Category: Diocese of Scranton News

MILFORD – Students in the Children’s Faith Formation Program at Saint Patrick Parish in Milford participated in a colorful pageant retelling the Nativity Story, from Jesus’ birth to the Visitation of the Magi.

The event took place on Christmas Eve at the Pike County parish.

Directed by Laurie Barcia, who is also a fifth grade catechist in the Children’s Faith Formation Program, the pageant featured Rachel Swinton and Angelica Barcia as narrators.

Shown in the above photo are, left to right: Joseph Barcia, Paul Barcia, Cassidy Lentoni, Joellen Nielsen, and Dominic Lake.

The celebration of Christmas serves as a reminder that God did not reveal his greatness in a grand spectacle, but rather in the “littleness” of a poor, vulnerable child born in a stable in Bethlehem, Pope Francis said.

“Let us be amazed by this scandalous truth,” the pope said in his homily Dec. 24 as he celebrated the nighttime liturgy.

“The one who embraces the universe needs to be held in another’s arms. The one who created the sun needs to be warmed. Tenderness incarnate needs to be coddled. Infinite love has a tiny heart that beats softly,” he said.

The nighttime Mass, which is often referred to as “midnight Mass,” has not been celebrated at midnight at the Vatican since 2009. However, while Italy no longer has a 10 p.m. curfew in force as part of its measures to stem the spread of COVID-19, Pope Francis celebrated the “Christmas Mass at Night” at 7:30 p.m., as he did in 2020.

The pope made his way toward the main altar, processing with hundreds of concelebrants as the sounds of the Christmas hymn, “Noel,” echoed in the basilica.

After the procession, the Mass began with the Christmas proclamation, or “kalenda,”  of Jesus’ birth. The pope then lifted a cloth, revealing a life-sized statue of baby Jesus, which he reverently kissed and blessed with incense.

As the bells of St. Peter’s Basilica rang loudly announcing the birth of Christ, several children made their way to the statue of baby Jesus, placing white flowers around the crib.

In his homily, the pope began by reflecting on the angel’s announcement of Christ’s birth to shepherds and that the sign they were given was to look for “a child, a baby lying in the dire poverty of a manger.”

Notably, he said, the Gospel reading begins by presenting “the first emperor in all his grandeur,” Caesar Augustus, who ordered a census of the whole world. It then immediately recounts the birth of Jesus who was “wrapped in swaddling clothes, with shepherds standing by.”

“That is where God is, in littleness. This is the message: God does not rise up in grandeur, but lowers himself into littleness. Littleness is the path that he chose to draw near to us, to touch our hearts, to save us and to bring us back to what really matters,” the pope said.

On Christmas, he added, “all is turned upside down: God comes into the world in littleness. His grandeur appears in littleness.”

Pope Francis urged Christians to reflect on how God came into the world and ask themselves if they can “accept God’s way of doing things.” While some “continue to seek grandeur, even in his name,” God “does not seek power and might; he asks for tender love and interior littleness.”

“This is what we should ask Jesus for at Christmas: the grace of littleness,” the pope said. “Jesus asks us to rediscover and value the little things in life. If he is present there, what else do we need? Let us stop pining for a grandeur that is not ours to have. Let us put aside our complaints and our gloomy faces and the greed that never satisfies!”

Continuing his homily, the pope also encouraged those who feel overwhelmed “by the darkness of night” and surrounded “by cold indifference” that can make them feel worthless and unloved.

“Tonight, God answers back,” he said. “Tonight, he tells you: ‘I love you just as you are. Your littleness does not frighten me, your failings do not trouble me. I became little for your sake. To be your God, I became your brother.'”

He also said that accepting the grace of littleness also means embracing Jesus in the poor and less fortunate because they are the “most like Jesus, who was born in poverty.”

The poor, he continued, are not only the ones chosen by God to be present at the birth of his son, but who also lived near Christ’s birthplace.

“That is where Jesus is born,” the pope said. He “is close to them, close to the forgotten ones of the peripheries. He comes where human dignity is put to the test. He comes to ennoble the excluded, and he first reveals himself to them: not to educated and important people, but to poor working people.”

However, he noted, not only the poor were present but also the rich, personified in the presence of the Magi.

“In Bethlehem, rich and poor come together, those who worship, like the Magi, and those who work, like the shepherds. Everything is unified when Jesus is at the center: not our ideas about Jesus, but Jesus himself, the living one,” he said.

Pope Francis called on Christians to return to the origins of faith where “the shepherds and Magi are joined in a fraternity beyond all labels and classifications.”

“Let us look at the Magi who make their pilgrim way, and as a synodal church, a journeying church, let us go to Bethlehem, where God is in man and man in God,” the pope said.

“May God enable us to be a worshipping, poor and fraternal church. That is what is essential. Let us go back to Bethlehem,” he said.

Right up through December, extreme weather events and natural disasters of 2021 continued to upend local communities and set agendas for domestic and overseas emergency response efforts at major Catholic aid organizations.

“We had about 85 disasters,” in the United States this past year, said Kim Burgo, vice president for disaster operations for Catholic Charities USA.

“Charities agencies don’t just respond to a disaster because it was declared so by the Federal Emergency Management Agency,” she said, noting that its agencies also respond to local events, like floods, which impact local communities.

Burgo is part of a staff of four monitoring disasters and helping collaborate with local affiliates wherever possible. She said the West Coast wildfires and major storms such as Hurricane Ida were some of the top disaster priorities of the past year, along with floods, tornados and winter storms in the Midwest and the South.

“We do not have unlimited resources, so we have to be careful with the funds we have, but we don’t turn away any disaster that a (local) agency has, and even the smallest ones are important to the local community,” Burgo told Catholic News Service.

Catholic Charities USA supports the local disaster response through financial assistance, technical support and, in the case of a late August landfall of Hurricane Ida in Louisiana, virtual deployment of case managers as a coronavirus surge was complicating logistics.

For Hurricane Ida, Catholic Charities estimates that local agencies assisted 10,000 families through gift cards and meals and over a million pounds of goods.

“We have a ton of relationships with the other disaster organizations which provide different services as well,” Burgo said, noting that the hurricane drew an immediate and sustained response.

Often the response at the local level can last five to seven years, and there are many places in the country that have preexisting economic challenges, “so you end up with a bad hurricane or tornado in a place where they never really recover before the next one comes, and you end up with a constant state of recovery,” she said.

One unusual addition for the 2021 history books was the deadly Surfside condominium collapse near Miami in late June. The 12-story Champlain Towers residential collapse resulted in 98 deaths. It also left many survivors displaced in the subsequent months.

“That was an absolute tragedy, and Catholic Charities was there responding with mental health needs, helping people rebuild their lives and joining a consortium of assistance to help people get their medications and funeral expenses for loved ones met through case management, ” Burgo said.

In states of Washington, Oregon, and California, Catholic Charities is still managing wildfire recovery efforts stemming from 2018 incidents, while new wildfires threatened those same states.

The COVID-19 pandemic in 2021 also prompted disaster response planners to think outside the box, realizing that they couldn’t rely on the model of placing survivors in massive shelters. Instead, they moved to putting fewer people in more shelters or even hotel rooms.

Also, people seeking assistance were not able to walk into Charities outreach offices due to social distancing, so there was a continued move toward distribution sites, drive by distributions and virtual case management programming.

And the second year of the pandemic continued to take an economic toll on communities, as people lost jobs and housing became more scarce and expensive.

“The cost of housing, housing availability, eviction issues. The poor and vulnerable are most at risk, and all of this goes way beyond handing out water: These are the complicated issues you are trying to resolve every day,” Burgo said.

Beyond the American borders, there was an August earthquake in Haiti complicated by a deteriorating political and security situation in that Caribbean nation. A December typhoon hit the Philippines, and summer flooding wreaked havoc in Germany and Belgium, while China, India, Nepal and Indonesia experienced various floods, volcanoes and cyclones.

Kim Pozniak, senior director of global communications at Catholic Relief Services, said that in the past year CRS spent about $380 million on emergency response programming, which accounted for 42% of yearly total expenditures. The funds went toward comprehensive relief and recovery efforts in response to natural and man-made emergencies across 60 countries — benefiting 15.8 million people.

In Central Asia, CRS is anticipating that the 2021 Taliban takeover of Afghanistan and the worst drought there in recent memory — compounded by the pandemic’s effects — will likely result in a hunger crisis putting 23 million people in danger of starvation.

“This coincides with the start of the winter lean season when food supplies from harvests are exhausted, and families face shortages even in the best years. But this year the winter threatens extraordinary hardship and widespread loss of life, particularly among young children,” Pozniak told CNS.

In Madagascar, more than 1 million people are struggling with food insecurity following several years of drought that is being attributed to climate change. Carla Fajardo, CRS country representative in Madagascar, said the area is suffering several concurrent crises, including extreme drought, sandstorms, locust invasions and pests. The region not only suffers from a lack of rain, but when it comes, the rain is unpredictable, he noted.

And in the Sahel region of Africa – between the Sahara and the savannas in Sudan – a cycle of unrelenting violence has caused the dislocation of some 2 million people in Burkina Faso, Chad, Mali and Niger.

“The bloodshed and violent displacement will only improve if we rebuild trust between and within communities while also partnering with local leaders to deliver lifesaving care to the 14.4 million people in need,” said Pat Williams, CRS program manager of the Sahel Peace Initiative.

Pozniak said despite the ongoing pandemic, giving to CRS has been strong and that while the lockdowns and restrictions might have changed how people connect, the underlying fundamentals have not changed.

“Generally, our donors are driven by their faith, and they give generously during emergencies — especially when the media coverage of an emergency spikes. We also benefit from generous public and institutional donor funds,” she said.

But even with this support, she fears that “not enough attention or funding is being directed toward the urgent crises that are far from the spotlight and that critical resources have fallen short to meet humanitarian needs in many areas.”

VATICAN CITY (CNS) – The birth of the son of God in a humble stable, in the presence of both lowly shepherds and majestic Magi, is a “universal event that concerns all of humanity,” Pope Francis said.

During his weekly general audience Dec. 22, the pope said that only through humility can one truly understand God and oneself because it “opens us up to the experience of truth, of authentic joy, of knowing what matters.”

“The Magi may have even been great according to the world’s logic, but they made themselves lowly, humble, and precisely because of this they succeeded in finding Jesus and recognizing him. They accepted the humility of seeking, of setting out on a journey, of asking, of taking a risk, of making a mistake,” he said.

Among those present in the Paul VI audience hall were a group of asylum-seekers who, with the pope’s help, arrived in Italy Dec. 16 from Cyprus under a special humanitarian visa program.

Pope Francis thanked Italian authorities for facilitating their transfer and said those who seek refuge and a better life are not just the concern of the country they arrive in but “for all of humanity.”

“All we need to do is to open one door: the door of the heart,” the pope said. “Let us not forget that this Christmas.”

During the audience, the pope paused his series of talks on St. Joseph to reflect on the coming celebration of Christ’s humble birth in Bethlehem.

“Let’s think (about that),” he said. “The Creator of the universe was not given a place to be born.”

The shepherds, who visited the manger after receiving an announcement of Jesus’ birth by an angel, “personify the poor of Israel, lowly people who interiorly live with the awareness of their own want.”

“Precisely for this reason, they trust more than others in God. They were the first to see the son of God made man, and this encounter changed them deeply,” the pope said.

While little is known of the Magi, he continued, their journey to find Jesus represents those “who have sought God down through the ages, and who set out on a journey to find him.”

“They also represent the rich and powerful, but only those who are not slaves to possessions, who are not ‘possessed’ by the things they believe they possess,” he added.

Despite the vast differences between the shepherds and the Magi, both shared in the joy of Jesus’ birth because their humility led them to see God. The pope said that for Christians, humility “leads us also to the essentials of life, to its truest meaning, to the most trustworthy reason for why life is truly worth living.”

The celebration of Christmas, he added, is a time to invite everyone, especially the poor and those who do not believe in God, to see the “reason for our joy.”

The reason, Pope Francis said, is “knowing that we are loved without any merit, we are always loved first by God, with a love so concrete that he took on flesh and came to live in our midst. This love has a name and a face: Jesus is his name, he is the face of love — this is the foundation of our joy.”

VATICAN CITY (CNS) – Pope Francis will beatify Pope John Paul I Sept. 4, 2022, at the Vatican, according to Stefania Falasca, a journalist and vice postulator of the late pope’s sainthood cause.

In October, Pope Francis had signed a decree recognizing a miracle attributed to the intercession of Pope John Paul I, clearing the way for his beatification. At the time, a date for the ceremony was not announced.

Writing Dec. 23 in Avvenire, the daily newspaper owned by the Italian bishops’ conference, Falasca said the date had been set.

Pope John Paul I, an Italian who was born Albino Luciani, served only 33 days as pontiff; he died in the papal apartments Sept. 28, 1978, three weeks shy of his 66th birthday, shocking the world and a church that had just mourned the death of St. Paul VI.

The miracle approved in his cause involved a young girl in Buenos Aires, Argentina, who developed a severe case of acute encephalitis, experienced uncontrollable and life-threatening brain seizures, and eventually entered septic shock.

After doctors told family members her death was “imminent,” the local priest encouraged the family, nurses and others to pray to the late pope for his intercession, according to the website of the Congregation for Saints’ Causes. A panel of experts studying the cause determined there was no scientific explanation for her complete recovery in 2011 and that it could be attributed to the late pope’s intercession.

Although his was one of the shortest papacies in history, Pope John Paul I left a lasting impression on the church that fondly remembers him as “the smiling pope.”

Born in the small Italian mountain town of Canale D’Agordo Oct. 17, 1912, the future pope and his two brothers and one sister lived in poverty and sometimes went to bed hungry.

He was ordained a priest in 1935 and was appointed bishop of Vittorio Veneto in December 1958 by St. John XXIII. More than 10 years later, he was named patriarch of Venice by St. Paul VI and was created a cardinal in 1973.

His surprise election, after St. Paul VI’s death, did not sway him from continuing his humble manner of living, such as rejecting the use of the traditional papal tiara and calling his first Mass as pope the “inauguration” of his papal ministry rather than a coronation.