Vatican City, Apr 8, 2016 / 04:05 am (CNA/EWTN News).- Pope Francis’ latest writings on the family include a strong affirmation of the need to welcome children even in difficult circumstances. He praises large families and adopted families, reje... Read more

Vatican City, Apr 8, 2016 / 04:05 am (CNA/EWTN News).- Pope Francis’ latest writings on the family include a strong affirmation of the need to welcome children even in difficult circumstances. He praises large families and adopted families, reje... Read more

Vatican City, Apr 8, 2016 / 04:00 am (CNA/EWTN News).- Catholics who have divorced-and-remarried need the fullness of Church teaching. They also need a wise pastoral and community response to their difficulties that can help them grow in the Christian life, Pope Francis said on Friday in his new document on love in the family. “The Church’s pastors, in proposing to the faithful the full ideal of the Gospel and the Church’s teaching, must also help them to treat the weak with compassion, avoiding aggravation or unduly harsh or hasty judgements,” the Pope said in Amoris Laetitia. Pope Francis’ highly anticipated post-synodal apostolic exhortation on the gifts and challenges of family life was published April 8. Titled Amoris Laetitia, or The Joy of Love, the document was presented to journalists in Italian, French, English, German, Spanish and Portuguese. Signed March 19, the Feast of St. Joseph, the release of the document was delayed in order to allow time for its translation into other languages. The apostolic exhortation is the conclusion of a two-year synod process discussing both the beauty and challenges of family life today. Hosted at the Vatican in 2014 and 2015, these synods gathered hundreds of bishops from around the world. While much of the Western secular media focused its coverage on homosexuality and the question of communion for the divorced-and-civilly remarried, actual topics discussed in the meetings were much broader, with synod fathers touching on themes such as domestic violence, incest and abuse within families, and marriage preparation. Pope Francis acknowledged the attention generated by the synods, saying, “The debates carried on in the media, in certain publications and even among the Church’s ministers, range from an immoderate desire for total change without suf¬ficient reflection or grounding, to an attitude that would solve everything by applying general rules or deriving undue conclusions from particular theological considerations.” The wide-ranging document included Biblical reflections on family, as well as discussion of the family as a place of faith and labor, celebration and tears. The Pope spoke about sexuality within marriage and on the sometimes devastating effects of poverty and migration on families. He also touched on the importance of communication within the family, the challenges of raising children in a technology-saturated world, and the witness of virginity. Pope Francis devoted a substantial section of the document to the topic of educating children, observing, “The family is thus the place where parents become their children’s first teachers in the faith.” He also offered suggestions for improving marriage preparation programs, inviting engaged couples to consider a simple wedding and to set aside technological distractions. In a world where many have lost respect for marriage and are delaying the union or choosing cohabitation instead, the Church must speak up, Pope Francis said. “As Christians, we can hardly stop advocating marriage simply to avoid countering contemporary sensibilities, or out of a desire to be fashionable or a sense of helplessness in the face of human and moral failings,” he reflected. “We would be depriving the world of values that we can and must offer.” At the same time, he said, “there is no sense in simply decrying present-day evils, as if this could change things. Nor it is helpful to try to impose rules by sheer authority. What we need is a more responsible and generous effort to present the reasons and motivations for choosing marriage and the family, and in this way to help men and women better to respond to the grace that God offers them.” Pope Francis praised the “indissolubility of marriage,” saying that it “should not be viewed as a ‘yoke’ imposed on humanity, but as a ‘gift’ granted to those who are joined in marriage.” He added that “Divorce is an evil and the increasing number of divorces is very troubling.” In addition, he said that “divorced people who have not remarried, and often bear witness to marital fidelity, ought to be encouraged to find in the Eucharist the nourishment they need to sustain them in their present state of life.” In the document’s introduction, Pope Francis wrote that “everyone should feel challenged by Chapter Eight,” which is titled “Accompanying, Discerning and Integrating Weakness.” That chapter, which describes the Church as “a field hospital,” discusses the pastoral care of the divorced-and-civilly-remarried, as well as those who cohabit and face other irregularities. Pope Francis wrote that “it is a matter of reaching out to everyone, of needing to help each person find his or her proper way of participating in the ecclesial community.” He emphasized that the divorced-and-remarried “can find themselves in a variety of situations” and that this variety requires discernment and accompaniment on the part of pastors. The Pope voiced agreement with the Synod Fathers’ observations that divorced-and-remarried Catholics need to be “more fully integrated into Christian communities…while avoiding any occasion of scandal.” He restated that the divorced-and-remarried are not excommunicated, and quoted the Synod Fathers, who had said that “language or conduct that might lead them to feel discriminated against should be avoided.” Care for these persons is not a weakening of Christian faith and belief in the indissolubility of marriage, but is rather “a particular expression of its charity,” he said, again quoting the Synod Fathers. While he affirmed the ideal of sacramental marriage in ministering to those in broken situations, the Pope also rejected a one-size-fits-all approach to individual cases. Considering the “immense variety of concrete situations” that the divorced-and-remarried have put themselves in, he said, “it is understandable that neither the Synod nor this Exhortation could be expected to provide a new set of general rules … applicable to all cases.” Instead, he said, what is possible is “a responsible personal and pastoral discernment of particular cases” which would recognize varying degrees of responsibility and therefore varying consequences or effects.    This is also the case with admission to the sacraments of Confession and Communion, he said, due to mitigating factors that might reduce a person’s culpability. “Hence it can no longer simply be said that all those in any ‘irregular’ situation are living in a state of mortal sin and are deprived of sanctifying grace,” Pope Francis said. “More is involved here than mere ignorance of the rule. A subject may … be in a concrete situation which does not allow him or her to act differently and decide otherwise without further sin.” Someone in such a situation of objective sin but without full culpability can grow in charity with the help of the Church, and “in certain cases, this can include the help of the sacraments,” he noted. “I would also point out that the Eucharist 'is not a prize for the perfect, but a powerful medicine and nourishment for the weak',” he added, quoting from his 2013 apostolic exhortation Evangelii gaudium. The Pope acknowledged the importance of fidelity to the Gospel, saying that “To show understanding in the face of exceptional situations never implies dimming the light of the fuller ideal, or proposing less than what Jesus offers to the human being.” He called it “reductive” in discernment merely “to consider whether or not an individual's actions correspond to a general law or rule.” “A pastor cannot feel that it is enough simply to apply moral laws to those living in ‘irregular’ situations, as if they were stones to throw at people’s lives. This would bespeak the closed heart of one used to hiding behind the Church’s teachings.” Pope Francis professed understanding for those who prefer “a more rigorous pastoral care which leaves no room for confusion.” “But I sincerely believe that Jesus wants a Church attentive to the goodness which the Holy Spirit sows in the midst of human weakness, a Mother who, while clearly expressing her objective teaching, 'always does what good she can, even if in the process, her shoes get soiled by the mud of the street'.”   Read more

Vatican City, Apr 7, 2016 / 01:37 pm (CNA/EWTN News).- Pope Francis on Thursday praised the consistency and courage of the modern day martyrs who continue to “carry the Church forward” even as they face death for their witness to the Risen ... Read more

Vatican City, Apr 7, 2016 / 06:04 am (CNA/EWTN News).- Pope Francis will travel to the Greek island of Lesbos next Saturday, April 16, where he will meet with ecumenical leaders and refugees, the Vatican announced Thursday. Director of the Holy See Pr... Read more

Vatican City, Apr 6, 2016 / 11:51 am (CNA/EWTN News).- When Lizzy Myers was diagnosed with a condition that could result in complete blindness, her parents, Steve and Christine, went to work on a “visual bucket list” for their daughter. Today, Lizzy got to check something off: meeting Pope Francis. The five-year-old, along with her parents and three-year-old sister Michaela, had special seats for the general audience with the Pope on Wednesday, where she was able to meet him in person. She gave him a gift – a piece of meteorite from an observatory she had recently visited – and he gave her a hug and blessed her eyes. “I felt an overwhelming sense of peace” when they met, Christine Myers said at a press conference following the meeting. “Since the beginning of all of this, this is the first time I have felt peace.” As for Lizzy, “She was awestruck. She just stared at him, she had totally big eyes,” Christine said. Lizzy attends a Catholic Montessori school back home in Ohio, and was excited to meet Pope, whom she refers to as the “big guy in the white hat.” When she first heard the family was going to Rome, where the Pope lived, she asked if she could knock on his door. The family is in Rome courtesy of Turkish Airlines, whose general manager heard her story and offered the family free plane tickets to anywhere in the world. They chose Rome because of their Catholic faith, and because of all the beautiful art and sights Lizzy could see there. Steve told reporters that he was very grateful for the meeting with the Pope, which he didn’t realize would be an option when they first decided to visit Rome. He said the encounter with his daughter and the Holy Father gave him an inexplicable sense of calm. “I was very nervous coming up to that point, I started having stomach pains,” he said. “But as soon as Pope Francis came up to where Lizzy was, a calm came over me, I don’t even know how to explain it.” “I believe and I think that what Pope Francis has done for her – if there’s any chance for a miracle, it would be there.” After several recent tests, Lizzy was diagnosed with Usher Syndrome Type II, a rare genetic condition that causes hearing and progressive vision loss, and can result in blindness. Steve and Christine created a “visual bucket list” for their daughter, which included a trip to a local observatory near their home town. The story made the front pages of a local paper, and caught the attention of the Associated Press, which eventually led to their Rome excursion. There are also many ordinary things on the list, Christine said – catching fireflies, roasting s'mores over a bonfire, kite-flying. The couple said they hope that Lizzy’s story will encourage other parents of children with bi-lateral hearing loss to genetically test their children for Usher II Syndrome, so they might be able to give their children as many visual experiences as possible before it’s too late. VIDEO: 5-year old Lizzy Myers, sees #PopeFrancis this morning - her wish before she goes blind. He blesses her eyes. pic.twitter.com/Z8AxRtKxMP — Catholic News Agency (@cnalive) April 6, 2016 Read more