Common Declaration of Pope Francis and the Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew I
PRIVATE MEETING WITH THE ECUMENICAL PATRIARCH OF CONSTANTINOPLE – COMMON DECLARATION OF POPE FRANCIS AND THE ECUMENICAL PATRIARCH BARTHOLOMEW I Apostolic Delegation (Jerusalem) Sunday, 25 May 2014 1. Like our venerable predecessors Pope Paul VI and Ecumenical Patriarch Athenagoras who met here in Jerusalem fifty years ago, we too, Pope Francis and Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew, were determined to meet in the Holy Land “where our common Redeemer, Christ our Lord, lived, taught, died, rose again, and ascended into Heaven, whence he sent the Holy Spirit on the infant Church” (Common communiqué of Pope Paul VI and Patriarch Athenagoras, published after their meeting of 6 January 1964). Our meeting, another encounter of the Bishops of the Churches of Rome and Constantinople founded respectively ...

An exception to the Status Quo: the ecumenical celebration in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre
One of the highlights of Pope Francis’ Apostolic Voyage to the Holy Land will be his meeting with Orthodox Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew I, a meeting that will be followed by a joint ecumenical celebration at the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. The ceremony will include representatives of the five Christian communities who maintain an historic presence at the major Christian holy sites – including the Holy Sepulchre. The relations between the Latin (or Catholic) community and the Greek, Armenian, Coptic, and Syrian communities, and between the Christian communities and the local government authorities, are maintained according to an arrangement known as the “status quo.” “The ‘status quo’ applies principally… to the shrines, four to be exact, that are shared by ...

Who will have lunch with Pope Francis?
JERUSALEM – An interview with Bishop William Shomali, Auxiliary Bishop of Jerusalem, about the families who will have lunch with Pope Francis in Bethlehem after Mass in Manger Square. 1 – Why did the Pope choose to lunch with Christian families? What is his reason for doing so?   Pope Francis wants to spend a little time with the poor families in the Bethlehem and their children to listen to them, permitting them to feel his closeness and tenderness. He did not want to have lunch with the cardinals, bishops and politicians, but with poor families. It took time to understand the reasons for this gesture. It really makes the Pope admired: how Jesus wants to stay close to the ...

Roots of the Culture of Death
  In Chapter 11 of Evangelium Vitae, Saint John Paul II refers to abortion and euthanasia as attacks made against human life at the time of its greatest frailty. He calls our attention to the fact that these attacks are no longer regarded as “crimes,” but as “rights”. They are carried out by health-care personnel and, even more disturbingly, more often than not, with the approval of the family, which is called by nature to be “the sanctuary of life”. This development, so widespread in its scope, so convoluted in its ethos, provoked the Holy Father to ask, “How did such a situation come about?” The question is a very good one, since this moral revolution, bringing into focus a ...

Being Catholic in Zanzibar
Mathew Limo* knows what to expect when he goes to church with his family. On the Tanzanian island of Zanzibar, where 98 percent of the population is Muslim, Christians are given the cold shoulder. The past year has been characterized by renewed violence against Christians. So far the violence remains aimed at religious, but the teacher has a great fear: that his wife and children may be forced to convert to Islam. Church attendance “If we go to church on Sunday, we have to go through a crowd of people who often try to intimidate us,” Limo told international Catholic charity Aid to the Church in Need. “We have a relatively large parish, about 400 people. Of these, usually 200 ...

Pope at Mass: Let not your heart be troubled
Those who welcome the Holy Spirit will have a solid and endless peace, unlike those who choose to “superficially” trust in the tranquility offered by money or power. This was Pope Francis’ message at Mass Tuesday morning in Casa Santa Marta. The peace offered by things – money , power , vanity – and peace in Person, the Holy Spirit. The first is always in danger of vanishing – Today you are rich and you are somebody, not tomorrow – instead no-one “can take away” the second because it is a “definitive” peace. The Pope’s homily, which centered on one of the greatest desires of mankind of all times, was inspired by a passage from the Gospel of John, in ...

Editing our own genes?
Several serious diseases are known to occur because of defects or mutations in our DNA. Curing such diseases could, in principle, be carried out by rewriting the DNA to fix the mutated base pairs. Yet, until recently scientists have remained largely stymied in their attempts to directly modify genes in a living animal. Findings described in the March 30, 2014 issue of Nature Biotechnology, however, reveal that a novel gene-editing technique, known as CRISPR (Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats), can be used successfully in mice to reverse disease symptoms for a liver defect known as type I tyrosinemia. In humans, this potentially fatal ailment affects about one in 100,000 people. CRISPR, which enables researchers to snip out the mutated ...

Pope at Mass: Firmness of heart
A Christian should have their heart fixed on the Holy Spirit, not a fickle heart that dances from one place to another. This was Pope Francis’ message Monday morning at Mass in Casa Santa Marta. The Pope focused his homily on St. Paul, who was able to continuously evangelize because his heart was made firm by the Holy Spirit. Emer McCarthy reports: What kind of heart do we have? That was the question at the certain of Pope Francis homily based on the First Reading from the Acts of the Apostles, which speaks of St Paul’s commitment to evangelization “his firm heart in continuous motion”. The Apostle to the Gentiles is in Iconium, where they tried to kill him, but ...

TRUCK DYNASTY: The First Deacon in the World of Monster Trucks
Crowds of people fill the stands, many sporting sunglasses and baseball caps and t-shirts with patriotic slogans. The sun beats down, the beer flows, and the cheers go up when the next “extreme diesel” pickup truck, souped-up so much that you’d probably need a ladder to get into the cab, enters the dirt field. If Hemingway were still alive, he might write about the way he wrote about bullfights. Only, the bull at the center of everyone’s attention is charging without any provocation of a matador. And there’s no likelihood that it will die when it’s all over. Up next is a 2010 Ford with a 1400+ horsepower turbo Cummins engine. Its four tires are almost six feet in diameter ...

Pope sends his blessings to participants of the Asian Conference on the Family
Pope Francis has praised Philippine Bishops for holding the “Asian Conference on the Family” currently underway in Manila. The conference, which runs until 16 May, gathers thousands of religious, educators, lay faithful, and politicians all over Asia to tackle the present-day situation of the human family. In a message signed by Vatican Secretary of State, Cardinal Pietro Parolin, and addressed to the President of the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of the Philippines, Archbishop Socrates Villegas of Lingayen Dagupan, the Pope calls upon “all the lay faithful gathered to deepen their experience of faith and communion (…) so as to be a leaven of Christ’s love in the midst of humanity”. Please find below the full text of the Pope’s message The ...