Month: June 2022

VATICAN CITY (CNS) – Perhaps signaling some improvement in Pope Francis’ painful knee, the Vatican announced June 23 that he will visit Canada in late July. However, the Canadian bishops said that, due to the 85-year-old pope’s age and limitations, it is expected that his participation at public events will be limited to approximately one hour.

The Vatican confirmed the pope’s plan to be in Canada July 24-29, returning to Rome July 30. The focus of the trip is his meetings with members of Canada’s Indigenous communities in the cities of Edmonton, Alberta; Quebec; and Iqaluit, Nunavut, the country’s most northern region.

The visit, drawing on the theme of “Walking Together,” will include a combination of public and private events.

The Vatican said Pope Francis will arrive in Edmonton July 24 and, following a brief airport ceremony, will take the remainder of the day to rest.

On July 25, Pope Francis will visit Maskwacis, home to the former Ermineskin Residential School, one of the largest residential school sites in Canada. He will join former residential school students from across the country as part of a formal program. Alberta is home to the largest number of former residential schools in Canada.

Later in the day, the pontiff will visit Sacred Heart Church of the First Peoples, a National Indigenous church in downtown Edmonton.

On July 26, the feast of St. Anne, grandmother of Jesus, Pope Francis will celebrate an open-air Mass at Commonwealth Stadium in Edmonton. In the early evening, he will travel to Lac Ste. Anne, the site of an annual pilgrimage that welcomes tens of thousands of Indigenous participants from throughout Canada and the United States each year. Programming will be offered throughout the day leading up to the pope’s participation in a prayer service.

On July 27, he will fly to Quebec City for private and public meetings. He has been invited to participate at a dedicated area on the Plains of Abraham, where there will be opportunities for Indigenous cultural expression as well as the chance to view papal events on large screens.

On July 28, Pope Francis will travel to Sainte-Anne-de-Beaupré, where he will celebrate Mass at one of the oldest and most popular pilgrimage sites in North America. The basilica draws more than a million visitors — including annual Indigenous pilgrimages — each year. Later in the day, he will meet with bishops, priests, seminarians, consecrated men and women as well as those who work in various church ministries. The pope will have the remainder of the evening for rest, while a dinner focused on friendship and ongoing dialogue will bring together Indigenous leaders from Eastern Canada and representatives of the Catholic bishops of Canada.

Following a private meeting with the Jesuits July 29, Pope Francis will meet with Indigenous leaders from Eastern Canada before departing for Iqaluit, where he will spend the afternoon in a private meeting with residential school survivors before attending a public community event hosted by Inuit. He will depart for Rome from Iqaluit at 6:45 p.m.

Pope Francis had promised to visit Canada during a meeting April 1 with representatives of Canada’s Métis National Council, Inuit Tapiriit Kanatami and Assembly of First Nations — three groups he also had met with individually. A delegation from the Manitoba Métis Federation met separately with the pope April 21.

Many of the representatives in the groups were survivors of residential schools — boarding schools the government established to educate and forcefully assimilate Indigenous children. Many of the schools were run by Catholic religious orders or dioceses.

Canada’s Catholic bishops have said that “the pope’s visit will provide a unique opportunity for him, once again, to listen and dialogue with Indigenous peoples, to express his heartfelt closeness and to address the impact of colonization and the participation of the Catholic Church in the operation of residential schools throughout Canada.”

The Indigenous communities have asked the pope to publicly apologize on Canadian soil for the church’s role particularly in the schools.

He already apologized to the Indigenous representatives at the Vatican. “For the deplorable conduct of those members of the Catholic Church,” the pope told the representatives in April, “I ask for God’s forgiveness, and I want to say to you with all my heart: I am very sorry.”

VATICAN CITY (CNS) – Thousands of records detailing requests to the Vatican made by Jewish people persecuted by the Nazis will be made available online to the public, the Vatican announced.

In a statement released June 23, the Vatican said universal access to the documentation, which has been available to researchers since March 2020, was made “at the request of the Holy Father.”

The documentation, titled “Ebrei” (“Jews”), aims “to preserve the petitions for help from Jewish people all over Europe, received by (Pope Pius XII) during the Nazi-Fascist persecutions,” the statement said.

“The archival series consists of a total of 170 volumes, equivalent to nearly 40,000 digital files. An initial 70% of the complete material will be made available initially, before being integrated with the final volumes that are currently being worked on,” the Vatican said.

While the Vatican made no direct link, the decision to make the documents available online closely follows controversy over a new book by historian David I. Kertzer.

In his book, “The Pope at War,” Kertzer suggested that Pope Pius remained silent out of fear of the Nazis and that the Vatican prioritized saving Jewish converts to Catholicism from persecution.

In an article for the Vatican newspaper, Archbishop Paul R. Gallagher, Vatican foreign minister, highlighted the case of Werner Barasch, a Jewish university student from Germany who was held at a concentration camp in Miranda de Ebro, Spain.

Barasch wrote a letter in 1942 to an Italian friend and asked that Pope Pius send the apostolic nuncio in Madrid to secure his release so he could travel to the United States and be reunited with his mother.

Archbishop Gallagher said that while two documents revealed that the Vatican Secretariat of State had intervened, no other paperwork existed that revealed the young man’s fate.

However, an internet search revealed that “he was released from the Miranda camp the year after his appeal in a letter to the pope, and that in 1945, he was finally able to join his mother in the United States,” the archbishop said.

The documentation being released online, he added, details more than 2,700 cases of requests for help from the Vatican, primarily for families, but also for groups of people.

“Thousands of people persecuted for their membership to the Jewish religion, or for merely having ‘non-Aryan’ ancestry, turned to the Vatican, in the knowledge that others had received help, like the young Werner Barasch himself writes,” Archbishop Gallagher said.

Archbishop Gallagher said the cases were given the name “Pacelli’s list,” referring to Pope Pius’ given name, Eugenio Pacelli, echoing “Schindler’s list,” the title given to the list of those saved by the German industrialist Oskar Schindler, who saved the lives of over a thousand Jews during World War II.

“Although the two cases differ, the analogy perfectly expresses the idea that people in the corridors of the institution at the service of the pontiff worked tirelessly to provide Jewish people with practical help,” he said.

The Vatican foreign minister said that the release of the documents to the public will aid “descendants of those who asked for help to find traces of their loved ones from any part of the world.”

It also will “allow scholars and anyone interested to freely examine this special archival heritage from a distance,” the archbishop said.

VATICAN CITY (CNS) – The Catholic Church professes marriage and family life to be a path to holiness – a daunting concept – but one that can start with a tiny step, Pope Francis said.

“Start from where you are, and, from there, try to journey together: together as couples, together in your families, together with other families, together with the church,” the pope said June 22, opening the World Meeting of Families with an evening “Festival of Families” in the Vatican audience hall.

The in-presence portion of most of the event June 22-26 was limited to about 2,000 people – official delegates of bishops’ conferences, Catholic family associations and movements. But the entire event was being livestreamed, and parishes and dioceses around the world were holding their own events at the same time on the theme, “Family love: a vocation and a path to holiness.”

At the opening festival, with some 4,500 people in the Vatican audience hall, Pope Francis said he wanted the church to be a “good Samaritan that draws near to you and helps you to continue your journey and to take a step forward, however small.”

Cardinal Kevin J. Farrell, prefect of the Dicastery for Laity, the Family and Life, welcomed delegates to the gathering and told Pope Francis the five families — from Rome, Ukraine and Congo — that shared their stories “are not perfect families … because, as you always say, perfect don’t exist.”

“They are normal families who, like so many others, in every country and latitude, go through the difficulties and sufferings typical of our time,” the cardinal said, but they have discovered that when the problems are experienced with faith, they can open “incredible paths of family holiness.”

Serena Zangla and Luigi Franco, who have lived together for 10 years and have three children, spoke to the pope of the difficulty they had in finding a parish that would accept and support them, for which Pope Francis apologized. Zangla said they finally have found a community and are hoping to be married soon.

The sacrament of marriage is the gift God gives to couples in love, the pope said. “It is a marvelous gift, which contains the power of God’s own love: strong, enduring, faithful, ready to start over after every failure or moment of weakness.”

“Family life is not ‘mission impossible,'” he told them. “By the grace of the sacrament, God makes it a wonderful journey, to be undertaken together with him and never alone.”

Roberto and Maria Anselma Corbella shared with the crowd the story of the illness and death of their daughter, Chiara, who eventually chose not to pursue cancer treatment so her unborn baby would live.

“To see how she experienced the trial of her illness helped you to lift up your gaze, not to remain imprisoned in grief, but to be open to something greater: the mysterious plans of God, to eternity, to heaven,” the pope said. “I thank you for this witness of faith!”

Paul and Germaine Balenza of Congo spoke of the crises in their marriage, including infidelity, and how members of the Christian Family Community helped them find the strength to forgive and begin again.

“No one wants a love that is short-term or is marked with an expiration date,” the pope said. “We suffer greatly whenever failings, negligence and human sins make a shipwreck of marriage. But even amid the tempest, God sees what is in our hearts.”

Listening to their story, the pope said he was reminded of the biblical story of the prodigal son, “only this time, the ones who went astray were the parents, not the child!”

Pope Francis congratulated the couple for celebrating a “feast of forgiveness” with their children and renewing their wedding vows at Mass, because it helped their children see “the humility needed to beg forgiveness and the God-given strength to pick yourselves up after the fall.”

Iryna Kozhushko and her daughter Sofia from Ukraine, and Pietro and Erika Chiriaco, the couple with six young children hosting them in Acilia, a suburb of Rome, also shared their stories.

The welcome offered by the Chiriaco family, Pope Francis said, shows the generosity that almost naturally comes from having a large family where people are “trained to make room for others.”

“In the end, this is what family is all about. In the family, we experience what it is to be welcomed. Husbands and wives are the first to ‘welcome’ and accept one another, as they said they would do on the day of their marriage,” he said. “Later, as they bring a child into the world, they welcome that new life.”

“Whereas in cold and anonymous situations, the weak are often rejected,” the pope said, “in families it is natural to welcome them: to accept a child with a disability, an elderly person in need of care, a family member in difficulty who has no one else — this gives hope.”

Zakia Seddiki, a Moroccan Muslim and widow of Luca Attanasio, the Italian ambassador to Congo killed in an ambush in 2021 at the age of 43, also spoke at the event.

Seddiki had told the crowd, “We based our family on authentic love, with respect, solidarity and dialogue between our cultures.”

“None of that was lost, not even after the tragedy of Luca’s death,” the pope said. “Not only do the example and the spiritual legacy of Luca continue to live on and to speak to the consciences of many people, but also the organization that Zakia founded in some way carries on his mission. Indeed, we can say that Luca’s diplomatic mission has now become ‘a mission of peace’ on the part of your entire family.”

Pope Francis praised Seddiki and Attanasio for supporting and respecting each other’s religious identities and focusing on how both Islam and Christianity called them to work “to overcome divisions, prejudices and narrow-mindedness, and to build together something grand, something beautiful, on the basis of what we have in common.”

WASHINGTON (CNS) – In a 6-3 ruling June 21, the Supreme Court said a Maine tuition aid program that excluded religious schools violated the Constitution’s free exercise clause.

The opinion, written by Chief Justice John Roberts, said: “A state need not subsidize private education but once a state decides to do so, it cannot disqualify some private schools solely because they are religious.”

He also said the court’s decision in Carson v. Makin stemmed from a principle in its two previous decisions, particularly the 2020 opinion in Espinoza v. Montana Department of Revenue. In that case, the court said the state of Montana could not exclude religious schools from receiving tax credit-funded scholarships under its school choice program.

The Maine case went a step further by asking if the state can prevent students from using state funds to attend schools that provide religious instruction.

Roberts stressed that a neutral benefit program that gives public funds to religious organizations through the independent choices of the recipients of those benefits does not violate the Constitution’s establishment clause.

During oral arguments last December on this case, several of the justices found fault with the state’s decision process in determining just how religious a school was in order to decide if the school could participate or not in the program specifically for rural communities.

Schools deemed as ones that could potentially “infuse” religion in classes were excluded while other schools deemed by the state’s board of education to be the “rough equivalent” of public schools — or religiously neutral — could take part in the tuition program.

“That’s discrimination based on doctrine. That’s unconstitutional,” Roberts said at the time, which he essentially reiterated in his opinion.

Justice Stephen Breyer, in his dissent, stressed that the court has “never previously held” what it is saying today, “namely, that a state must (not may) use state funds to pay for religious education as part of a tuition program designed to ensure the provision of free statewide public education.”

Breyer, joined by Justice Elena Kagan and in part by Justice Sonia Sotomayor, said this decision pays more attention to the free exercise clause and not enough to the Constitution’s Establishment Clause.

Cardinal Timothy M. Dolan of New York, chairman of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops’ Committee for Religious Liberty, and Bishop Thomas A. Daly of Spokane, Washington, chairman of the USCCB’s Committee on Catholic Education, said the high court “rightly ruled that the Constitution protects not just the right to be religious but also to act religious.”

“This commonsense result reflects the essence of Catholic education,” they said.

“The court has again affirmed that states cannot exclude religious schools from generally available public benefits based on their religious affiliation or exercise,” the USCCB chairmen added. “In our pluralistic society, it is vital that all people of faith be able to participate in publicly available programs and so to contribute to the common good.”

Nichole Garnett, a law professor at Notre Dame Law School, who focuses on education policy, called the decision “a victory both for religious liberty and for American schoolchildren.”

“The majority makes clear, once again, that, when the government makes a benefit available to private institutions, it must treat religious institutions — including faith-based schools — fairly and equitably,” she said in June 21 statement.

She also noted that the opinion cements the constitutional principle that “requires government neutrality — and prohibits hostility — toward religious believers and institutions.”

Garnett, signed an amicus brief in the Maine case submitted by the Religious Liberty Initiative of Notre Dame Law School on behalf of elementary and secondary schools from three faith traditions – Catholic (Partnership for Inner-City Education), Islamic (Council of Islamic Schools in North America) and Jewish (National Council of Young Israel).

Noting how this decision could impact school choice programs, she said it “clears away a major hurdle to the expansion of parental choice in the U.S. by clarifying that, when states adopt choice programs, they must permit parents to choose faith-based schools for their children.”

“Faith-based schools have a long and proven track record of providing high-quality education, especially for our most disadvantaged children and policies that exclude them from private-school choice programs are both unconstitutional and unwise,” she added.

Becket, a religious liberty law firm, similarly filed an amicus brief in this case, emphasizing that states have had a long history of excluding religious institutions from public benefits, often in part from the Blaine Amendments passed during a time of anti-Catholic sentiment in the last 19th century.

The Blaine Amendment to prohibit direct government aid to educational institutions that have a religious affiliation was first proposed in Congress in 1875 by Rep. James G. Blaine of Maine. (Blaine also served as a U.S. senator from 1876 to 1881.)

In their statement, Cardinal Dolan and Bishop Daly noted that Blaine’s “cynically anti-Catholic” proposal was narrowly defeated in Congress but Blaine Amendments “were ultimately adopted in some form by 37 states.”

“These laws have nothing to do with government neutrality toward religion,” the two prelates said. “Rather, they are expressions of hostility toward Catholics. We are grateful that the Supreme Court continues to rebuke this harmful legacy.”

VATICAN CITY (CNS) – One cannot share the Gospel without living it first, Pope Francis said in separate meetings with members of the general chapters of the Pauline Fathers and Comboni Missionaries.

“The first thing a communicator communicates is himself, perhaps without meaning to, but it is himself,” the pope told the Paulines, a religious order with a focus on communications and the media.

“A missionary is a disciple who is so united to his master and lord that his hands, his mind and his heart are channels of Christ’s love,” the pope told the Comboni Missionaries.

Pope Francis met members of the general chapters of the orders at the Vatican June 18.

“Great missionaries” like Blessed Daniele Comboni and St. Frances Cabrini “lived their mission feeling animated and driven by the heart of Christ, that is, by the love of Christ,” the pope told the Combonis. That drive pushed them “to go out and go beyond: not only beyond geographical limits and boundaries, but first and foremost beyond their own personal limits.”

“The push of the Holy Spirit is what makes us come out of ourselves, out of our closures, out of our self-referentiality,” he said, and it “makes us go toward others, toward the peripheries, where the thirst for the Gospel is greatest.”

To be sent on mission, he said, it to be sent to bring God’s mercy, compassion and tenderness to people, and that can be done only by being merciful, compassionate and tender.

“Mercy, tenderness is a universal language, which knows no boundaries,” the pope said. “But you carry this message not so much as individual missionaries, but as a community, and this implies you must care not only for your personal style but also the style of your communities,” cultivating honest communication and care for one another.

At his meeting with the Pauline Fathers, Pope Francis handed them the speech he had prepared and then proceeded to talk about the importance of honest, complete communication.

“You have the vocation to communicate cleanly, evangelically,” the pope told them. “If we take today’s media, there is a lack of cleanliness, a lack of honesty, a lack of completeness.”

“Disinformation is the order of the day: one thing is said, but many others are hidden,” he said. “We must ensure that in our communication of faith, this does not happen, that communication comes precisely from vocation, from the Gospel – crisp, clear, witnessed with one’s life.”