By Cindy Wooden
VATICAN CITY (CNS) – When he told Pope Francis that writing the meditations for the papal Way of the Cross service was tough, Cardinal Gualtiero Bassetti of Perugia-Citta della Pieve said the pope told him, “Remember, you aren’t doing it for me, but for the church.”
The Good Friday service, which takes places at night at Rome’s Colosseum, is broadcast around the world. Tens of thousands of people gather with the pope around the ancient Roman amphitheater to meditate on the last moments of Jesus’ life.
Each year the pope asks a different person to write the meditations and prayers that are read out after each station is announced. Cardinal Bassetti was chosen for the March 25 service.
“For every station I tried to make a reference to current events because, as Pope Francis says, ‘God is real and shows himself today,’” the cardinal told the Vatican newspaper, L’Osservatore Romano.
Reflecting on Christ’s passion, the cardinal also urged people to reflect on how human sin and suffering continue today. His meditations refer to modern martyrs being killed “in every corner of the globe” just because they are Christians. He refers to the suffering of migrants and refugees fleeing poverty and persecution but risking disease and death as they make the perilous journey toward a new life.
“Without a doubt, though, it was most difficult to write about violence against children,” both those reduced to slavery in forced work and those abused by adults, he said. “When I wrote those lines I felt like I was not using a pen on paper, but a chisel on marble, such was the suffering in writing about those plagues.”
Reading and praying about the stations in preparation for writing, the cardinal said he was struck particularly by portrayals of the use and abuse of power.
In the first station, “Jesus is condemned to death,” Pilate has political power and can “give or take a life according to his own interests,” he said. In the fourth station, “Jesus meets his mother,” one sees the power love has to give life; and the 11th station, “Jesus is nailed to the cross,” illustrates divine power in “the ability of the Lord to open the path to eternal life when human eyes see only death and humiliation.”
Standing before Pilate, the cardinal wrote in the first station, “Jesus is alone before the power of this world. And he submits to human justice completely.”
Pilate and the crowds – including men and women today – hand him over to be crucified, he wrote. They are “dominated by a sensation that is common to all people: fear – the fear of losing their security, their goods, their lives.”
The Vatican publishing house, Libreria Editrice Vaticana, printed booklets with the complete texts of the prayers and meditations. They were to be handed out free of charge to people joining the pope at the Colosseum and available for sale at the Vatican bookstore.
By participating in the Via Crucis service and remembering Christ’s passion, Christians assert their faith that suffering is not absurd and that, in the end, Christ is victorious over both evil and death, Cardinal Bassetti told L’Osservatore Romano.
At the same time, he said, it means “recognizing that in our daily crosses, Jesus is with us.”
Most of the cardinal’s meditations and prayers were designed to help Catholics recognize how much they need God’s mercy, the great cost paid by Jesus for their salvation and how Christ continues to suffer today in the lives of so many people.
In his meditation for the third station, “Jesus falls for the first time,” Cardinal Bassetti asks a question countless have asked throughout history, “Where is God?”
“There are situations that seem to negate God’s love,” he wrote. “Where is God in the death camps? Where is God in the mines and factories where child slaves work? Where is God in the rickety boats that sink in the Mediterranean?”

By Junno Arocho Esteves
VATICAN CITY (CNS) – Jesus’ call to be the salt of the earth is a reminder to his disciples to preach hope and life and not be wrapped up in dogmatic conundrums, a Servite priest told the pope and Vatican officials.
“We are salt that has lost its flavor if we are not resolute men, if we are not free from masks and fear. People want to receive fragments of life from Jesus’ disciples, not fragments of doctrine,” Servite Father Ermes Ronchi said.
The Italian priest, who is a member of Rome’s Pontifical “Marianum” theological faculty, was chosen by Pope Francis to lead the Lenten retreat of the Roman Curia; he chose to preach on the theme: “The bare questions of the Gospel.”
The March 6-11 retreat was held at the Pauline Fathers’ retreat center in Ariccia, 20 miles southeast of Rome.
In his morning meditation March 7, Father Ronchi spoke about fear, which entered the world after Adam and Eve’s disobedience in the Garden of Eden. Adam’s hiding out of fear of God’s wrath, he said, indicates the effect of sin which keeps the possibility of mercy far from him. For Christians, he added, this fear “produces a sad Christianity, a God without joy.”
“In this sense, the enemy of fear is not courage but faith,” he said.
Reflecting on the passage in Mark’s Gospel (4:35-41) where Jesus calms the storm, Father Ronchi said that fear initially drives the disciples on the boat to “almost command” God to act and save them from doom.
However, he added, “God does not take us out of the storm but supports us within the storm.”
The church, which “for a long time has transmitted a faith mixed with fear,” is called instead to free men and women from the fear of God like “the angels have done through sacred history.”
“Be angels who free (people) from fear,” Father Ronchi told the Vatican officials.
In the afternoon, Father Ronchi focused on the Bible passage from Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount in which he says, “You are the salt of the earth. But if salt loses its taste, with what can it be seasoned?”
The Servite priest told Vatican officials that the imagery of the salt, which dissipates in order to season, reflects the mission of a church that “gives of itself and melts away.”
“Salt and light are not intended to perpetuate themselves but to pour themselves out. And so it is with the church: It is not an end, but a means to make person’s life better and more beautiful,” he said.
Father Ronchi chose to reflect on the church’s mission to give a true witness to Jesus on the retreat’s third day March 8. Drawing from the Gospel reading on Peter’s profession of faith, the Italian theologian said Jesus’ question, “But who do you say that I am?” is a query that “digs into the soul.”
“The answer Jesus is looking for are not words. He is looking for people. Not definitions but engagements,” he said. “Jesus does not give lessons, he does not suggest answers; he gently leads you to look inside of yourself.”
Jesus’ question, he continued, is striking given that he “does not indoctrinate anyone” nor compels the disciples to give a “prepackaged response.” Peter’s answer that Christ “is the son of the living God” is a witness that “Christ is living within us.”
“Our heart can become either God’s cradle or his tomb,” he said.
Jesus’ ordering of the disciples “to tell no one that he was the Messiah,” Father Ronchi said, extends to the church, which sometimes has preached a “deformed” perception of God and is called to preach through their own personal witness.
“We clergy look all the same: the same gestures, words and clothes. But people are asking us to ‘Give me an experience of God.’ Jesus is not what I say of him but what I live from him. We are not mediators between God and humanity; the true mediator is Jesus,” he said.
(Copyright © 2016 Catholic News Service/United States Conference of Catholic Bishops. The CNS news services may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or otherwise distributed, including but not limited to, such means as framing or any other digital copying or distribution method in whole or in part, without prior written authority of Catholic News Service.)

By Cindy Wooden
VATICAN CITY (CNS) – Pope Francis will declare Blessed Teresa of Kolkata a saint at the Vatican Sept. 4.
The date was announced March 15 during an “ordinary public consistory,” a meeting of the pope, cardinals and promoters of sainthood causes that formally ends the sainthood process.
At the same consistory, the pope set June 5 as the date for the canonizations of Blessed Stanislaus Papczynski of Poland, founder of the Marian Fathers of the Immaculate Conception, and Blessed Mary Elizabeth Hesselblad of Sweden, who re-founded the Bridgettine sisters.

A poster of Blessed Teresa of Kolkata and Missionaries of Charity are seen in Kolkata, India, in this Sept. 5, 2007, file photo. Pope Francis will declare her a saint at the Vatican Sept. 4, the conclusion of the Year of Mercy and jubilee for those engaged in works of mercy. (CNS photo/Jayanta Shaw, Reuters)

In addition, Pope Francis declared that Oct. 16 he would celebrate Mass for the canonizations of Argentina’s “gaucho priest,” Blessed Jose Brochero, and Blessed Jose Sanchez del Rio, a 14-year-old Mexican boy martyred for refusing to renounce his faith during the Cristero War of the 1920s.
Setting the dates concludes a long process of studying the lives and writings of the sainthood candidates:
— Mother Teresa was widely known as a living saint as she ministered to the sick and the dying in some of the poorest neighborhoods in the world. Although some people criticized her for not also challenging the injustices that kept so many people so poor and abandoned, her simple service touched the hearts of millions of people of all faiths.
Born to an ethnic Albanian family in Skopje, in what is now part of Macedonia, she went to India in 1929 as a Sister of Loreto and became an Indian citizen in 1947. She founded the Missionaries of Charity in 1950.
Shortly after she died in 1997, St. John Paul II waived the usual five-year waiting period and allowed the opening of the process to declare her sainthood. She was beatified in 2003.
After her beatification, Missionary of Charity Father Brian Kolodiejchuk, the postulator of her sainthood cause, published a book of her letters, “Mother Teresa: Come Be My Light.” The letters illustrated how, for decades, she experienced what is described as a “dark night of the soul” in Christian spirituality; she felt that God had abandoned her. While the letters shocked some people, others saw them as proof of her steadfast faith in God, which was not based on feelings or signs that he was with her.
— Blessed Papczynski founded the Marian Fathers of the Immaculate Conception in Poland in the 17th century. Today the Marians are special promoters of the Divine Mercy devotion of St. Faustina Kowalska.

Blessed Stanislaus Papczynski of Poland, (right) founder of the Marian Fathers of the Immaculate Conception, also set to be canonized this year, is depicted in an undated painting. (CNS photo/courtesy Marian Fathers of the Immaculate Conception)

Born in 1631, he was ordained as a Piarist priest, but left the order after 10 years. His new congregation was established officially in 1679 and he died in 1701.
— Blessed Hesselblad was born in Faglavik, Sweden, in 1870 and went to the United States at the age of 18 in search of work to help support her family. She studied nursing in New York and, impressed by the faith of the Catholics she cared for, began the process of entering the Catholic Church. Coming from a Lutheran family, she was conditionally baptized by a Jesuit priest in Washington, D.C. On a pilgrimage to Rome, she visited the home of the 14th-century St. Brigid of Sweden and was welcomed by the Carmelite sisters who were then living there.
She received permission from the pope to make religious vows under the rule of St. Brigid and re-found the Bridgettine order that had died out in Sweden after the Protestant Reformation. She was beatified in 2000.
— Blessed Brochero, the “gaucho priest,” was born in Argentina in 1840 and died in 1914. Ordained for the Archdiocese of Cordoba, he spent years traveling far and wide by mule to reach his flock. Pope Francis, in a message in 2013 for the priest’s beatification — a ceremony scheduled before the Argentine pope was elected — said Father Brochero truly had “the smell of his sheep.”

Pope Francis greets cardinals during an “ordinary public consistory” to formally conclude sainthood causes at the Vatican March 15. Among new saints to be made are Mother Teresa of Kolkata, whose canonization will take place at the Vatican Sept. 4. (CNS photo/L’Osservatore Romano, handout)

He gained particular fame for his work caring for the sick and dying during a cholera epidemic in 1867. During his travels, he contracted Hansen’s disease, more commonly known as leprosy; many people believe he was infected by sharing a cup of mate, an herbal tea, with someone who already had the disease.
— Blessed Sanchez was martyred in Mexico in 1928, just weeks before his 15th birthday. In 1926 Mexican President Plutarco Elias Calles had introduced tough anti-clerical laws and confiscated church property across the country. Some 90,000 people were killed in the ensuing Cristero war before the government and church reached an accord in 1929.
Young Sanchez was allowed to be the flag bearer of a unit. During an intense battle, he was captured by government troops, who ordered him to renounce his faith. He refused, even when tortured. The boy was executed about two weeks later. He was beatified in 2005.
(Copyright © 2016 Catholic News Service/United States Conference of Catholic Bishops. The CNS news services may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or otherwise distributed, including but not limited to, such means as framing or any other digital copying or distribution method in whole or in part, without prior written authority of Catholic News Service.)

By Carol Glatz
VATICAN CITY (CNS) – Pope Francis called for abolishing the death penalty worldwide, lifting the burden of debt on poor nations, global aid policies that respect life and revamped laws that welcome and integrate migrants.
He urged individuals, communities and nations to not let indifference, information overload or pessimism discourage them from concrete efforts “to improve the world around us, beginning with our families, neighbors and places of employment.”
Building peace, he said, is not accomplished by words alone, but through the grace of God, a conversion of heart, an attitude of compassion and the courage to act against despair.
The pope’s multifaceted plea came in his message for World Peace Day, Jan. 1. The message, which was delivered to world leaders by Vatican ambassadors, was released at the Vatican Dec. 15.
The message, titled “Overcome Indifference and Win Peace,” contained a three-fold appeal to the world’s leaders.
He asked that countries: “refrain from drawing other peoples into conflicts of wars,” which not only destroy a nation’s infrastructure and cultural heritage, but also their “moral and spiritual integrity;” forgive or make less burdensome international debt of poorer nations; and “adopt policies of cooperation which, instead of bowing before the dictatorship of certain ideologies, will respect the values of the local populations” and not harm the “fundamental and inalienable right to life of the unborn.”
Also part of building peace in the world, he said, is addressing the urgent problem of improving the living conditions of prisoners, especially those still awaiting trial. Since rehabilitation should be the aim of penal sanctions, effective alternatives to incarceration should be considered as well as the abolition of  the death penalty.
The pope called on national governments to review their current laws on immigration and find ways they could “reflect a readiness to welcome migrants and to facilitate their integration” as well as respect the rights and responsibilities of all parties concerned.
All nations’ leaders should also take concrete measures in alleviating the problem of a lack of housing, land and employment, the pope wrote, as well as stop discrimination against women in the workplace, which included unfair wages and precarious or dangerous working conditions. He said he hoped those who are ill could be guaranteed access to medical treatment, necessary medications and home care.
The pope’s message focused on the dangers of cynicism and indifference against God, neighbor and creation.
“With the present Jubilee of Mercy, I want to invite the church to pray and work so that every Christian will have a humble and compassionate heart” and that all people will learn “to forgive and to give,” he said in his message.
The credibility of the church and its members rests on their willingness to live and act with the same tireless mercy God has for the world, the pope said. “We, too, then are called to make compassion, love, mercy and solidarity a true way of life, a rule of conduct in our relationships with one another,” he said.
Since these attitudes of compassion and solidarity are often handed down from person to person, the pope emphasized the importance of families and teachers in showing what love, respect, dialogue, generosity, charity and faith mean.
He also reminded the media and communicators of their responsibility to “serve the truth and not particular interests.” They don’t just inform people, he said, but also form and influence their audience.
“Communicators should also be mindful that the way in which information is obtained and made public should always be legally and morally admissible,” he said.
In his message, the pope praised those journalists and religious who raise awareness about troubling and “difficult situations,” and defend the human rights of minorities, indigenous peoples, women, children and the most vulnerable people in society.

By Cindy Wooden
VATICAN CITY (CNS) – Pope Francis said his Bible is old, beat up and worth more to him than anything money can buy.
“If you saw my Bible, you would not be impressed,” he wrote to young people. “You’d say, ‘What? This is the pope’s Bible? A book so old, so beat up?’ You might even want to give me a gift of a new one, something that costs 1,000 euro. But I don’t want it.”
Pope Francis wrote about his Bible and his Bible-reading habits in the preface to the German-language study guide, “Youth Bible for the Catholic Church.” It was released in late October by the Germany-based Katholisches Bibelwerk and the YouCat Foundation. Other language versions are expected in 2016.
The Jesuit journal, La Civilta Cattolica, published an Italian translation of the preface in early December.
The well-worn Bible has been with Pope Francis for half his life, wrote the pope, who will turn 79 Dec. 17.
“It has seen my joy and has been bathed by my tears: it is my priceless treasure,” the pope wrote, and “nothing in the world would make me give it up.”
Youths and young adults in Germany and Austria worked with three Catholic biblical scholars to compile the new introduction to reading and understanding the Bible. The illustrated guide, designed for teens and young adults, contains selections from every book of the Bible with an introductory note, as well as commentary on the chosen passages, reflections by the young people and related citations from saints and popes.
In the preface, Pope Francis urges young people to use the study guide and to read their Bibles daily. He asks them not to hide it on a bookshelf where it will gather dust “until one day your own children sell it at a used book stall. No! Don’t let that happen.”
The Bible is not just a piece of literature, he said. There are Christians in the world today being persecuted just for having a Bible; “evidently, the Bible is an extremely dangerous book.”
The pope quoted Mahatma Gandhi, a Hindu, who said, “You Christians look after a document containing enough dynamite to blow all civilization to pieces, turn the world upside down and bring peace to a battle-torn planet. But you treat it as though it is nothing more than a piece of literature.”
God speaks through the Bible, the pope wrote. It is not a book designed for the shelves, but for the hands.
Pope Francis asked young people to read from the Bible each day and with attention.
“Ask ‘What does this say to my heart? What is God saying to me through these words?’” the pope counseled.
“I want to tell you how I read my old Bible. Often I pick it up, read a bit, then set it down and let myself be seen by the Lord. I am not the one looking at him, but he looks at me. God is truly there, present.”
Pope Francis reassured the young people that it is not uncommon at all to feel like God is not saying anything. “But, patiently, I stay there and I wait, reading and praying.”
“I pray seated,” he said, “because it hurts when I kneel. Sometimes when I’m praying I even fall asleep, but that’s OK because I’m like a son near his father and that’s what counts.”
“Do you want to make me happy?” the pope asked the youths. “Then read the Bible.”

By Junno Arocho Esteves
VATICAN CITY (CNS) – On a cloudy, damp morning, Pope Francis’ voice echoed in the atrium of St. Peter’s Basilica: “Open the gates of justice.” With five strong thrusts, the pope pushed open the Holy Door, a symbol of God’s justice, which he said will always be exercised “in the light of his mercy.”
The rite of the opening of the Holy Door was preceded by a Mass with 70,000 pilgrims packed in St. Peter’s Square Dec. 8, the feast of the Immaculate Conception and the beginning of the extraordinary Holy Year of Mercy.
As the sun broke through the clouds, heralding the start of the jubilee year, the pope bowed his head and remained still for several minutes in silent prayer.
Amid a crowd of dignitaries and pilgrims, a familiar face was also present at the historic event: retired Pope Benedict XVI, who followed Pope Francis through the Holy Door into St. Peter’s Basilica.
During his homily, Pope Francis emphasized the “simple, yet highly symbolic” act of opening the Holy Door, which “highlights the primacy of grace;” the same grace that made Mary “worthy of becoming the mother of Christ.”
“The fullness of grace can transform the human heart and enable it to do something so great as to change the course of human history,” he said.
The feast of the Immaculate Conception, he continued, serves as a reminder of the grandeur of God’s love in allowing Mary to “avert the original sin present in every man and woman who comes into this world.”
“This is the love of God which precedes, anticipates and saves,” he said. “Were sin the only thing that mattered, we would be the most desperate of creatures. But the promised triumph of Christ’s love enfolds everything in the Father’s mercy.”
The Year of Mercy, the pope stressed, is a gift of grace that allows Christians to experience the joy of encountering the transforming power of grace and rediscovering God’s infinite mercy toward sinners.
“How much wrong we do to God and his grace when we speak of sins being punished by his judgment before we speak of their being forgiven by his mercy,” he said.
“We have to put mercy before judgment, and in any event God’s judgment will always be in the light of his mercy. In passing through the Holy Door, then, may we feel that we ourselves are part of this mystery of love.”
Fifty years ago, he said, the church celebrated the “opening of another door,” with the Second Vatican Council urging the church to come out from self-enclosure and “set out once again with enthusiasm on her missionary journey.” The council closed Dec. 8, 1965.
Pope Francis, the first pope to be ordained to the priesthood after the council, said the council documents “testify to a great advance in faith,” but the council’s importance lies particularly in calling the Catholic Church to return to the spirit of the early Christians by undertaking “a journey of encountering people where they live: in their cities and homes, in their workplaces. Wherever there are people, the church is called to reach out to them and to bring the joy of the Gospel. After these decades, we again take up this missionary drive with the same power and enthusiasm.”
Shortly after the Mass, as thousands of people waited in St. Peter’s Square for a chance to walk through the Holy Door, Pope Francis led the midday Angelus prayer.
The feast of the Immaculate Conception has a special connection to the start of the Year of Mercy, he said, because “it reminds us that everything in our lives is a gift, everything is mercy.”
Like Mary, the pope continued, Christians are called to “become bearers of Christ” and to “let ourselves be embraced by the mercy of God who waits for us and forgives everything. Nothing is sweeter than his mercy. Let us allow ourselves to be caressed by God. The Lord is so good and he forgives everything.”
(Editor’s note: The Diocese of Jackson  was set to open the Holy Door at the Cathedral of St. Peter the Apostle Sunday, Dec. 13 before the 10:30 a.m. Mass.  See page 4 for a look at opportunities to participate here.)

By Cindy Wooden
VATICAN CITY (CNS) – “Jesus wept.” Pope Francis opened his morning homily with those words as he spoke about the wars and violence engulfing numerous parts of the world.
The Gospel reading for Nov. 19 began, “As Jesus drew near Jerusalem, he saw the city and wept over it, saying, ‘If this day you only knew what makes for peace – but now it is hidden from your eyes.’”
“Jesus is weeping today, too, because we have preferred the path of war, the path of hatred, the path of enmity,” the pope said during the Mass in the chapel of the Domus Sanctae Marthae where he lives.
“The whole world” seems to be at war today, the pope said, and there is “no justification” for it.
“A war can be – quote-unquote – ‘justified’ for many reasons, but when the whole world is embroiled in war like it is today – there is a world war (being fought) in pieces, here, there, everywhere – there is no justification. And God weeps. Jesus weeps,” the pope said.
“It would do us good to ask for the grace of tears for this world that does not recognize the path of peace,” the pope said. “Let us ask for the conversion of hearts.”
Pope Francis prayed that the upcoming Year of Mercy would bring with it “the grace that the world would discover again the ability to weep for its crimes, for those who make war.”
“We are approaching Christmas,” the pope said, and soon everywhere “there will be lights, decorated trees, even Nativity scenes,” but if they are not signs of faith in Jesus and a commitment to following him, then it is “all fake.”
“The world continues to make war,” he said. “The world has not understood the path of peace.”
All the wars and violence lead to “ruin, thousands of children without an education, many innocent people dead and a lot of money in the pockets of those who sell weapons,” the pope said. “Jesus once said, ‘You cannot serve two masters: Either God or riches.’ War is choosing riches.”
Choosing war, he said, is like saying, “’Let’s make weapons, that way we can balance the budget a bit and move our own interests forward.’ The Lord has strong words for those people: ‘Be cursed!’ He said, ‘Blessed are the peacemakers.’ Those who decide for war, who make wars, are cursed; they are criminals.”
While arms sellers around the world are getting rich, the pope said, peacemakers are humbly helping people one at a time.
Describing Blessed Teresa of Kolkata as an “icon of our age,” Pope Francis said she was one of those humble peacemakers. Cynics would ask what good Mother Teresa did by caring for the dying, but their question simply shows they do not understand the path to peace, he said.

By Carol Glatz
VATICAN CITY (CNS) — Bring honor back to keeping one’s promises, which must be made in full freedom and kept by making sacrifices, Pope Francis said.
The beauty of love and promises is that they are carried out in freedom, he said during his weekly general audience Oct. 21 in St. Peter’s Square. “Without freedom there can be no friendship, without freedom there is no love, without freedom there is no marriage.”
The pope also prayed for the intercession of “the pope of the family,” St. John Paul II, whose optional memorial is Oct. 22. He asked that the Synod of Bishops on the family “renew in the whole church the meaning of the indisputable value of the indissoluble marriage and healthy families, based on the mutual love between a man and woman and divine grace.”
The pope dedicated his catechesis to the promise of love and fidelity made between a husband and wife.
“The identity of the family is founded on promise,” he said, which can be seen in the loving care families provide one another in sickness and in health, and by accepting each other’s limitations and helping each other realize their full potential.
It is a promise of love that must not stay holed up in the home, but must expand to embrace one’s extended family, the community and the whole human family, the pope said.
Unfortunately, he said, honoring one’s promises has lost its standing. That is because, on the one hand, “a misunderstood right to pursue one’s own pleasure at all costs and in any relationship is exalted as a non-negotiable principle of freedom,” he said.
On the other hand, people “exclusively entrust the bonds of life’s relationships and the commitment to the common good to the requirements of law,” he said. But in reality, he said, nobody wants to be loved because of selfish reasons or out of compulsion.
“Love, just like friendship, owe their strength and beauty to this fact: that they generate a bond without removing freedom.”
“Freedom and fidelity are not opposed to each other, rather, they support each other” as people grow in the “free obedience to one’s word,” he said.
There is no better place than marriage and the family to teach the beauty and strength of keeping promises. “If we look at its audacious beauty, we are intimidated, but if we scorn its courageous tenacity, we are lost,” the pope said.
But this “masterpiece” and “miracle” of being true to one’s word must be an honest desire rooted in one’s very heart and soul – because promises “cannot be bought and sold, they cannot be coerced with force but nor can they be safeguarded without sacrifice,” he said.
“It’s necessary to bring social honor back to the fidelity of love,” he said, as well as bring to light the hidden miracles of millions of men and women who are building and rebuilding their families and promises every day.
St. Paul says the love which grounds the family points to the bond of love between Christ and the church, the pope said. That means, he said, that the church itself can find in the family “a blessing to safeguard” and always something to learn – even before it tries to teach or apply church discipline to it.
“Love for the human family, for better or for worse, is a point of honor for the church,” he said.
The pope asked that God bless the work of the Synod of Bishops that has gathered to discuss, “with creative fidelity,” the vocation and mission of the family.
He asked for prayers that the church would “uphold and strengthen the promise of the family” with an “unfailing trust in that faithful love by which the Lord fulfills his every promise.”
(Copyright © 2015 Catholic News Service/United States Conference of Catholic Bishops. The CNS news services may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or otherwise distributed, including but not limited to, such means as framing or any other digital copying or distribution method in whole or in part, without prior written authority of Catholic News Service.)