his most fervent statements of the whole trip, he told them:
As pastors, we bishops are called to collect our energies and to rebuild enthusiasm for making families correspond ever more fully to the blessing of God which they are! We need to invest our energies not so much in rehearsing the problems of the world around us and the merits of Christianity, but in extending a sincere invitation to young people to be brave and to opt for marriage and the family. Here too, we need a bit of holy parrhesia! A Christianity which “does” little in practice, while incessantly “explaining” its teachings, is dangerously unbalanced. I would even say that it is stuck in a vicious circle. A pastor must show that the “Gospel of the family” is truly “good news” in a world where self-concern seems to reign supreme!
This is one of Francis’s constant themes and, it bears noting, it’s also one that deeply confuses and upsets many people. There’s no quarrel, or problem, with the active going out to others: indeed, there are any number of groups and individuals who spend their entire waking lives precisely at such tasks. And those very same people often can’t figure out how it is that “rehearsing the problems” or “the merits of Christianity” – even worse, “explaining” its teachings – are somehow opposed to the practical outreach. How do you invite and persuade young people to marry, other than by giving them ideas different than the ones dominant in the culture? By sheer force of personality? But that’s an appeal to emotion, not truth or the word of God. Is that really how Christianity should work?
Situations differ widely around the world, of course, and no doubt some are “dangerously unbalanced” with too much time and effort devoted to explaining teachings, though it’s hard to say exactly where those situations might exist. It’s quite unlikely, at any rate, that most bishops, anywhere, would regard an overemphasis on teaching as one of the major failings of the Church in our time. Indeed, if there’s an unbalance among us, it’s that Christianity has been reduced to a few slogans like “love one another,” or be “tolerant and open,” current shibboleths that the secular world doesn’t much need the Church to tell it.
Further, this fed into a, by now, common complaint that one hears from many of the most faithful and active Catholics in our parishes and dioceses: why does the Holy Father seem so often to be criticizing us while he praises the slightest evidence of virtue or right action by people outside or even opposed to the whole Catholic thing?
In the afternoon, after one of his remarkable personal encounters, this time at the Curran-Frommhold Prison to meet with ninety-five inmates, the pope’s homily at the concluding Mass seemed to be a programmatic prelude to the Synod on the Family. As with the address to the bishops earlier in the day, he scolded – no other word will do – those whom he regards as rigid followers of rules, and not the Spirit. He did this last year prior to the 2014 Synod when, in a homily, he criticized those who, like the ancient Pharisees, follow hundreds of minute precepts – something Our Lord told them they should not deviate from by one jot or tittle, but must also fulfill the weightier matters of the Law.
It’s best to speak of precisely what the Holy Father said in this context. Towards the end of his homily, in his somewhat vague way, he again advocated care for our common home, his environmental theme, but also recognition of the need for an openness to life, that “invites all those who want to share the prophecy of the covenant of man and woman, which generates life and reveals God!” In other words, he reflected the full Catholic position, something that has both liberal and conservative elements, as those are understood in current American culture.
It was what he said earlier, in his reflection on the Gospel – where the apostles are worried about healers who are not among the formal adherents to the Lord – that Francis expressed a radical view that may well tell us what will start to happen at the Synod on the Family next weekend:
Moses and Jesus both rebuke those closest to them for being so narrow! . . .For them, his openness to the honest and sincere faith of many men and women who were not part of God’s chosen people seemed intolerable. The disciples, for their part, acted in good faith. But the temptation to be scandalized by the freedom of God, who sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous alike (Mt5:45), bypassing bureaucracy, officialdom and inner circles, threatens the authenticity of faith. Hence it must be vigorously rejected. There’s much to be said against rigid institutions that betray the freedom and action of the Spirit, but much also to be said in favor of those institutions, and the good and faithful pastors who run them, that support us all through the many twists and turns of earthly life, which cannot solely be met with spontaneous recourse to the Spirit, but must also engage the dumb practicalities of daily life.
Sharp criticism of the Churchmen who try to serve the people. High praise of those outside the Church who may be following the Spirit without knowing it. And all this in a homily during a Mass supposed to be the conclusion to an international meeting to help affirm and promote the family.
Even a sophisticated Catholic cannot help but find this quite unsettling. We know and agree up to a point with what the Holy Father is saying. But there’s much else – much that seems far more urgent – challenging our societies. Perhaps the Synod on the Family, which begins this week, will enlighten us.
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- Ngwa Bertrand
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“Bless me, father, for I have sinned. It’s a month since my last confession. For the past four weeks I have made little effort to prepare my homily for Sunday Mass…”
Pope Francis has mentioned it again and again, but I am not sure that even he fully grasps the extent of the problem with preaching in the Church today, not least in Cameroon.
It’s a huge problem with many sides to it yet, apart from the Pope, it receives virtually no attention. In fact, we hardly seem to be aware that it even needs attention.
Many of us priests get up Sunday after Sunday and preach no homily at all or we dish out a plateful of psychological platitudes, moralistic abstractions and reassuring waffle sprinkled with a few token phrases from the Scriptures.
This is certainly not what Jesus had in mind when he sent us out to pastor the sheep. Rather, too often we sound like those who have little care for the sheep, those who are ready to flee at just a mention of the wolf.
Often we can analyse in detail how each member of the Cameroon National football team has been playing, what he needs to do to up his fitness or to eliminate the flaws in his positioning, passing or kicking.
But when it comes to our own “preaching performance” at Sunday Mass, we have gladly forgotten it before we say, “Let us all stand now for the Creed.”
But no committed footballer acts like that. Rather, he reviews how he has played, what he needs to improve on, what worked or didn’t work, and so on. He talks to other players, reads sports magazines, takes coaching.
But he does all this for one reason only – because he wants to improve, he wants to improve. How many priests ever reflect, “I want to improve as a preacher, I want to give better homilies”?
How many reflect on the immense importance of the homily for the spiritual well-being of the people who still come to Mass, of their Christ-given responsibility towards those people?
Our people are dying from spiritual starvation. In the past they received spiritual nourishment from a variety of sources – school, prayer in the home, religious books, a culture that confirmed their Christian faith.
But today few of these sources still exist. Which means that people depend even more on the Sunday homily.
We need to make preaching a major priority in our ministry, to keep reflecting on it, to study how others do it, to examine what “works” and what doesn’t work.
Once we make this a central concern, we will be surprised at how passion alone for the Word of God, and for preaching it, can begin to change our preaching for the better.
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- Ngwa Bertrand
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Pope Francis immediately dove into the whirlpool of U.S. politics on Wednesday using his first direct address to the nation to weigh in on deeply divisive issues including climate change, Cuba, marriage and immigration reported CNN. The pontiff, speaking before 11,000 ticketed guests at an elaborate welcoming ceremony on South Lawn of the White House, signaled he will not steer clear of controversial issues during his six-day visit.
He climbed aboard an open-sided Popemobile later in the morning to parade before tens of thousands of cheering people lining the streets around the White House. In remarks delivered slowly in accented English at the White House, Francis said he was ready to listen to the "hopes and dreams of the American people" and to offer guidance to those charged with shaping the nation's political future "in fidelity to its founding principles."
And in comments that could antagonize Republicans, Francis endorsed President Barack Obama's efforts on climate change and rebuilding ties with Cuba after more than half a century of estrangement.
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- Ngwa Bertrand
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An extract from a new e-book by Edward Pentin is required reading ahead of the upcoming synod on the family I have just spent the weekend reading Edward Pentin’s e-book about the Family Synod, which is entitled The Rigging of a Vatican Synod? My copy of the book by the former Catholic Herald Vatican correspondent is embargoed, and my review will appear in an upcoming edition of this magazine. Because of the embargo, I cannot say anything about the content, but the author himself has given us a foretaste of what is to come, publishing an extract via the Catholic World Report, which can be read here.
The extract, I am sure everyone will agree, makes interesting reading. Indeed, based on this extract, one can see that the book itself promises to be an exciting even thrilling, well-sourced, fly-on-the-wall style documentary exposé of what exactly happened at the Extraordinary Synod last year. As such, it is required reading, as it may well give us a key to understanding what will unfold at the forthcoming Synod this October. A synod is supposed to be an opportunity to “travel together” as the Greek origins of the world suggest, but it is clear from the extract just published, that this synod has been anything but. Indeed, it has revealed cracks in the façade of the Catholic Church which are worrying indeed. Let us hope the second stage of the process, the October synod, can heal the wounds in unity opened up by last year’s shenanigans. A few well-placed people have told me that they have confidence in the Synod process.
The very fact that they have taken the trouble to say this makes me wonder. If you look at Canterbury, synods do not have a good track record at producing unity. If you look East, the Orthodox world’s model of synodical government displays a history of division, mutual anathemas and excommunications, as this recent speech by Bartholomew I makes clear. (For a short report on the speech, see here) Whichever way, synods need careful handling and organisation. Meanwhile, do everything you can, short of sin, to get a copy of Mr Pentin’s book!
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- Ngwa Bertrand
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I understand spin. Spin is not lying. It is capturing the narrative. If your side does not capture the narrative, the other side will. The other side most likely will have the media on their side so capturing the narrative is so much easier for them. Still, you must try. Therefore, I fully understand the gaggle of faithful Catholics gathered here and there in cafés near the Vatican pressroom during those October days of the Extraordinary Synod last fall. Huddled together, coming up with talking points, trying to capture the narrative. The progressive narrative on that first day when the Vatican released the interim document was that Church teaching on homosexuality and on communion for the divorced and civilly remarried was at least softening, if not changing altogether. This news rocketed around the world in the moments after the document was released. Some hopeful people practically danced in the streets. The counter narrative cooked up in those cafés that afternoon and on subsequent days was that nothing had changed. The interim document did not change doctrine. It only softens the practice. We are meeting people where they are. We were told the Holy Spirit protected the synod and that everything would turn out okay. There is a tendency, a good tendency, for faithful Catholics to step in and defend the Church, to explain what is almost always misunderstood, either through ignorance of Church teaching, or through willful manipulation.
It is natural to step in and defend your Mother. It seems to me that these faithful Catholics, some of them anyway, were being used. Still others were taking advantage of their good natural inclination. In actuality, this counter narrative was not so much counter after all. It was a narrative hewing closely to what some in the synod were driving for all along, that nothing much had changed when, in fact, a great deal had changed. Moreover, while these good Catholics thought they were defending the Church and the Pope, they were actually supporting something called the “synodal process” that was cooked-up by those wanting to change Church teaching. There was a third narrative coming from faithful Catholics who were also huddling around Rome that week: that is, a great deal might change, and that the document was an enormous problem striking at the heart of Church teaching born from Scripture, tradition, and other sources of Magisterial teaching. The document represented nothing short of revolutionary change. These people had the better argument. I was in the pressroom during that week when the document was released.
It was a remarkable scene for a synod. Something big was clearly up because we were told the pressroom for a synod is usually largely empty. This time, it was packed to the rafters. It was hard not to see that controversy would surround this synod. It was preceded by a deeply misguided attempt to discern popular Catholic opinion about certain hot button Church teachings through a survey sent to all the bishops in the world. Not surprising at all that those pushing certain points of view used the results for their own ends. Rigging coverThe pressroom was electric; journalists practically shouted their questions. Experienced Vatican journalists exchanged shocked expressions as the Vatican spokesman and two bishops fumbled through answers about how adulterous couples could be accepted for communion, or exactly how the Church could or would welcome homosexual couples. Question after question, fumbled answer after fumbled answer. It was a disaster. Subsequent days in that room further revealed a synod out of control, and one that pitted bishops against each other. What we saw in the pressroom that week was only a peek into the machinations going on behind the scenes. Some of this broke into the open, by means of what some bishops said in the pressroom, especially Archbishop Wilfred Napier of South Africa, who was disgusted that the initial document misrepresented the actual discussion in the synod.
One of the journalists in the pressroom made global news when he caught German cardinal Walter Kasper denigrating the African bishops, who were the biggest block to the German attempt to change Church teaching. Edward Pentin of Zenit and National Catholic Register caught all this on tape, so when Kasper denied it, he walked right into a revealing moment: the Germans might do and say practically anything to advance their cause and denigrate their critics. Pentin tells this and many other stories in his new e-book The Rigging of a Vatican Synod? I think his Ignatius editors must have insisted on that question mark because the book is page after page of evidence that the synod was rigged stem to stern by the synod secretariat led by Cardinal Lorenzo Baldisseri, Archbishop Bruno Forte, and others in cahoots with the Germans Kasper and the aptly named Cardinal Reinhard Marx, all of whom were explicit in their desire that Church teaching change. Pentin presents evidence of manipulation in practically everything related to the synod, including the fact that homosexuality was barely a topic of conversation for the synod fathers, yet loomed large in the interim document. Pentin reports, “Vatican spokesman Jesuit Father Federico Lombardi said he recalled only one speech out of about 265 that discussed homosexuals during the debate.” Pentin reports on some things not previously revealed. For instance, he records that the synod secretariat deliberately excluded “conservative” theologians as experts for the meeting. He also reports that Archbishop Bruno Forte was elected to the position of special secretary of the extraordinary “by only a small number of the fifteen-member Ordinary Council of the Synod of Bishops.”
Forte is generally blamed for writing the most controversial paragraphs of the interim document. Indeed he was outed as the author of the gay paragraphs by Napier of South Africa during the raucous first-day press conference. Pentin also presents voluminous evidence that Kasper, seemingly with the approval of Pope Francis, initiated a global campaign to change Church teaching on marriage, beginning with his two-hour address to a consistory of cardinals wherein he “floats the idea of admitting divorced and ‘remarried’ Catholics to Holy Communion without amendment of life.” Kasper then published this confidential talk and took his arguments on the road, including to Fordham University in New York. So it’s odd that Kasper and his allies got so angry when a group of cardinals and other experts published a book upholding Church teaching on marriage, and then tried to get copies to the synod fathers. Their efforts were blocked by the synod secretariat. Pentin tells this story in great detail and the story reveals a malicious attitude that the synod managers seem to have toward Church tradition and those trying to uphold it. Kasper’s proposal to allow divorced and civilly remarried Catholics to receive communion was challenged in the Ignatius Press book Remaining in the Truth of Christ: Marriage and Communion in the Catholic Church. It included essays by Cardinal Raymond Burke, Cardinal George Pell, and Cardinal Gerhard Müller, who heads the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. Ignatius Press was eager to get the book into the hands of the synod fathers. They decided the best way was to send them to the temporary addresses, which turned out to be Casa Santa Marta, the hotel-like residence within the Vatican walls.
Organizers of the book did display a bit of skullduggery. They made sure the books were deliberately mailed from a post office away from the Vatican, and that “the books were placed in envelopes of different types and colors…” Trouble brewed when a synod staff member looked inside of one of the packages after “an envelope came open and the book was identified.” Pentin reports that Cardinal Baldeserri “was ‘furious’ to learn that the book was being sent to synod fathers.” Pentin states that Baldeserri believed Father Joseph Fessio of Ignatius Press was trying to interfere with the synod; further, that Baldeserri tried to get the postmaster of the Vatican post office fired for letting the books through. Pentin says Baldeserri wanted the deliveries blocked, but was told that was illegal. Because most of the books had not been stamped by the Italian post office, he decided to send them back for stamping figuring the delay would mean synod fathers would never get them, which turned out to be true.
The cover-up of what happened with the book is quite remarkable. But there is also the fallout—the score settling. Pentin reports that Baldeserri’s cronies tried to get American Father Robert Dodaro to resign his post as president of the Institum Patristicum Augustinianum in Rome because Dodaro served as editor of the book. The narrative from the Kasper camp was that the book created a battlefield in the synod, and that it was intended to undermine the synod, even though it was Kasper who began the debate. Remarkably, Kasper said the book should have been given to him in advance so that he could “review it.” Vaticanista Marco Tosatti wrote in La Stampa that a group of Italian bishops told the Pope that the five cardinals who wrote the book had the “sole intention of fighting against Kasper,” and that the cardinals had committed a “mortal sin” in publishing it. So angry was Kasper that he actually shouted at Cardinal Burke on the floor of the synod meeting.
It is said the book was the final straw that caused the Pope to fire Burke from head of the Apostolic Signatura, thereby guaranteeing that he would not be present at the synod starting in a few weeks, where all these questions will come up for debate again. Burke will certainly be missed. He has been fearless in continuing the debate as he circles the globe in his new role as Patron of the Order of Malta. Anyone who thought he would go quietly is sorely mistaken. But even without Burke, many others oppose these doctrinal changes, including the contributors to Eleven Cardinals Speak, available from Ignatius Press next week. Included in this group is African cardinal Robert Sarah of the Ivory Coast. He will not be the lone African at the synod. Wilfred Napier of South Africa will be there again, along with others. When Kasper lashed out at the Africans a year ago, it was these men to whom he was talking and they are weary of taking ideological guff from pushy condescending Europeans. I see this at the UN, too. There, too, it is primarily the Africans who are standing up to the West. Could it be that the Africans will save the synod, the Church and the world?
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Pope Francis met Cuba's revolutionary leader Fidel Castro on Sunday hours after warning Cubans to beware the dangers of ideology and the lure of selfishness as their country enters a new era of closer ties with the United States. Latin America's first pope and Castro, the region's last surviving leftist icon of the 20th century, discussed religion and world affairs at the home of the 89-year-old retired president for about 40 minutes. Vatican spokesman Father Federico Lombardi said the meeting, which included Castro's wife and other family members, was "very relaxed, fraternal and friendly." Francis gave Castro several of his official papal writings, two books on spirituality and a book and CD on the writings of Father Armando Llorente, a priest who taught Castro in Jesuit prep school more than 70 years ago.
Castro, who wore a blue-and-white track suit, gave him a copy of "Fidel and Religion," a 1985 book of interviews with a Brazilian priest which lifted a taboo on speaking about religion in Cuba, then officially atheist. Francis later went to the Palace of the Revolution, where he held private talks for about an hour with President Raul Castro, Fidel's 84-year-old younger brother. Raul Castro, an atheist like his brother, surprised the pope by giving him a sculpture of a life-sized crucified Jesus Christ against a backdrop of fishing nets and oars.
Francis met with Fidel Castro, who built a one-party state that improved health and education services for Cubans but also limits democratic freedoms and represses dissent, after celebrating Mass in Havana's Revolution Square. There, he spoke beneath massive portraits of revolutionary leaders Ernesto "Che" Guevara and Camilo Cienfuegos built into the facades of state buildings. To welcome the pope, who helped bring about the recent rapprochement between Cuba and the United States, a similarly giant poster of Jesus Christ was hung nearby.
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