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BENEDICT XVI: NEWS, PAPAL TEXTS, PHOTOS AND COMMENTARY

Ultimo Aggiornamento: 23/08/2021 11:16
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See preceding page for earlier entries on 1/23/13.



Article Bragues

Dear Teresa,
The text is here: http://benoit-et-moi.fr/2013-I/articles/mariage-pour-tous-ou-est-le-debat.php
[SM=j7798]



Many thanks, Beatrice... I hope I can get around to translating it later today, after the priority and duty posts...

TERESA


NB to the casual 'follower': The link is to an article by philosopher and Ratzinger Prize winner Remi Bragues cited in a 1/30/13 OR article presenting views opposing the proposed law that would recognize homosexual 'marriage' and approve adoption of children by same-sex couples. Beatrice suggests on her site, benolit-et-moi.fr, that theso-called 'debate' about the proposal in the National Assembly is a charade, intended to give a democratic semblance to the parliamentary passage of a pet proposal that the government of Socialist President Francois Hollande is sure to pass...

It's appalling but we see now that one of the frightening and unwanted consequences of the democratic system is that a parliamentary majority, which is not always truly representative and may be transient [as was the sliver=thin majority that passed Obamacare by the skin of its teeth in 2008], or a determined executive like Obama, can and does impose legislation capable of 'fundamentally transforming' society, as Obama vowed to do... I am starting to be terrified more and more of the anti-Christs in our midst.


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GENERAL AUDIENCE TODAY
Articles of the Creed (2)
'I believe in God the Father Almighty'

January 30, 2013



At the Geneeral Audience today, audience Pope Benedict XVI continued his catechesis on the Creed, reflecting on what it means when we call God 'the Father Almighty'. In English, he said:

In our continuing catechesis during this Year of Faith, we now reflect on the Creed’s description of God as "the Father Almighty".

Despite the crisis of fatherhood in many societies, the Scriptures show us clearly what it means to call God "Father". God is infinitely generous, faithful, and forgiving; he so loves the world that he has given us his only Son for our salvation.

As "the image of the invisible God" (Col 1:15), Jesus reveals God as a merciful Father who never abandons his children and whose loving concern for us embraces even the Cross. In Christ, God has made us his adopted sons and daughters.

The Cross shows also us how God our Father is "almighty". His omnipotence transcends our limited human concepts of power; his might is that of a patient love expressed in the ultimate victory of goodness over evil, life over death, and freedom over the bondage of sin.

As we contemplate the Cross of Christ, let us turn to God the almighty Father and implore the grace to abandon ourselves with confidence and trust to his merciful love and his saving power.

The Pope said fatherhood is a topic that is not always easy to talk about in contemporary society where, in many cases,there are no reference points for a recognizable father figure. "Without adequate models of reference even imagining God as a father becomes problematic.”

He concluded: “Saying 'I believe in God the Father Almighty', in His power, in His way of being a father, is always an act of faith, conversion, transformation of our thoughts, our love, our whole way of life".



The following is a translation of the Holy Father's catechesis:

Dear brothers and sisters,

In the catechesis last Wednesday, we dwelt on the first words of the Credo: "I believe in God". But our profession of faith then specifies that God is the almighty Father, Creator of heaven and earth. Thus I wish to reflect with you today on the first fundamental definition of God that the Credo gives us: He is a Father.

It's not always easy these days to speak of fatherhood. Especially in the Western world, broken families, increasingly demanding work commitments, the concerns and often, difficulties, of balancing he family budget, the distracting invasion of the mass media into our daily life, are just some of the many factors that can prevent a serene and constructive relationship between fathers and their children.

Communications sometimes become difficult, there is less trust, and a relationship with the father figure can well become problematic. Thus it also becomes a problem to imagine God as a father, without having adequate models of reference.

Whoever has experienced having a father who is too authoritarian and inflexible, or indifferent and not affectionate, it is not easy to think of God as a father to whom one can trustingly abandon himself.

But Biblical revelation helps overcome this difficulty by speaking to us of a God who shows what it really means to be a 'father'. It is the Gospel, above all, that reveals the face of God as Father who loves to the point of giving his own Son in order to save mankind.

The reference to a father figure therefore helps to understand something of God's love which is infinitely greater, more faithful and more total than that of any man.

"Which one of you," Jesus asked. to show his disciples the face of the Father, "would hand his son a stone when he asks for a loaf of bread, or a snake when he asks for fish? If you then, who are wicked, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your heavenly Father give good things to those who ask him"
(Mt 7,9-11; cfr Lk 11,11-13).

God is our Father because he blessed and chose us before the creation of the world (cfr Eph 1,3-6), he made us truly his children in Jesus (cfr 1Jn 3,1). And as a Father, he accompanies our existence with his love, giving us his Word, his teaching, his grace, his Spirit.

He, as Jesus reveals, is the Father who feeds the birds in the skies though they do not have to sow and reap, and adorns dresses even wild flowers in wonderful colors more beautiful than the robes of King Solomon
(cfr Mt 6,26-32; Lk 12,24-28).

Yet we, Jesus points out, are worth much more than flowers and the birds in the sky. And if God is so good that "he makes his sun rise on the bad and the good, and causes rain to fall on the just and the unjust" (Mt 5,45), then we can always, without fear and with total confidence, entrust ourselves to the Father's forgiveness when we lose our way.

God is a good Father who welcomes and embraces the son who was lost and who has repented
(cfr Lc 15,11ff), gives freely to those who ask (cfr Mt 18,19; Mk 11,24; Jn 16,23) and offers the bread of heaven and living water which grant eternal life (cfr Jn 6,32.51-58).

That is why the man who prays in Psalm 27, as he is surrounded by enemies, besieged by malevolents and calumniators, seeks the Lord's help and in invoking him, he is able to affirm with a testimony full of faith: "Even if my father and mother forsake me, the LORD will take me in" (v 10).
`
God is a Father who never abandons his children, a loving Father who supports, helps, welcomes, forgives, and saves - with a faithfulness that immensely surpasses that of humans, in order to open the dimensions of eternity to us.

"Because his mercy (love) endures forever", as Psalm 136, in recalling the history of salvation, repeats litany-like at every verse.

The love of God the Father will never diminish. He will never tire of us. It is a love that gives to the extreme, up to the sacrifice of his Son. Faith gives us this certainty, which becomes the secure rock on which to build our life. We can face all time times of difficulty and danger, the experience of darkness during a crisis or in times of sorrow, sustained by the confidence that God will not leave us alone and is always near to rescue us and to bring us to eternal life.

The benevolent face of our Father who is in heaven shows itself in its fullness in Jesus. It is by knowing him that we also know the Father
(cfr Jn 8,19; 14,7), and by seeing him that we can see the Father, because he is in the Father and the Father is in him (cfr Jn 14,9.11).

He is the 'image of the invisible God' as he is described in the Hymn that starts the Letter to the Colossians, "the firstborn of all creation...the firstborn from the dead" through whom we obtained redemption, the forgiveness of sins, "through him to reconcile all things for him, making peace by the blood of his cross, whether those on earth or those in heaven" (cfr Col 1,13-20).

Faith in God the Father demands believing in his Son, under the action of the Spirit, recognizing the definitive revelation of divine love in the Cross that saves. God is Father to us by giving us his Son. God is our Father by forgiving our sins and bringing us to the joy of resurrected life. God is our Father by giving us the Spirit that makes us his children and allows us to call him "Abba, Father" (cfr Rm 8,15). That is why Jesus, teaching us to pray, asks us to say "Our Father" (Mt 6,9-13; cfr Lk 11,2-4).

Thus, God's fatherhood is infinite love, a tenderness that bends down to us weak children who need everything. Psalm 103, that great hymn of divine mercy, proclaims: "As a father has compassion on his children, so the LORD has compassion on those who fear him. For he knows how we are formed, remembers that we are dust" (vv 13-14).

It is our very smallness, our weak human nature, our frailty, that becomes an appeal to the Lord's mercy so that he may manifest his grandeur and paternal tenderness by helping us, forgiving us and saving us.

God answers our appeal, sending his Son who died and resurrected for us. He enters our human frailty and achieves that which man by himself could never do" to take upon himself, an innocent Lamb, the sins of the world, reopening the way to communion with God, making us true children of God.

It is there, in the Paschal mystery, that the definitive face of God is revealed in all its luminousness. It is there on the glorious Cross that the full manifestation takes place of God's grandeur as the 'almighty Father'.

We can well ask: How is it possible to think of an almighty God when looking at the Cross of Christ? At the power of evil to the point of killing the Son of God? We would want a divine omnipotence according to our own ideas and desires: an 'almighty' God who solves problems, who intervenes so that we may not have problems, who conquers all adverse forces, changes the course of events and cancels out all pain.

Thus, today, various theologians say that God cannot be almighty, otherwise there would not be so much suffering, so much evil in the world. Indeed, in the face of evil and suffering, for many, for us, it becomes problematic and difficult to believe in God the Father and that he is almighty. Some take refuge in idols, yielding to the temptation of finding a response in some presumed 'magic' omnipotence and its illusory promises.

But faith in almighty God urges us to follow very different paths: to learn to recognize that God's thinking is different from ours, that God's ways are different from ours
, (cfr Is 55,8) and even his omnipotence is different: It is not expressed as an automatic or arbitrary power, but it is characterized by giving us freedom lovingly and paternally.

God, in creating free human beings, in giving them freedom, has renounced part of his own power by allowing us the power of our freedom. Therefore he respects the free response of love to his call. As a Father, God wants us to be his children and to live as his children in his Son, in communion, in full intimacy with him.

His omnipotence is not expressed in violence, nor in the destruction of every adverse force as we would wish, but it is expressed in love, in mercy, in forgiveness, in accepting our freedom and in his tireless call for our change of heart, our conversion - an attitude that seems weak because it requires patience, meekness and love, but which shows that this is the true way of being powerful. This is the power of God. And this is a winning power.

The sage of the Book of Wisdom addresses God this way: "You have mercy on all, because you can do all things; and you overlook sins for the sake of repentance. For you love all things that are... because they are yours, O Ruler and Lover of souls"
(11,23-24a.26). [The Italian translation of the verse used by the Holy Father translates to 'Lover of life'. ]

Only he who is truly powerful can bear evil and show compassion. Only he who is truly powerful can fully exercise the power of love. God, to whom all things belong because he made all things, shows his power by loving everything and everyone, patiently awaiting our conversion, whom he wants to be his children. God awaits our conversion. His omnipotent love knows no limits, such that He "did not spare his own Son but handed him over for us all". (Rm 8,32)

The omnipotence of love is not that of worldly power, but of total giving, and Jesus, Son of God, reveals to the world the true omnipotence of the Father by giving his life for us sinners. Here is the true, authentic and perfect divine power: To respond to evil not with evil but with goodness, to insults with forgiveness, to homicidal hatred with love that gives life.

Then evil is truly defeated, because it is washed clean by the love of God. Then death is definitively defeated because it is transformed into the gift of life. God the Father resurrected his Son: death, the great enemy
(cfr 1 Cor 15,26), is engulfed and deprived of its poison (cfr 1 Cor 15,54-55), and we, freed from our sins, can realize our destiny as children of God.

So, when we say "I believe in almighty God", we express our faith in the power of the love of God, who in his Son's death and resurrection, defeated hatred, evil, and sin, and opened us to eternal life as his children, children who only want to be in the 'Father's house' for always.

To say "I believe in God the Father almighty", in his power, in the way that he is our Father, is always an act of faith, of conversion, of transforming our thinking, all our affections and our whole way of life.

Dear brothers and sisters, let us ask the Lord to sustain our faith, to help us truly find the faith, and to give us the strength to announce the crucified and risen Christ, and to bear witness to him in love of God and our neighbor.

God grant that we accept the gift of our filiation with him, in order to fully live the reality of the Credo, in trusting abandon to the love of the Father and his almighty mercy which is the true omnipotence and salvation.


In his Italian-language greeting at the end of the audience, the Pope had a few special messages:
I extend a heartfelt greeting to all Italian-speaking pilgrims. I especially greet the bishops who are friends of the Focolari movement. Dear brothers, together with you. I greet all those who are taking part in meetings of the Focolari in various parts of the world. Assuring you of my prayers, I hope that the charism of unity which is particularly dear to you will sustain and inspire you in your apostolic ministry.

I greet the faithful from the Archdiocese of Potenza-Muro Lucano-Marsiconuovo, accompanied by their bishop, Mons. Agostino Superbo. Dear friends, continue to dedicate every effort so that solid religious instruction may be assured, in the cities as in smaller centers, in order that everyone may be prepared to fruitfully receive the Sacraments, which are indispensable nourishment for the growth of the faith.

The presence of civilian authorities from the Basilicata region, whom I respectfully greet, gives me the opportunity to express my sincere appreciation of those who did all they could to put up the evocative Nativity scene in this Piazza last Christmas, which was admired by numerous pilgrims, and by me, with great joy, as an expression of Lucanian art.

Finally, I address the young people, the sick and the newlyweds. Tomorrow is the liturgical commemoration of St. John Bosco, priest and educator. Look to him, dear young people, as an authentic teacher of life.

You, dear patients, must learn from your experience to trust in every circumstance in the crucified Christ.

Dear newlyweds, have recourse to him in order to live your mission as spouses with generous commitment. Thank you.





The Holy Father received a football jersey from an official of the Lazio region, within which Rome is located.


I do not understand why the news agency took a photo like this out of the only five newsphotos of the GA that has been released so far.

Today's Twee, supposedly occasioned by the catechesis, seems more than a bit off compared to what the Pope actually said today about the meaning of 'God the Father almighty', although he has said what's contained in the Tweet on other occasions:

@Pontifex 1/30/13


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Benedict XVI receives book
summarizing 2012 symposium on child abuse
held for bishops and religious

Translated from the Italian service of

January 30, 2013

At the end of Wednesday's General Audience, Benedict XVI greeted Jesuit Fr. Hans Zollner, director of the Center for the Protection of Minors and dean of the Institute of Psychology at the Pontifical Gregorian University.

Zollner presented the Pope with the German edition of the acts (papers and discussions) of the International Symposium on Child Abuse held at the Gregorian this time last year. The volume takes its title from the symposium itself, Towards healing and renewal". It is also published in English, Spanish and Italian.

A meeting to mark the first anniversary of the symposium will be held at the Gregorian on Monday, February 5, to present the book to the public, and to review the activities carried out since the Symposium of the Rome-based Center for Protection of Minors and the Munich-based E-learning program.

The latter assists diocesan, parish and congregation personnel around the world who work with children and young people to increase their awareness about the issue of child abuse and to provide them with the tools they need to fight the problem and to protect the children and young people in their care. This includes educating the workers on the canonical measures they can avail of and how to create a climate of listening and sensitivity in dealing with young people.


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Philosopher Remy Bragues's recent article in Le Figaro was not about the merits and demerits of the soon-to-be French law but about whether it represents an 'advance' in any way, and in general, what its proponents mean by 'advance'. Mr. Bragues's language - and logic - is refreshingly simple and clear...

Homosexual 'marriage':
Is this an advance?

by Remy Bragues
Translated from

January 25, 2013

One hears from the most authoritative voices, i.e., presidential, that the proposed law authorizing homosexual 'marriage', with its consequences such as allowing adoption by same-sex couples, will be an 'advance'. I don't intend to comment here on the value of this statement.

I would simply like to use the opportunity to question the recurrent use of this formula, or similar formulas of this kind, in various contexts.

First, the use of the word 'advance' is interesting in itself. It replaces a more classic word, 'progress', which itself has become too common. To the point that one loses sight of the prefix 'pro-' in the word, which means, rightly, that one goes forward.

So to use the word 'advance' instead of 'progress' is meant to refresh the idea of progress by evoking the image that it contains. It has another advantage. (It overcomes) the fact not just that the word 'progress' is passe, but that the very idea of Progress itself, with a capital P, has been dealt a blow. Especially with respect to all the crimes committed in its name in the 20th century, which could appear to future generations, if there will be any, as the nadir of history.

Now, to speak of 'an advance' allows the isolation of a positive novelty, without having to convoke a greater view of the human adventure. One thus appears to be modest and sober, someone who chooses not to judge the totality but merely wants to add a drop of oil to the gears of society.

But if I may say so, that's not the same as taking a step forward. Two questions must be asked, both of which require a larger perspective.

On the one hand, and to start with the more obvious, one can only isolate an advance, or a presumed advance, in an abstract and artificial way, in any context. Economic, social, moral, and juridical systems make up organic totalities in which all the parties involved act and react on each other, producing effects that are not always predictable.

A seemingly slight modification, discreetly introduced, could lead to immense upheavals. Switch two medical tubings, and the patient will never revive. A bad calculation, and the economy can collapse.

On the other hand, and more important, it is impossible to speak of an advance, if one does not deceive oneself about the meaning of words, without presuming that the step is in the right direction. But are we sure this particular step is?

One remembers the old joke in which an orator declares with emotion: "We are on the brink of an abyss. We must take a big step forward."

Society has evolved, we hear them argue. But are we sure it has evolved for the better? That society changes, that it does not cease to change, or that it has never ceased to change - one understands what they mean. But how do we know it has changed for the better?

Because there are also diseases that evolve towards a fatal end. Or one can reach an impasse and simply 'hit the wall'. And all of us each day take one more step towards death. Nor should we forget that 'advanced' also describes cheese which is no longer fit for consumption.

As it happens, it is very possible that our society too is advancing towards its own destruction and is doing so methodically, in its deployment of suicidal logic.

Our civilization has believed in progress since roughly the second half of the 18th century, and by the 19th century, this dogma had become unassailable.

But this is just one of the ways of representing how history evolves. One can imagine a primitive Golden Age, a Paradise lost, followed by a long decadence, stepwise or along a gentle slope (Hesiod). Or cycles within which mankind is oscillating indefinitely. According to an earlier model, between exponential ascents and hard landings provoked by sone natural catastrophe (Plato). According to a second mode, by slow ascents, followed by a more or less stable plateau, which is then followed by slow decline (Spengler).

Finally, history could simply be a kaleidoscope in which the basic elements are always the same but present themselves in constantly new configurations. none of which are better than the other (Schopenhauer).

And so I ask: What is our guarantee that every innovation necessarily is for the better? And I answer: Nothing, other than a naive relic of faith in Providence. But, look, we who are modern, we who are enlightened, we who are not dupes, it's been a long time since we believed in such things...

So, does the statement really hold up? Let us make a distinction: There are things we believe we don't believe, but on the other hand, there is what we really do in practice, the things we do every day, which are assumed to represent our implicit though unavowed beliefs.

This is demonstrated by the fact that we speak of 'advances' without asking in what direction. It is as if we think that whatever we do, everything will turn up well.

I don't know if "it will all work out" or if "everything will go to the dogs". I tend to think, with Bernanos, that a pessimist is a sad imbecile and an optimist is a happy imbecile. My faith in Providence is not that of someone in a parachute.

But I must ask, does one go bungee jumping without verifying who set up the cord?


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US bishops intervene in Supreme Court hearings
with formal briefs in defense of traditional marriage



January 30, 2013

As the Supreme Court considers the constitutionality of the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) and California's Proposition 8, the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) has filed briefs in their defense.

Arguing in defense of the federal Defense of Marriage Act, the USCCB brief notes:

There is no fundamental right to marry a person of the same sex. Such a claim must be rejected because it does not satisfy the test to which this Court adheres in determining whether an asserted right is fundamental.

Specifically, civil recognition of same-sex relationships is not deeply rooted in the Nation’s history and tradition — quite the opposite is true. Nor can the treatment of such relationships as marriages be said to be implicit in the concept of ordered liberty, such that neither liberty nor justice would exist if they were sacrificed … This Court’s decisions describing marriage as a fundamental right plainly contemplate the union of one man and one woman.

The USCCB brief also argued that “‘sexual orientation’ is not a classification that should trigger heightened scrutiny,” as discrimination on the basis of sex or race would. Homosexual behavior “is not a trait attributable from conception or birth,” the brief states, adding:

Elevation of sexual orientation to a quasi-suspect class would immerse federal courts into a quagmire of family law issues reserved to the states, issues for which the Judicial Branch is not institutionally suited … Application of heightened scrutiny would hinder the ability of legislatures to create accommodations for those with religious or moral objections to homosexual conduct.

“The claim that homosexual persons today have ‘no ability to attract the attention of the lawmakers’ is frivolous,” the brief added. It concludes:

If this Court were to conclude that the Constitution requires a redefinition of marriage to include persons in same-sex relationships — a requirement that we believe cannot reasonably be inferred from the Constitution — it is unclear where the logical stopping point would be.

This Court will ultimately be asked why other interpersonal relationships are not entitled to similar inclusion, and why other “barriers” to marriage (such as those posed by youth, kinship, or multiplicity of parties) should not also have to be struck down as inconsistent with this redefinition.

In its defense of Proposition 8 – the 2008 California ballot initiative defining marriage as the union of a man and a woman – the USCCB argued that

First, as a matter of simple biology, the union of one man and one woman is the only union capable of creating new life.

Second, the People of California could reasonably conclude that a home with a mother and a father is the optimal environment for raising children, an ideal that Proposition 8 encourages and promotes.

Given both the unique capacity for reproduction and unique value of homes with a mother and father, it is reasonable for a State to treat the union of one man and one woman as having a public value that is absent from other intimate interpersonal relationships.


“Proposition 8 is not rendered invalid because some of its supporters were informed by religious or moral considerations,” the brief continued. “Many, if not most, of the significant social and political movements in our Nation’s history were based on precisely such considerations.”

“The current debate specifically concerns the meaning of marriage and the proposal to redefine marriage, not the phenomenon of same-sex attraction and the persons who experience such attraction,” the brief added. “For this reason, the suggestion that opposition to the redefinition of marriage is equivalent to an animus against people who experience same-sex attraction is particularly offensive and plainly wrong … The further suggestion that opposition to homosexual conduct is simply animus against persons who engage in such conduct is also erroneous and offensive.”

Apropos, here is an excellent profile of Mons. Salvatore Cordileone, one of the most prominent 'conservative' bishops in the US Church. It is the article from which the only 'soundbite' that resonated in MSM was his remark that legislating 'marriage' between two persons of the same sex would be like legislating male breastfeeding....

The archbishop of San Francisco
on standing up against any travesty of marriage:
'All our detractors can do is call us names’

By Mary O'Regan

28 January 2013

If you had no idea that Archbishop Salvatore Cordileone is an Italian-American who had four Sicilian grandparents, his hands would give the game away. From the minute we start talking in the parlour of the London Oratory, he gestures with his fingers and swirls his hands for emphasis. I even wonder whether, if his hands were tied, he would be able to speak.

But speak up he must. Now, as Archbishop of San Francisco, he is one of the most vocal members of the US bishops’ conference in objecting to the re-definition of marriage.

Promoting marriage is not a new mission for the shepherd. As a newly ordained diocesan priest in California, he confronted the situation of preparing young couples for marriage who were not always fully practising their Catholic faith.

Then, as a veteran canon lawyer of the Apostolic Signatura, his speciality was the legal points of marriage. This month he was invited to London in his capacity as a member of the working group on the liturgy for the Anglican ordinariates.

Archbishop Cordileone’s contribution is to bring the perspective of a canon lawyer and a pastor. This was especially helpful in preparing the rite for marriage that will be used by former Anglicans who are coming into the Catholic Church, so that their traditions are incorporated into the marriage ceremony, while it remains an entirely Catholic and canonically correct rite.

The 56-year-old is a native of San Diego and grew up in a strong, inter-dependent Italian-American family, with his paternal grandparents living next door and his maternal grandparents a few miles away. During his childhood he was in constant contact with his grandparents, who spoke the old Sicilian dialect with his parents, as well as with his entire extended family on both sides.

They didn’t keep every feature of life from the old country; as he says, “our generation lost the old Sicilian language”. But the family remained loyal to the traditional pieties of Sicilian Catholicism. St Joseph was the focal point of their devotions.

On the feast day of Jesus’s foster father they set up an altar in their home with his statue and three loaves of bread to represent the Holy Family, which included a braided loaf of bread for Our Lady. They would stage a drama of the Holy Family coming into the home, with a young girl as Mary, an older man as Joseph and, on several occasions, the young Salvatore was in role as Jesus.

The archbishop says there was never a time when he struggled with his faith or did not believe in God. He did, however, feel the stirrings of a vocation, while also feeling drawn to being a husband and father.

“My main challenge in seminary was interior, in discerning if this was really my call,” he explains. “When I entered the seminary at the age of 19, in 1975, I felt strongly inclined in that direction but was not yet absolutely convinced that God was calling me to be a priest. It was when I gave my life totally to God, I felt a burden was lifted from my shoulders, and had the confirmation of my vocation to the priesthood.”

At seminary he developed a keen attachment to St Peter Claver, a favourite saint whose courageous ministry to African-Americans and radical holiness has inspired him throughout his 30 years of priesthood. Now, as a member of the Church hierarchy, he continues to pray to the patron saint of slaves, for “commitment to the Church’s mission and for graces to help the poor and marginalised”.

As Archbishop Cordileone was a seminarian in the 1970s, the obvious question is whether he inclined more to the spirit of rebellion of that time or if he held true to the Church’s time-honoured teachings.

“I’m quite a law-abiding type who doesn’t have a problem with authority,” he says, “but more than that, the Church’s teachings are completely rational and made sense to me.”

It was the time of the Humanae Vitae wars: did he have any problems with any of the details in the most resisted encyclical of the age? No, in fact, in 1978 he and some fellow seminarians travelled from San Diego to San Francisco so that they could attend a symposium held by the archdiocese in honour of the 10th anniversary of Humanae Vitae.

After he was ordained in 1982, he was assigned to St Martin de Tours church, near where he had grown up, which was a very friendly parish. This was, however, the era immediately after the sexual revolution, and as a young priest starting out he found it difficult to know what to do when couples who were living together wanted to be married in the Church.

“To begin with, I was naïve enough to think that people would follow reason, and I would say to couples that, if they wanted a Catholic wedding, were they not aware that they were violating Catholic teaching by cohabiting? They would respond that it was ‘special’ to get married in the Church. But I learned that you can’t make a blanket policy; you have to look at each case separately. You have to know the couple well first, and pick your moment for asking that they live separately before the wedding. One couple had coped with a lot of addiction problems and had come very far in their journey of faith very quickly, and they didn’t have family close by. So I was concerned that asking them to live apart would jeopardise the progress they had made so far. But instead I asked them to sleep apart before their wedding, and I believe them when they told me they did.”

After he finished his stint at St Martin of Tours, he was sent to Rome in 1985 to study canon law. The 1983 code had been promulgated, and he was one of the priests selected to go to Rome. It was while studying at the Gregorian University that he got to know the future cardinal Raymond Burke, when the Wisconsin-born prelate taught a course on jurisprudence. Archbishop Cordileone says that Cardinal Burke was the same then as now, “very gentle and gracious, wise and holy”.

It is often said that Cardinal Burke and Archbishop Cordileone were colleagues, collaborating on projects together for years at the Apostolic Signatura, but in reality this was not the case.

Fr Cordileone started at the Vatican’s canonical court in early 1995, just as Mgr Burke was leaving to return to America. At the Apostolic Signatura, Fr Cordileone’s main duty was to advise bishops on their tribunals, especially regarding annulments of marriage on grounds such as “psychic incapacity”, which refers to an instance where a person may not be capable of understanding what they are committing themselves to in marriage.

It was no mean feat that he had responsibility for all the English-speaking countries and select Spanish-speaking countries.

Having earned his stripes at the Apostolic Signatura, he returned to California and became an Auxiliary Bishop of San Diego in 2002. A new chapter in his priestly ministry began when he was asked by a group of lay people to offer Mass in the Extraordinary Form. An elderly Augustinian priest, Fr Neely, taught him how to offer it.

Archbishop Cordileone is quick to add that the task was made easier because “I only had to learn the rubrics. When I worked at the Apostolic Signatura, I would go to a Benedictine convent to celebrate the Triduum. There I learned to sing the Mass in Latin and the chants are the same in both forms of the Mass.”

For nearly 10 years Archbishop Cordileone has accepted invitations to celebrate the Tridentine Mass. In the middle of our interview, the Oratorian priest Fr Rupert pops in and asks the archbishop if he will offer the 8am Tridentine Mass the next day, and he enthusiastically agrees to do so.

Commenting on what he feels distinguishes the Extraordinary Form, Archbishop Cordileone says: “With that form of Mass you can feel the Church breathing through the centuries.”

He has strong opinions about Latin. “It is the common language of the Catholic world and it’s especially advantageous when people of different language backgrounds come together,” he says. “The irony is that the Church made the move to the vernacular just at the point in history when, because of migration and tourism, people began travelling all over the world. Thus, it would be convenient to have a shared language that we can all worship in. But it does make sense to have parts in the vernacular, such as the Propers, and especially the readings.”

We get on to discussing why there is a relatively high number of young men pursuing vocations in seminaries dedicated to the Extraordinary Form. “The Old Rite corresponds more to a masculine spirituality in that the masculine psyche is one that protects, defends and provides, and during the Mass the priest is the one who dares to approach God to reconcile His people to him. In the Old Rite there is a greater sense of the priest as intercessor, offering a sacrifice for the people and bringing God’s gift to the people.”

While women may not become priests, Archbishop Cordileone clarifies that women do not in any way occupy second place. Instead, he pinpoints why women should be shown the highest respect and says that chivalrous practices such as holding a door open for a woman ought to be the norm.

“A woman should walk out, ahead of the man, because she is the life-giver and, in holding a door for a woman, the man is recognising her special place as the one who gives life.” He says that mantillas, or chapel veils, are a way for a woman to veil their sacredness: “In Christian worship what is sacred is veiled, women are sacred because they are the life-givers.”

Why are the youth associated more and more with the Old Rite? “It follows the phenomenon of young people being more traditional in their religion,” he says. “In the years after the Council there were social revolutions in religious groups and the thinking was that the Church should be more like modern culture. Prayerfully minded young people of this generation want something different or opposed to secular culture. But they perceive the failures of western civilisation. They want something seriously Catholic and meaty.”

He does say, however, that being drawn to the external beautiful trappings of Catholicism is not enough. “We won’t deepen their faith by window dressing. They might be attracted to externals and there’s nothing wrong there, but we also have to bring them to a deeper faith.”

People are quick to say there is something staunchly “traditional” about Archbishop Cordileone. He says the rosary every morning. He traces many modern-day problems back to the secular doctrine that discounts the differences between men and women (the specific confusion, he explains, is that men and women are conditioned to think of themselves as the same and not complementary).

And he loves the Tridentine Mass. But he sees a potentially dangerous trend in the traditionalist movement, if it simply wants to revert to a distant time in the past and stay there. Here, Archbishop Cordileone refers to Ronald Knox, who called this blinkered outlook “an impoverishment of our heritage”.

But where does one find a happy medium between the old and the new? He hails the London Oratory, with its Ordinary Form in Latin and frequent Benediction, as “the ideal model of the hermeneutic of continuity, which has been so consistently promoted by Pope Benedict”.

Other than being a leader in liturgical renewal, Archbishop Cordileone is best known as the chairman of the US bishops’ subcommittee for the promotion and defence of marriage. He was appointed to this position in 2011. Since then, he has earned the ire of many gay marriage campaigners and his appointment to San Francisco was met with sharp words from some outspoken progressive locals.

From our point of view in Britain, we may think the gay marriage lobby is surrounding Archbishop Cordileone on all sides, but support for him often outnumbers the opposition. On his installation day, October 4 2012, there were reportedly a maximum number of three dozen protesters outside. But many more people came to show support, chief among them being members of the Neocatechumenal Way, who held banners proclaiming: “Teaching the Truth about the Family.”

If people of Italian blood sometimes have a reputation for being hot-tempered, Archbishop Cordileone defies this image by being unflappable. He consistently uses level-headed logic in arguing against same-sex marriage.

He says: “Truth is clear. Wanting children to be connected to a mother and father discriminates against no one. Every child has a father and a mother, and either you support the only institution that connects a child with their father and mother or you don’t. Adoption, by a mother and father, mirrors the natural union of a mother and father and provides a balanced, happy alternative for when a child may not be reared by their biological parents.”

I tell him that I’m searching for good theological answers against gay marriage, but he corrects this notion by saying: “If you use theology, you will play into their hands and they will say you use religion to control people. Marriage isn’t primarily in theology; marriage is in nature. Theology builds on the natural institution, giving us a deeper mystical and supernatural sense of its meaning.” [That is why the Church, most notably Benedict XVI, has used natural law, not confessional faith, as the basic justification for Church teaching on marriage.]

I admit that I didn’t step up to the plate when Channel 4 invited me on live television to debate gay marriage, because I didn’t want to become a hate figure. I feared my career would suffer and I wouldn’t be able to pay my rent. The archbishop sighs and responds: “You say that you can’t debate it without suffering for your beliefs, so who is being discriminated against? Who is being intolerant? It is the secular orthodoxy that allows no dissent and will punish those who do.

When I concede that I feel like a coward for passing up the opportunity to argue the case for marriage on television, Archbishop Cordileone says: “It’s a lot easier for us priests to speak out. Fellow clergy are not going to marginalise us. And we’re not going to be passed up for a promotion or lose our jobs!”

While speaking out may be less daunting for priests, he encourages lay people to embrace the challenge, which for us in Britain means actively opposing the forthcoming gay marriage Bill. Archbishop Cordileone urges us to see it as a way of winning grace.

“Fighting for marriage is our way of loving God, and the struggle is the particular gift that God has given our generation. This is our particular trial, and by overcoming it we may achieve spiritual greatness. It will entail suffering if we are to oppose gay marriage, something which poses such destruction to the understanding of natural marriage, which is a child-oriented institution.”

Archbishop Cordileone cautions against over-using the term “gay marriage”, advising that it should be used “only sparingly” because it is a natural impossibility and if we keep talking about gay marriage we might fool ourselves into thinking it is an authentic reality, which only needs government approval to make it legitimate. He compares it with another impossibility: “Legislating for the right for people of the same sex to marry is like legalising male breastfeeding.” [That is why I try to make sure that everytime the term 'marriage' is used with the qualifiers gay, homosexual or same-sex, it is used in quotation marks, because the latter category is not marriage at all but 'so-called marriage', 'wannabe'marriage'.]

One could get the impression that Archbishop Cordileone is an uncompromisingly serious person. It’s true that his face can be set in deep contemplation and his compelling blue eyes can seem still and sombre, but his face lights up when he laughs and his eyes shine with mirth. When I lose my train of thought, mess up a question and excuse myself as not being Mensa but Densa, he curls up in a spontaneous fit of boyish giggles. He finds the idea of going on Twitter hilarious, and says: “I don’t know where I’ll find the time for a Twitter account. But if I can find a way to go on Twitter, then I will!”

Even if opponents do not agree with his stance on same-sex 'marriage', he commands respect for his persistence in arguing for marriage between a man and a woman, in the face of being called homophobic and charged with the erroneous idea that he discriminates against gay people and lesbians.

All the same, it must be unnerving at times to be on the receiving end of such hostility in San Francisco. But he doesn’t let it get to him. “All our detractors can do is call us names,” he says. He throws his hands up in the air, and adds: “Big deal if they shout at us or throw insults!”

When I say that people in Britain who oppose gay 'marriage' have been slammed as “bigots”, by people who won’t allow any opinion but their own, he says: “How ironic!”

It’s not that Archbishop Cordileone is so indifferent and hard that he does not feel the sting of slurs. Rather, he knows that winning the battle is more important, even if it will mean personal suffering. Courage is writ large on his determined face, and he is living up to the demands of his Italian surname, which means “heart of a lion”.
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Tuesday, January 31, Third Week in Ordinary Time
MEMORIAL OF ST. JOHN BOSCO


ST. GIOVANNI (John) BOSCO, (Italy, 1850-1888) - Priest, Founder of the Society of St. Francis de Sales, 'Father and Teacher of Youth'
Familiarly known around the world as Don Bosco, which is how he was best known in life ('Don' is how Italians address a Catholic priest), his first assignment
as a priest was as chaplain of a girls' boarding school in Turin, when he first started tending to poor children on the side through an 'oratory' he named for St.
Francis de Sales and which did not find a fixed home until much later. His first co-worker was his mother, who became known to everyone as Mamma Margherita
[and who was declared Venerable in November 2006], and who spent the last 10 years of her life helping him care for his wards. In 1846, they started taking in orphans.
Don Bosco's philosophy was to educate young boys with 'reason, religion and kindness', not forgetting music and sport, as well as practical vocational training -
all this continue to be the distinguishing marks of Salesian schools all over the world. By 1859, Don Bosco's work had attracted the attention of Pope Pius IX who
supported him when he decided to establish his Salesian order of priests and lay brothers, now better known as the Salesians of Don Bosco (SDB). Eventually,
an order of Salesian sisters was also established. In life, Don Bosco already had a reputation for holiness and working miracles. Shortly after his death, there was
a popular movement to make him a saint. But the hearings for his cause brought out all his adversaries in the Church hierarchy who thought he was a loose cannon
and wheeler-dealer. Pius XI, who had known him personally, pushed his cause in the 1920s, beatifying him in 1929 and canonizing him in 1934 with the title 'Father
and Teacher of Youth'. He is buried at the Basilica of Mary Help of Christians in Turin.
Readings for today's Mass: www.usccb.org/bible/readings/013113.cfm



AT THE VATICAN TODAY

The Holy Father met with

= Cardinal João Braz de Aviz, Prefect of the Congregation for the Institutes of Consecrated Life and
Societies of Apostolic Life

- Ten bishops of the Campania region (Group 2) of Italy led by Cardinal Crescencio Sepe, Archbishop
of Naples, on ad-limina visit.


A joint communique from the Holy See and the Palestine Liberation Organization reports on the last
bilateral meeting held in Ramallah on the West Bank last January 10. Indications are both sides hope
to conclude a bilateral agreement soon to formally define their relations.

A news conference was held by the Pontifical Council for Culture to announce its plenary session from
February 6-9 on the theme of "Emerging youth cultures".

Along with a number of episcopal appointments made by the Pope, the Vatican announced that he has assigned
the new cardinals created in the November 2012 consistory to various dicasteries of the Roman Curia, as follows:

1) to the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith: Cardinal John Olorunfemi Onaiyekan, Archbishop of Abuja, Nigeria;

2) to the Congregation for the Oriental Churches: Cardinal Bechara Boutros Rai, O.M.M., Patriarch of Antioch of the Maronites, Lebanon and Cardinal Baselios Cleemis Thottunkal, major Archbishop of Trivandrum of the Syro-Malankars, India;

3) to the the Pontifical Commission for Latin America: Cardinal Ruben Salazar Gomez, Archbishop of Bogota, Colombia;

4) to the Congregation for the Evangelisation of Peoples and to the Administration of the Patrimony of the Apostolic See (APSA): Cardinal James Michael Harvey, Archpriest of the Basilica of Saint Paul Outside-the-Walls.

5) to the Supreme Tribunal of the Apostolic Signatura: Cardinal Bechara Boutros Rai, O.M.M., Patriarch of Antioch of the Maronites, Lebanon;

6) to the presidential committee of the Pontifical Council for the Family: Cardinal John Olorunfemi Onaiyekan, Archbishop of Abuja, Nigeria and Cardinal Luis Antonio Tagle, Archbishop of Manila, Philippines;

7) to the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace: Cardinal Ruben Salazar Gomez, Archbishop of Bogota, Colombia;

8) to the Pontifical Council for the Pastoral Care of Migrants and Itinerant Peoples: Cardinal Bechara Boutros Rai, O.M.M., Patriarch of Antioch of the Maronites, Lebanon and Cardinal Luis Antonio Gokim Tagle, Archbishop of Manila, Philippines;

9) to the Pontifical Council for Inter-Religious Dialogue: Cardinal Baselios Cleemis Thottunkal, Major Archbishop of Trivandrum of the Syro-Malankars, India; and

10) to the Pontifical Council for Social Communications: Cardinal Bechara Boutros Rai, O.M.M., Patriarch of Antioch of the Maronites, Lebanon.
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JOINT COMMUNIQUE FROM THE HOLY SEE
AND THE 'STATE OF PALESTINE'


January 31, 2013

Following the bilateral negotiations held in past years with the Palestine Liberation Organization (P.L.O), an official meeting took place in Ramallah on the 30th of January 2013, at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the State of Palestine.

The talks were headed by H.E. Dr. Riad Al-Malki, Minister of Foreign Affairs of the State of Palestine, and Msg. Ettore Balestrero, Under-Secretary for the Holy See’s Relations with States.

The Parties exchanged views regarding the draft Agreement under discussion, especially the Preamble and Chapter I of the mentioned Agreement. The talks were held in open and cordial atmosphere, expression of the existing good relations between the Holy See and the State of Palestine. The Delegations expressed the wish that negotiations be accelerated and brought to a speedy conclusion. It was thus agreed that a joint technical group will meet to follow-up.

Gratitude was expressed for the Holy See’s contribution of 100.000 euro towards the restoration of the roof of the Basilica of the Nativity in Bethlehem.

The Holy See Delegation was composed of H.E Archbishop Giuseppe Lazzarotto, Apostolic Delegate to Jerusalem and Palestine; H.E. Archbishop Antonio Franco, Apostolic Nuncio; H.E. Msgr. Selim Sayegh, Auxiliary Bishop Emeritus of the Latin Patriarchate of Jerusalem; Msgr. Maurizio Malvestiti, Under-Secretary of the Congregation for Oriental Churches; Msgr. Alberto Ortega Martin, Counsellor in the Section for the Relations with States of the Secretariat of the State; Msgr. Waldemar Stanislaw Sommertag, Counsellor of the Apostolic Delegation in Jerusalem and Palestine; Fr. Emil Salayta, President of the Ecclesiastical Court of the Latin Patriarchate; Fr. Pietro Felet S.C.J., Secretary General of the A.O.C.T.S.; Fr. Ibrahim Faltas O.F.M., Administrator of the Custody of the Holy Land; Mr. Sami E. Shehadeh, Advocate.

The Delegation of the State of Palestine was composed of H.E. Hanna Amira, P.L.O. Executive Committee Member; H.E. Minister Ziad Al-Bandak, Palestinian President’s Advisor for Christian Relations; H.E. Issa Kssasieh, Deputy of P.L.O. Negotiations Department; H.E. Ambassador Rawan Sulaiman, Assistant Minister of Foreign Affairs; Mr. Ammar M.Hijazi, Counsellor of the Political Committee; H.E. Ambassador Dr. Amal Jadou, Assistant Minister for European Affairs.



I was too much in a rush this morning when I posted my 'almanac' entry for the day before leaving for work, that I failed to notice how the joint communique on Vatican-Palestinian talks above openly referred to the State of Palestine, now recognized de facto by 139 countries at last count since the United Nations General Assembly approved the participation of the Palestinian National Authority in the UN as a non=member observer state. Since the PNA has been representing what is conceptually the State of Palestine, the UN vote was widely considered de facto recognition of a Palestinian state.

My delayed 'first' reaction this afternoon when preparing to post this item was, "Omigosh, the Vatican has jumped the gun with this open reference to the 'State of Palestine' before de jure recognition of Palestine sovereignty", but then, realizing it is a joint communique, I don't think the Vatican had a choice but to use the nomenclature by which the Palestinian National Authority now styles itself.

Although the UN vote came on November 11, 2012, it was not until January 6, 2013, that PNA President Mahmoud Abbas signed a decree changing the Palestinian National Authority name to “the State of Palestine” in all official documents, on stamps and government agency plaques." Abbas also said he has changed his title to President of the State of Palestine, instead of President of the PNA.

Last December 12, when Abbas visited Benedict XVI at the Vatican, the changes had not been made, and so I prepared the following 'banner' for the PNA.


There still is no official website for the 'State of Palestine' as such, and as far as I can check online, all the PNA ministries, including the Ministry of Information, are still online as PNA, not as State of Palestine. Abbas's own official website is in Arabic only ,and I presume it does identify him as President of Palestine. I do not know what the epigraph in Arabic says. Right panel is Wikipedia's adaptation of its earlier PNA entry to its 'State of Palestine' entry.


In fact, the only website in English I could find today that carries the name 'State of Palestine' is the Office of the Prime Minister. Salem Fayyad, an American-educated economist first appointed by Abbas to be Prime Minister in 2007 and is also concurrent Finance Minister.


Note that the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem features prominently on the official Palestinian websites. The Palestinians claim Jerusalem as their capital, but Israel has held Jerusalem since it recaptured it from Jordan in the Arab-Israeli War of 1967, and since Jerusalem was the capital of the the Kingdom of Israel in King David's time, centuries before Islam was ever founded, the Jerusalem question will remain open long after a State of Palestine is established de jure.

The Vatican has always said it favors making Jerusalem an 'international city' under UN administration so that all three religions claiming historical bonds to it - Judaism, Christianity and Islam - may have equal access and privileges. This solution for Jerusalem was widely-favored in the United Nations after World War II, but this problem was sidelined by the wars forced by the Arab nations on Israel as soon as it became an independent sovereign state - wars that Israel easily won, making territorial gains from Syria but especially Egypt and Jordan. It has since returned the Sinai peninsula to Egypt, and ceded the Gaza Strip and most of the West Bank to serve as the territory for a future Palestinian state.


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The communique with Palestine came one day after a joint communique with Israel that noted "significant progress' made in bilateral negotiations held twice a year for the past 14 years to settle outstanding issues concerning the status of the Church in Israel. The text of the communique is on
http://en.radiovaticana.va/news/2013/01/30/vatican:_holy_see-israeli_commission_meets_in_jerusalem/en1-660249

The official communique is almost identical word for word to similar communiques issued twice a year over the past seven years that I have had to 'follow' these talks, so I was pleasantly jolted by the definitive statements from the Israeli Deputy Minister who has led the Israeli panel in the negotiations over the past four years... This is real news, because it seems they have worked out all the problems now, except for ownership of the Cenacle, a medieval Franciscan monastery built on the site where the Last Supper took place...

Israel and the Vatican are nearing
'a historic relationship upgrade'

By HERB KEINON

01/30/2013

After 14 years of glacial negotiations, Israel and the Vatican are on the verge of signing a long-elusive agreement that would formalize diplomatic relations, Deputy Foreign Minister Danny Ayalon said today.

Ayalon’s comments to The Jerusalem Post came after a meeting in Jerusalem of a working commission that has been trying to iron out various issues between Israel and the Holy See since 1999. Israel and the Vatican established diplomatic ties in 1993.

“In the last four years a lot of ground has been covered, and after long, intensive and serious negotiations we have overcome most if not all the outstanding issues that have prevented signing of this agreement for so long,” Ayalon said.

He said the two sides were “on the verge of signing, subject to final approval by the government of Israel and the Holy See.”

Ayalon explained that the final agreement was not signed on Tuesday, because it was not appropriate for a caretaker government to sign the agreement, and that the actual acceptance and signing should be left to the next government.


“All the ground work is finished and I trust the new government will sign soon, which is nothing short of a milestone in the relationship,” he said.

Ayalon, who has led the negotiations with the Vatican for the past four years, but will be leaving his post next week, said the conclusion of the agreement signifies a “real upgrade in relations between Israel and the Holy See, and between the Jewish people and one billion Catholics around the world, to the benefit of both sides.”

Ayalon and his counterpart from the Vatican, Ettore Balestrero, the under-secretary of the Holy See for the relations with states, issued a joint communiqué saying the joint commission that met on Tuesday “took notice that significant progress was made and looks forward to a speedy conclusion of the agreement.”

Jerusalem expects this agreement to improve relations not only with the Vatican, but also with other Catholic countries around the world for whom the Vatican’s position vis-a-vis Israel is important.

Over the years the discussions have centered around three main issues: the status of the Catholic Church in Israel; the issue of sovereignty over some 21 sites in the country, including the Cenacle – the site of the Last Supper on Mount Zion; and taxation and expropriation issues.

Ayalon said that agreements have been reached on each of the issues.

The most contentious was the issue of sovereignty over the Last Supper Room, with the Catholic Church demanding ownership, and Israel not willing to relinquish it. The two sides have essentially agreed to disagree on the matter, but not let it stand in the way of the overall accord.

While the Catholic Church does not pay taxes on its properties in Israel, under the agreement, religious institutions owned by the Holy See will be exempted from tax, just as synagogues and mosques are, but church-owned businesses will not.

The agreement also works out the issue of expropriating Church property for infrastructure purposes, with a list of five sites – including the Mount of Beatitudes and Capernaum near Lake Kinneret (the Sea of Galilee) and the Church of the Annunciation in Nazareth – where land expropriation would not be allowed except for public safety in situations of emergency, and then only after coordination with the Church.


There being no hue and cry in the international MSM so far nor from the Israeli media about today's (1/31) joint communique with Palestine, I assume it means 1) no one is surprised - nor should they be - at the Vatican's de facto recognition of the State of Palestine; and 2) since the same Vatican panel that met with the Israelis also met with the Palestinians, the ranking member would have duly informed the Israelis as a matter of courtesy they were meeting with the Palestinians the next day.
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Jesuit expert at Vatican-II says
Councils have always taken more than 50 years
to really take root in the Church

by Cindy Wooden

February 1, 2013

ROME – A 91-year-old Jesuit who served as an expert at the Second Vatican Council said, “I’m just beginning to understand the depth and breadth of the council” and its teachings.

Jesuit Father Ladislas Orsy, a visiting professor at the Georgetown University Law Center in Washington, told an audience in Rome Jan. 24 that while every ecumenical council in Church history led to debate – and sometimes even schism – it always has taken more than 50 years for a Council’s teachings and reforms to take root in the Christian community.

“Granted we may see a great deal of confusion today; granted we may even see a denial of the Council or we may even hear a way of explaining away the Council,” Father Orsy said during a speech that was part of the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity celebrations at Rome’s Centro Pro Unione.

Vatican II can be examined as a historical event, and theologians can use a variety of scholarly tools to propose different interpretations of its teachings, but one thing Catholics cannot deny is the Church’s teaching that the Holy Spirit is active in its ecumenical councils, he said.

Father Orsy asked his audience, “Are you surprised that there is a bit of disarray today in the Roman Catholic Church when this happened in the case of Nicaea, dealing with the very foundation of our faith?” The Council of Nicaea in 325 affirmed the divinity of Christ.

Nicaea’s deliberations led to debate and division, he said, but over the centuries “this wave of energy” of the Holy Spirit “quietly took possession of the Church and the confusion sorted itself out.” Today, he said, mainline Christians, while divided on a variety of issues, profess the basic tenets of their faith using the Nicaean creed.

“Just looking at what happened after Nicaea,” he said, “it is not farfetched” to think that the work the Holy Spirit began at the Second Vatican Council continues in the Church and “maybe, shall we say, 100 years from now,” people will recognize how deeply it impacted the Church.* [See rejoinder below]

The Jesuit said he hoped to live a “few more years” so he could try to understand more about where the Holy Spirit is leading the Church through the teachings of Vatican II and the continuing process of that teaching taking root in the lives of Catholics.

In his talk, Father Orsy looked particularly at Dignitatis Humanae, Vatican II’s declaration on human dignity and religious freedom.

The Jesuit canon lawyer said the document, approved on the last day of the Council, takes the visions of the Church, the world and the human person expressed in the other Vatican II documents and applies them to “real-life situations.”

It reaffirmed traditional Church teaching that all human beings have an obligation to seek the truth and to strive for the perfection to which God calls all people, but it insisted the truth could be imposed on no one.

The document insists on “respect for the truth, but asserts that charity has its own priority, sometimes even above truth,” urging the Church to model itself more closely after Christ, “who never imposed with any kind of violence the truth that he proclaimed.”

[Too bad Wooden did not pursue more of Fr. Gray's reflections on Dignitatis Humanae, one of the major objections of the FSSPX to Vatican II. In trying to find any commentary written by Joseph Ratzinger about Dignitatis Humanae, I came across a 1967 commentary on Dei Verbum translated from German (one has the impression this is his favorite of the Vatican-II documents). For now, here is the link. www.deiverbum2005.org/Articels/ratzinger.pdf
Before the Year of Faith is over, I will try to find and post any and all commentaries he has made on each of the 16 Vatican documents....


*A rejoinder to Fr. Gray
about the impact of Vatican-II


The question is not whether Vatican-II has impacted the Church at all, or how deeply, because
- It was universally hailed when it was first announced;
- The tendentious reporting about it as a 'progressive' milestone in the Church during the four years it lasted, raised unrealistic expectations while laying the groundwork for a hermeneutic of discontinuity;
- It was universally and incontestably hailed at its conclusion as 'the greatest Church event in the 20th century'; and
- The immediate post-Conciliar implementation, especially the sweeping but misguided liturgical reform, really shook up the Church as nothing had in centuries!

So no, Fr. Gray, the question is not whether Vatican-II had impact or not - rather, it's about the kind of impact it has cumulatively had on the Church. It has been more harmful than helpful because it led to so many unwanted consequences, like devil's spawn, primarily because the first 42 years after the Council were characterized by the ascendancy of the progressivists professing to represent the 'spirit of Vatican-II', who aggressively promoted a real counter-Magisterium to the Popes on their favorite 'reform causes', and co-opted bishops, priests, theologians and seminaries into their allow-everything Catholicism-without-tears-or-sacrifice.

Providentially, the Lord made Benedict XVI Pope - the right Pope at the right time, in more ways than one - and in the past eight years, he has done much to correct what went wrong in the first 42 years, starting with employing the right hermeneutic in interpreting the Council as 'renewal in continuity with Tradition', exactly as John XXIII intended it to be when he convoked it.

Benedict XVI has done so much in this necessary course correction that starting two years ago, the Catholic media in the USA have been acknowledging the dying-out of the progressivist movement in the US - though they also attribute it to the generational dying out of the original Vatican-II progressivist vanguard.

The course correction has fallen to him - the last of the five Popes who took part in Vatican II and the only one of them who was not a Council Father (John XXIII and Paul VI both presided over the Council; John Paul I and John Paul II participated as bishops; he was just a theological consultant) - and perhaps God also meant it that way. He is the only authoritative voice left from Vatican II, having not just taken part in the behind-the-scenes work of the Council, but also emerging as a punctilious scholar-chronicler-commentator of the Council itself - while it was taking place and in the initial post-Conciliar period.

His focus, consistency and faith in Vatican-II over the five decades since it opened have been remarkable, and yet his detractors continue to say that he is anti-Vatican-II and trying to bring back the Church to pre-1962, while even his admirers in the media fail to credit him enough for his unfailing advocacy of all the actual and potential good in Vatican II.

The Pope of joy, the Pope of love, the Pope of Christian unity, is also the quintessential Pope of Vatican II.


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So forget the Soviets, the Bulgarians, any Communists... Think Iran and Islam instead? And the third secret of Fatima...

Agca claims in autobiography that
Iran's Khomeini asked him to kill John Paul II

He thought the third secret of Fatima meant the Church would collapse
with the death of the Pope, and Islam would then triumph in the world

by GIACOMO GALEAZZI
Translated from

February 1, 2013

"Iran wanted Papa Wojtyla dead. It was the Ayatollah Khomeini who was the mastermind of the assassination attempt against him". So says Ali Agca in an autobiography now published in Italian as Mi hanno promesso il Paradiso: La mia vita e la verita sull'attentato sul Papa (They promised me Paradise: My life and the truth on the assassination attempt against the Pope), out in bookstores today.

He says he got the order directly from Khomeini who received him at the Green Palace in Tehran.

So is this finally the truth after almost 32 years of lies and false leads? Since that fateful day in May 1981, when, in a crowded St. Peter's Square, the Turkish hired gun shot at John Paul II, wounding him seriously but not mortally.

"This is the will of Allah, dear Ali, you must not doubt it", Khomeini reportedly told him in Turkish. "Allah is calling you to carry out this great mission. Never doubt, have faith, kill for him, kill the Anti-Christ, kill John Paul II mercilessly, and then take your own life so that the temptation of betrayal will not darken your gesture. This death will open the way once and for all for the return of the Imam Mahdi to the world... This bloodshed will be the prelude to the triumph of Islam in the whole world, and your martyrdom will be rewarded in Paradise, eternal glory in the kingdom of Allah".

Harsh and clear words to which Agca did not initially respond. He had come to Iran after escaping a Turkish prison where he was serving time for the murder of the editor of the Turkish liberal newspaper Milliyet.

But then he decided to accept, wishing to earn merit, to escape poverty, and to avenge himself. "I found out I was strong, ready to immolate myself for the cause of Islam as if it were the most natural thing to do - yes, I would kill John Paul II and right afterwards, kill myself".

A chapter of the book is dedicated to the meeting in prison between the Pope and his would-be assassin on December 2, 1983. Until now, their conversation has remained secret.

Agca says he told the Pope: "Holiness, I know the third secret of Fatima. They revealed it to me in Iran".

He said the killing was not out of 'enmity' but because the Iranians interpreted the third secret of Fatima (which was revealed by John Paul II only on May 13, 2000) as the fall of the Vatican with the death of the Pope, and therefore, they thought that if that happened, then Islam would triumph in the world.

Agca explains that this conversation was never reported because he asked the Pope, "Holy Father, I will tell you all about the assassination plot but you must give me your word of honor that you will never say anything to anyone". And John Paul II reportedly said, "You have my word".

In the version of this story that appears in La Stampa's Vatican Insider, the paragraphs on Agca's conversation with John Paul II are omitted, but he has a little more detail on what Agca claims went through his mind at the time he accepted the Ayatollah's order:

"I knew I had to say something and that I had to say it right away, without hesitation. I listened to the words coming from my mouth, and as I listened, I found myself strong, courageous and ready to immolate myself for the Islamic cause as if it was the most natural thing to do! - I, Mehmet Ali Agca, am ready for martyrdom. Yes, I will kill John Paul II, I will kill the Pope, and right afterwards, I will take my own life".

What Agca cannot explain is how it was possible that having fired several shots at the Pope directly in the chest, John Paul II did not die. The question that would torment him for years was why his mission had failed.

Why? A question to which there is no answer. But for him, Papa Wojtyla became a special person - almost like a messenger of God who was able, through the forgiveness he expressed to him in that narrow prison cell in Rebibbia, to make him see the error into which he had fallen and to make him say, "I was wrong".

Did Agca choose the date, May 11, feast of Our Lady of Fatima, to carry out his deadly mission? And how could the Ayatollah know what the third secret was before it was revealed to the world? Is Agca so sure that he is safe now from the Iranians so he can finally speak out? Or is he making all this up just to sell his book? And, not incidentally, what about the resonance of the place name Fatima, named for a Moorish princess who, in turn, took her name from that of a daughter of Mohammed?
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Vatican Library starts to post
selected documents for online research


January 31, 2013

More than six centuries after it was founded by Pope Nicholas V, the Vatican Library announced this week that it has made a first selection of ancient manuscripts available for consultation online.

The first 256 documents to be digitalised form part of a broader project to make a large section of this prestigious archive freely available to students, scholars, researchers and teachers.

The library, founded in 1451, has been supported in this work of digitalisation by a £2 million grant from the Polonsky Foundation and other sponsors.

Speaking to Vatican Radio on Wednesday, the prefect of the Vatican Library, Mgr Cesare Pasini, said it had taken two years to make this first selection of manuscripts available online.

He said the majority of the documents have been digitalised as a result of a joint project with the University of Heidelberg in Germany. A similar project with the Bodleian Libraries in Oxford is also underway to make more of the material available as soon as possible.

For full details of how to obtain an electronic reader’s pass for access to these documents, visit the website: www.vaticanlibrary.va
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LA archbishop relieves retired
Cardinal Mahony of all public duties

By GILLIAN FLACCUS


LOS ANGELES, February 1 (AP) — Cardinal Roger Mahony, who retired with a tainted career after dodging criminal charges over how he handled pedophile priests, was stripped of duties by his successor as a judge ordered confidential church personnel files released.

The unprecedented move by Archbishop Jose Gomez came less than two weeks after other long-secret priest personnel records showed how Mahony worked with top aides to protect the Roman Catholic church from the engulfing scandal.

Gomez said Mahony, 76, would no longer have administrative or public duties in the diocese.

One of Mahony's former aides, Monsignor Thomas Curry, stepped down Thursday as auxiliary bishop in the Los Angeles archdiocese's Santa Barbara region.

"I find these files to be brutal and painful reading," Gomez said in a statement, referring to 12,000 pages of files posted online by the church Thursday night just hours after a judge's order. "The behavior described in these files is terribly sad and evil. There is no excuse, no explaining away what happened to these children."

The fallout was highly unusual and marks a dramatic shift from the days when members of the church hierarchy emerged largely unscathed despite the roles they played in covering up clergy sex abuse, said the Rev. Thomas Reese, a Jesuit and senior fellow at the Woodstock Theological Center at Georgetown University.

"It's quite extraordinary. I don't think anything like this has happened before," Reese said. "It's showing that there are consequences now to mismanaging the sex abuse crisis."

Several of the documents released late Thursday echo recurring themes that emerged over the past decade in dioceses nationwide, where church leaders moved problem priests between parishes and didn't call the police.

In one instance, a draft of a plan with Mahony's name on it calls for sending a molester priest to his native Spain for a minimum of seven years, paying him $400 a month and offering health insurance. In return, the cardinal would agree to write the Vatican and ask them to cancel his excommunication.

It was unclear whether the proposed agreement was enacted with the Rev. Jose Ugarte, who had been reported to the archdiocese 20 years earlier by a physician for drugging and raping a boy in a hotel in Ensenada, his file shows.

"He has been sexually involved with three young men in addition to the original allegations," Curry, then Mahony's point person for dealing with suspected priests, wrote in 1993.

In another case, Mahony resisted turning over a list of altar boys to police who were investigating claims against a visiting Mexican priest who was later determined to have molested 26 boys during a 10-month stint in Los Angeles.

"We cannot give such a list for no cause whatsoever," he wrote on a January 1988 memo.

Mahony, who retired in 2011 after more than a quarter-century at the helm of the archdiocese, has publicly apologized for mistakes he made in dealing with priests who molested children.

He has survived three grand jury investigations and several depositions by civil attorneys representing alleged abuse victims.

Prosecutors, who have been stymied for years in their attempts to see the internal church files, have said they will search for new evidence of criminal wrongdoing by church leaders. Most of the material, however, now falls well outside the statute of limitations.

Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Emilie Elias ordered the diocese to turn over the files Thursday without blacking out the names of top church officials who were responsible for handling the priests.

The judge gave the archdiocese until Feb. 22 to turn over the files, but they were released in less than an hour after she signed the order.

While the church left the names of church leaders intact, as specified, they removed names of victims, witnesses and priests who weren't accused. In some instances, whole sections were removed, including paragraphs of newspaper articles and efforts to black out other names even included the bylines of reporters and the phone number of the district attorney's office.

The church said in a statement that the files' release "concludes a sad and shameful chapter in the history of our local church."

The archdiocese, the nation's largest with 4.3 million members, had planned to black out the names of members of the hierarchy who were responsible for the priests, and instead provide a cover sheet for each priest's file, listing the names of top officials who handled that case. The church reversed course Wednesday after The Associated Press, the Los Angeles Times and plaintiff attorneys objected.

A record-breaking $660 million settlement in 2007 with more than 500 alleged victims paved the way for the ultimate disclosure, but the archdiocese and individual priests fought to keep them secret for more than five years.

Some church critics said Gomez's actions, particularly against Mahony, amounted to a slap on the wrist as long as he (Mahony) remained a cardinal and a member of the powerful Vatican body that elects the Pope.

The reprimand is a "purely symbolic punishment that they hope will satisfy at least some people in the archdiocese," said Terry McKiernan, founder of BishopAccountability.org, which tracks the release of priest files nationally.


I cannot find any information on line on how cardinals can be disciplined, other than the information that the former Archbishop of Vienna, Hans Hermann Groer, after resigning as Archbishop in 1995, was then asked by Pope John Paul II three years later, Groër relinquished all ecclesiastical duties and privileges as an archbishop and cardinal in 1998, at the behest of John Paul II. Groer was directly accused of sexual abuses himself.

Perhaps Mahony should do the honorable thing and offer to relinquish all such privileges himself, not placing the onus on Benedict XVI to ask him to do so. His cover-up and maneuvering to 'protect' offending priests was so systematic and long-standing that his crime is just as bad as if he had committed the abuses himself. Or perhaps worse because he became an enabler for many crimes to go unpunished and probably for more crimes and victims. That he recently acknowledged he only started thinking of the victims in 2006 is appalling, to say the least, even if he did have the honesty to say so.
.

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Friday, February 1, Third Week in Ordinary Time

Left photo: Statue of Ansgar in Hamburg.
ST. ANSGAR (Anskar, Oskar), (b France 801, d Germany 865)
Benedictine, Missionary, Bishop, 'Apostle of the North'
Ansgar was born near Amiens and educated at the Benedictine abbey of Corbie.
When the king of Denmark converted to Christianity, he volunteered to be
a missionary there, eventually going to Sweden as well. Unsettled political
conditions forced the Christian missionaries back, and Ansgar withdrew into
Germany, where he served as first Archbishop of Hamburg-Bremen. Later,
however, he helped to consecrate Gotbert, the first bishop of Sweden. The Church
of Sweden honors him as its apostle. He spent the last 39 years of his life
preaching the Gospel, doing charitable works, redeeming captives from barbaric
tribes and fighting the slave trade in northern Germany, while maintaining
relations as best he could in Scandinavia. He was known as an extraordinary
preacher and a humble ascetic. He is the patron saint of Denmark.
Readings for today's Mass: www.usccb.org/bible/readings/020113.cfm



AT THE VATICAN TODAY


The Holy Father met with

- Mons Luis Ladaria Ferrer, SJ, secretary of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith.

- Eight Italian bishops from the Campania region (Group 3) on ad limina visit.

The Holy Father's message for Lent 2013 was presented at a news conference presided by Cardinal Robert Sarah,
president of the Pontifical Council Cor Unum. The theme is "Believing in charity inspires charity", inspired by
a verse from the First Letter of John, "We have come to know and to believe in the love God has for us" (4,16)..


NEW CHALDEAN PATRIARCH

The Congregation for Oriental Churches announced today that the Synod of Bishops of the Chaldean Church, convoked in Rome by the Holy Father on January 28, elected Mons. Louis Sako, until now Archbishop of Kirkuk of the Chaldeans, to succeed Cardinal Emmanuel II Delly as Patriarch of Babylon of the Chaldeans. The new Patriarch has taken the name Louis Raphael I Sako and will be addressed as His Beatitude.

At the same time, the Holy Father recognized the election of the new Patriarch by 'granting ecclesiastical communion' in conformity with the Canonical Code of the Orthodox Churches.


THE POPE'S PRAYER INTENTIONS
FOR FEBRUARY 2013


General intention:
That migrant families, in particular mothers, may be sustained
and accompanied in their difficulties.


Missionary Intention:
That peoples experiencing war and conflicts may be the protagonists
in building a future of peace.




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Dear Brothers and Sisters,

The celebration of Lent, in the context of the Year of Faith, offers us a valuable opportunity to meditate on the relationship between faith and charity: between believing in God – the God of Jesus Christ – and love, which is the fruit of the Holy Spirit and which guides us on the path of devotion to God and others.

1. Faith as a response to the love of God
In my first Encyclical, I offered some thoughts on the close relationship between the theological virtues of faith and charity.

Setting out from Saint John’s fundamental assertion: “We have come to know and to believe in the love God has for us”
(1 Jn 4:16), I observed that “being Christian is not the result of an ethical choice or a lofty idea, but the encounter with an event, a person, which gives life a new horizon and a decisive direction … Since God has first loved us (cf. 1 Jn 4:10), love is now no longer a mere ‘command’; it is the response to the gift of love with which God draws near to us” (Deus Caritas Est,1).

Faith is this personal adherence – which involves all our faculties – to the revelation of God’s gratuitous and “passionate” love for us, fully revealed in Jesus Christ. The encounter with God who is Love engages not only the heart but also the intellect: “Acknowledgement of the living God is one path towards love, and the ‘yes’ of our will to his will unites our intellect, will and sentiments in the all-embracing act of love.

But this process is always open-ended; love is never ‘finished’ and complete”
(ibid.,17). Hence, for all Christians, and especially for charity workers, there is a need for faith, for “that encounter with God in Christ which awakens their love and opens their spirits to others. As a result, love of neighbour will no longer be for them a commandment imposed, so to speak, from without, but a consequence deriving from their faith, a faith which becomes active through love” (ibid.,31a).

Christians are people who have been conquered by Christ’s love and accordingly, under the influence of that love – “Caritas Christi urget nos” (2 Cor 5:14)they are profoundly open to loving their neighbour in concrete ways (cf. ibid.,33).

This attitude arises primarily from the consciousness of being loved, forgiven, and even served by the Lord, who bends down to wash the feet of the Apostles and offers himself on the Cross to draw humanity into God’s love.

“Faith tells us that God has given his Son for our sakes and gives us the victorious certainty that it is really true: God is love! … Faith, which sees the love of God revealed in the pierced heart of Jesus on the Cross, gives rise to love. Love is the light – and in the end, the only light – that can always illuminate a world grown dim and give us the courage needed to keep living and working”

(ibid.,39). All this helps us to understand that the principal distinguishing mark of Christians is precisely “love grounded in and shaped by faith” (ibid.,7).

2. Charity as life in faith
The entire Christian life is a response to God’s love. The first response is precisely faith as the acceptance, filled with wonder and gratitude, of the unprecedented divine initiative that precedes us and summons us.

And the “yes” of faith marks the beginning of a radiant story of friendship with the Lord, which fills and gives full meaning to our whole life. But it is not enough for God that we simply accept his gratuitous love. Not only does he love us, but he wants to draw us to himself, to transform us in such a profound way as to bring us to say with Saint Paul: “it is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me”
(cf. Gal 2:20).

When we make room for the love of God, then we become like him, sharing in his own charity. If we open ourselves to his love, we allow him to live in us and to bring us to love with him, in him and like him; only then does our faith become truly “active through love” (Gal 5:6); only then does he abide in us (cf. 1 Jn 4:12).

Faith is knowing the truth and adhering to it (cf. 1 Tim 2:4); charity is “walking” in the truth (cf. Eph 4:15).

Through faith we enter into friendship with the Lord, through charity this friendship is lived and cultivated (cf. Jn 15:14ff).

Faith causes us to embrace the commandment of our Lord and Master; charity gives us the happiness of putting it into practice (cf. Jn 13:13-17).

In faith we are begotten as children of God (cf. Jn 1:12ff); charity causes us to persevere concretely in our divine sonship, bearing the fruit of the Holy Spirit (cf. Gal 5:22).

Faith enables us to recognize the gifts that the good and generous God has entrusted to us; charity makes them fruitful (cf. Mt 25:14-30).

3. The indissoluble inter-relation of faith and charity
In light of the above, it is clear that we can never separate, let alone oppose, faith and charity. These two theological virtues are intimately linked, and it is misleading to posit a contrast or “dialectic” between them.

On the one hand, it would be too one-sided to place a strong emphasis on the priority and decisiveness of faith and to undervalue and almost despise concrete works of charity, reducing them to a vague humanitarianism.

On the other hand, though, it is equally unhelpful to overstate the primacy of charity and the activity it generates, as if works could take the place of faith. For a healthy spiritual life, it is necessary to avoid both fideism and moral activism.

The Christian life consists in continuously scaling the mountain to meet God and then coming back down, bearing the love and strength drawn from him, so as to serve our brothers and sisters with God’s own love.

In sacred Scripture, we see how the zeal of the Apostles to proclaim the Gospel and awaken people’s faith is closely related to their charitable concern to be of service to the poor
(Cf. Acts 6:1-4). In the Church, contemplation and action, symbolized in some way by the Gospel figures of Mary and Martha, have to coexist and complement each other (cf. Lk 10:38-42).

The relationship with God must always be the priority, and any true sharing of goods, in the spirit of the Gospel, must be rooted in faith (cf. General Audience, 25 April 2012).

Sometimes we tend, in fact, to reduce the term “charity” to solidarity or simply humanitarian aid. It is important, however, to remember that the greatest work of charity is evangelization, which is the “ministry of the word”.

There is no action more beneficial – and therefore more charitable – towards one’s neighbour than to break the bread of the word of God, to share with him the Good News of the Gospel, to introduce him to a relationship with God: evangelization is the highest and the most integral promotion of the human person.

As the Servant of God Pope Paul VI wrote in the Encyclical Populorum Progressio, the proclamation of Christ is the first and principal contributor to development
(cf. n. 16). It is the primordial truth of the love of God for us, lived and proclaimed, that opens our lives to receive this love and makes possible the integral development of humanity and of every man (cf. Caritas in Veritate, 8).

Essentially, everything proceeds from Love and tends towards Love. God’s gratuitous love is made known to us through the proclamation of the Gospel. If we welcome it with faith, we receive the first and indispensable contact with the Divine, capable of making us “fall in love with Love”, and then we dwell within this Love, we grow in it and we joyfully communicate it to others.

Concerning the relationship between faith and works of charity, there is a passage in the Letter to the Ephesians which provides perhaps the best account of the link between the two: “For by grace you have been saved through faith; and this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God; not because of works, lest anyone should boast. For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them”
(2:8-10).

It can be seen here that the entire redemptive initiative comes from God, from his grace, from his forgiveness received in faith; but this initiative, far from limiting our freedom and our responsibility, is actually what makes them authentic and directs them towards works of charity.

These are not primarily the result of human effort, in which to take pride, but they are born of faith and they flow from the grace that God gives in abundance. Faith without works is like a tree without fruit: the two virtues imply one another.

Lent invites us, through the traditional practices of the Christian life, to nourish our faith by careful and extended listening to the word of God and by receiving the sacraments, and at the same time to grow in charity and in love for God and neighbour, not least through the specific practices of fasting, penance and almsgiving.


4. Priority of faith, primacy of charity
Like any gift of God, faith and charity have their origin in the action of one and the same Holy Spirit (cf. 1 Cor 13), the Spirit within us that cries out “Abba, Father” (Gal 4:6), and makes us say: “Jesus is Lord!” (1 Cor 12:3) and “Maranatha!” (1 Cor 16:22; Rev 22:20).

Faith, as gift and response, causes us to know the truth of Christ as Love incarnate and crucified, as full and perfect obedience to the Father’s will and infinite divine mercy towards neighbour; faith implants in hearts and minds the firm conviction that only this Love is able to conquer evil and death. Faith invites us to look towards the future with the virtue of hope, in the confident expectation that the victory of Christ’s love will come to its fullness.

For its part, charity ushers us into the love of God manifested in Christ and joins us in a personal and existential way to the total and unconditional self-giving of Jesus to the Father and to his brothers and sisters. By filling our hearts with his love, the Holy Spirit makes us sharers in Jesus’s filial devotion to God and fraternal devotion to every man
(cf. Rom 5:5).

The relationship between these two virtues resembles that between the two fundamental sacraments of the Church: Baptism and Eucharist. Baptism (sacramentum fidei) [the sacrament of faith] precedes the Eucharist (sacramentum caritatis) -the sacrament of charity], but is ordered to it, the Eucharist being the fullness of the Christian journey.

In a similar way, faith precedes charity, but faith is genuine only if crowned by charity. Everything begins from the humble acceptance of faith (“knowing that one is loved by God”), but has to arrive at the truth of charity (“knowing how to love God and neighbour”), which remains for ever, as the fulfilment of all the virtues
(cf. 1 Cor 13:13).

Dear brothers and sisters, in this season of Lent, as we prepare to celebrate the event of the Cross and Resurrection – in which the love of God redeemed the world and shone its light upon history – I express my wish that all of you may spend this precious time rekindling your faith in Jesus Christ, so as to enter with him into the dynamic of love for the Father and for every brother and sister that we encounter in our lives.

For this intention, I raise my prayer to God, and I invoke the Lord’s blessing upon each individual and upon every community!


From the Vatican
15 October 2012




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I hope this is the last we have to do with Agca at all...

The new truths - or better said,
the new lies - from Ali Agca

Note by Fr. Federico Lombardi
Translated from the Italian service of

February 1, 2012

Father Federico Lombardi, Vatican news director, has responded with a lengthy statement dismissing, among other things, Ali Agca's claim in his autobiography that he was personally ordered by Iran's late Ayatollah Khomeini ('Supreme Leader' of Iran, 1970-1989) to kill John Paul II.

The publishing house Chiarelettere placed on sale yesterday in Italian bookstores a new book which it probably hopes will be another best-seller. [Chiarelettere published Gianluigi Nuzzi's Vatileaks book, Sua Santita.] This time, it is an autobiography - not the first one! - of Mehmet Ali Agca, recounted for the public with unquestionable expertness with the help of a ghost writer who has remained anonymous.

Let us cut to the whys and wherefores. The central revelation would be - finally, after 32 years! - that the true mastermind for the attempted assassination of John Paul II was Iran's Ayatollah Khomeini.

Of course, the killer says he has respected the secret about this order rigorously, and that he has only said the truth to one person. To John Paul II, during their conversation in Rebibbia prison on December 27, 1983. And of course, this episode represents a crucial part of the book, and their conversation is recounted vividly and with attention to detail (pp 161-168).

After an initial exchange about the third secret of Fatima, the Pope reportedly asked him explicitly: "Who ordered you to kill me?", and in the face of Agca's uneasiness, he reportedly said, :I give you my word of honor that anything you say to me will remain a secret between you and me".

And the disconcerting answer that revealed 'the great secret': "It was Khomeini and the Iranian government that ordered me to do it".

A third part of the prison conversation concerned the Pope's invitation to Agca to convert to Christianity, corroborated [????] with an account Agca makes of an impressive vision he claims to have had [Whose vision? The Pope's or Agca's?], "I was on the Cross as if I was Jesus... etc etc".

Agca claims the Pope faithfully kept his promise of secrecy, but he considers it time for him to reveal it himself because, having achieved full freedom from his Turkish prison sentence in 2001, and having decided to reject the fanaticism of "Islamic Nazi-fascism", to which he had been a slave, he could now "write the truth about my life, the truth on the assassination attempt on Papa Wjtyla, and the great secret that know one else has known" (p. 184).

And should we believe Agca now? I think not. I have been concerned to make the verifications that are my duty to make and that I could carry out with specific persons about what Agca states in his book.

I met with and questioned Cardinal Stanislaw Dziwisz on some very concrete points. First of all, of course, about that jail conversation. John Paul II's former secretary has a very vivid memory especially of everything that had to do with the assassination attempt. Which is not surprising.

As the Pope's secretary, he was present in the jail cell for that conversation, with the Pope's approval, and even if he was not very close, he could hear the conversation clearly [the jail cell is not very big, after all]. His testimony is therefore essential.

He confirms that the two spoke about the secret of Fatima and the inexplicability of the Pope's survival, but he denies absolutely that they had spoken about who had ordered Agca nor about the Ayatollah Khomeini, nor that the Pope had asked Agca to convert to Christianity. He also denies another claim in the book about a subsequent letter written by John Paul II to Agca reiterating the invitation for him to convert. He says there was never such a letter.

In the book, Agca also claims of 'various letters from then Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger" that he describes as "spiritual letters in which he says that with the Pope, he is praying for me and also for my conversion" (p. 176).

Scrupulously, I asked the former Cardinal Ratzinger today whether he had written letters to Agca. His answer was very clear: He had received letters from Agca - no one should be surprised, because Agca has written everyone, including me - but that he never answered him.

Of course, Agca now claims that he tore up all these papal and cardinal letters because "I was still an Islamic combatant and I could not have such letters in my possession"...

We can go on. For example, Agca would have us understand that on many occasions, the Vatican itself had followed 'the Islamist lead' as an explanation for the attempt on the Pope's life. He cites a supposed statement made by Joaquin Navarro-Valls, who in the context of the disappearance of Emmanuela Orlandi in 1983, had reportedly said, "This could have to do with Islamic fundamentalists who have the illusion that they could thus secure Agca's release".

The book says: "The Vatican was making clear it understood [how things were]. That Islamic fundamentalism was behind Orlandi's abduction and therefore, behind the assassination attempt on John Paul II" (page 153).

But Navarro=Valls did not become the Vatican spokesman until December 4, 1984, and he denies pointblank that he had ever spoken about the Orlandi girl's disappearance in this context nor that he had ever considered 'the Islamic lead' about the assassination attempt.

Cardinal Dsiwisz likewise denies that the Vatican had ever considered the so-called Islamic lead as reliable, and in fact, that it was hardly ever brought up. Moreover, it is absolutely incredible that if the Pope had truly been informed and had believed in the information, that not the slightest hint of it would have leaked out.

This fictional life of Ali Agca reiterates many things he had already written in the past, confirms his policy of systematically derailing any inquiries, denies the leads that focused attention on Eastern Europe, but seeks above all to generate an international 'scoop': that Ayatollah Khomeini, Iran, 'Nazi-fascist' Islam, are the true explanations for the intent to kill the Pope on 1981 as a supposed crucial point in Islam's final war against the much-hated Western Christianity.

For my part, I have put together some precise rebuttals [of Agca's statements] on the basis of the most reliable testimony:
- It is not true that Agca spoke to the Pope, during their prison encounter, of the Ayatollah Khomeini and Iran as those who gave him his orders (this is a crucial point in the book!)

- It is not true that the Vatican ever considered an 'Islamic lead' regarding the asassination attempt.

- It is not true that John Paul II asked Agca to convert to Christianity and sent him a letter about this when Agca was still in prison.

- It is not true that Cardinal Ratzinger ever wrote letters to Agca.

- It is not true that Navarro-Valls referred to an Islamic lead for the Orlandi case and the assassination attempt on John Paul II.

In short, everything [in the book] that concerns my responsibility and that I could verify is false.

The earlier hundred versions of the 'facts' that Agca has given so far, to which this last is now added,are just a bit too much' for us to believe anything he says.



Frankly, I found the above extended and rather colloquial statement by the Vatican spokesman reacting to Agca's latest claims very odd, to say the least. Not that it came so promptly - he obviously prepared to answer claims he considers outrageous and false before the book actually went on sale - because the Vatican has started to learn that in a 24/7 news cycle, it must be prompt with its responses to media reports.

But that Fr. Lombardi went to such lengths to verify his rebuttals of Agca, which he had to seek from primary witnesses, is more astounding because the Vatican never went out of its way to dispute - much less in such a prompt and detailed manner - the various personal slanders in the MSM against Joseph Ratzinger/Benedict XVI all these years. Slanders which have sought not just to pin on him the ultimate blame for the scandal of perverted priests and permissive pastors, but to seek to implicate him directly in covering up for the offenders when he was Archbishop of Munich and later, Prefect of the CDF. In utter contradiction of the fact that almost singlehandedly, Cardinal Ratzinger-Benedict XVI has fought this war against abuse of minors by some priests and dereliction of duty by some bishops

And yet the facts to rebut the slanderous accusations against the present Pope did not have to be researched - it is all in the Vatican's own official documentation and in reports contemporaneous to the events described.

Now that Fr. Lombardi has set this precedent about rebutting Agca's claims in seeming defense and exculpation of Khomeini and Iran, we must hold his feet to the fire, as they like to say, the next time some injurious scuttlebutt is peddled in the media about the Holy Father himself!

BTW, the first great slander against Benedict XVI came early in his Pontificate - the BBC documentary in the autumn of 2005 on child abuse by priests that even blamed him for a 1960 instruction from the CDF. I do not recall that Navarro-Valls (who remained as Vatican spokesman for over a year after John Paul II's death) or anyone in the Vatican ever sought to protest that documentary, not even two years later when an Italian TV outlet bought rights to it and caused considerable media mayhem in Italy. As I recall, the Vatican effort during that Italian resuscitation of a dead dog was limited to fielding some middle-level prelates to a panel discussion staged by the TV channel in an attempt to show ;fairness' after showing the documentary. How much can you say when there are twice as many panel speakers taking the viewpoint of the documentary? Never a formal written protest and point-by-point rebuttal of all the lies told in the documentary.

At least, when the AP and New York Times mounted their totslly unfounded campaign - sort of a self-arrogated journalistic license to kill - against Cardinal Ratzinger regarding the Milwaukee priest who had abused his wards at a school for the deaf, Cardinal William Levada, then CDF Prefect, took it upon himself to present a detailed rebuttal in the US media - a statement that can be found on the Vatican-CDF's site on the Church response to abuse of minors.

And, of course, the response to the Irish Prime Minister's outrageous lies told on the floor of the Irish Parliament only came several weeks later, in an omnibus Vatican response to the Irish government on a variety of untruths having to do with the government inquiries into a number of Irish dioceses on the matter of child abuse and pastoral dereliction of duty.

In the 24/7 news cycle, a delayed response amounts to no response at all, because editors will tend to relegate it to the category of 'old news' and not worth playing up or even reporting.

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I might have missed seeing this item longer than I already have, were it not for Beatrice and her site - thank you, as always!

Benedict XVI is in good health
and well able to lead the Church towards
the new evangelization and a new human culture

An interview with Mons. Mueller
Translated from

January 29, 2013

The Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, Mons. Gerhard Ludwig Mueller, took part in the observance of the Feast Day of St. Thomas Aquinas on December 28 at the Universidad San Damaso of Madrid, where he gave a lecture on the sense of liturgy in the theological work of Joseph Ratzinger-Benedict XVI.

He was interviewed on the occasion by Jose Luis Restan for his radio program on the Spanish radio network COPE, Here is a transcript of the interview, which was conducted in Spanish, which is one of the languages Mueller speaks
:


Talk to us first of your new job as CDF Prefect. From your dicastery, we usually read only about controversies, or the necessary corrections you must make... But I am sure your task goes far beyond that...
Controversies are useless. We must concentrate on the great existential questions of men in our time who are looking for a future. Questions about the family, over how to live, the future of our nations and this Europe... A message of hope is needed, and the Church has that hope to bring to everyone.

Our Congregation has the task, entrusted by the Holy Father, to promote the faith, not just to defend it. We cannot be superficial, we must enter into the heart of the questions asked by all the persons around us.

You took part today in a celebration of St. Thomas at the Universidad San Damaso. What is the importance of universities and centers of higher learning for the Church in the task of New Evangelization?
Let us begin by saying that it was the Church that founded the university. Universities were the fruit of European Christianity, they have created a great part of the culture of the continent, and are part of its identity.

Our Catholic faith is no irrationality, nor mere sentiment. It implies a philosophy and a theology that express all of reality and the Logos that became flesh and that is among us even today. That is why John Paul II wrote the encyclical Fides et ratio. Our present Pope, Benedict XVI, has always underscored this link between faith and reason.

For the New Evangelization, in order to present the Gospel as a life-giving force, one must underscore the intelligence and the rationality of the faith, but we must also acknowledge the way of reasoning of the people who are inclined towards faith, to help them on towards that encounter with God as a Person and in his Trinity.

We Spanish Catholics are sometimes overwhelmed by the idea that our society has become impermeable to the Christian message, and that all we can do is take refuge and resist. As someone who comes from Germany, what can you tell us?
Secularization is a problem everywhere in Europe, despite her Christian roots. But this secular mentality cannot resolve man's existential problems, it cannot give an answer for his suffering, to the question of what is beyond death, to the desire to build a society with social justice and respect for human dignity... That is why a new encounter is needed with God who gives life, God whose very Word became flesh in Jesus Christ, his son. We cannot lose the courage to announce the Gospel. Christians know much better than the secular politicians or the relativist communications media what man today needs. And so, I would say to the Catholics of Spain: Take courage!

You have known the Pope for several years, and now you are working closely with him. What has impressed you most about his way of living through this historical moment?
The Pope is a man of great humility and simplicity, but he is also a great intellectual who has profound knowledge of history, philosophy, music, all the elements of our culture.

Moreover, he is in good health, and is well able to lead the Church in the right direction, towards a new evangelization, towards a new culture for mankind, because ultimately, evangelization and humanism are two faces of the same coin.


It is most gratifying that Mons. Mueller volunteered the information about the Pope's health as a premise for his active leadership of the Church... AD MULTOS ANNOS, SANCTE PATER...
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This is all of a piece with my earlier riff on this page about Joseph Ratzinger-Benedict XVI's unique roles with respect to Vatican II and how he has tirelessly advocated its teachings through thick and thin.

Benedict on the hermeneutic of continuity:
'The Pope’s most important discourse'
according to the Papal Household's theologian

by Robert Duncan

February 1, 2013

Dominican Father Wojciech Giertych is charged with proofreading all of the drafts and texts submitted to Pope Benedict XVI to ensure they are free of doctrinal error. As theologian of the papal household, he plays a key role in the teaching mission of the Pope.

In a recent interview with Catholic News Service, Father Giertych singled out Pope Benedict’s December 2005 speech to the Roman Curia as the most important speech the Pope has delivered in his pontificate.

In that address, the Pope said that the only correct understanding of the Second Vatican Council is to see it in continuity with the Church’s perennial tradition.

Father Giertych also spoke about the debate taking place among historians regarding the correct interpretation of the council’s decisions.

One book that made waves in Italy in recent years was Roberto de Mattei’s Concilio Vaticano II: Una Storia Mai Scritta (The Second Vatican Council: An Unwritten Story). Mattei’s history of the council was an Italian P.E.N. literary award finalist in 2011.

“He’s a historian who brings in a wealth of detail that was unknown, and I think that is done very seriously,” Father Giertych said,”but he interprets the council through a specific key, comparing it to the French Revolution”.

According to Mattei, in 1789, the French Estates-General was called in Paris and a small group of representatives “hijacked” the general assembly’s proceedings, Father Giertych said.

“Mattei seems to interpret what happened at Vatican II with this interpretative key,” Father Giertych said, meaning that “a small group (of bishops) from northern Europe imposed their agenda at the council”.

“Maybe historically it is true,” Father Gierych said, because each council is located in a certain historical and geographical context. That means some “groups” are going to have more power and influence than others, he explained.

Nevertheless, the Pope’s theologian said “we need to see the hand of the Holy Spirit working through even these human maneuverings”.

To learn more about the day-to-day proceedings and what actually happened on the floor of the Second Vatican Council, check out the CNS blog "Vatican II: 50 years ago today" vaticaniiat50.wordpress.com/

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The site from which this item comes actually has a webpage called 'L'agenda Ratzinger', but I prefer to call it 'Benedict XVI's social agenda', to distinguish it from what we might call the 'faith agenda' on God and the tenets of the faith... The website, Aleteia (from the Greek word for truth), subtitled 'seekers of the truth', is a multi-lingual international website launched last September for sharing Catholic resources...

Benedict XVI's social agenda:
Non-negotiable values provide
a compass for the faithful

Translated from the Italian site of

February 1, 2013

Life, family, education, religious freedom - these are the bases of what one might call Benedict XVI's social agenda, which the Pope reaffirmed once more during his traditional New Year reception for the diplomatic corps to the Holy See last January 7.

Benedict XVI called attention to what some have called a 'mini-encyclical' on social doctrine, his Message for the World Day for Peace on January 1, 2013, in which he presents a program to safeguard the fundamental rights of the human being.

Ahead of the rights he presents first, as always, the non=negotiable principles on life, the family, education and religious freedom - or, as La Nuova Bussola Quotidiana described them collectively, "respect for human life in its every phase".

About the family, the Pope says that the West today has "numerous equivocations on the significance of human rights and their correlated duties", and that often these rights are confused with "exacerbated manifestations of personal autonomy... of being closed in on oneself seeking to satisfy only one's personal desires".

But in order for the defense of human rights to be authentic, man must be considered "in his personal and communitarian wholeness".

Education, for which freedom to educate children as their parents desire, as well as the quality of such education, must be guaranteed. is fundamental for being able "to truly build peace".

The Pontiff included in this third non=negotiable principle the economic crisis, which is a result of a lack of integral education on basic values, leading to an absolutization of profit at the expense of the worker, in unreined ventures along the paths of a virtual economy reflected in profits on paper rather than the real economy.


But there is a fourth principle that often appears in Benedict XVI's Magisterium, and that is religious freedom, attacks against which constitute a danger to social peace - from the marginalization of religion in society to cases of intolerance and outright violence against persons, as well as religious symbols and institutions.

In the West today, religious freedom is at risk from laws which attempt to limit the right of 'conscientious objection' not only for Catholic doctors and the practice of abortion, but also pharmacists in the dispensation of contraceptives and abortifacients, and civil servants who refuse to administer homosexual 'marriages'.

According to the Pope, to prohibit conscience objection according to the beliefs of an individual and an institution, in the name of pluralism, would paradoxically open the doors "to intolerance and to an enforced levelling" of society.

Andrea Nicolussi, professor of civilian law at the Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore in Milan, says that the repeated appeals of Benedict XVI demanding respect for conscience objections must be read in the context of the contemporary concept of 'rights', which in the second half of the 20th century, have been 'constitutionalized' as being based on the inviolable rights of man.

If these points of the Ratzinger agenda are not clear - that is, if peace and the common good must not first require the protection of the human being and his basic rights, then our common house is no longer built on rock but on sand, and values like life and family "become no more than electoral talking points meant to solicit votes from those who are most concerned with such issues".
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Church's charities worldwide
are immense but difficult to quantify,
says Cor Unum president

Translated from the Italian service of

February 1, 2013

The relationship between faith and charity, at the heart of Benedict XVI's Message for Lent this year, was also the focus of the news conference Friday morning at which the message was presented.

Cardinal Robert Sarah, president of the Pontifical Council Cor Unum, cited the immense charitable work that the Church does worldwide, and announced a new mission in Jordan to coordinate Catholic aid to the peoples in the Middle East, especially refugees from Syria. Benedetta Capelli has this report:

The commitment of the Church in favor of the poor, victims of war, families in difficulty, and sick people is impossible to quantify, Cardinal Sarah said, pointing out more than once that faith and charity are two faces of belonging to Jesus and following him.

In 2012, he said, Benedict XVI asked Cor Unum to help in emergencies that involved some three million and a half persons in a concrete demonstration of his closeness to those who suffer in the world.

"In the Church, there are at least 165 Caritas national organizations around the world and are federated in Caritas Internationalis. The work of the Church for the disadvantaged is immense," Sarah said.

An idea further developed by Mons. Segundo Tejado Muñoz, under-secretary of Cor Unum. "Many ask us why we do not publish statistics of the work done by the Church... It is impossible. The great strength of our work is in volunteer work which is for the most part anonymous. Indeed, Christian charity is often anonymous. Or, we could provide some figures, but as the Pope said in the recent motu prlorio Intima Ecclesiae Natura, the true identity, the true nature of charity is in the life of the Church - in her parishes, in Christian communities, among individual Christians, who live practising charity and often anonymously. If we give any figures, they will be merely approximative". [I don't think even the detractors of the Church would dispute the fact that the Church through various organizations does considerable 'humanitarian' work around the world - they just prefer to ignore it because they believe nothing good has come or can ever come out of the Church.]

Journalists asked questions about the recent motu proprio on 'the service of charity', and Cardinal Sarah said it underscored the commitment of Benedict XVI to clarify some normative aspects of charity work.

"The Holy Father has noted that a commitment from the bishops has been lacking. So he decided to illustrate the work and commitment expected of a bishop in promoting charitable activities in his diocese and parishes, and to involve the entire community. The lack of involvement by the local bishop in charity work can also lead to activities that do not truly express the identity of the Church."

Cardinal Sarah said he will be making another trip to the Middle East on February 19-21, specifically to Jordan, where he will meet with King Abdullah and representatives of Caritas MONA (Medio Oriente/Nord Africa) to discuss what can be done about the difficult situation in Syria.

"We are now in the phase of providing concrete help to refugees from Syria who have mostly fled to Lebanon and Jordan. We have to discuss what needs to be done considering that it is the winter season. The refugees need warm shelters, food and medicine".

Michael Tio, general president of the International Confederation of the Societies of St. Vincent de Paul, also spoke at the news conference about their work in 148 countries, where they ha e 780,000 active members and 1.3 million volunteers serving around 30 million people in the neediest situations.

He said Christian charity was love for God transformed to service to others.

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Here is my belated translation of the OR article on January 30 about how Vatican investments in the United States during World War II were used not just to administer financing for the universal Church's regular activities but also to funnel aid to European countries under Nazi occupation and to help US war industries in the fight against Nazism.

The article was a companion piece to an editorial commentary (translated in the preceding page of this thread) dismissing an alleged 'scoop' by the UK Guardian claiming that considerable real estate holdings in the UK by the Vatican were originally acquired with 'Mussolini's millions', a 'scoop' that was so glaringly wrong in its facts that no one else in MSM picked up the story. The newspaper was referring to the initial compensation paid to the Holy See by the Kingdom of Italy under the Lateran Pacts of 1929 which created Vatican City State but said nothing about that, instead alleging that Mussolini paid millions to the Vatican to 'buy recognition of his fascist regime'. The compensation was from the Kingdom of Italy (of which Mussolini was Prime Minister in 1929), not Mussolini's pockets, and it was for the Church properties confiscated by Italy in 1860-1870 from the former papal states absorbed in the unification of Italy. The State of Italy continues paying for those in the yearly 0.008% of Italian tax revenues that is paid to the Church in Italy through the Italian bishops' conference.


How the Vatican managed
its finances during WWII -
and thereby helped defeat Nazism

Translated from the 1/30/13 issue of



'THE POPE'S DOLLARS AGAINST HITLER: New documents from the British National Archives show how Pius XII fought Nazism through investments in the United States".

A hitherto unknown story, which obliges us to draw up new conclusions. A story of secret contacts and of very sensitive documents that have remained hidden for 70 years and are only now emerging from the archives with great impact.

In the center of this story is Bernardino Nogara, a director of the Banca Commerciale Italiana and a friend of the Ratti family (Pius XI's family), who had been asked by the Pope to manage the finances of the Holy See.

It would be Nogara, acting under orders from the Roman Curia, who would be the Vatican's financial strategist, and who, during the Second World War, would enable the Holy See to make a fundamental contribution to the Allied victory against the Nazis and fascists.

A strategy carried out through millions of dollars invested in the largest banks in the United States and Great Britain, through which the Vatican aided persecuted Churches and populations most in need.

The story has been reconstructed by Patricia M. McGoldrick, of London's Middlesex University, in an article entitled "New Perspectives on Pius XII and Vatican Financial Transactions during the Second World War", published in the December 2012 issue of the trimestral The Historical Journal of Cambridge University. (Vol. 55, 2012, pp 1029-1048).

The text is based on documents of the British Secret Service in 1941-1943 kept in the British National Archives, concerning the activities of the major Vatican financial institutions: the Extraordinary Section of the Administration of the Assets of the Apostolic See (ASSS) and the IOR.

The papers reveal, besides regular correspondence with dioceses, nunciatures and Catholic institutions around the world, vast movements of money to US banks.

We learn from all this that at the start of the Second World War, the Vatican quickly transferred all its stocks, bonds and gold reserves out of harm's way to the United States, making the US the center from which the Universal Church was supported and administered, even as the Vatican invested tens of millions in the US economy (pp 1043-1044).

In other words, the Holy See used financial instruments to fight the Nazi folly and to help heal the wounds of Europe. And did so with great efficacy.

From the start of his mandate, Nogara and his staff wove a dense fabric of relationships and contacts, showing a remarkable ability for diplomacy.

"ASSS had its accounts in JP Morgan and Company, while IOR used the National City Bank of New York. In Great Britain, the ASSS had an account in Morgan Grenfell, a sister bank of JP Morgan, while IOR banked with Barclay's (p. 1038).

Such activities, McGoldrick writes, "provide the clear proof that the Vatican systematically sent its stocks and bonds - even those that were registered in countries affected by the [Allied] financial blockade - to keep them securely in the special custody of its US accounts, and that once it had obtained authorization from the Department of Treasury, it could freely trade them on the US market" (p 1039).

In short, when the war began, the Holy See decided to move an enormous amount of money (stocks and bonds, gold reserves, contributions from the dioceses, donations, etc) from territories controlled by the Nazis to the United States.

This happened with the blessing of Washington which, in fact - as both the British documents and US Treasury archives show - did not just exempt the Vatican from restrictions imposed on operations in enemy countries (US Freezing Orders) but also used more flexibility when dealing with such requests from Rome.

What triggered this massive movement of money? The British documents are informative on two fundamental aspects. The first is that the US accounts of the Vatican primarily held the regular payments of dioceses to the Vatican, direct contributions from the faithful and from religious institutions around the world, and to a lesser degree (about 20 percent), any capital gains made from stocks, bonds and other investments

A great part of these funds were aimed at supporting Churches in difficulty, missions, nunciatures, seminaries and dioceses on all the continents.

There was a special channel for aids to Europe: "To bring relief to Churches persecuted under Nazi occupation - where Catholic schools, monasteries and churches had been confiscated or closed, youth associations and Catholic publications suppressed, and numerous priests and religious had been arrested and sent to concentration camps, IOR maintained a separate account at Chase National Bank in New York (p 1042).

When the British government sought to block one such transaction, "The Vatican directly appealed to the United States government and did so successfully" (p 1042).

The documents of the National Archives also disclose Vatican financing of humanitarian activities for Allied troops and populations that were most affected by German occupation.

Such as when, in April 1944, Pius XII ordered tons of flour for the city of Rome, where the Church was already providing more than 100,000 hot meals daily. It also tried to import food from Argentina and Spain for Italy and Greece.

From 1939, as we see from Nogara's correspondence with Washington ,the Vatican heavily invested in US Treasury bills and in buying stocks from major industrial and technological companies like Rolls Royce, US Steel Corporation, Dow Chemical, Westinghouse Electric, Union Carbide and General Electric.

McGoldrick goes as far as to describe "a stream of financing from the Vatican" that helped war industries in the US which "eventually defeated the Nazis and put an end to the bestial exterminations of the Holocaust".

It is too soon to make a rigorous and expert evaluation of the documents analyzed by McGoldrick. The financial story of the Second World War is largely terra incognita that very few have started to explore. Much more material remains to be discovered and studied.

Nonetheless, the documents that are now available more than suffice to abandon hasty judgments and ideological views of the facts that can be reconstructed.


P.S. It must be pointed out that the Vatican needed to use subterfuges in its activities against the Axis powers
because the Lateran Pacts of 1929 require the Pope to be neutral in international conflicts.


The following item is very apropos:



The latest from the 'Pius wars' front:
A new definitive biography of Pius XII

by Michael Coren

January 31, 2013

There’s a running joke in Canada about our charming sense of delicate hubris. A Toronto newspaper headline wryly proclaims: “Man Lands on Moon. Boots made in Montreal!” In other words, we’re only 30 million strong and we’re invariably mistaken for quiet Americans, and so when we do achieve something remarkable, even of a minimal variety, we like people to know.

Which is why the world needs to know that what will now be the standard life of Pope Pius XII — the definitive biography of the wartime Pontiff at least for the present — has just appeared. And it was written by a Canadian academic.

It’s true that Harvard University Press published the book, but Robert A. Ventresca is a professor at King’s College at Western University in London, Ontario. And his new volume, Soldier of Christ: The Life of Pope Pius XI is a splendid work.

It won’t be the last word in the “Pius wars”, of course, but it is one of the best. It depicts a profoundly good and devout man who, contrary to what the critics have claimed, had absolutely no personal animus against Jewish people, was active in the struggle against Nazism, and was clearly and transparently the victim of a concerted attempt to libel him and by extension the Papacy, the Church, and serious Catholicism.

Ventresca does agree that were times, both before and during the war, when Pius could have been more specific in mentioning Jewish targets of Nazi eugenics and oppression, but that’s about as severe as the censorship goes.

[Can't everyone just agree, out of hindsight and plain common sense, that nothing Pius XII could have said, as explicitly and as frequently as he could have done (regardless of the additional risk such statements would have posed to Catholics as well as the European Jews themselves, not to mention to himself and the Vatican who were trapped in Nazi=Fascist controlled Rome) would have deterred the Nazis from carrying out their 'Final Solution' to exterminate the European Jewry? This is just so obvious that for any person with common sense to insist, as Jewish obstinates and other Pius XII detractors do, that the Holocaust would not have happened if only he had spoken out against it, is sheer defiance of practical logic. They also ignore the fact that few outside Hitler's apparatchik (not even Churchill and Roosevelt, much less Jewish leaders outside Europe, though they had good reason to suspect it) were aware just how absolute and wide-ranging the Final Solution was until after the war and the full horror of the Nazi death camps was revealed to the world. Only then - and the eventual final toll of 6 million Jews killed - did the Jewish people as a whole realize that a Holocaust had indeed descended upon them. Apropos, look up a paper history.hanover.edu/hhr/94/hhr94_5.html
that states how official and unofficial information reached President Roosevelt as early as 1942 about the genocide perpetrated by the Nazis against Jews, but that he made the decision, along with other Allied leaders, that since it would be impossible to help rescue the Jews during a world war, the best way to do so would be to defeat the Nazis, and that remained the Allied priority. This has been the standard excuse for why the Allies did noting about the Jewish problem during the war.]


I’ve obsessed about this issue for some years, partly out of familial and emotional necessity, in that I am a Catholic whose father was Jewish. He was not only Jewish but also from a Polish family. The role of Pope Pius XII and the Church during the Second World War is to me at the epicenter of identity, loyalty, and truth.

There are still Jewish leaders, even after years of debate (and now Ventresca’s book), who claim that Pope Pius said little and did less as Europe’s Jews were rounded up and slaughtered. There are non-Jewish activists — often liberal Catholics fighting modern battles vicariously through the tragedy of the Holocaust — who want to discredit papal history and thus the contemporary papacy by arguing the Pope abandoned his moral authority. They then construe that his successors have to delegate power because of this, and that power is always to be delegated to their liberal friends.

So, was Pius silent? Was the Church complicit in some monumental indifference? Was the Church on the wrong side during one of the great ethical litmus tests of world history? The latter, by the way, is the genuine issue at play here. The new, or revived, orthodoxy of the Church is terrifying to the older generation of liberals and they will use history as a battering ram if they can get away with it.

The truth is somewhat different. Before he became Pope Pius, Cardinal Pacelli drafted the papal encyclical condemning Nazi racism ['Mit brennender Sorge'] and had it read from every pulpit in Germany. The Vatican used its assets to ransom Jews from the Nazis, ran an elaborate escape route and hid Jewish families in Castel Gondolfo. All this is confirmed by Jewish experts such as B’nai B’rith’s Joseph Lichten.

The World Jewish Congress donated a great deal of money to the Vatican in gratitude for its wartime work and in 1945 Rabbi Herzog of Jerusalem thanked Pope Pius, “for his lifesaving efforts on behalf of the Jews during the occupation of Italy.” When the Pope died in 1958 Golda Meir, then Israeli Foreign Minister, delivered a eulogy at the United Nations praising the man for his work on behalf of her people.

For twenty years, in fact, it was considered a self-evident truth that the Church was a member of the victim class during the Second World War and Pope Pius was mentioned alongside Churchill and Roosevelt as part of a triumvirate of good.

It was as late as the 1960s that the cultural architecture began to be restructured around this issue and it is deeply significant that the attacks on the Pope were largely initiated by the German playwright Rolf Hochhuth, who claimed in his 1963 play The Deputy that the Vatican had ignored the plight of the Jews. What is seldom mentioned is that Hochhuth was a renowned anti-Catholic who would later champion the infamous Holocaust-denier David Irving.

While it is true is that the Pope did not issue an outright attack on the Nazis’ treatment of the Jews, one of the main reasons was because the leaders of the Catholic Church in Holland had made just such a public statement condemning Nazi anti-Semitism and protesting the deportation of the Jewish people.

In response the German occupiers had arrested and murdered every Dutch Jewish convert to Catholicism they could find. The group included Edith Stein (Sister Teresa Benedicta of the Cross), who was dragged from her convent to the slaughterhouse of Auschwitz, to be gassed in August 1942. She would later be declared a saint by the Church. So, actions have consequences, and the Nazis were hardly some civilized group who would be swayed by moral and intellectual argument. [Precisely. The anti-Pius brigades behave as if the Nazis would have listened to reason, or could have been influenced in any way by what a sovereign said whose life and earthly territory they literally held completely in their hands!]

Hundreds of thousands of Catholic religious and lay people risked their lives and sometimes gave their lives to help the Jewish victims of the Nazi pagans. To a very large extent their sacrifices have gone uncelebrated, even ignored.

Shamefully, much of the criticism of the Church comes from within, as well as from critics who use the issue to vicariously attack orthodoxy and Popes John Paul II and Benedict XVI. This was precisely the case with John Cornwell’s risible book Hitler’s Pope.

Rabbi David Dalin’s scholarly response, The Myth of Hitler’s Pope, stated that people are trying to "exploit the tragedy of the Jewish people during the Holocaust to foster their own political agenda of forcing changes on the Catholic Church today.”

Dalin’s work has done much to reverse or at least explain the situation, and he is essential reading for anybody who wants to genuinely understand the reality and the subtext of all this.

We also need to recall the actions of another significant Jewish man, also a rabbi. In 1945 the Chief Rabbi of Rome, Israel Zolli, publicly embraced Catholicism. This extraordinary conversion was partly due to Zolli’s admiration for the Pope’s sheltering and saving of Italian Jews. Zolli suffered greatly due to his conversion, and his motives have been questioned quite dreadfully by his detractors. But that does not change the truth of the situation.

Which brings us back to the meat of the problem, which is anti-Catholicism using any means necessary to discredit the Church. We may win the Pius wars, but our enemies will simply find another battleground on which to fight.

The irony of this particular skirmish is that while the Church, and in particular serious and orthodox Catholics, have worked tirelessly to expunge any vestige of an anti-Semitism that may have existed, the new Jew-hatred, often disguised as anti-Zionism, is largely the preserve of the left, Islam, militant atheism, and their friends.

And that unholy alliance, it should be noted, hates the Church just as much!


Michael Coren is the host of The Arena, a nightly television show broadcast on the Canadian network Sun News, and a columnist whose work appears in numerous publications across Canada. He is the author of 14 books, the most recent of which is Heresy: Ten Lies They Spread About Christianity. His website is www.michaelcoren.com, where his books can be purchased and he can be booked for speeches.

[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 02/02/2013 17:01]
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