Category: 2024 News

SCRANTON – Hundreds of people filled the Cathedral of Saint Peter on Christmas Eve to celebrate the Nativity of the Lord.

The Most Rev. Joseph C. Bambera, Bishop of Scranton, served as principal celebrant and homilist for both the 4 p.m. and midnight Masses.

During his homily, Bishop Bambera acknowledged conflicts taking place in many parts of the world, including in the Holy Land and Ukraine.

“May the message of this day so permeate our hearts that peace will one day finally become a reality for all people,” Bishop Bambera said.

The bishop said that many people, unfortunately, look for God in the wrong place and self-righteously point fingers at others who are different than themselves.

“And then we wonder why our world is unsettled, our hearts uneasy, our families broken, and why countless numbers of souls are suffering in Israel, Ukraine, far too many places in our world, and in our own land,” Bishop Bambera continued.

Instead, the bishop said the “miracle of this day is that despite living in a world that’s been turned upside down, we are once again blessed with the opportunity to embrace the good news of Christmas – good news that proclaims God’s love and mercy to everyone who is humble and wise enough to know where to look to find it and how to keep it alive each day.”

Bishop Bambera began the Vigil Mass by blessing the large, beautiful creche which adorned the right-hand side of the Cathedral sanctuary during the Christmas season.

“God of every nation and people, from the very beginning of creation, you have made manifest your love. When our need for a savior was great, you sent your Son to be born of the Virgin Mary. To our lives, He brings joy and peace, justice, mercy and love. Lord, bless all who look upon this manger. May it remind us of the humble birth of Jesus and raise up our thoughts to Him, who is God with us, and savior of all,” the bishop said in his blessing.

As the Christmas season approached its conclusion, Bishop Bambera celebrated Mass for the Solemnity of the Epiphany of the Lord, Jan. 7, 2024, in which he reminded the faithful that Jesus did not remain in a manger forever.

“He went forth to embrace the work given to him by His Father: A mission grounded in humble service; unconditional and sacrificial love; and unlimited forgiveness and compassion,” the bishop explained. “These are the real gifts of Christmas – gifts available to all who open their hearts to Jesus’ presence – from those who worship with reverence and devotion; to the suffering poor who are unable to find their way to a church; to refugees and immigrants seeking a better life; to modern day victims of terrorism and war in the Middle East, Ukraine and beyond; to the magi of our time: every soul who seeks meaning, purpose, and a way forward in life through an encounter with the living God – including me and you.”

VATICAN CITY (CNS) – It may seem insignificant to some, but praying the rosary every day is huge in the eyes of God, Pope Francis told an association of laywomen dedicated to the Holy Family and prayer.

“God loves what is small and makes it bear fruit,” he told members of the “Sentinelles de la Sainte Famille” (Sentinels of the Holy Family) during an audience at the Vatican Jan. 11.

Founded in Brussels in 2013, the group coordinates an international prayer network of women, known as “sentinels,” to pray the rosary every day for the pope, priests, consecrated women, vocations, families and evangelization.

“The commitment required of someone who wants to become a ‘sentinel’ is simple, it might even seem laughable: recite a decade of the rosary every day,” the pope said.

The “very simple” requirement, he said, and may seem “small in the eyes of mankind, but it is much in the eyes of God if it is done faithfully over time, with faith and fervor and in a spirit of communion among you.”

Their prayer and commitment as “sentinels” are guided by Mary and her special attributes of looking upon the world with her maternal gaze, holding the world’s troubles in her heart and her tenderness, he said.

“Our world, as well as our brothers and sisters, need tenderness more than ever,” the pope said.

“How harsh today’s world is sometimes, merciless, deaf and indifferent to the suffering and needs of our neighbor. Mary was tenderness for Jesus, and she is tenderness for the church and the world,” he said.

The pope encouraged the women to help people “discover the meaning of what they experience, and to always hold on to hope and confidence in the future,” and he asked them to “persevere with courage.”

“May your growth, numerical and geographical, not cause you to lose simplicity and smallness of heart,” he added.

VATICAN CITY (CNS) – A major leap forward in Christian unity began with an embrace, as Pope Francis recalled.

St. Paul VI and Orthodox Ecumenical Patriarch Athenagoras I of Constantinople met, and embraced, in Jerusalem in January 1964 and the following year they lifted the mutual excommunications their churches had issued in 1054.

Pope Francis marked the anniversary during his Angelus address Jan. 6, telling a crowd in St. Peter’s Square that the two leaders had broken down “a wall of incommunicability that had kept Catholics and Orthodox apart for centuries. Let us learn from the embrace of those two great men of the church on the path to Christian unity: praying together, walking together, working together.”

The praying, walking and working will be highlighted Jan. 18-25 as Christians around the world celebrate the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity.

After the embrace, Pope Paul VI had told the patriarch: “What can and must now commence to develop is that fraternal charity, which is ingenious in finding new ways of showing itself, and which, taking its lessons from the past, is ready to pardon, more ready to believe good than evil, careful above all to conform itself to the Divine Master and to allow itself to be drawn to and transformed by him.”

The prayers and reflections for this year’s week of prayer — focused on the theme, “You shall love the Lord your God … and your neighbor as yourself” — were prepared by an ecumenical group of Christians in Burkina Faso, which has been “experiencing a serious security crisis” since 2016. Christians have been the target of jihadist terrorist attacks, and hundreds of churches have been forced to close.

Yet, the materials said, the situation has prompted Christian communities not only to pray for peace, but to work together to care for people displaced by the fighting and to promote Christian-Muslim dialogue.

In Rome Pope Francis will be joined by Anglican Archbishop Justin Welby of Canterbury Jan. 25 for vespers closing the week of prayer and to witness just how much fraternal charity exists among bishops of their churches.

Bishop Brian Farrell, secretary of the Dicastery for Promoting Christian Unity, told Catholic News Service Jan. 9 that the pope and archbishop will formally send forth 25 pairs of bishops — an Anglican and a Catholic from the same region — who have promised to pray and work together, usually on a joint charitable project.

Pope Francis and Archbishop Welby sent forth a similar group of 19 Anglican and 19 Catholic bishops during a prayer service in Rome in 2019. The twinning is a project of the International Anglican-Roman Catholic Commission for Unity and Mission, known as IARCCUM. The teams of bishops will have seminars in both Rome and Canterbury, England.

Some of the highlights in Vatican ecumenical relations over the past year included: Pope Francis’ ecumenical peace pilgrimage to South Sudan with Archbishop Welby and the Rev. Iain Greenshields, moderator of the Church of Scotland; the Vatican visit of Coptic Orthodox Pope Tawadros II of Alexandria, Egypt, and Pope Francis’ announcement that he added the 21 Coptic martyrs murdered by Islamic State terrorists in 2015 to the Roman Martyrology, the list of saints’ feast days; and the ecumenical prayer vigil that preceded the opening of the Synod of Bishops on synodality.

Bishop Farrell said it is difficult to know what else to add because “visits, mutual support, ecumenical dialogues — it’s all so normal now that we take it for granted.”

“The challenge we have is to not get used to the good relations that we have and forget that we are on a journey toward full unity,” he said. “This is the temptation of the ecumenical movement, to just kind of be happy with what we have achieved.”

“We still are not being faithful to Jesus’ prayer at the Last Supper that his disciples be one,” the bishop said.

The global ecumenical movement also is increasingly focused on 2025, which is the 1,700th anniversary of the Council of Nicaea, which gave birth to the Nicene Creed.

The anniversary, Bishop Farrell said, will be an opportunity for the Christian churches “to bring the fundamentals of the faith into the center of Christian life because we have a tendency, especially here in the West, to think of the church as what it does, but we forget the very foundation of what we’re doing is our faith in God, the father, son and Holy Spirit.”

Another Nicaea-related ecumenical hope is making less progress, Bishop Farrell said.

Different Christian communities celebrated Easter on different days until the Council of Nicaea in 325 decided that for the unity of the Christian community and its witness, Easter would be celebrated on the first Sunday after the first full moon after the spring equinox.

But the Julian calendar, which is what Christians used in the fourth century and many Orthodox churches still use, was out of sync with the actual solar year, so March 21 – generally assumed to be the date of the northern hemisphere’s spring equinox – gradually “drifted” away from the actual equinox.

In 1582, Pope Gregory XIII, relying on the work of astronomers, reformed the calendar, dropping 10 days and making the equinox fall on March 21 again.

While the World Council of Churches, the Vatican and a variety of Christian churches and ecumenical bodies have tried to get all Christians to agree on a common date for Easter, Bishop Farrell said that “not all the churches are willing to adapt or change.”

However, an occasional coincidence in the Julian and Gregorian calendars means that even if they do not have an agreement for the future, Christians will celebrate Easter on the same day in 2025.

(OSV News) – Nearly 15 years after spending a summer at the Abbey of Regina Laudis in Connecticut living alongside its Benedictine nuns, Jane Sloan Peters still recalls the tinge of frustration she would feel when the bells tolled, signaling the need to set aside work and head to prayer.

“I’m the kind of person that wants to just complete something before I move on to something else. And we couldn’t, you know. We had to stop weeding the hill halfway through and go up” for prayer, she said. “And then, you know, maybe you could go back to the task, or maybe it would be time for something else.”

While monks and nuns may interrupt their work to keep the prayer hours of their day, stopping a task at a predetermined time is a common mainstream productivity practice.

Jeroen Kraaijenbrink, a strategy expert and business consultant in Amsterdam, uses the method himself.

“You stop when the bell rings, and preferably that’s right in the middle of something, because when you stop right in the middle of something, it’s much easier to start again,” he told OSV News. “It’s kind of a time management aspect of the monastery life that makes you very productive.”

In the world of time management, monasticism has been touted as a source of tools for achieving a desired lifestyle. Headlines in Forbes, Fast Company, Business Insider and elsewhere in 2023 highlighted the productivity hack of going “monk mode” — a period (hours to weeks) of deeply focused work, often particularly free of social media. While at least a decade old, the idea appears to have had a resurgence, and alludes to monks in either Western or Eastern religious traditions.

Kraaijenbrink himself drew from the Rule of St. Benedict for his 2019 book, “No More Bananas: How to Keep Your Cool in the Collective Madness.” Unlike his other strategy-focused books, he said “No More Bananas” belongs in the self-help genre, and grew out of his personal efforts to find peace in a world that often feels “out of control.”

Kraaijenbrink and others, however, are skeptical about approaches that aim to reduce monastic wisdom to techniques and “hacks.” Rather, that wisdom is rooted in principles and practice, he said. In his own search, he spent time in a nearby Benedictine monastery, and said he still draws on what he learned — the importance of obedience, practicing silence and speaking less.

“It’s not about the grand gestures,” Kraaijenbrink said. “It’s about living life in a humble way” with appropriate flexibility — an approach that might resonate with people as they consider how to shape their lives in 2024.

St. Benedict of Nursia (480-547) and other monastic fathers and mothers were concerned with using time well. Often considered the father of Western monasticism, St. Benedict outlined the monastic day in his rule, organizing periods for individual and communal prayer, sleeping, eating, spiritual reading and study, and manual labor. The rule — often summarized as “ora et labora,” prayer and work — continues to shape the rhythms of Benedictine monks and nuns, as well as Trappists and Cistercians.

Like people today, medieval monks and nuns struggled to overcome distraction in their mental work and prayer, said Jamie Kreiner, a history professor at the University of Georgia and author of “The Wandering Mind: What Medieval Monks Tell Us About Distraction,” published in January 2023.

“They definitely were really sophisticated thinking about this problem (of distraction) but … they were the first to admit this (attention) is really hard, and we’re struggling a lot,” she said.

Kreiner, an expert in early medieval history, said that she wrote “The Wandering Mind,” in part, to highlight the complexity of medieval monasticism and to push back against “treating monks like they figured it all out.”

Her book makes the point that distraction isn’t a modern problem. “We kind of see early monks as being in this golden age when everyone could just concentrate on whatever they wanted all the time,” she said, “but they actually found out that when they made the choice to dedicate themselves to concentrating as really their professional and spiritual orientation, they still really struggled, even though they wanted to concentrate.”

Monks “saw your attention as something that wasn’t just about telling yourself to try harder,” she said. “You have to see your mind as being tied to all these different layers of experience. So you had to think first about what your goals were and what you wanted from the world. And you had to make decisions about what to say no to, or cut out of your life.”

Those decisions included how to approach friendships, time, schedules, books and technology, care for body and mind, and even memory.

“We tend to sort of focus mostly on personal hacks, or individual hacks — and those can help, and monks have those — but it was much more systemic and complex for them,” she said.

Steven Lawson taps into that holistic approach to living through the Monk Manual, a productivity system he developed and launched in 2018. It’s based on a 90-day planner designed to help its users prepare, act and reflect, but has expanded to include larger goal-setting tools and coaching.

He noted that monks, while approaching work with a “different value set” than much of the post-industrial world, have historically been strong producers, with monasteries serving as “centers of innovation where incredible things take place.”

The idea for the Monk Manual system, he told OSV News, originated with an article a friend shared that considered the Rule of St. Benedict as “a form of spiritual technology, as in something that is a system, a tool, created by an individual that makes some aspect of life much easier or more efficient or more effective — in this case, human flourishing.”

“That got me thinking about monasticism in a different way — that monasticism is actually designed around a particular function, and a lot of times when we look at monks, they actually seem very foreign to us, and maybe even inaccessible,” he said. “But what I saw was that a lot of what we see doesn’t apply to us in monasticism is the external forums, but the functional elements actually apply to all of us.”

Lawson, a Catholic who has spent time at St. Vincent Archabbey in Latrobe, Pennsylvania, said he thinks monasticism has wide appeal because monks “show a different model for what life can look like, and I think that’s attractive,” he said. “Whether someone is religious, spiritual but not religious, just purely secular, across the board — the majority sentiment is there’s a lot that isn’t working for people today. There’s something missing.”

Father Christian Raab, a Benedictine monk of St. Meinrad Archabbey in southern Indiana, suspects the ubiquity of the smartphone and the upheaval of the COVID-19 pandemic have kindled new interest in monastic habits as a potential panacea for widespread challenges.

The smartphone has “heightened the level of our distraction significantly,” he told OSV News. “It’s a wonderful tool that connects us to so many things. It can also rob us of our interiority. And so, we’re never bored, instead we’re scrolling. We don’t take the time to be reflective. Some people get addicted to various things on their phones and they end up feeling like a slave.”

Meanwhile, pandemic-related upheaval also prompted many people to reevaluate their priorities and “question the rat race,” said Father Raab, associate professor of systematic theology at St. Meinrad Seminary and School of Theology, and associate pastor of St. Joseph Parish in Jasper, Indiana.

“I think it’s the call of freedom that attracts people to monasticism,” he said. “They want more freedom from distraction and noise.”

He thinks, however, that some time-management approaches that highlight monks romanticize monasticism, or are founded in a vision of monasticism that doesn’t actually exist.

Monasticism is a form of religious life, and as such, it includes prayer, community, service and the proclamation of the kingdom, he said, noting that Benedictines have the particular value of stability and charism of hospitality.

“That’s what I think the right definition is, but if you talk to most people, what they mean by monasticism — they’re thinking mostly in terms of people who leave the world and are really trying to make a break from noise and distraction in order to perhaps heighten their spiritual connection,” he said.

While the “fuga mundi,” or “flight from the world,” is an aspect of monasticism that allows monks to pursue God in a more concentrated way, Father Raab said, “it’s perhaps not as total as some people on the outside imagine it is, or it characterizes maybe part of our day, or certain phases of our life, like the novitiate.”

If an aspect of monasticism deserves more attention, it’s stability, Father Raab said.

“We have a very rootless, mobile society and … it’s really culturally impoverished and people feel that,” he said. “I think they’re depressed by the fact that every stop on the Interstate looks exactly the same. People just want a richer experience of community and culture and identity.”

Kraaijenbrink said listening well is another monastic practice worth adopting.

“As a consultant, as a mentor, one of the key skills is listening, and not just listening to the words, but being very sensitive to also what is not said,” he said. That also applies to what one hears interiorly, he added.

Likewise, he applies “lectio divina” — a way of slowly reading and rereading, open to divine inspiration through a text, usually Scripture — to all reading, including social media.

“Whenever you read a post, don’t just scroll to the next one, but wait until something really resonates. Stop, let it sink in, so that way even social media can be used in a Benedictine fashion,” Kraaijenbrink said.

Peters, now an assistant professor of religious studies at the University of Mount St. Vincent in Riverdale, New York, said her time at Abbey of Regina Laudis helped her connect prayer and work.

“The stuff you’re doing with your hands and the things you’re giving attention to can inform and give a kind of a shape to your spiritual life,” she said. Pulling garden weeds, for example, makes space to ask “what does it look like to pull the weeds in your heart? Your imagination is fueled in very concrete ways to bring that back to your spiritual life.”

Peters’ experience also influences how she thinks of time and interruption. She aims to better accept interruption for the purposes of prayer or charity — an approach she finds especially helpful as the mother of two young sons.

“It proposes a kind of humility,” she said, “like, what you’re doing right now is important, and there are things that are more important, and you’re kind of putting your work in its proper perspective in the grand scheme of things.”

(OSV News) – A beloved Italian saint is speaking to faithful anew through a series of letters sent directly to their email inboxes.

The St. Pio Foundation has announced the release of “Epistolary,” a collection of 365 letters written by St. Pio of Pietrelcina, widely known as Padre Pio, to his spiritual directors and students. A dedicated page on the foundation’s website includes a sign-up form (available at saintpiofoundation.org/saint-pios-epistolary) for receiving a weekly PDF with seven letters, one for each day of a given week. The first batch of letters was sent out Jan. 1 by the Tuckahoe, New York-based foundation.

Freshly translated into English from the original Italian, the Epistolary represents a fraction of the “thousands and thousands of letters” Padre Pio wrote during his lifetime, Luciano Lamonarca, founder and CEO of the St. Pio Foundation, told OSV News.

Born Francesco Forgione in 1887 in Pietrelcina, Italy, the future saint entered the Capuchin order at age 15 and was ordained in 1910. Between 1915 and 1918, he served intermittently in the Italian Army’s medical corps during World War I, but was ultimately discharged due to poor health. He returned to his monastery at San Giovanni Rotondo in southern Italy, and in 1918 received the Stigmata (the wounds of Christ), the first priest to receive such marks in the history of the Catholic Church.

Amid sustained physical and spiritual suffering — compounded by austerity and long hours of prayer — he established Casa Sollievo della Sofferenza, now a renowned national research hospital located in San Giovanni Rotondo. The Capuchin also devoted himself to the healing of souls, often spending more than 15 hours a day hearing confessions. Padre Pio died in 1968 and was canonized in 2002 by then St. John Paul II, with whom he had been friends since 1947.

The Capuchin’s voluminous correspondence was a ministry unto itself, imparting encouragement, fatherly corrections and commonsense spirituality centered in an intensely personal relationship with Christ.

“If God has not abandoned you in the past, how would he abandon you in the future when now, more than in the past, you want to belong to him from now onwards?” wrote Padre Pio to Antonietta Vona, one of his “spiritual daughters,” in November 1917. “Do not fear that something bad could happen to you in this world because it may never happen to you. But, in any case, should this ever happen to you, God will give you the strength to overcome it.”

At the same time, Padre Pio’s writings reveal his own struggles with spiritual dryness.

“I’m alone in the day, I’m alone during the night and no ray of light comes to shine on me, never a drop of refreshness comes to put off the flame that engulfs me continuously without ever consuming me,” he admitted in a 1916 letter to his superior, Capuchin Father Benedetto of San Marco in Lamis, who would later attest to Padre Pio’s reception of the stigmata.

With the Epistolary, Padre Pio’s ministry of spiritual counsel continues — and faithful have been eagerly waiting, said Lamonarca.

“I always find people around the (U.S.), when I travel with the relics (of Padre Pio) especially — they’re very demanding (about access to the letters, asking), ‘How can we get all that? It’s difficult to find.'”

Lamonarca told OSV News the Epistolary is one of several “gifts” he wanted to give to the Catholic community to mark the foundation’s upcoming 10th anniversary in April.

But the gifts he has received from his own devotion to the saint have been life-changing, he added.

A native of the Puglia region in southern Italy, Lamonarca — an opera singer and philanthropist — was accustomed to visiting the saint’s shrine there as a child with his mother and brother.

But in 2014, that childhood devotion took on a profound dimension, as Lamonarca and his wife, Valentina, experienced what they consider a miracle through the saint’s intercession: the conception and birth of their 8-year-old son, Sebastian.

The couple had lost their first child, Alma, to stillbirth in 2010. Surgeries to address complications from the delivery made future pregnancies highly unlikely.

Devastated, the Lamonarcas traveled to San Giovanni Rotondo, spending their wedding anniversary there and visiting Padre Pio’s shrine to implore the saint for a sign they would someday become parents. While there, they venerated a relic of the saint – a handkerchief with blood stains from the stigmata experienced by Padre Pio – and felt a sense of divine reassurance.

Upon their return to the U.S., that reassurance and a growing closeness to Padre Pio sustained them through several miscarriages. In 2013, Lamonarca was inspired to create the foundation to promote the spirituality and charism of Padre Pio, and in April 2014 the foundation was officially launched. In December 2014, Valentina learned she was pregnant, and Sebastian was born in September 2015.

Lamonarca told OSV News that Padre Pio’s spiritual wisdom is summarized in one of the saint’s best-known maxims: pray, hope and don’t worry.

“He releases his fear, he releases everything (into) God’s grace,” Lamonarca said, adding, “remember, when he says, ‘pray, hope and don’t worry,’ he said them in a specific order. It never came to his mind to say, ‘Don’t worry, hope, pray,’ (but) in a specific order because that is the way life should be looked upon.”

Along with his letters, Padre Pio’s suffering is instructive, said Lamonarca, adding that he has become “completely different” due to his devotion to the saint.

“I consider being grateful to God for everything that’s happened in my life, bad and good,” said Lamonarca. “Because those bad experiences also bring us to understand and to help us be better people.”

While “in this life, many try to get rid of their sufferings, even the small headaches,” following Padre Pio’s example — which modeled Christ’s own — offers “a way of looking at (suffering) with much more relief,” and bearing it “with much more dignity,” said Lamonarca.

VATICAN CITY (CNS) – While bishops may take a cautious approach to the Vatican’s guidance on blessing same-sex or other unmarried couples, they should not deny their priests the possibility of discerning and imparting blessings on people who ask for them, the Vatican doctrinal office said.

“Prudence and attention to the ecclesial context and to the local culture could allow for different methods of application, but not a total or definitive denial of this path that is proposed to priests,” said a press release issued Jan. 4 by the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith.

Each bishop has a responsibility to discern the local application of the declaration “Fiducia Supplicans” (“Supplicating Trust”) on “the pastoral meaning of blessings,” signed by Pope Francis and published by the Dicastery for the Doctrine of Faith Dec. 18, but a bishop should not deny priests the ability to bless people who come to them, the press release said.

Signed by Cardinal Víctor Manuel Fernández, prefect of the dicastery, the statement said it hoped “to help clarify” the reception of “Fiducia Supplicans” among bishops’ conferences.

Besides causing both outrage and celebration on social media, the declaration was greeted by bishops’ conferences with reactions that ran the gamut from embracing its guidance to outright banning local priests from applying it.

Many bishops’ conferences in Western countries, underscoring that the declaration did not change Catholic doctrine on marriage, reacted positively to the document. But others, particularly in Africa, were vocal in their opposition. The Zambian bishops’ conference issued a statement Dec. 20 stating that the Vatican document should “be taken as for further reflection and not for implementation in Zambia.” In Malawi, the bishops’ conference directed that “blessings of any kind for same-sex unions of any kind are not permitted in Malawi.”

Bishop Robert E. Barron, chairman of the U.S. bishops’ Committee on Laity, Marriage, Family Life and Youth, said in a statement Dec. 21 that the document “in no way calls for a change in the Church’s teaching regarding marriage and sexuality.”

Bishop Georg Bätzing, president of the German bishops’ conference, wrote Dec. 18 that he welcomed the document and was “grateful for the pastoral perspective it takes.”

Bishop Oscar Ojea, president of the Argentine bishops’ conference, said Dec. 30 that it would be “inappropriate” to inquire about the moral life of someone asking for a blessing, and he surmised that bishops and ministers who disagree with the Vatican guidance on blessings have not had the experience of witnessing someone simply asking for God’s help or, perhaps, have not even acknowledged a need for God’s mercy in their own lives.

The statements made by bishops’ conferences “cannot be interpreted as doctrinal opposition,” the dicastery’s Jan. 4 statement said, since “Fiducia Supplicans” clearly states the church’s perennial teaching on marriage and sexuality.

“There is no room to distance ourselves doctrinally from this Declaration or to consider it heretical, contrary to the Tradition of the Church or blasphemous,” the statement said.

Still, it acknowledged that while in some places “no difficulties arise” for the immediate application of the declaration, “in others it will be necessary not to introduce them” or to wait until more time is provided for study and for catechesis.

Some bishops have forbidden priests in their diocese from imparting the pastoral blessings laid out in the Vatican document. Archbishop Tomash Peta and Auxiliary Bishop Athanasius Schneider of Astana, Kazakhstan, said in a Dec. 19 statement that they “prohibit priests and the faithful of the Archdiocese of Saint Mary in Astana from accepting or performing any form of blessing whatsoever of couples in an irregular situation and same-sex couples.”

In other local contexts, the Vatican statement said some bishops have given priests encouragement to discern when such blessings may be appropriate, but the dicastery insisted a priest may perform the blessings “only in private.”

The variety of reactions is not “problematic if it is expressed with due respect for a text signed and approved by the Supreme Pontiff himself, while attempting in some way to accommodate the reflection contained in it,” it said.

The statement also discussed at length the situation in countries where homosexuals are threatened with prison, torture or death for being gay. In those places, “it goes without saying that a blessing would be imprudent,” it said. “It is clear the Bishops do not wish to expose homosexual persons to violence.”

But beyond blessings for same-sex couples, the “real novelty” of “Fiducia Supplicans,” the dicastery said, is not the possibility of blessing couples in irregular situations, rather “the invitation to distinguish between two different forms of blessings: ‘liturgical and ritualized’ and ‘spontaneous or pastoral.'”

The statement recognized that while some bishops will choose not to impart pastoral blessings to couples in irregular situations, “we all need to grow equally in the conviction that: non-ritualized blessings are not a consecration of the person nor of the couple who receives them, they are not a justification of all their actions, and they are not an endorsement of the life that they lead.”

“When the Pope asked us to grow in a broader understanding of pastoral blessings, he proposed we think of a way of blessing that does not require the placing of so many conditions to carry out this simple gesture of pastoral closeness, which is a means of promoting openness to God in the midst of the most diverse circumstances,” the statement said.

Concretely, the dicastery said such pastoral blessings last only “a few seconds” and must be performed “without an approved ritual and without a book of blessings.”

If two people approach a priest for a blessing, he “simply asks the Lord for peace, health and other good things for these two people who request it” and that “they may live the Gospel of Christ in full fidelity.”

A simple, brief and non-ritualized blessing “does not intend to justify anything that is not morally acceptable” and is “not an ‘approval’ or ratification of anything either,” the statement said.

The press released also noted that catechesis will be necessary in some places to help people understand that such blessings are “not an endorsement of the life led by those who request them” or a form of absolution, but “simple expressions of pastoral closeness.”