05/18/2013VATICAN Pope: Rumors are destructive in the Church, misinformation, libel and slander and "all three are sins" Celebrating the Mass this morning, Francis remembers when Jesus asked Peter, " What is it to you". Gossip is fun at first but then it ruins you, ruins your soul. It’s the spirit of Cain: killing a brother, with wagging tongues; killing a brother. "
Vatican
City (AsiaNews) - "How much gossip there is in the Church! How we
Christians gossip!" A behavior that can take on three aspects:
disinformation, defamation and slander and "all three are sins." Again
today, at Mass celebrated in St....
05/17/2013VATICAN The life of the Church and of the Churches is the mission, pope says In meeting the national directors of the Pontifical Mission Societies, Francis focuses on the duty to bring the Gospel to the world, which includes "educating every Christian, from childhood, to have a genuinely universal and missionary spirit," and giving "special attention to the young Churches, which often operate in a climate of difficulty, discrimination, and persecution, so that they might be sustained and assisted in witnessing the Gospel in word and in deed."
05/16/2013VATICAN Pope: Church does not need lukewarm, "backseat" Christians In this morning's Mass, Francis spoke about Saint Paul's apostolic zeal. "Paul is a nuisance. He is a man who, with his preaching, his work, his attitude irritates others, because he bears witness to Jesus Christ". We can ask the Holy Spirit "to give us all this apostolic fervour to be nuisance in the Church's comfort zones and the grace to reach the outer edges of existence."
05/16/2013VATICAN Pope: Money must serve and not rule Addressing a group of ambassadors, Francis criticizes the role that economics and finance have on people and society today, reducing humanity to being consumers and consumer goods. The rejection of God and ethics "considered counterproductive as too human, because it relativizes money and power, as a threat, because it rejects the manipulation and submission of the person."
05/15/2013VATICAN Pope: Pray for priests and bishops so they do not yield to temptation of money and careerism During Mass celebrated this morning, Francis comments on the phrase of St. Paul that exhorts the "elders" of the Church of Ephesus to be vigilant of themselves and their flock, shepherds attentive to the "ravenous wolves." "When a priest, a bishop goes after money, the people do not love him and that's a sign. But he ends up badly." "And when a bishop, a priest travels the road of vanity, enters into the spirit of careerism - which hurts the Church so much – he ends up being ridiculous, he boasts, he likes to be seen, all powerful ... And the people did not love that. "
05/15/2013VATICAN Pope: you cannot be a “part-time” Christian, "at certain moments, circumstances, choices" At the general audience Francis talks about the truth that the Holy Spirit helps us to get know and that "always and totally involves our daily lives." In an era marked by relativism, Jesus is the answer to the question: is there "the" truth? "The truth does not grab you like an object, the truth is encountered. It is not a possession, it is an encounter with a Person." In his greetings in Italian he announces his desire to visit, Cagliari, Sardinia, "probably in September”, and in particular the shrine of Our Lady of Bonaria, connected to the founding of Buenos Aires.
05/13/2013VATICAN Growth in number of Catholics worldwide, number of priests and seminarians also increase The data from the Statistical Yearbook of the Church. The faithful of Rome have passed, from 1196 in 2010 to 1214 million in 2011, up 1.5%. Asia remains a religiously vibrant continent: number of faithful and priests rise, as do the number of professed religious who are not priests, seminarians, and in contrast to the world's data, the number of nuns.
05/13/2013VATICAN Pope: the Holy Spirit, the "unknown of our faith," is "God reminding us" of our salvation During the Mass celebrated this morning, Francis reflects on the remarks of a group of Christians from Ephesus: "we have not even heard that there is a Holy Spirit." Even today, "many Christians do not know who the Holy Spirit is, what the Holy Spirit is." The Spirit is "God active in us," a "God who helps us remember" who "awakens our memory." Jesus himself says to the Apostles before Pentecost: the Spirit that God will send in my name, "will remind you of everything I have said."
05/12/2013VATICAN Pope: Fidelity to Christ even unto martyrdom and in mission, as witness of charity During Mass in St Peter's Square, Francis canonises the 800 martyrs of Otranto slaughtered by the Turks in 1480; Sister María Laura Montoya Upegui, the first Colombian saint, teacher and evangeliser of the poor and the Indians; Sister María Guadalupe García Zavala, a Mexican apostle of the poor and the sick. Martyrdom and mission are born from love of God and express themselves in the witness of charity. "[L]let us ask God to sustain those many Christians who, at this time in many parts of the world, continue to endure violence, and give them the courage of fidelity to respond to evil with goodness." Speaking ad-lib, the pope also said, "Individualism eats away at the Christian community and our hearts . . . . How much damage does the easy life and the embourgeoisement of the heart do?" Serving the sick and the abandoned means "touching Christ's flesh." The "sick, the poor, the dying are the flesh of Christ." The pope pleads on behalf of life in the womb and the rights of embryos.
05/11/2013VATICAN Pope: True prayer is that which is done in the name of Jesus, the one that brings us out of ourselves and opens us to the Father and to the neediest brothers and sisters As he celebrated Mass today, Francis noted that on many occasions we get bored during prayer. However, the latter does not mean asking this or that, but is "the intercession of Jesus, who before the Father bares His wounds for the Father to see." Indeed, "If we are not able to move out of ourselves and toward our brother in need, to the sick, the ignorant, the poor, the exploited; if we are not able to accomplish this exodus from ourselves, and towards those wounds, we shall never learn about the freedom that carries us through that other exodus from ourselves towards the wounds of Jesus."
05/10/2013EGYPT - VATICAN Tawadros II and Francis discuss Egypt's plight In his first trip abroad, the patriarch of the Coptic Orthodox Church meets the pope, invites him to visit Egypt. Interfaith dialogue and relations between Catholics and Orthodox are among the issues the two leaders discussed.
05/10/2013VATICAN - EGYPT Pope: an "ecumenism of suffering" shared by Coptic Orthodox and Catholics in Egypt Francis meets Tawadros II, head of the Coptic Orthodox Church of Egypt, welcoming the establishment of the National Council of Christian Churches "it is an important symbol of the will of all believers in Christ in everyday life to develop more and more fraternal relations and to place themselves in service of the entire Egyptian society of which they are an integral part. "
_0517_-_Papa_POM.jpg)
_1005_-_Papa_francesco_Incontra_Tawadros_ii.JPG)
